Book picks similar to
The Works of Lord Byron, Volume 3 by Lord Byron
poetry
non-fiction
memoir
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Twelve Years a Slave
Solomon Northup - 1853
It is a slave narrative of a black man who was born free in New York state but kidnapped in Washington, D.C., sold into slavery, and kept in bondage for 12 years in Louisiana. He provided details of slave markets in Washington, D.C. and New Orleans, as well as describing at length cotton and sugar cultivation on major plantations in Louisiana.
Lost in Thought: The Hidden Pleasures of an Intellectual Life
Zena Hitz - 2020
Drawing on inspiring examples, from Socrates and Augustine to Malcolm X and Elena Ferrante, and from films to Hitz's own experiences as someone who walked away from elite university life in search of greater fulfillment, Lost in Thought is a passionate and timely reminder that a rich life is a life rich in thought.Today, when even the humanities are often defended only for their economic or political usefulness, Hitz says our intellectual lives are valuable not despite but because of their practical uselessness. And while anyone can have an intellectual life, she encourages academics in particular to get back in touch with the desire to learn for its own sake, and calls on universities to return to the person-to-person transmission of the habits of mind and heart that bring out the best in us.
Access All Areas: Stories from a Hard Rock Life
Scott Ian - 2017
Those of you who have read Scott's memoir I'm the Man may know the history of the band, but Access All Areas divulges all the zany, bizarre, funny, and captivating tales of what went on when the band wasn't busy crafting chart-topping albums. In his more than thirty years immersed in the hard rock scene, Scott has witnessed haunting acts of depravity backstage, punched a legendary musician, been a bouncer at an exclusive night club, guest-starred with Anthrax on Married with Children, invaded a fellow rock star's home, played poker professionally, gone on a non-date with a certain material girl, appeared on The Walking Dead, and much more.Access All Areas allows its readers to do just that. With humor, candor, hindsight, and writing chops that would make Stephen King jealous (nope, not even on Bizarro world), Scott Ian takes his fans along for the ride at all the parties, hot spots, and behind-the-scenes shenanigans they will never hear about from anyone else. And none of it would have happened without a bit of divine inspiration from KISS. (No, seriously. Read chapter two.) Best of all, Scott seemingly lacks the ability to be embarrassed, making Access All Areas howlingly funny, self-deprecating, and every bit as brash and brazen as one would expect from one of the original architects of speed metal.
Getting Personal: Selected Essays
Phillip Lopate - 2003
Organized in six parts (Childhood; Youth; Early Marriage and Bachelorhood; Teaching and Work; Fiction; Politics, Religion, Movies, Books, Cities; The Style of Middle Age) Getting Personal tells two stories: the development of Lopate's career as a writer and the story of his life.
Although of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself: A Road Trip with David Foster Wallace
David Lipsky - 2010
Wallace’s pieces for Harper’s magazine in the ’90s were, according to Lipsky, “like hearing for the first time the brain voice of everybody I knew: Here was how we all talked, experienced, thought. It was like smelling the damp in the air, seeing the first flash from a storm a mile away. You knew something gigantic was coming.”Then Rolling Stone sent Lipsky to join Wallace on the last leg of his book tour for Infinite Jest, the novel that made him internationally famous. They lose to each other at chess. They get iced-in at an airport. They dash to Chicago to catch a make-up flight. They endure a terrible reader’s escort in Minneapolis. Wallace does a reading, a signing, an NPR appearance. Wallace gives in and imbibes titanic amounts of hotel television (what he calls an “orgy of spectation”). They fly back to Illinois, drive home, walk Wallace’s dogs. Amid these everyday events, Wallace tells Lipsky remarkable things—everything he can about his life, how he feels, what he thinks, what terrifies and fascinates and confounds him—in the writing voice Lipsky had come to love. Lipsky took notes, stopped envying him, and came to feel about him—that grateful, awake feeling—the same way he felt about Infinite Jest. Then Lipsky heads to the airport, and Wallace goes to a dance at a Baptist church.A biography in five days, Although Of Course You End Up Becoming Yourself is David Foster Wallace as few experienced this great American writer. Told in his own words, here is Wallace’s own story, and his astonishing, humane, alert way of looking at the world; here are stories of being a young writer—of being young generally—trying to knit together your ideas of who you should be and who other people expect you to be, and of being young in March of 1996. And of what it was like to be with and—as he tells it—what it was like to become David Foster Wallace.
Epic Text Fails! The Funniest Autocorrects, Wrong Numbers, and Smartphone Mishaps
Marcus Rainey - 2013
Smart phones can make us look really dumb! Get this e-book and laugh your #@% off at what happens when you don't double-check before you hit send! Please Note: Some profanity, not for children!
Best American Poetry 2018
Dana Gioia - 2018
Gioia has published five volumes of poetry, served as the Chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, and currently sits as the Poet Laureate of California, but he is also a graduate of Stanford Business School and was once a Vice President at General Foods. He has studied opera and is a published librettist, in addition to his prolific work in critical essay writing and editing literary anthologies. Having lived several lives, Gioia brings an insightful, varied, eclectic eye to this year’s Best American Poetry. With his classic essay “Can Poetry Matter?”, originally run in The Atlantic in 1991, Gioia considered whether there is a place for poetry to be a part of modern American mainstream culture. Decades later, the debate continues, but Best American Poetry 2018 stands as evidence that poetry is very much present, relevant, and finding new readers.
The Letters of Robert Browning and Elizabeth Barret Barrett 1845-1846 Vol I (1899)
Robert Browning - 2006
1 of 2 After all, I need not give up the thought of doing that, too, in time; because even now, talking with whoever is worthy, I can give a reason for my faith in one and another excellence, the fresh strange music, the affluent language, the exquisite pathos and true new brave thought; but in this addressing myself to you your own self, and for the first time, my feeling rises altogether. I do, as I say, love these books with all my heart - and I love you too. Do you know I was once not very far from seeing - really seeing you? Mr. Kenyon said to me one morning 'Would you like to see Miss Barrett?' then he went to announce me, - then he returned .. you were too unwell, and now it is years ago, and I feel as at some untoward passage in my travels, as if I had been close, so close, to some world's-wonder in chapel or crypt, only a screen to push and I might have entered, but there was some slight, so it now seems, slight and just sufficient bar to admission, and the half-opened door shut, and I went home my thousands of miles, and the sight was never to be? I thank you, dear Mr. Browning, from the bottom of my heart. You meant to give me pleasure by your letter - and even if the object had not been answered, I ought still to thank you. But it is thoroughly answered. Such a letter from such a hand!
Pomes Penyeach and Other Verses
James Joyce - 1927
'Pomes Penyeach' is a collection of Joyce's poetry. James Joyce was born in Dublin, Ireland in 1882. He excelled as a student at the Jesuit schools Clongowes and Belvedere, and then at University College Dublin, where he studied English, French, and Italian. Joyce produced several prominent works, including: 'Ulysses', 'A Portrait of the Young Artist', 'Dubliners', and 'Finnegans Wake. He is widely regarded as one of the most influential writers of the early twentieth century and his legacy can be seen throughout modern literature.
Red Sky at Sunrise: Cider with Rosie; As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning; A Moment of War
Laurie Lee - 1992
As I Walked Out One Summer Morning picks up the story as he leaves his valley for London and then for Spain. There, equipped only with a violin and his wits, he crossed the dramatic landscape of a vibrant and still almost medieval Spain for which he developed an abiding affection. In the winter of 1937 he returned to a country now in the grip of Civil War and joined the International Brigade, describing in A Moment of War his journey into the dark side of Spain with unsparing honesty and poignancy.Cider With Rosie: "A prose poem that flashes and winks like a prism." - H.E. BatesAs I Walked Out One Summer Morning: "The vivid, sensitive, irresistibly readable story of what happened after he left home." - Daily MailA Moment of War: "A great heart-stopping narrative of one young Englishman's part in the war in Spain... crafted by a poet, stamping an indelible image of the boredom, random cruelty and stupidity of war." - John Sweeney in the Literary ReviewThe cover shows a portrait of Laurie Lee by Anthony Devas in the National Portrait Gallery, London
Chitra - A Play in One Act
Rabindranath Tagore - 1892
This particular tale revolves around the character Chitrangada - a female soldier who attempts to get the attention of Arjuna. "Chitra" has been performed in many countries around the world and has been used as the basis for a variety of different mediums and formats, including dance. Rabindranath Tagore (1861 - 1941), was a Bengali polymath who was pivotal in the reshaping of Bengali literature and music. This antiquarian book is being republished now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition, complete with a specially commissioned new biography of the author. Many antiquarian books such as this are increasingly hard to come by and expensive, and it is with this in mind that we are republishing this book now in an affordable, modern, high-quality edition. It comes complete with a specially commissioned biography of the author."
Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee
Li-Young Lee - 2006
. . . I think we are in the presence of a true spirit.” Poetry lovers agree! Rose has gone on to sell more than eighty thousand copies, and Li-Young Lee has become one of the country’s most beloved poets.Breaking the Alabaster Jar: Conversations with Li-Young Lee is a collection of the best dozen interviews given by Li-Young Lee over the past twenty years. From a twenty-nine-year-old poet prodigy to a seasoned veteran in high demand for readings and appearances across the United States and abroad, these interviews capture Li-Young Lee at various stages of his artistic development. He not only discusses his family’s flight from political oppression in China and Indonesia, but how that journey affected his poetry and the engaging, often painful, insights being raised a cultural outsider in America afforded him. Other topics include spirituality (primarily Christianity and Buddhism) and a wide range of aesthetic topics such as literary influences, his own writing practices, the role of formal and informal education in becoming a writer, and his current life as a famous and highly sought-after American poet.
Between the Stops: The View of My Life from the Top of the Number 12 Bus
Sandi Toksvig - 2019
It's about a bus trip really, because it's my view from the Number 12 bus (mostly top deck, the seat at the front on the right), a double-decker that plies its way from Dulwich, in South East London, where I was living, to where I sometimes work - at the BBC, in the heart of the capital. It's not a sensible way to write a memoir at all, probably, but it's the way things pop into your head as you travel, so it's my way'.From London facts including where to find the blue plaque for Una Marson, 'The first black woman programme maker at the BBC', to discovering the best Spanish coffee under Southwark's railway arches; from a brief history of lady gangsters at Elephant and Castle to memories of climbing Mount Sinai and, at the request of a fellow traveller, reading aloud the Ten Commandments; from the story behind Pissarro's painting of Dulwich Station to performing in Footlights with Emma Thompson; from painful memoires of being sent to Coventry while at a British boarding school to thinking about how Wombells Travelling Circus of 1864 haunts Peckham Rye;from anecdotes about meeting Prince Charles, Monica Lewinsky and Grayson Perry to Bake-Off antics; from stories of a real and lasting friendship with John McCarthy to the importance of family and the daunting navigation of the Zambezi River in her father's canoe, this Sandi Toksvig-style memoir is, as one would expect and hope, packed full of surprises. A funny and moving trip through memories, musings and the many delights on the Number 12 route, Between the Stops is also an inspiration to us all to get off our phones, look up and to talk to each other because as Sandi says: 'some of the greatest trips lie on our own doorstep'.