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The award-winning author of Super Sad True Story traces his uproarious experiences as a young bullied Jewish-Russian immigrant in Queens, his haphazard college pursuits and his initial forays into a literary career. -- Publisher's description.
"Shteyngart shares his American immigrant experience, moving back and forth through time and memory with self-deprecating humor, moving insights, and literary bravado. The result is a resonant story of family...
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"In inland Southern California, near the desert and the Mexican border, Susan Straight, a self-proclaimed book nerd, and Dwayne Sims, an African American basketball player, started dating in high school. After college, they married and drove to Amherst, Massachusetts, where Straight met her teacher and mentor, James Baldwin, who encouraged her to write. Once back in Riverside, at driveway barbecues and fish fries with the large, close-knit Sims family,...
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The Discomfort Zone is Franzen's memoir of growth from his boyhood as a "small and fundamentally ridiculous person," through an adolescence both excruciating and strangely happy, into an adult with embarrassing and unexpected passions. It's also a portrait of a Midwestern middle-class family weathering the turbulence of the 1970s and a vivid personal history of an America turning its back on a certain idealism.
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Here, for the first time, is the full and unforgettable life of John Cheever (1912-1982), written with unprecedented access to essential sources. Cheever was a soul in conflict, a high-school dropout who published his first story at eighteen, a dire alcoholic who recovered to write the great novel Falconer, a secret bisexual who struggled with his longings and his fierce homophobia, whose groundbreaking work landed him on the covers of Time and Newsweek,...
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With color, irony, and sensitivity, Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Dillard illuminates the dedication, absurdity, and daring that is the writer's life. As it probes and exposes, examines and analyzes, The Writing Life offers deeper insight into one of the most mysterious of professions.
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One of the most popular and mysterious figures in American literary history, J.D. Salinger eluded fans and journalists for most of his life. Now comes a new biography. Filled with new information and revelations, garnered from countless interviews, letters, and public records, this work presents his extraordinary life that spanned nearly the entire twentieth century. The author explores Salinger's privileged youth, long obscured by misrepresentation...
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"Still known to millions only as the author of the "The Lottery," Shirley Jackson (1916-1965) remains curiously absent from the American literary canon. A genius of literary suspense, Jackson plumbed the cultural anxiety of postwar America better than anyone. Now, biographer Ruth Franklin reveals the tumultuous life and inner darkness of the author behind such classics as The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle. Placing Jackson...
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"Millions of devoted readers believe they know Laura Ingalls -- the pioneer girl who survived blizzards and near-starvation on the Great Plains and went on to write the famous autobiographical books. But the full saga of her life has never been told. Now Caroline Fraser, editor of the Library of America's Little House series, masterfully fills in the gaps. For all the hardships Wilder's books describe, her life was harder and grittier. With fresh...
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Jack London was born a working-class, fatherless San Franciscan in 1876, and in his youth was a boundlessly energetic adventurer. His adventures in the American wilderness and underworld informed his fiction, and his writing came to captivate the nation as it defined his era. Within his own short lifetime, London became the most popular and best-selling author of his generation. After a short, breathless life, he passed away at age forty, but he left...
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"In June of 1961, A.E. Hotchner visited an old friend in the psychiatric ward of St. Mary's Hospital. It would be the last time they spoke: a few weeks later, Ernest Hemingway was released home, where he took his own life. Their final conversation was also the final installment in a story whose telling Hemingway had spread over nearly a decade. Hemingway divulged the details of the affair that destroyed his first marriage: the truth of his romantic...
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"A landmark biography of the great American writer Stephen Crane"--
Stephen Crane transformed American literature through an avalanche of original short stories, novellas, poems, journalism, and war reportage before his life was cut short by tuberculosis at age twenty-eight. Auster casts a dazzled eye on Crane's astonishing originality and productivity. He provides insight into Crane's creative processes, and shows how Crane's life experiences, in...
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"Explores the surprising truth about women's most popular body part with vulnerable, witty frankness and true nuggets of American culture that will resonate with everyone who has breasts--or loves them. ...At turns funny and heartbreaking, A Boob's Life explores both the joys and hazards inherent to living in a woman's body. Lehr deftly blends her personal narrative with national history, starting in the 1960s with the women's liberation movement...
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This Is Not My Beautiful Life is the story of how Victoria lost her parents to prison and nearly lost her mind. No one ever said motherhood would be easy, but as she struggles to change diapers, install car seats, and find the right drop-off line at pre-school--no easy task--when each one is named for a stage in the lifecycle of a freaking butterfly! She's also forced to ask herself whether a jump-suit might actually complement her Mom's platinum-blonde...
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A book that instantly captured the hearts of readers across the country, An American Childhood is Pulitzer Prize–winning author Annie Dillard's poignant, vivid memoir of growing up in Pittsburgh in the 1950s. “Dillard's luminous prose painlessly captures the pain of growing up in this wonderful evocation of childhood. Her memoir is partly a hymn to Pittsburgh, where orange streetcars ran on Penn Avenue in 1953 when she was eight, and where the...
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Many years ago, the British philosopher Sir Isaiah Berlin urged Herman Wouk to write his autobiography. Wouk responded, "Why me? I'm nobody." Berlin answered, "No, no. You've traveled. You've known many people. You have interesting ideas. It would do a lot of good." Now, in the same year he has celebrated his hundredth birthday, Herman Wouk finally reflects on the life experiences that inspired his most beloved novels. Among those experiences are...
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