Edith de Belleville is a native Parisian woman who was an attorney for many years. Her passion for Paris led her back to university to get her official tour guide license. Deeply inspired by great Parisian women of the past, Edith decided to write a book, in French, entitled The Beautiful Rebels of Paris (Belles et Rebelles Editions du 81). She just published her memoirs in English to share her literary & dreamy adventures in Paris, Parisian Life, adventures in the City of Light. When she's not at Versailles or the Louvre Museum to do her 'Beautiful Rebels of Paris Tour' Edith is sitting on a café terrace in Paris watching the world go by.
If I tell you I'm coming from Roaring Twenties and I have fascinating conversations with great characters who lived in Paris in 1920s, you will maybe think I'm a bit weird. And you will be right.
That's my Parisian life. In front of a café crème at La Rotonde café in Montparnasse, I fight with Picasso and I flirt with the young Hemingway.
And my best friend is called Kiki de Montparnasse. I know how to choose my best friend. Kiki was friendly with a strong temper and beautiful. She posed for painters and sculpters whose art now costs a fortune.
And of course Kiki was elected queen of Montparnasse, the place where modern art was created and the navel of the world, according Henry Miller. And like Miller, Kiki's book was censured in USA because it was too spicy.
She even has an introduction written by Ernest Hemingway—a rare…
In the bohemian and brilliant Montparnasse of the 1920s, Kiki managed to escape poverty to become one of the most charismatic figures of the avant-garde years between the wars. Partner to Man Ray - whose most legendary photos she inspired - she would be immortalised by Kisling, Foujita, Per Krohg, Calder, Utrillo and Leger. Kiki was the muse of a generation that seeks to escape the hangover of the Great War, but she was above all one of the first emancipated women of the 20th century.
Alongside writing poems and short stories, I am a clinical psychologist focusing on the psychology of men. People echo the vastness of the stellar expanse in which only 1% is matter like the planets and stars, our bodies, days in which we love and hate, moments we embody healthy intimacy or enact violence, the light that gives the face radiance. 19% of the universe is dark energy, and 80% dark matter-- less than 1% is light, and yet light is the foundation of life. "God is light," the ancient text intones, and though the words resound, what that light means in the despair of this world is a beloved mystery.
There is great beauty to the concrete and close-space urban worlds generated by Edward P. Jones. We descend with him into an ever more compassionate world in which people love and hate one another, seek one another, find one another, and bring about uncommon transcendence of heart, mind, and spirit. An artist whose books never fail to forward the depths of American literary gravity, he is a wonder to read and his art a joy to behold. Lost in the City, his first book of short stories, garnered the PEN/Hemingway award. His second book, The Known World, was granted the Pulitzer Prize. The words of social philosopher bell hooks provide the same grounding found in reading Jones’ beautiful powerful stories, it’s “all about love.”
“Original and arresting….[Jones’s] stories will touch chords of empathy and recognition in all readers.” —Washington Post
“These 14 stories of African-American life…affirm humanity as only good literature can.” —Los Angeles Times
A magnificent collection of short fiction focusing on the lives of African-American men and women in Washington, D.C., Lost in the City is the book that first brought author Edward P. Jones to national attention. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award, and numerous other honors for his novel The Known World, Jones made his literary debut with these powerful tales of ordinary people who…
I’ve penned (so far) seventeen novels, most set during some historical conflict or other, all of them revolving around intense personal relationships (loyalty, love, betrayal, those sorts of profound truths). I tend to read the sorts of books I wish to write. I also teach creative writing at a university (VCU); I tell my students that if they want to really know what a character is made of, shoot at them or have them fall in love. In my own work, I do both.
Inspired by his experiences as a reporter during the Spanish Civil War, Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls tells the story of Robert Jordan, an American volunteer in the International Brigades fighting to defend the Spanish Republic against Franco. After being ordered to work with guerrilla fighters to destroy a bridge, Jordan finds himself falling in love with a young Spanish woman and clashing with the guerrilla leader over the risks of their mission.
One of the great novels of the twentieth century, For Whom the Bell Tolls was first published in 1940. It powerfully explores the brutality of…
Books—broadly defined as any kind of written or printed document—are the primary means by which civilizations are constructed, memories are preserved, ideas are communicated, wealth is distributed, and power is exercised. To understand any human society, you must read its books. And as Winston Churchill said, “Books last forever.” The physical structures of civilizations eventually crumble into ruins, but the books they leave behind are immortal.
Modern American literature is inconceivable without Maxwell Perkins. As an editor at Scribner's, he probably saved that dustily respectable firm by dragging it into the 20th century. He nursed F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway and performed lifesaving surgery on the baggy manuscripts of Thomas Wolfe.
For all manner of authors, he had an unprejudiced eye for brilliance. He angled for Henry Roth's radical proletarian fiction and gave Winston Churchill the idea that eventually became A History of the English-Speaking Peoples. He advised Charles Scribner to grab Bruce Barton's The Man Nobody Knows, explaining that "it treats Christ as a supersalesman." (Scribner was scandalized, and another publisher made it a blockbuster.) He published the classy mysteries of S.S. Van Dine and capped his career with From Here to Eternity. And he gave every author unstinting time, attention, and labor.
Read this classic biography, and you'll understand why…
The National Book Award winner from Pulitzer Prize-winning author A. Scott Berg is now celebrating its 40th anniversary.
The talents he nurtured were known worldwide: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, and numerous others. But Maxwell Perkins remained a mystery, a backstage presence who served these authors not only as editor but also as critic, career manager, moneylender, psychoanalyst, father-confessor, and friend.
This outstanding biography, a winner of the National Book Award, is the first to explore the fascinating life of this genius editor extraordinare-in both the professional and personal domains. It tells not only of Perkins's stormy marriage,…
One of my favorite bits of praise for my books was Michael Silverblatt, of KCRW, saying, "There is no one else like her—she invents a new improvised form for her fiction." The last five books of fiction I’ve written (my total is nine) have been webs, spinning out from one character to another, across different times and places. It lets me be intimate and distant both at once. So I’ve naturally loved reading writers who’ve done this in various ways. People like to quote John Berger saying, “Never again shall a single story be told as though it were the only one,” and I’m in line with that.
In a novel inspired by the decade-long kidnapping of three women in Cleveland, Ferrell has crafted a story out of voices. We hear each of the young women—their inner obsessions and distractions, the details they live inside of—before, during, and after their confinement, and their joy in each other. But Ferrell has also included the Miss Metropolitan of her title, a nosy woman living on the same street, with her eager attentions misdirected, one of the neighbors who didn’t notice. There’s an extra ambition in the reach of that, a context that insists on including unexpected corners, picking up lots of loosely connected characters to get the full meaning of the story.
A finalist for the 2022 PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction A finalist for the 2022 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel
Introducing an extraordinary and original writer whose first novel explores the intersections of grief and rage, personal strength and healing--and what we owe one another.
Fern seeks refuge from her mother’s pill-popping and boyfriends via Soul Train; Gwin finds salvation in the music of Prince much to her congregation’s dismay and Jesenia, miles ahead of her classmates at her gifted and talented high school, is a brainy and precocious enigma. None of this matters to Boss Man, the monster who abducts…
One of my fondest childhood memories is the holiday parties that my parents threw. Lying in bed I could hear roars of laughter crash the silence and gently ebb as the grownups shared stories and made merry. Later in life, I came to realize how different that kind of drinking is from the frat-boy binging of college and the anxious bracers at singles’ bars. As an adult, I became a Catholic theologian, got married, and had a family of my own. My wife Alexandra and I have relished an evening cocktail together in order to unwind and catch up on each other’s day (Alexandra has homeschooled all six of our children, which is itself a compelling reason to drink daily).
Philip Greene is probably the world’s greatest living cocktail historian (how cool is that?). I am personally grateful to him for correcting and guiding my own work. Greene has written several excellent cocktail books. In To Have and Have Another, he canvases Hemingway’s personal preferences as well as the drinks featured in his writings. I hope that Greene one day does something similar with Evelyn Waugh and his novels, though it may fill several volumes.
Ernest Hemingway is nearly as famous for his drinking as he is for his writing. Throughout his collected works, Papa's sensuous explorations of the delights of imbibing engaged both his characters and his readers.
In To Have and Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion, Philip Greene, cocktail historian, spirits consultant, and cofounder of the Museum of the American Cocktail, offers us a view of Papa through the lens Papa himself preferred—the bottom of a glass.
A bartender’s manual for Hemingway enthusiasts, this revised and expanded volume offers a unique take on Hemingway’s oeuvre that privileges the tastes, smells, and colors…
I am a painter who specializes mostly in sleazy sports (boxing, snooker, etc. – nothing really healthy!) who happens to have written and designed 18 books. Obviously, producing books has become something of a habit. These books are about curiosities of natural history and also about art – but they have little to do with my paintings. Anyone who is interested in either the books or the paintings can see them on my website. I suppose the book that I’m best known for is Drawn from Paradise, a book that I did with David Attenborough on one of our two mutual obsessions – birds of paradise.
Apart from books and paintings, my life is fairly humdrum; in fact, there isn’t a lot of time for much else, although I’ve been married more than once and have children. I’ve now reached an age when I should start slowing down but I’ve no intention of stopping what I do until either bad health or death finish me off!
Peter Beard settled in Kenya in the late 1950s and became obsessed with the plight of wildlife in Africa. The book is full of evocative photos that he took over a period of some 20 years – some of them absolutely tragic. It is not a book for the faint-hearted; but it tells with truth the stories of explorers, entrepreneurs, big game hunters, and missionaries.
It has been published in several editions and formats. The copy I have is a large paperback that dates from 1989, but there are editions that were produced before that time and many that have been published since.
This book is certainly not an attempt to be gently persuasive, and the author’s position can be summed up in these words that he wrote:
When I first escaped to East Africa in August 1955…it was
one of the heaviest wildlife areas…in the world…No one then
could…
This book describes the origins, history, and prospects of big game in Africa.Researched, photographed, and compiled over 20 years, Peter Beard's "End of the Game" tells the tale of the enterprisers, explorers, missionaries, and big-game hunters whose quests for adventure and "progress" were to change the face of Africa in the 20th century. This landmark volume is assembled from hundreds of historical photographs and writings, starting with the building of the Mombasa Railroad ("The Lunatic Line") and the opening-up of darkest Africa. The stories behind the heroic figures in Beard's work - Theodore Roosevelt, Frederick Courtney Selous, Karen Blixen (Isak…
The Boulevardis a weird historical fiction in a supernatural frame. What’s not to like?
Satan has presumptuously had Vincent Van Gogh brighten up the main street of his gloomy, corporeal Hell. God would definitely not approve.
So when God decides to pay the dark realm an unprecedented visit, Satan sadly realizes he’ll have to tear it all down. On a train ride to break the news to the reclusive artist, he regales drinking companion Ernest Hemingway with the history of how the project came about, including a well-researched and wonderfully shaped walk-through of Western art history.
Known for his Saint John-based novels, Jerrod Edson enters the world of speculative literature with The Boulevard, an ambitious novel featuring Ernest Hemingway, Vincent van Gogh, Satan, and a train ride through Hell.
For the first time since Satan's banishment, God plans a visit to the lower world, and Satan is in a bind. In defiance, he has built Hell in the image of Heaven, but now he must destroy its beauty or face God's wrath. Singed with dark humour, packed with historical detail and written in Edson's straightforward style, with themes that include the search for happiness and the…
I have always been intrigued by the Roaring 20s, and specifically in how the lives of women truly began to change during this time. My grandmother loved to boast about how she had been a flapper as a young woman. Her sister-in-law was one of the first female attorneys in Detroit in the mid-20s. The era brought about opportunities and freedoms previously unknown to women. Many women suddenly had options, both in terms of careers and lifestyles. Goals of first wave feminists were beginning to be reached. The research I did for my book furthered my understanding of society at the time, particularly in America.
Many readers knowledgeable about the Jazz Age know about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s many novels, as well as his life.
This fictionalized account gives keen insight into his wife, Zelda. Read to discover the difficulties faced by a creative woman married to a celebrated man. In many ways, Zelda was a woman of her times, yet like so many women overshadowed by her husband.
Read about their scandalous lives—hers in some ways even more so than his.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER OF THE JAZZ AGE NOW AN AMAZON ORIGINALS SERIES STARRING CHRISTINA RICCI
'If ever a couple ... became an era, it was F Scott Fitzgerald and his glamorous "flapper" wife, Zelda. They were the Jazz Age' Independent
When beautiful, reckless Southern belle Zelda Sayre meets F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918, she is seventeen and he is a young army lieutenant. Before long, Zelda has fallen for him, even though Scott isn't wealthy or prominent or even a Southerner and keeps insisting, absurdly, that his writing will bring him both fortune…
Nobody
likes Ernest Hemingway these days, but In Our Time is one of
the great novels, not just of this remarkable year but of the twentieth
century.
Hemingway was a terrible human being, as far as I can tell, and the
majority of his work is terrible, too: I challenge anyone to read Across the
River and Into the Trees, for instance, without becoming nauseous.
It is perhaps the worst single book ever written by a prominent American author.
But this first book is brilliant, and although often seen as a collection of
short stories, it is a collage-like novel, the stories punctuated with
paragraph-long vignettes, bits of what we now call flash fiction, all of it put
together with a jeweler’s skill and precision.
It is more complex (and more
elegant) than the experimental form of his mentor Sherwood Anderson’s Winesburg,
Ohio. And it was considerably more…
A Vintage Classics edition of the early collection of short fiction that first established Ernest Hemingway's reputation, including several of his most loved stories
Ernest Hemingway, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1954, did more to change the style of fiction in English than any other writer of his time with his economical prose and terse, declarative sentences that conceal more than they reveal. In Our Time, published in 1925, was the collection that first drew the world's attention to Hemingway. Besides revealing his versatility as a writer and throwing fascinating light on the themes of his major…
