It’s so easy to forget how good writing can send a blast of wind through your hair.
This book of stories made me fall in love with reading all over again. The early twentieth century became famous through Faulkner, Hemingway, and the rest – but I have not read anyone from the period quite as bright and alive as Saroyan.
A timeless selection of brilliant short stories that won William Saroyan a position among the foremost, most widely popular writers of America when it first appeared in 1934.With the greatest of ease William Saroyan flew across the literary skies in 1934 with the publication of The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze and Other Stories. One of the first American writers to describe the immigrant experience in the U.S., Saroyan created characters who were Armenians, Jews, Chinese, Poles, Africans, and the Irish. The title story touchingly portrays the thoughts of a very young writer, dying of starvation. All of…
We all grew up with the legends of Jack Kerouac and the Beats, and I love those legends.
Now here is the day-to-day truth behind how it all happened, how the Beats came together, and how Kerouac’s masterpiece On The Road was actually written. Joyce Johnson – a girlfriend of Kerouac’s with access to his daily journals – is an exceptional writer herself, which makes the paradigm shift of this book a joy to read.
I loved Kerouac’s old legend; now I love the facts behind it, and feel closer to his works than ever.
A groundbreaking portrait of Kerouac as a young artist—from the award-winning author of Minor Characters
In The Voice is All, Joyce Johnson, author of her classic memoir, Door Wide Open, about her relationship with Jack Kerouac, brilliantly peels away layers of the Kerouac legend to show how, caught between two cultures and two languages, he forged a voice to contain his dualities. Looking more deeply than previous biographers into how Kerouac’s French Canadian background enriched his prose and gave him a unique outsider’s vision of America, she tracks his development from boyhood through the phenomenal breakthroughs of 1951 that resulted…
Every so often a book comes along which throws open the curtains on a theme we thought we knew.
Here the poet, novelist, and scholar Jeet Thayil recreates the end days of the prophet Jesus, but seen through the lives of women around him.
Not a religious text, nor one that sets out to alter history – Thayil’s sensitivity and brilliance lie in exploring what must have been, at the time, routine dusty days with animals to feed, in a world where only male viewpoints would survive. As refreshing as it is finely written.
Under a predawn sky, humming with starlight and the songs of birds, a group of determined women return to the cave where they have laid the body of their saviour. When they arrive, it is empty.
Names of the Women tells the stories of fifteen women whose lives overlapped with the life of Christ. Women who stayed with Christ through the crucifixion, when his disciples had abandoned him, and who spread his radical message - one that made them equals and a profound threat to power within…
How to write when all you have is a feeling. This little book is a pocket buddy for anyone sitting alone in front of a page, plus anyone interested in the mysteries of feelings turning into ideas, words, and books. Writing my first novel I found myself naked before an abyss of blank pages; I didn’t want a PhD course in writing, I just needed practical tips I could use right away. After working those out the hard way, that novel went on to win the biggest prizes in English literature - Release the Bats contains all the stuff I wish I had known in the dead of those nights.
