Book picks similar to
A Journey Through Literary America by Thomas Hummel


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Howards End Is on the Landing: A Year of Reading from Home


Susan Hill - 2009
    Early one autumn afternoon in pursuit of an elusive book on her shelves, Susan Hill encountered dozens of others that she had never read, or forgotten she owned, or wanted to read for a second time. The discovery inspired her to embark on a year-long voyage through her books, forsaking new purchases in order to get to know her own collection again. A book which is left on a shelf for a decade is a dead thing, but it is also a chrysalis, packed with the potential to burst into new life. Wandering through her house that day, Hill's eyes were opened to how much of that life was stored in her home, neglected for years. 'Howards End is on the Landing' charts the journey of one of the nation's most accomplished authors as she revisits the conversations, libraries and bookshelves of the past that have informed a lifetime of reading and writing.

Henry Miller: A Life


Robert Ferguson - 1991
    But Robert Ferguson’s new biography tells a different tale; for where the novels are sexually explicit and brutally frank—woundingly so to those close to Miller—they are also the fantasies of a man escaping from his past, and from himself.

Lonely Planet Miami & the Keys (Travel Guide)


Regis St. Louis - 2002
    Check out Miami's definitive art-deco style, spot alligators in the Everglades, or drive Hwy 1 to see blue waters of the Florida Keys -all with your trusted travel companion. Get to the heart of Miami & the Keys and begin your journey now! Inside Lonely Planet Miami & the Keys: Full-color maps and images throughout Highlights and itineraries help you tailor your trip to your personal needs and interests Insider tips to save time and money and get around like a local, avoiding crowds and trouble spots Essential info at your fingertips - hours of operation, phone numbers, websites, transit tips, prices Honest reviews for all budgets - eating, sleeping, sight-seeing, going out, shopping, hidden gems that most guidebooks miss Cultural insights give you a richer, more rewarding travel experience - architecture, history, cuisine, local lifestyles, environment, wildlife. Free, convenient pull-out Miami map (included in print version), plus over 26 color maps Covers Miami, the Everglades, Florida Keys, Key West and more The Perfect Choice: Lonely Planet Miami & the Keys , our most comprehensive guide to Miami & the Keys, is perfect for both exploring top sights and taking roads less traveled. Looking for more extensive coverage? Check out Lonely Planet Florida guide for a comprehensive look at all the state has to offer. About Lonely Planet: Lonely Planet is a leading travel media company and the world's number one travel guidebook brand, providing both inspiring and trustworthy information for every kind of traveller since 1973. Over the past four decades, we've printed over 145 million guidebooks and phrasebooks for 120 languages, and grown a dedicated, passionate global community of travellers. You'll also find our content online, and in mobile apps, video, 14 languages, 12 international magazines, armchair and lifestyle books, ebooks, and more, enabling you to explore every day. Lonely Planet enables the curious to experience the world fully and to truly get to the heart of the places they find themselves, near or far from home. TripAdvisor Travelers' Choice Awards 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015 and 2016 winner in Favorite Travel Guide category 'Lonely Planet guides are, quite simply, like no other.' - New York Times 'Lonely Planet. It's on everyone's bookshelves, it's in every traveller's hands. It's on mobile phones. It's on the Internet. It's everywhere, and it's telling entire generations of people how to travel the world.' - Fairfax Media (Australia) eBook Features: (Best viewed on tablet devices and smartphones) Downloadable PDF and offline maps prevent roaming and data charges Effortlessly navigate and jump between maps and reviews Add notes to personalise your guidebook exper

Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading: Finding and Losing Myself in Books


Maureen Corrigan - 2005
    “It’s just that there always comes a moment when I’m in the company of others—even my nearest and dearest—when I’d rather be reading a book.” In this delightful memoir, Corrigan reveals which books and authors have shaped her own life—from classic works of English literature to hard-boiled detective novels, and everything in between. And in her explorations of the heroes and heroines throughout literary history, Corrigan’s love for a good story shines.

The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books


Azar Nafisi - 2014
    In this exhilarating followup, Nafisi has written the book her fans have been waiting for: an impassioned, beguiling and utterly original tribute to the vital importance of fiction in a democratic society. What Reading Lolita in Tehran was for Iran, The Republic of Imagination is for America. Taking her cue from a challenge thrown to her in Seattle, where a skeptical reader told her that Americans don’t care about books the way they did back in Iran, she challenges those who say fiction has nothing to teach us. Blending memoir and polemic with close readings of her favorite American novels—from Huckleberry Finn to The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter—she invites us to join her as citizens of her "Republic of Imagination," a country where the villains are conformity and orthodoxy, and the only passport to entry is a free mind and a willingness to dream.

Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway’s Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises


Lesley M.M. Blume - 2016
    Then, over the next six weeks, he channeled that trip’s maelstrom of drunken brawls, sexual rivalry, midnight betrayals, and midday hangovers into his groundbreaking novel The Sun Also Rises. This revolutionary work redefined modern literature as much as it did his peers, who would forever after be called the Lost Generation. But the full story of Hemingway’s legendary rise has remained untold until now.  Lesley Blume resurrects the explosive, restless landscape of 1920s Paris and Spain and reveals how Hemingway helped create his own legend. He made himself into a death-courting, bull-fighting aficionado; a hard-drinking, short-fused literary genius; and an expatriate bon vivant. Blume’s vivid account reveals the inner circle of the Lost Generation as we have never seen it before, and shows how it still influences what we read and how we think about youth, sex, love, and excess.

Both Flesh and Not: Essays


David Foster Wallace - 2012
    Here, Wallace turns his critical eye with equal enthusiasm toward Roger Federer and Jorge Luis Borges; Terminator 2 and The Best of the Prose Poem; the nature of being a fiction writer and the quandary of defining the essay; the best underappreciated novels and the English language's most irksome misused words; and much more.Both Flesh and Not restores Wallace's essays as originally written, and it includes a selection from his personal vocabulary list, an assembly of unusual words and definitions.

The Most Beautiful Libraries in the World


Jacques Bosser - 2003
    Often architectural treasures in themselves, they were constructed in styles that befitted the riches they stored, from Neoclassical temples to Baroque palaces to Jeffersonian athaeneums. Both public in purpose and intensely private in feel, they have served the noble role of preserving and disseminating that key cultural artifact of mankind - the book - and in doing so, their role has been central to the nourishment and development of the world's great civilizations. To this day the great libraries of the world remain extraordinary environments for scholarship and enlightenment." "Here, for the first time, architectural photographer Guillaume de Laubier takes the reader on a privileged tour of twenty-three of the world's most historic libraries, representing twelve countries and ranging from the great national monuments to scholarly, religious, and private libraries: the baroque splendor of the Institut de France in Paris; the Renaissance treasure-trove of the Riccardiana Library in Florence; the majestic Royal Monastery in El Escorial, Spain; the hallowed halls of Oxford's Bodleian Library; and the New York Public Library, a Beaux-Arts masterpiece. Also included are the smaller abbey and monastic libraries - often overlooked on tourist itineraries - each containing its own equally important collections of religious and philosophical writings, manuscripts, and church history. Through color photography one can marvel at the grandeur of the great public libraries while relishing the rare glimpses inside scholars-only private archives." The accompanying text by journalist and translator Jacques Bosser traces the history of libraries from the Renaissance to the present day, vividly describing how they came to serve the famous men of letters of centuries past and the general public of the ni

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.

Bleaker House: Chasing My Novel to the End of the World


Nell Stevens - 2017
    Then came an irresistible opportunity: she won a fellowship to spend three months, all expenses paid, anywhere in the world to research and write a book. Did she choose a glittering metropolis, a romantic village, an exotic paradise? Um, no. Nell chose Bleaker Island, a snowy, windswept pile of rock off the Falklands. There, in a guesthouse where she would be the only guest, she imagined she could finally rid herself of distractions and write her 2,500 words a day. In three months, surely she'd have a novel, right?It's true that there aren't many distractions on Bleaker, other than sheep, penguins, paranoia and the weather. But as Nell gets to work on her novel--a delightful Dickensian fiction she calls Bleaker House--she discovers that an excruciatingly erratic Internet connection and 1100 calories a day (as much food as she could carry in her suitcase, budgeted to the raisin) are far from ideal conditions for literary production. With deft humour, this memoir traces Nell's island days and slowly reveals details of the life and people she has left behind in pursuit of her art. They pop up in her novel, as well, as memoir and novel start to reflect one another. It seems that there is nowhere Nell can run--neither a remote island nor the pages of her notebook--to escape herself.A whimsical, entertaining, thought-provoking blend of memoir and travelogue, laced with tongue-in-cheek writing advice, Bleaker House brilliantly captures the hopes, fears, self-torture and humour of being young and yearning to make a creative life. With winning honesty and wit, Nell's race to finish her book emerges as a fascinating narrative in its own right.

The Novel Cure: From Abandonment to Zestlessness: 751 Books to Cure What Ails You


Ella Berthoud - 2013
    It offers distraction, entertainment, and an opportunity to unwind or focus. But it can also be something more powerful—a way to learn about how to live. Read at the right moment in your life, a novel can—quite literally—change it. The Novel Cure is a reminder of that power. To create this apothecary, the authors have trawled two thousand years of literature for novels that effectively promote happiness, health, and sanity, written by brilliant minds who knew what it meant to be human and wrote their life lessons into their fiction. Structured like a reference book, readers simply look up their ailment, be it agoraphobia, boredom, or a midlife crisis, and are given a novel to read as the antidote. Bibliotherapy does not discriminate between pains of the body and pains of the head (or heart). Aware that you’ve been cowardly? Pick up To Kill a Mockingbird for an injection of courage. Experiencing a sudden, acute fear of death? Read One Hundred Years of Solitude for some perspective on the larger cycle of life. Nervous about throwing a dinner party? Ali Smith’s There but for The will convince you that yours could never go that wrong. Whatever your condition, the prescription is simple: a novel (or two), to be read at regular intervals and in nice long chunks until you finish. Some treatments will lead to a complete cure. Others will offer solace, showing that you’re not the first to experience these emotions. The Novel Cure is also peppered with useful lists and sidebars recommending the best novels to read when you’re stuck in traffic or can’t fall asleep, the most important novels to read during every decade of life, and many more. Brilliant in concept and deeply satisfying in execution, The Novel Cure belongs on everyone’s bookshelf and in every medicine cabinet. It will make even the most well-read fiction aficionado pick up a novel he’s never heard of, and see familiar ones with new eyes. Mostly, it will reaffirm literature’s ability to distract and transport, to resonate and reassure, to change the way we see the world and our place in it.The Economist"Astute and often amusing . . . a charming addition to any library. Time spent leafing through its pages is inspiring - even therapeutic."

Hi! My Name is Loco and I am a Racist


Baye McNeil - 2012
    Loco of the influential blog "Loco in Yokohama) vividly illustrates with unflinching introspection and candor, the birth and evolution of a racist, and in doing so makes the persuasive argument that the only way to cure this social virus is by first acknowledging and engaging one’s own racism. Loco takes us on a scintillating journey from the streets of Brooklyn, where a child’s first playground was the frontlines of the Black Nationalist Movement of the seventies, to a period of black militancy, military service, interracial romance and corporate bigotry in the eighties and nineties. Following the traumatic events of 9/11/2001, Loco relocates to Japan where he learns that old adage -— you can’t hide from yourself -— the hard way. He finds the woman he was made to love; only she’s a member of a race he has come to loathe. In the name of this love, Loco confronts this dark stowaway with deep roots even as the world is literally falling apart around him, in the form of the Tohoku disaster of 3/11/2011. A book that is both a memoir and an impassioned call to arms, Hi! My Name is Loco and I am a Racist tells us in no uncertain terms that while racism continues to be demonized as a dark aberration that only “evil people,” ignorant fools, or people lacking compassion and common decency are subject to, then it will remain at large – hiding in plain sight, in our schools, offices, carpools, living rooms...and sometimes even in the mirror.

The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them


Elif Batuman - 2010
    “Babel in California” told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University during a conference about the enigmatic writer Isaac Babel. Over the course of several pages, Batuman managed to misplace Babel’s last living relatives at the San Francisco airport, uncover Babel’s secret influence on the making of King Kong, and introduce her readers to a new voice that was unpredictable, comic, humane, ironic, charming, poignant, and completely, unpretentiously full of love for literature. Batuman’s subsequent pieces—for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and the London Review of Books— have made her one of the most sought-after and admired writers of her generation, and its best traveling companion. In The Possessed we watch her investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy’s ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin’s wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying; and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their place in The Possessed. Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence—including her own.

The Unquiet Daughter


Danielle Flood - 2016
    Home comes and goes, like thoughts, like the clouds drifting over our slightly wild blue garden. It doesn't make sense, for I am loved by my husband and our children who scamper in and out during the day. I am loved by the dog even, who likes to listen with me to opera in the evening. Still, the feeling that home is somewhere in general and nowhere in particular returns, quite predictably, when I remember my mother." --So begins THE UNQUIET DAUGHTER: A journalist born of the wartime love triangle that inspired the one in Graham Greene's THE QUIET AMERICAN, searches for her father after barely surviving a bizarre youth of privilege, estrangement and cruelty. As she yearns for her father's love and presence -- and that of anyone in her family abroad who was kept from her -- Danielle's tall, beautiful, French and Vietnamese mother leaves her in burlesque house dressing rooms in the American Midwest, in convent schools in Long Island and Dublin, and with strangers in New York City. Meanwhile she lies to Danielle about who they are and their past for decades in this sometime-humorous near-tragic love story between a daughter and a mother and more. In the end we learn if Flood's journey through the truth of what happened between her parents in early 1950's Saigon satisfies her life-long quest for who she is. A story of resilience and love on many levels. A tale of the power of love."Powerful," "compelling," "heartbreaking," "a gripping story of self-doubt and self-discovery." --PUBLISHERS WEEKLY"The similarities in THE UNQUIET DAUGHTER between Flood’s parents’ lives and the plot of Graham Greene novel, THE QUIET AMERICAN, “are tantalizingly close, far too close to be coincidental; as Flood writes in the Prologue: ‘I came from a love triangle much like the one Greene describes in his novel. I am the sequel he never wrote.’“…As sequels go, Danielle Flood’s life story could easily be a Graham Greene novel, full of dark twists and turns, betrayals, heartbreak and the saddest of all forms of unrequited love …“…moving and at times imbued with humour…the tension is all too believable, but so is the joy…forgiveness and healing are at the heart of the story and the author’s ability to forgive is almost as powerful as the complex plot itself.” --THE CATHOLIC WORLD REPORT"I loved it." -- Sara Nelson, as books editor of O, THE OPRAH MAGAZINE."THE UNQUIET DAUGHTER by Danielle Flood is the true story of an exceptional woman. It takes the reader on an amazing journey. Exotic, mysterious, exciting, and romantic.Bravo Danielle Flood. It's a classic." -- Oscar-nominated actor Elliott Gould"When I was 13 or so, the Vietnam War in full flower, reading Graham Greene's THE QUIET AMERICAN let me appreciate fiction in a whole new way. Years later, Danielle Flood's riveting memoir-cum-mystery-story has let me appreciate Greene and his novel - and the intersections of fiction and nonfiction - in new ways. Such a story! And so beautifully told." -- Kurt Andersen, novelist, host of the public radio show STUDIO 360"Holy Moly, Mother of God...It's a knockout...Ferociously honest and gorgeously written, Flood's memoir is a fiercely tragic story of her search for her real father, her knotted relationship with her complicated mother-and her hard-won understanding of herself. About memory, love, loss and time, Flood's engrossing debut shines like mica and is as polished as platinum." -- Caroline Leavitt, NEW YORK TIMES bestselling author."Passionate and unflinchingly honest, this is a fascinating memoir...Danielle Flood is the child of an affair so much like the one described in the love triangle of Greene's novel, THE QUIET AMERICAN that she is perfectly right to make her startling claim, 'I am a sequel he never wrote." --Michael Shelden, author, GRAHAM GREENE THE ENEMY WITHIN"In Danielle Flood's clear eyed memoir of her early life with her exquisitely beautiful and deeply troubled mother, this truth echoes: the fact that a child could survive such emotional devastation and cruelty is a testament to her resilience and her valiant spirit." -- Leslie Daniels, author, CLEANING NABOKOV'S HOUSEFor a limited time, you can read and excerpt -- the prologue and the first two chapters -- of THE UNQUIET DAUGHTER at http://www.danielleflood.com

So You Think You're a Bookworm?: Over 20 hilarious profiles of book lovers—from sci-fi fanatics to romance readers


Jo Hoare - 2018
    Or maybe you’re The Adulterer, who struggles to commit and never has less than four books on the go, or The Abuser, whose “treat ’em mean” attitude leads to turned-down corners, broken spines, and water-damaged pages. With over 20 hilarious bookworm profiles, you’re sure to spot a good few character traits that any member of the literati will recognize. While we won’t claim it’s as funny as a Philip Roth novel, So You Think You’re a Bookworm? will definitely raise a smile or two.