Then Again


Book Description

An intimate account by the Academy Award-winning actress documents her rise from an everyday girl to an acclaimed performer while exploring her defining relationship with her mother and how their shared and separate dreams influenced their experiences.




Then Again, Maybe I Won't


Book Description

Ever since his dad got rich from an invention and his family moved to a wealthy neighborhood on Long Island, Tony Miglione’s life has been turned upside down. For starters, there’s his new friend, Joel, who shoplifts. Then there’s Joel’s sixteen-year-old sister, Lisa, who gets undressed every night without pulling down her shades. And there’s Grandma, who won’t come down from her bedroom. On top of all that, Tony has a whole bunch of new questions about growing up. . . . Why couldn’t things have stayed the same?




Then, Again


Book Description




The Art of Time in Memoir


Book Description

The Art Of series is a new line of books reinvigorating the practice of craft and criticism. Each book will be a brief, witty, and useful exploration of fiction, nonfiction, or poetry by a writer impassioned by a singular craft issue. The Art Of volumes will provide a series of sustained examinations of key but sometimes neglected aspects of creative writing by some of contemporary literature's finest practioners. In The Art of Time in Memoir, critic and memoirist Sven Birkerts examines the human impulse to write about the self. By examining memoirs such as Vladimir Nabokov's Speak, Memory; Virginia Woolf's unfinished A Sketch of the Past; and Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, Birkerts describes the memoirist's essential art of assembling patterns of meaning, stirring to life our own sense of past and present.




Representing Black Music Culture


Book Description

In this collection of essays, interviews, and profiles, William Banfield reflects on his life as a musician and educator, as he weaves together pieces of cultural criticism and artistry, all the while paying homage to Black music of the last 40 years and beyond. In Representing Black Music Culture: Then, Now, and When Again?, Banfield honors the legacy of artists who have graced us with their work for more than half a century. The essays and interviews in this collection are enhanced by seven years of daily diary entries, which reflect on some of the country's most respected Black composers, recording artists, authors, and cultural icons. These include Ornette Coleman, Bobby McFerrin, Toni Morrison, Amiri Baraka, Gordon Parks, the Marsalis brothers, Spike Lee, Maya Angelou, Patrice Rushen, and many others. Though many of the individuals Banfield lauds are well-known to most readers, he also turns his attention to musicians and artists whose work, while perhaps unheralded by the world at large, are no less deserving of praise and respect for their contributions to the culture. In addition, this volume is filled with candid photographs of many of these fellow artists as they participate in expressive culture, whether on stage, on tour, in clubs, behind the scenes, in rehearsal, or even during meals and teaching class. This unique book of essays, interviews, diary entries, and Banfield's personal photographs will be of interest to scholars and students, of course, but also to general readers interested in absorbing and appreciating the beauty of Black culture.




Inside Out & Back Again


Book Description

Moving to America turns H&à's life inside out. For all the 10 years of her life, H&à has only known Saigon: the thrills of its markets, the joy of its traditions, the warmth of her friends close by, and the beauty of her very own papaya tree. But now the Vietnam War has reached her home. H&à and her family are forced to flee as Saigon falls, and they board a ship headed toward hope. In America, H&à discovers the foreign world of Alabama: the coldness of its strangers, the dullness of its food, the strange shape of its landscape, and the strength of her very own family. This is the moving story of one girl's year of change, dreams, grief, and healing as she journeys from one country to another, one life to the next.




Shirana Shahbazi


Book Description

Photography is always suspended between authenticity, construction and selection ... a balancing act that is, to me, its quintessential justification as an artistic medium--Shirana Shahbazi Shirana Shahbazi explores genres as varied as the vanitas still-life, portraiture, landscape and color abstraction. Shahbazi is just as mobile in her choice of media, for example commissioning carpet makers in her native Iran and billboard painters to copy her images. Often employing the slick look of commercial photography, Shahbazi's images are bright and accessible, yet at heart dispassionate and skeptical. Shirana Shahbazi was born in Tehran in 1974, moved to Germany in 1985 and today lives in Zurich. She studied photography and design at the University of Applied Sciences and Arts in Dortmund and at Zurich University of the Arts. Her work has been exhibited at venues including the Centre d'Art Contemporain in Geneva, the Barbican Art Gallery in London and the Hammer Museum in Los Angeles.




Then Again


Book Description

The trade paperback edition of Diane Keaton’s unforgettable memoir includes a new Afterword about the bonds between mother and daughter. NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Janet Maslin, The New York Times • People • Vogue ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR —Financial Times • Chicago Sun-Times The Independent • Bookreporter The Sunday Business Post Mom loved adages, quotes, slogans. There were always little reminders pasted on the kitchen wall. For example, the word THINK. I found THINK thumbtacked on a bulletin board in her darkroom. I saw it Scotch-taped on a pencil box she’d collaged. I even found a pamphlet titled THINK on her bedside table. Mom liked to THINK. So begins Diane Keaton’s unforgettable memoir about her mother and herself. In it you will meet the woman known to tens of millions as Annie Hall, but you will also meet, and fall in love with, her mother, the loving, complicated, always-thinking Dorothy Hall. To write about herself, Diane realized she had to write about her mother, too, and how their bond came to define both their lives. In a remarkable act of creation, Diane not only reveals herself to us, she also lets us meet in intimate detail her mother. Over the course of her life, Dorothy kept eighty-five journals—literally thousands of pages—in which she wrote about her marriage, her children, and, most probingly, herself. Dorothy also recorded memorable stories about Diane’s grandparents. Diane has sorted through these pages to paint an unflinching portrait of her mother—a woman restless with intellectual and creative energy, struggling to find an outlet for her talents—as well as her entire family, recounting a story that spans four generations and nearly a hundred years. More than the autobiography of a legendary actress, Then Again is a book about a very American family with very American dreams. Diane will remind you of yourself, and her bonds with her family will remind you of your own relationships with those you love the most. Look for special features inside. Join the Circle for author chats and more.




On Vanishing


Book Description

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice An essential book for those coping with Alzheimer’s and other cognitive disorders that “reframe[s] our understanding of dementia with sensitivity and accuracy . . . to grant better futures to our loved ones and ourselves” (The New York Times). An estimated fifty million people in the world suffer from dementia. Diseases such as Alzheimer's erase parts of one's memory but are also often said to erase the self. People don't simply die from such diseases; they are imagined, in the clichés of our era, as vanishing in plain sight, fading away, or enduring a long goodbye. In On Vanishing, Lynn Casteel Harper, a Baptist minister and nursing home chaplain, investigates the myths and metaphors surrounding dementia and aging, addressing not only the indignities caused by the condition but also by the rhetoric surrounding it. Harper asks essential questions about the nature of our outsized fear of dementia, the stigma this fear may create, and what it might mean for us all to try to “vanish well.” Weaving together personal stories with theology, history, philosophy, literature, and science, Harper confronts our elemental fears of disappearance and death, drawing on her own experiences with people with dementia both in the American healthcare system and within her own family. In the course of unpacking her own stories and encounters—of leading a prayer group on a dementia unit; of meeting individuals dismissed as “already gone” and finding them still possessed of complex, vital inner lives; of witnessing her grandfather’s final years with Alzheimer’s and discovering her own heightened genetic risk of succumbing to the disease—Harper engages in an exploration of dementia that is unlike anything written before on the subject. A rich and startling work of nonfiction, On Vanishing reveals cognitive change as it truly is, an essential aspect of what it means to be mortal.




then/again


Book Description

Michelle Elrick's then/again is a poetic account of finding home, and the meanings and moments that the concept of home can come to embody. The collection tracks the poet through a landscape of intimate places—an ancestral home in Scotland, a mother's birthplace in Salzburg, a childhood home on the West Coast—as well as the memory-warped terrain of the poet's past houses. In brief poetic capsules that combine to form long, lyrical narratives, Elrick enfolds layers of tactile and remembered experience, offering continual moments of surprise. In the observer's eye, the double act of perceiving and writing lends transformative and mythic properties to the everyday: "a heron drums a pattern of shadows on the surface of the sea, wings tick with quartz regularity. bay clouds spot red, bulbs of peach bloom, smoulder and die down into blue.” The collection is infused by a sense of nostalgia and longing within the present moment, illustrating the elusiveness of home even while it is being lived: "I watch as the day opens, expanding its geometry. diffuse light penetrates the blind. hot sun yellows cold concrete (caress stretching across the courtyard).” Each quiet moment of reflection builds upon the others to produce a sense of place that is as immediate and fleeting as home itself. Elrick has an uncanny sense for capturing and illuminating those moments that will later glow in memory.