Book picks similar to
Alternating Current by Octavio Paz
non-fiction
essays
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Lolita in the Afterlife: On Beauty, Risk, and Reckoning with the Most Indelible and Shocking Novel of the Twentieth Century
Jenny Minton QuigleyLauren Groff - 2021
More than sixty years later, it is more important than ever to discuss this complex novel. Now, having commissioned original contributions by Cheryl Strayed, Roxane Gay, Erika Sánchez, Sloane Crosley, Andre Dubus III, Ian Frazier, Lauren Groff, Stacy Schiff, Emily Mortimer, Victor LaValle, and many more, Jenny Minton Quigley examines how we read Lolita today.Lolita both exists in and exemplifies many of the issues at the forefront of our current national discourse: art and politics, race and whiteness, gender and power, sexual trauma. Jenny, the daughter of Walter J. Minton, who published Lolita at G. P. Putnam's Sons after it had been rejected by five other American publishers, brings a unique vantage point to this conversation. In her introduction she tells the amazing true story of the original publication, a risk Walter took despite the very real possibility that he could be prosecuted and go to jail (and which, by the way, included Walter's daring flight through a storm to meet Nabokov and strike the deal).Lolita in the Afterlife is a riveting examination of the bright and dark spell that Nabokov's indelible novel left and still leaves on the cultural landscape. As these prominent writers of the twenty-first century attest, Lolita lives on, in an afterlife as blinding as a supernova.
An American Requiem: God, My Father & the War That Came Between Us
James Carroll - 1996
But more than that, it is a coming to terms with the conflicts that disrupted many families, inflicting personal wounds that were also social, political, and religious. James Carroll grew up in a Catholic family that seemed blessed. His father Joe had abandoned his own dream of becoming a priest to rise through the ranks of Hoover's FBI and then become one of the most powerful men in the Pentagon, the founder of the Defense Intelligence Agency. Young Jim lived the privileged life of a general's son, dating the daughter of a vice president and meeting the pope, all in the shadow of nuclear war, waiting for the red telephone to ring in his parents' house. He worshiped his father until Martin Luther King, Jr., the civil rights movement, turmoil in the Catholic Church, and then Vietnam combined to outweigh the bond between father and son. These were issues on which they would never agree. Only after Carroll left the priesthood to become a writer and husband with children of his own did he come to understand fully the struggles his father had faced. In this work of nonfiction, the bestselling novelist draws on the skills he honed with nine much-admired novels to tell the story he was, literally, born to tell. An American Requiem is a benediction on his father's life, his family's struggles, and the legacies of an entire generation.
Other Colors: Essays and A Story
Orhan Pamuk - 1999
He opens a window on his private life, from his boyhood dislike of school to his daughter’s precocious melancholy, from his successful struggle to quit smoking to his anxiety at the prospect of testifying against some clumsy muggers who fell upon him during a visit to New York City. From ordinary obligations such as applying for a passport or sharing a holiday meal with relatives, he takes extraordinary flights of imagination; in extreme moments, such as the terrifying days following a cataclysmic earthquake in Istanbul, he lays bare our most basic hopes and fears. Again and again Pamuk declares his faith in fiction, engaging the work of such predecessors as Laurence Sterne and Fyodor Dostoyevsky, sharing fragments from his notebooks, and commenting on his own novels. He contemplates his mysterious compulsion to sit alone at a desk and dream, always returning to the rich deliverance that is reading and writing.By turns witty, moving, playful, and provocative, Other Colors glows with the energy of a master at work and gives us the world through his eyes, assigning every radiant theme and shifting mood its precise shade in the spectrum of significance.
Letters of E.B. White
E.B. White - 1976
They evoke E.B. White's life in New York and in Maine at every stage of his life. They are full of memorable characters: White's family, the New Yorker staff and contributors, literary types and show business people, farmers from Maine and sophisticates from New York–Katherine S. White, Harold Ross, James Thurber, Alexander Woolcott, Groucho Marx, John Updike, and many, many more.Each decade has its own look and taste and feel. Places, too–from Belgrade (Maine) to Turtle Bay (NYC) to the S.S. Buford, Alaska–bound in 1923–are brought to life in White's descriptions. There is no other book of letters to compare with this; it is a book to treasure and savor at one's leisure.As White wrote in this book, "A man who publishes his letters becomes nudist–nothing shields him from the world's gaze except his bare skin....a man who has written a letter is stuck with it for all time."
Are You Kidding Me?! Chronicles of an Ordinary Life
Lesley Crewe - 2019
Readers will relate to Crewe’s ache at missing her mom, her nostalgia for her childhood, her frustrations at raising teenagers, and her impatience for terrible parking lot etiquette in equal measure. The book spans sixteen years’ worth of columns for The Cape Bretoner Magazine, Cahoots Magazine, and The Chronicle Herald.Are You Kidding Me?! is a side-splitting, heartwarming, Cape Breton–flavoured celebration of the little things.
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
Flannery O'Connor - 1969
At her death in 1964, O'Connor left behind a body of unpublished essays and lectures as well as a number of critical articles that had appeared in scattered publications during her too-short lifetime. The keen writings comprising Mystery and Manners, selected and edited by O'Connor's lifelong friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, are characterized by the directness and simplicity of the author's style, a fine-tuned wit, understated perspicacity, and profound faith.The book opens with "The King of the Birds," her famous account of raising peacocks at her home in Milledgeville, Georgia. Also included are: three essays on regional writing, including "The Fiction Writer and His Country" and "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction"; two pieces on teaching literature, including "Total Effect and the 8th Grade"; and four articles concerning the writer and religion, including "The Catholic Novel in the Protestant South." Essays such as "The Nature and Aim of Fiction" and "Writing Short Stories" are widely seen as gems.This bold and brilliant essay-collection is a must for all readers, writers, and students of contemporary American literature.
It Calls You Back: An Odyssey through Love, Addiction, Revolutions, and Healing
Luis J. Rodríguez - 2011
RODRÍGUEZ CONTINUES THE REMARKABLE STORY OF HIS BESTSELLING MEMOIR, ALWAYS RUNNING. Hundreds of thousands of readers came to know Luis J. Rodríguez through his fearless classic, Always Running, which chronicled his early life as a young Chicano gang member surviving the dangerous streets of East Los Angeles. The longawaited follow-up, It Calls You Back, is the equally harrowing story of Rodríguez starting over, at age eighteen, after leaving gang life—the only life he really knew. It Calls You Back opens with Rodríguez’s final stint in jail as a teenager and follows his struggle to kick heroin, renounce his former life, and search for meaningful work. He describes with heartbreaking honesty his challenges as a father and his difficulty leaving his rages and addictions completely behind. Even as he breaks with “la vida loca” and begins to discover success as a writer and an activist, Rodríguez finds that his past—the crimes, the drugs, the things he’d seen and done—has a way of calling him back. When his oldest son is sent to prison for attempted murder, Rodríguez is forced to confront his shortcomings as a father and to acknowledge how and why his own history is repeating itself, right before his eyes. Deeply insightful and beautifully written, It Calls You Back is an odyssey through love, addiction, revolutions, and healing.
The Status Seekers
Vance Packard - 1959
The car you drive, the church you attend, where you went to school, the house you live in -- even your choice of words -- are brandings of your place in society. This is your status -- and you may be stuck with it, like it or not. The author minces no words in letting the reader know exactly who he is, how he measures up, where he is likely to go -- and where, because of society's harsh rules, he is NOT likely to go."~ from back cover (1963 Cardinal Books paperback edition)
El arte de la fuga
Sergio Pitol - 1996
The debut work in English by Mexico's greatest and most influential living author and winner of the Cervantes Prize ("the Spanish language Nobel"), The Art of Flight takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of the world's cultural capitals as Sergio Pitol looks back on his well-traveled life as a legendary author, translator, scholar, and diplomat.The first work in Pitol's "Trilogy of Memory," The Art of Flight imaginatively blends the genres of fiction and memoir in a Borgesian swirl of contemplation and mystery, expanding our understanding and appreciation of what literature can be and what it can do.
My Poets
Maureen N. McLane - 2012
In this stunningly original book Maureen N. McLane channels the spirits and voices that make up the music in one poet’s mind. Weaving criticism and memoir, My Poets explores a life reading and a life read. McLane invokes in My Poets not necessarily the best poets, nor the most important poets (whoever these might be), but those writers who, in possessing her, made her. “I am marking here what most marked me,” she writes. Ranging from Chaucer to H. D. to William Carlos Williams to Louise Glück to Shelley (among others), McLane tracks the “growth of a poet’s mind,” as Wordsworth put it in The Prelude. In a poetical prose both probing and incantatory, McLane has written a radical book of experimental criticism. Susan Sontag called for an “erotics of interpretation”: this is it. Part Bildung, part dithyramb, part exegesis, My Poets extends an implicit invitation to you, dear reader, to consider who your “my poets,” or “my novelists,” or “my filmmakers,” or “my pop stars,” might be.
Black Butterflies
John Shirley - 1998
Winner of the Bram Stoker Award, the International Horror Guild Award, and a Publishers Weekly Best Book of the Year.
China: Alive in the Bitter Sea
Fox Butterfield - 1982
Penetrates the soul of this intricate and mysterious nation.
A Crown of Feathers
Isaac Bashevis Singer - 1973
Antonio S and the Mystery of Theodore Guzman
Odo Hirsch - 1997
In the same area lives a recluse actor called Theodore Guzman. Antonio draws him out by presenting a play. Guzman leads Antonio, in turn, into the magical world of theatre, where the only limit is the limit of imagination.