In Praise of Messy Lives

In Praise of Messy Lives PDF Author: Katie Roiphe
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781782112082
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 265

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Book Description
'Is there some adventure out there that we are not having, some vividness, some wild pleasure, that we are not experiencing in our responsible, productive days? . . . We are bequeathed on earth one very short life, and it might be good, one of these days, to make sure that we are living it.'In this powerful, unified and vital work Katie Roiphe touches on everything from the romantic ambivalence of Jane Austen to the cast of Mad Men whilst delivering a collection of autobiographical pieces that are by turns, deeply moving, self-critical, razor-sharp, entertaining and unapologetic in their defence of 'messy lives'.'Brilliant and unflinching, on everything from divorce to Mad Men to sex to the food we eat. Every sentence is an eye-opener' India Knight

In Praise of Messy Lives

In Praise of Messy Lives PDF Author: Katie Roiphe
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781782112082
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 265

Get Book

Book Description
'Is there some adventure out there that we are not having, some vividness, some wild pleasure, that we are not experiencing in our responsible, productive days? . . . We are bequeathed on earth one very short life, and it might be good, one of these days, to make sure that we are living it.'In this powerful, unified and vital work Katie Roiphe touches on everything from the romantic ambivalence of Jane Austen to the cast of Mad Men whilst delivering a collection of autobiographical pieces that are by turns, deeply moving, self-critical, razor-sharp, entertaining and unapologetic in their defence of 'messy lives'.'Brilliant and unflinching, on everything from divorce to Mad Men to sex to the food we eat. Every sentence is an eye-opener' India Knight

In Praise of Messy Lives

In Praise of Messy Lives PDF Author: Katie Roiphe
Publisher: Dial Press Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 9780812992823
Category : Essays
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
A vital collection of essays from one of the most astute, provocative and engaged cultural critics we have, for fans of the essays of Jonathan Lethem and John Jeremiah Sullivan.

In Praise of Messy Lives

In Praise of Messy Lives PDF Author: Katie Roiphe
Publisher: Canongate Books
ISBN: 1782112103
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Is there some adventure out there that we are not having, some vividness, some wild pleasure, that we are not experiencing in our responsible, productive days? ... We are bequeathed on earth one very short life, and it might be good, one of these days, to make sure that we are living it.' As steely eyed in examining her own life as she is in skewering our cultural pitfalls, Roiphe gives us autobiographical pieces that are by turns, deeply moving, self-critical, razor-sharp, entertaining and unapologetic in their defence of 'messy lives'. In Praise of Messy Lives is powerfully unified, vital work from one of our most astute and essayists writing today.

The Power Notebooks

The Power Notebooks PDF Author: Katie Roiphe
Publisher: Free Press
ISBN: 198212802X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Katie Roiphe, culture writer and author of The Morning After, shares a “beautifully written” (The New York Times Book Review) “astute memoir [that] reverberates with rich prose, crisp pacing, and self-compassion” (Publishers Weekly) and an essential discussion of how strong women experience their power. Told in a series of notebook entries, Roiphe weaves her often fraught personal experiences with divorce, single motherhood, and relationships with insights into the lives and loves of famous writers such as Sylvia Plath and Simone de Beauvoir. She dissects the way she and other ordinary, powerful women have subjugated their own power time and time again, and she probes brilliantly at the tricky, uncomfortable question of why. “Although Ms. Roiphe seems to be exposing her vulnerabilities here, she is actually, once again, demonstrating her unique brand of fearlessness” (The Wall Street Journal). The Power Notebooks is Roiphe’s most vital, thought-provoking, and emotionally intimate work yet.

The Violet Hour

The Violet Hour PDF Author: Katie Roiphe
Publisher: Dial Press
ISBN: 0812988493
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
From one of our most perceptive and provocative voices comes a deeply researched account of the last days of Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak, and James Salter—an arresting and wholly original meditation on mortality. In The Violet Hour, Katie Roiphe takes an unexpected and liberating approach to the most unavoidable of subjects. She investigates the last days of six great thinkers, writers, and artists as they come to terms with the reality of approaching death, or what T. S. Eliot called “the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea.” Roiphe draws on her own extraordinary research and access to the family, friends, and caretakers of her subjects. Here is Susan Sontag, the consummate public intellectual, who finds her commitment to rational thinking tested during her third bout with cancer. Roiphe takes us to the hospital room where, after receiving the worst possible diagnosis, seventy-six-year-old John Updike begins writing a poem. She vividly re-creates the fortnight of almost suicidal excess that culminated in Dylan Thomas’s fatal collapse at the Chelsea Hotel. She gives us a bracing portrait of Sigmund Freud fleeing Nazi-occupied Vienna only to continue in his London exile the compulsive cigar smoking that he knows will hasten his decline. And she shows us how Maurice Sendak’s beloved books for children are infused with his lifelong obsession with death, if you know where to look. The Violet Hour is a book filled with intimate and surprising revelations. In the final acts of each of these creative geniuses are examples of courage, passion, self-delusion, pointless suffering, and superb devotion. There are also moments of sublime insight and understanding where the mind creates its own comfort. As the author writes, “If it’s nearly impossible to capture the approach of death in words, who would have the most hope of doing it?” By bringing these great writers’ final days to urgent, unsentimental life, Katie Roiphe helps us to look boldly in the face of death and be less afraid. Praise for The Violet Hour “A beautiful book . . . The intensity of these passages—the depth of research, the acute sensitivity for declarative moments—is deeply beguiling.”—The New York Times Book Review “Profound, poetic and—yes—comforting.”—People “Unconventional, engaging . . . [The Violet Hour] is at once scholarly, literary, juicy—and unabashedly personal.”—Los Angeles Times “Enveloping . . . I read it in bed, at the kitchen table, while walking down the street. . . . ‘What normal person wants to blunder into this hushed and sacred space?’ she asks. But the answer is all of us, and Ms. Roiphe does it with grace.”—Jennifer Senior, The New York Times “A beautiful and provocative meditation on mortality.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune “A tender yet penetrating look at the final days . . . Roiphe has always seemed to me a writer to envy. No matter what the occasion, she can be counted on to marry ferocity and erudition in ways that nearly always make her interesting.”—The Wall Street Journal “Here is a critic in supreme control of her gifts, whose gift to us is the observant vigor that refuses to flinch before the Reaper. . . . She knows that true criticism does not bother with the mollification of delicate sensibilities, only with the intellect as it roils and rollicks through language.”—William Giraldi, The New Republic

Forty-one False Starts

Forty-one False Starts PDF Author: Janet Malcolm
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 0374709726
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 320

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Book Description
A National Book Critics Circle Finalist for Criticism A deeply Malcolmian volume on painters, photographers, writers, and critics. Janet Malcolm's In the Freud Archives and The Journalist and the Murderer, as well as her books about Sylvia Plath and Gertrude Stein, are canonical in the realm of nonfiction—as is the title essay of this collection, with its forty-one "false starts," or serial attempts to capture the essence of the painter David Salle, which becomes a dazzling portrait of an artist. Malcolm is "among the most intellectually provocative of authors," writes David Lehman in The Boston Globe, "able to turn epiphanies of perception into explosions of insight." Here, in Forty-one False Starts, Malcolm brings together essays published over the course of several decades (largely in The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books) that reflect her preoccupation with artists and their work. Her subjects are painters, photographers, writers, and critics. She explores Bloomsbury's obsessive desire to create things visual and literary; the "passionate collaborations" behind Edward Weston's nudes; and the character of the German art photographer Thomas Struth, who is "haunted by the Nazi past," yet whose photographs have "a lightness of spirit." In "The Woman Who Hated Women," Malcolm delves beneath the "onyx surface" of Edith Wharton's fiction, while in "Advanced Placement" she relishes the black comedy of the Gossip Girl novels of Cecily von Zeigesar. In "Salinger's Cigarettes," Malcolm writes that "the pettiness, vulgarity, banality, and vanity that few of us are free of, and thus can tolerate in others, are like ragweed for Salinger's helplessly uncontaminated heroes and heroines." "Over and over," as Ian Frazier writes in his introduction, "she has demonstrated that nonfiction—a book of reporting, an article in a magazine, something we see every day—can rise to the highest level of literature." One of Publishers Weekly's Best Nonfiction Books of 2013

In Praise of Messy Lives: Essays

In Praise of Messy Lives: Essays PDF Author: Katie Roiphe
Publisher: Dial Press
ISBN: 0679644024
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 227

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Book Description
This powerful collection of essays ranges from pop culture to politics, from Hillary Clinton to Susan Sontag, from Facebook to Mad Men, from Joan Didion to David Foster Wallace to—most strikingly—the author’s own life. For fans of the essays of John Jeremiah Sullivan and Jonathan Lethem. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times • The Wall Street Journal Katie Roiphe’s writing—whether in the form of personal essays, literary criticism, or cultural reporting—is bracing, wickedly entertaining, and deeply engaged with our mores and manners. In these pages, she turns her exacting gaze on the surprisingly narrow-minded conventions governing the way we live now. Is there a preoccupation with “healthiness” above all else? If so, does it lead insidiously to judging anyone who tries to live differently? Examining such subjects as the current fascination with Mad Men, the oppressiveness of Facebook (“the novel we are all writing”), and the quiet malice our society displays toward single mothers, Roiphe makes her case throughout these electric pages. She profiles a New York prep school grad turned dominatrix; isolates the exact, endlessly repeated ingredients of a magazine “celebrity profile”; and draws unexpected, timeless lessons from news-cycle hits such as Arnold Schwarzenegger’s “love child” revelations. On ample display in this book are Roiphe’s insightful, occasionally obsessive takes on an array of literary figures, including Jane Austen, John Updike, Susan Sontag, Joan Didion, and Margaret Wise Brown, the troubled author of Goodnight, Moon. And reprinted for the first time and expanded here is her much-debated New York Times Book Review cover piece, “The Naked and the Conflicted”—an unabashed argument on sex and the contemporary American male writer that is in itself an exciting and refreshing reminder that criticism matters. As steely-eyed in examining her own life as she is in skewering our cultural pitfalls, Roiphe gives us autobiographical pieces—on divorce, motherhood, an emotionally fraught trip to Vietnam, the breakup of a female friendship—that are by turns deeply moving, self-critical, razor-sharp, and unapologetic in their defense of “the messy life.” In Praise of Messy Lives is powerfully unified, vital work from one of our most astute and provocative voices.

Some of My Best Friends

Some of My Best Friends PDF Author: Tajja Isen
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1982178426
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 240

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Book Description
A fearless and darkly comic essay collection about race, justice, and the limits of good intentions. In this stunning debut collection, Catapult editor-in-chief and award-winning voice actor Tajja Isen explores the absurdity of living in a world that has grown fluent in the language of social justice but doesn’t always follow through. These nine daring essays explore the sometimes troubling and often awkward nature of that discord. Some of My Best Friends takes on the cartoon industry’s pivot away from colorblind casting, the pursuit of diverse representation in the literary world, the law’s refusal to see inequality, and the cozy fictions of nationalism. Isen deftly examines the quick, cosmetic fixes society makes to address systemic problems, and reveals the unexpected ways they can misfire. In the spirit of Zadie Smith, Cathy Park Hong, and Jia Tolentino, Isen interlaces cultural criticism with her lived experience to explore the gaps between what we say and what we do, what we do and what we value, what we value and what we demand.

A Writer's Book of Days

A Writer's Book of Days PDF Author: Judy Reeves
Publisher: New World Library
ISBN: 9781577313120
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
First published a decade ago, A Writer's Book of Days has become the ideal writing coach for thousands of writers. Newly revised, with new prompts, up-to-date Web resources, and more useful information than ever, this invaluable guide offers something for everyone looking to put pen to paper — a treasure trove of practical suggestions, expert advice, and powerful inspiration. Judy Reeves meets you wherever you may be on a given day with: • get-going prompts and exercises • insight into writing blocks • tips and techniques for finding time and creating space • ways to find images and inspiration • advice on working in writing groups • suggestions, quips, and trivia from accomplished practitioners Reeves's holistic approach addresses every aspect of what makes creativity possible (and joyful) — the physical, emotional, and spiritual. And like a smart, empathetic inner mentor, she will help you make every day a writing day.

Starting with Goodbye

Starting with Goodbye PDF Author: Lisa Romeo
Publisher: University of Nevada Press
ISBN: 1943859698
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 317

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Book Description
Starting with Goodbye begins with loss and ends with love, as a midlife daughter rediscovers her enigmatic father after his death. Lisa has little time for grief, but when her dead dad drops in for “conversations,” his absent presence invites Lisa to examine why the parent she had turned away from in life now holds her spellbound. Lisa reconsiders the affluent upbringing he financed (filled with horses, lavish vacations, bulging closets), and the emotional distance that grew when he retired to Las Vegas and she remained in New Jersey where she and her husband earn moderate incomes. She also confronts death rituals, navigates new family dynamics, while living both in memory and the unfolding moment. In this brutally honest yet compelling portrayal and tribute, Lisa searches for meaning, reconciling the Italian-American father—self-made textile manufacturer who liked newspapers, smoking, Las Vegas craps tables, and solitude—with the complex man she discovers influenced everything, from career choice to spouse. By forging a new father-daughter “relationship,” grief is transformed to hopeful life-affirming redemption. In poignant, often lyrical prose, this powerful, honest book proves that when we dare to love the parent who challenged us most, it’s never too late.