Sallies, Romps, Portraits, and Send-Offs


Book Description

Sixteen years’ worth of incisive essays by the great poet and memoirist “Witty, gritty poet and memoirist Kleinzahler” (Publishers Weekly) has gathered the best of sixteen years’ worth of essays, remembrances, and reviews in this scabrous and essential collection, setting down his thoughts about great poets and bad poets, about kvetching fiction writers and homicidal musicians, about eccentric critics and discerning nobodies, always with insight and humor, and never suffering fools gladly. Here, in Sallies, Romps, Portraits, and Send-Offs, August Kleinzahler eulogizes famous friends, warts and all (Thom Gunn, Christopher Middleton, Leonard Michaels); leads the charge in carving up a few bloated reputations (E. E. Cummings, Richard Brautigan); and sings the praises of unjustly neglected masters (Lucia Berlin, Kenneth Cox). He also turns the spotlight on himself in several short, delightful memoirs, covering such subjects as his obsessive CD collecting, the eerie effects of San Francisco fog, and the terrible duty of selling of his childhood home.




Author


Book Description

A beautiful and moving collection of photographs by Beowulf Sheehan, whose work captures the essence of 200 of our most prominent writers, historians, journalists, playwrights, and poets. Beowulf Sheehan is considered to be his generation's foremost literary portrait photographer, having made portraits of the literary luminaries of our time across the globe, from Roxane Gay to Masha Gessen, Patti Smith to Zadie Smith, Karl Ove Knausgaard to J.K. Rowling, and Jonathan Franzen to Toni Morrison. In Authors Sheehan presents the most insightful, intimate, and revealing portraits of these artists made in his studio, in their homes, in shopping malls and concert halls, on rooftops and in parking lots, on the beach and among trees, surrounded by flowers and in clock towers. Following an enlightening foreword by Salman Rushdie, Beowulf Sheehan shares an essay offering insights in the poignant and memorable moments he experienced while making these portraits. A treasure gift for readers and lovers of portrait photography, Authors is the only book of its kind to appear in more than a decade.




The Letters of Thom Gunn


Book Description

The Letters of Thom Gunn presents the first complete portrait of the private life, reflections, and relationships of a maverick figure in the history of British and American poetry. “I write about love, I write about friendship,” remarked Thom Gunn. “I find that they are absolutely intertwined.” These core values permeate his correspondence with friends, family, lovers, and fellow poets, and they shed new light on “one of the most singular and compelling poets in English during the past half-century” (Hugh Haughton, The Times Literary Supplement). The Letters of Thom Gunn, edited by August Kleinzahler, Michael Nott, and Clive Wilmer, reveals the evolution of Gunn’s work and illuminates the fascinating life that informed his poems: his struggle to come to terms with his mother’s suicide; settling in San Francisco and his complex relationship with England; his changing relationship with his life partner, Mike Kitay; the LSD trips that led to his celebrated collection Moly (1971); and the deaths of friends from AIDS that inspired the powerful, unsparing elegies of The Man with Night Sweats (1992).




The FSG Poetry Anthology


Book Description

To honor FSG's 75th anniversary, here is a unique anthology celebrating the riches and variety of its poetry list—past, present, and future Poetry has been at the heart of Farrar, Straus and Giroux's identity ever since Robert Giroux joined the fledgling company in the mid-1950s, soon bringing T. S. Eliot, John Berryman, Robert Lowell, and Elizabeth Bishop onto the list. These extraordinary poets and their successors have been essential in helping define FSG as a publishing house with a unique place in American letters. The FSG Poetry Anthology includes work by almost all of the more than one hundred twenty-five poets whom FSG has published in its seventy-five-year history. Giroux's first generation was augmented by a group of international figures (and Nobel laureates), including Pablo Neruda, Nelly Sachs, Derek Walcott, Seamus Heaney, and Joseph Brodsky. Over time the list expanded to includes poets as diverse as Yehuda Amichai, John Ashbery, Frank Bidart, Louise Glück, Thom Gunn, Ted Hughes, Yusef Komunyakaa, Mina Loy, Marianne Moore, Paul Muldoon, Les Murray, Grace Paley, Carl Phillips, Gjertrud Schnackenberg, James Schuyler, C. K. Williams, Charles Wright, James Wright, and Adam Zagajewski. Today, Henri Cole, francine j. harris, Ishion Hutchinson, Maureen N. McLane, Ange Mlinko, Valzhyna Mort, Rowan Ricardo Phillips, and Frederick Seidel are among the poets who are continuing FSG's tradition as a discoverer and promoter of the most vital and distinguished contemporary voices. This anthology is a wide-ranging showcase of some of the best poems published in America over the past three generations. It is also a sounding of poetry's present and future.




Before Dawn on Bluff Road / Hollyhocks in the Fog


Book Description

A collection of August Kleinzahler’s best poems, divided—like his life—between New Jersey and San Francisco When August Kleinzahler won the 2004 Griffin Poetry Prize for his collection The Strange Hours Travelers Keep, the judges’ citation referred to his work as “ferociously on the move, between locations, between forms, between registers.” They might also have added “between New Jersey and San Francisco,” the places Kleinzahler has spent his life traveling between, both on the road and on the page. This collection assembles the best of his New Jersey and San Francisco poems for the first time, organized according to place, with each city receiving its own title and cover. Providing readers with a gorgeous guide to Kleinzahler’s interior geography, Before Dawn on Bluff Road (New Jersey) and Hollyhocks in the Fog (San Francisco) function as both word-maps and word-anatomies of one of our greatest poet’s lifelong passions and preoccupations.




A History of Western Music


Book Description

In a career-spanning selection of poems, August Kleinzahler captures the essence of the West's greatest music. In A History of Western Music, August Kleinzahler’s rhythmic, wry, kinetic style captures the ineffable power and beauty of great songs and artists, as well as the potency of our response to them. In this collection, music is inextricable from life, from landscape, and from the people we remember through it. The poet inhabits the minds and milieus of musicians; he hears arpeggios in the salon of Princesse Edmonde de Polignac and listens to the vibrations of a hummingbird through Béla Bartók. Kleinzahler’s verse not only contains the same sonorous beauty as the compositions he writes of but also the vitality and complexity of the moments we associate with them—the way the soundtrack of one’s life becomes defined by the scenes it scores, and vice versa. From John Coltrane to Annie Lenox, from opera to bebop and all the jingles and melodies in between, A History of Western Music is a portrait of the vast range of meaning and memory that music creates and contains in one’s life.




Cutty, One Rock


Book Description

Cutty, One Rock takes the reader on a wild journey by airplane, bus, ferry, and foot from childhood to early manhood in the company of a New Jersey family in equal measures cultivated and deranged. We witness scenes of passionate, even violent intensity that give rise to meditations on eros and literature, the solitariness of travel, and the poetics of place. These individual pieces, most of which first appeared in The London Review of Books and won an international cult following, are by turns "poignant, surreal, down home and lyrical, a mixture of qualities that inheres in his language with uncommon delicacy and effect" (Leonard Michaels). Together they make up an intellectual and emotional autobiography on the run. The book's final section, about Kleinzahler's adored, doomed older brother, is unforgettable, and since its appearance last year in the LRB, has already entered the literature as one of the most moving contemporary memoirs.




RKO Radio Pictures Horror, Science Fiction and Fantasy Films, 1929-1956


Book Description

King Kong and The Thing from Another World are among the most popular horror and science fiction films of all time and both were made by RKO Radio Pictures. Between 1929 and 1956, RKO released more than 140 genre features, including The Most Dangerous Game, The Phantom of Crestwood, Before Dawn, The Monkey's Paw, The Hunchback of Notre Dame, You'll Find Out, The Spiral Staircase, The Enchanted Cottage, It's a Wonderful Life, Captive Women and Killers from Space. RKO is remembered for its series of psychological horror movies produced by Val Lewton, including Cat People, I Walked with a Zombie, The Seventh Victim and The Body Snatcher. The studio also produced films in the adventure, comedy, fantasy, mystery and western genres. They released many Walt Disney classics--Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, Fantasia, Pinocchio, Cinderella, Peter Pan--as well as several "Tarzan" features. This volume covers these movies in detail with critical and historical analysis, in-depth plot synopsis and numerous contemporary reviews.




The Goddess Effect


Book Description

All she wants is to be her best self. Is she ready? Absolutely. Does she know what to expect? Absolutely not. Anita is over her life in New York: her dead-end job, tiny studio apartment, self-obsessed friends, and overbearing mom. So she moves west to Los Angeles in search of a new career, enlightenment, and that nebulous target...wellness. She discovers an elite workout class called the Goddess Effect, run by a lifestyle guru named Venus who's the very definition of #goals. One look at her Lululemon-clad acolytes sweating out their demons while dripping with confidence and Anita's all in. When one of the class regulars takes Anita under her wing, Anita's sure she's found her people. But Anita's not so smitten that she doesn't wonder about a few things: an inexplicable invitation to a Goddess Effect retreat, a strange tradition of secret sharing, and whispers about "enhancements" that only Venus can provide. Anita is awakening to a terrifying epiphany: the Goddess Effect isn't quite what it seems, and it may turn her world--and that of everyone around her--upside down.




Hearst's


Book Description