American Writers at Home


Book Description

From Big Sur to coastal Maine, The Library of America presents a lavish and fascinating tour of the homes of America's greatest writers.




Notable American Women Writers


Book Description

This new title brings together overviews and in-depth analysis of hundreds of American women writers, from Colonial America to present day. This work concentrates on women writers of literature, including novels, short stories, poetry, and drama. Essays include a personal biography and a summary of works, with valuable top matter details and further reading sections. The volumes include reviews and excerpts of the writer's most acclaimed works to give the researcher a unique, comprehensive perspective




Eminent Outlaws


Book Description

This “standard text of the defining era of gay literati” tells the cultural history of the interconnected lives of the 20th century's most influential gay writers (Philadelphia Inquirer). In the years following World War II a group of gay writers established themselves as major cultural figures in American life. Truman Capote, the enfant terrible, whose finely wrought fiction and nonfiction captured the nation's imagination. Gore Vidal, the wry, withering chronicler of politics, sex, and history. Tennessee Williams, whose powerful plays rocketed him to the top of the American theater. James Baldwin, the harrowingly perceptive novelist and social critic. Christopher Isherwood, the English novelist who became a thoroughly American novelist. And the exuberant Allen Ginsberg, whose poetry defied censorship and exploded minds. Together, their writing introduced America to gay experience and sensibility, and changed our literary culture. But the change was only beginning. A new generation of gay writers followed, taking more risks and writing about their sexuality more openly. Edward Albee brought his prickly iconoclasm to the American theater. Edmund White laid bare his own life in stylized, autobiographical works. Armistead Maupin wove a rich tapestry of the counterculture, queer and straight. Mart Crowley brought gay men's lives out of the closet and onto the stage. And Tony Kushner took them beyond the stage, to the center of American ideas. With authority and humor, Christopher Bram weaves these men's ambitions, affairs, feuds, loves, and appetites into a single sweeping narrative. Chronicling over fifty years of momentous change-from civil rights to Stonewall to AIDS and beyond. Eminent Outlaws is an inspiring, illuminating tale: one that reveals how the lives of these men are crucial to understanding the social and cultural history of the American twentieth century.




The Vintage Book of American Women Writers


Book Description

For centuries women have been marginalized and overlooked in American literary history. That injustice is corrected in this entertaining and provocative collection of 350 years of poetry and fiction by American women. From Puritan poet Anne Bradstreet to Margaret Fuller to Harriet Beecher Stowe, readers will encounter scores of lesser-known and forgotten writers who fully deserve to be rediscovered and enjoyed by new generations. Our famous women writers, including contemporary stars like Annie Proux and Jhumpa Lahiri, are showcased in their full literary context, offering an epic overview of the canon in one monumental, dazzling volume. This landmark anthology features the best work of our best American women, and was inspired and informed by the author's groundbreaking history celebrating women writers, A Jury of Her Peers.




The Mystery Writers of America Cookbook


Book Description

Enjoy over 100 recipes and murderously fun facts from legendary mystery authors like Sue Grafton, Louise Penny, Harlan Coben, and James Patterson! With art deco embellishments and stunning photos, this heirloom cookbook is the perfect gift for book lovers and mystery fans. Whether you’re planning a sinister dinner party or whipping up comfort food for a day of writing, you’ll find plenty to savor in this cunning collection of recipes from bestselling mystery authors! Discover hard-boiled breakfasts, thrilling entrees, and cozy desserts, including: • Mary Higgins Clark’s Celebratory Giants Game Night Chili • Harlan Coben’s Myron’s Crabmeat Dip • Nelson DeMille’s Male Chauvinist Pigs in a Blanket • Lee Child’s Coffee, Pot of One • Gillian Flynn’s Beef Skillet Fiesta • Sue Grafton’s Kinsey Millhone’s Famous Peanut Butter and Pickle Sandwich • Charlaine Harris’s Very Unsophisticated Supper Dip • James Patterson’s Grandma’s Killer Chocolate Cake • Louise Penny’s Madame Benoît’s Tourtière • Scott Turow’s Innocent Frittata Featuring full-color photography and intriguing sidebars on the surprising—and sometimes deadly—links between food and foul play, this is the ultimate cookbook for crime fiction aficionados.




Soul of a People


Book Description

Soul of a People is about a handful of people who were on the Federal Writer's Project in the 1930s and a glimpse of America at a turning point. This particular handful of characters went from poverty to great things later, and included John Cheever, Ralph Ellison, Zora Neale Hurston, Richard Wright, and Studs Terkel. In the 1930s they were all caught up in an effort to describe America in a series of WPA guides. Through striking images and firsthand accounts, the book reveals their experiences and the most vivid excerpts from selected guides and interviews: Harlem schoolchildren, truckers, Chicago fishmongers, Cuban cigar makers, a Florida midwife, Nebraskan meatpackers, and blind musicians. Drawing on new discoveries from personal collections, archives, and recent biographies, a new picture has emerged in the last decade of how the participants' individual dramas intersected with the larger picture of their subjects. This book illuminates what it felt like to live that experience, how going from joblessness to reporting on their own communities affected artists with varied visions, as well as what feelings such a passage involved: shame humiliation, anger, excitement, nostalgia, and adventure. Also revealed is how the WPA writers anticipated, and perhaps paved the way for, the political movements of the following decades, including the Civil Rights movement, the Women's Right movement, and the Native American rights movement.




The Writers


Book Description

Screenwriters are storytellers and dream builders. They forge new worlds and beings, bringing them to life through storylines and idiosyncratic details. Yet up until now, no one has told the story of these creative and indispensable artists. The Writers is the only comprehensive qualitative analysis of the history of writers and writing in the film, television, and streaming media industries in America. Featuring in-depth interviews with over fifty writers—including Mel Brooks, Norman Lear, Carl Reiner, and Frank Pierson—The Writers delivers a compelling, behind-the-scenes look at the role and rights of writers in Hollywood and New York over the past century. Granted unprecedented access to the archives of the Writers Guild Foundation, Miranda J. Banks also mines over 100 never-before-published oral histories with legends such as Nora Ephron and Ring Lardner Jr., whose insight and humor provide a window onto the enduring priorities, policies, and practices of the Writers Guild. With an ear for the language of storytellers, Banks deftly analyzes watershed moments in the industry: the advent of sound, World War II, the blacklist, ascension of television, the American New Wave, the rise and fall of VHS and DVD, and the boom of streaming media. The Writers spans historical and contemporary moments, and draws upon American cultural history, film and television scholarship and the passionate politics of labor and management. Published on the sixtieth anniversary of the formation of the Writers Guild of America, this book tells the story of the triumphs and struggles of these vociferous and contentious hero-makers.




Afield


Book Description

Collects stories by famous figures and writers on their relationships with hunting dogs, describing each contributor's forays into the outdoors at the side of a faithful canine companion, in a nostalgic tribute that includes pieces by such figures as Tom Brokaw, Rick Bass, and Chris Camuto.




Extraordinary American Writers


Book Description

Profiles over sixty United States authors representing different eras, cultures, and genres who have made their mark in history, including Benjamin Franklin, Emily Dickinson, and W.E.B. DuBois.




How To Write An Autobiographical Novel


Book Description

Named a Best Book of 2018 by New York Magazine, the Washington Post, Publisher's Weekly, NPR, and Time, among many others, this essay collection from the author of The Queen of the Night explores how we form identities in life and in art. As a novelist, Alexander Chee has been described as “masterful” by Roxane Gay, “incendiary” by the New York Times, and "brilliant" by the Washington Post. With his first collection of nonfiction, he’s sure to secure his place as one of the finest essayists of his generation as well. How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is the author’s manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend. He examines some of the most formative experiences of his life and the nation’s history, including his father’s death, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, the jobs that supported his writing ​— ​Tarot-reading, bookselling, cater-waiting for William F. Buckley ​— ​the writing of his first novel, Edinburgh, and the election of Donald Trump. By turns commanding, heartbreaking, and wry, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel asks questions about how we create ourselves in life and in art, and how to fight when our dearest truths are under attack. Named a Best Book by: Time, Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Wired, Esquire, Buzzfeed, New York Public Library, Boston Globe, Paris Review, Mother Jones,The A.V. Club, Out Magazine, Book Riot, Electric Literature, PopSugar, The Rumpus, My Republica, Paste, Bitch, Library Journal, Flavorwire, Bustle, Christian Science Monitor, Shelf Awareness, Tor.com, Entertainment Cheat Sheet, Roads and Kingdoms, Chicago Public Library, Hyphen Magazine, Entropy Magazine, Chicago Review of Books, The Coil, iBooks, and Washington Independent Review of Books Winner of the Publishing Triangle's Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction * Recipient of the Lambda Literary Trustees' Award * Finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay * Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography