I’ve loved F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories ever since I read The Great Gatsby as a teenager. After that, I devoured all of his works, thanks to a membership in one of those book subscription services where you have to send back monthly book selections if you don’t want them. I read almost all his short stories, all his novels, including the unfinished The Last Tycoon, and everything I could find on him and his wife Zelda.When The Great Gatsby entered the public domain a couple years ago, I started daydreaming of how I'd love to revisit the story from a fresh perspective, which led me to penning Daisy.
When I first read this book, I could hear Roberta Flack’s famous song “Killing Me Softly” playing in my head.
I felt as if the author had peered into my own heart and articulated everything I felt about F. Scott Fitzgerald’s greatest work, The Great Gatsby. Corrigan covers an enormous amount of territory—everything from her personal reflections on the novel to how it didn’t sell well at first to how it gained in popularity as GIs read it during WWII as part of a free books program designed just for them up to the four film iterations of the tale.
Along the way, though, she explores why Gatsby still moves so many readers and why it’s considered The Great American Novel.
The "Fresh Air" book critic investigates the enduring power of The Great Gatsby -- "The Great American Novel we all think we've read, but really haven't."
Conceived nearly a century ago by a man who died believing himself a failure, it's now a revered classic and a rite of passage in the reading lives of millions. But how well do we really know The Great Gatsby? As Maureen Corrigan, Gatsby lover extraordinaire, points out, while Fitzgerald's masterpiece may be one of the most popular novels in America, many of us first read it when we were too young to fully…
If you like stories that tear your heart into tiny pieces and have you on the edge of your seat wondering if it can ever be put back together, then Life After was written for you.
It isn’t an easy read, but it is a memorable one. What grabbed me the most was the authenticity of the story.
August, a high school senior, never had an easy life, but after the tragic loss of her twin brother, her struggle to cope becomes formidable. Will she make it? I turned the pages hoping things would improve for August, but the author kept it real. There was no quick return from tragedy. The road back can be long, winding, and filled with obstacles.
"Readers will cheer for August in this gorgeously-written story of hope that will stay with you long after you finish the last page." (Amber Smith, New York Times bestselling author of The Way I Used to Be and The Last to Let Go)
Someone once asked August Haiz if twins realize one of them is an accident. Deep down, August knows if anyone was an accident, it wasn't Benny-it was her. Granted, August doesn't mind dancing in the background, letting Benny be the star musician and center of attention. In fact, she prefers is that way.
I grew up on the set of Little House on the Prairie. Yes, it was a fictional world created by Hollywood, but the foundation and lessons I learned about love, family, and faith have stayed with me. I now travel with the cast of Little House all over the country to engage and share with fans about how my experiences have shaped me. I can’t say enough about these memoirs or the cast members who wrote them. I know every Little House fan will love them too!
Jennifer’s memoir affected me in ways I didn’t expect. We were both twins on the set of Little House on the Prairie, but to read how she lost her sister had me in tears. I loved her honesty and vulnerability to share such a difficult part of her life. Indeed, there is so much more to Jennifer’s life than just the prairie. She tells it beautifully.
From the sets of the prairie to the real world of today, my journey has been one of resilience and transformation. As a baby, I started my life on the set of a prairie, surrounded by the loving family of the show. Years after the cameras stopped rolling, I faced the harsh reality of losing my twin, Sarah. She had been by my side since before our birth and was right there beside me on the sets of Little House on the Prairie, as we together portrayed Baby Rose Wilder. Losing her was my first encounter with the fragility of…
Suspense thrillers were staple “reading food” in my college and young adult days, and my love for them continues. I always craved thrillers that are based on WWII, the Cold War, and secret scientific advances and that offered fresh historical perspectives and dared to challenge popular narratives while delighting the readers with dexterously woven fictional tales. And then, most importantly, it is the feeling the author has conducted genuine, painstaking research bringing out captivating, reasoned nuggets of history that I find most satisfying.
Can a memoir be a thriller? I say this one is. It is truly an amazing and inspiring account of an immigrant’s tenacious, fearless journey to success, from humble beginnings in a small town in India to earning a PhD in the US and becoming a multimillionaire entrepreneur.
While not exactly a historical thriller, The Blue Suitcase took me on a roller coaster ride full of fascinating cultural insights and nuances and the serendipities that shaped Thanedar’s journey.
I am fascinated by the idea of good people, moral people, people you know and like and love, who make terrible choices, wrong decisions, and mistakes that can’t be undone. And when the person who makes the mistake is a mother—my God! How the world turns on them. We live in a society where mothers are judged so harshly, where they are not allowed mistakes, where they are barely allowed to have a life or a want or a desire or a longing not connected to mothering. And so I write about this, and I read about this.
This one I loved for the style as much as the character. I love the use of fragments to weave together a life and it felt true to the life of a mother—that a mother only gets snippets of time to piece together her story and her thoughts. I also loved that Offil was wrestling with such a big issue—how to hold onto oneself while giving so much of your self to a child.
They used to send each other letters. The return address was always the same: Dept. of Speculation.
They used to be young, brave, and giddy with hopes for their future. They got married, had a child, and skated through all the small calamities of family life. But then, slowly, quietly something changes. As the years rush by, fears creep in and doubts accumulate until finally their life as they know it cracks apart and they find themselves forced to reassess what they have lost, what is left, and what they want now.
Written with the dazzling lucidity of poetry, Dept.…
I’ve always been driven by curiosity about other cultures. I grew up in Germany but became restless and studied in Italy before moving to the United States. Some of the texts I recommend here I discovered while working on the Norton Anthology of World Literature. When I began this work, I realized just how narrow my own education had been and spent the next several years reading world literature and world culture. Ever since, I’ve been on a mission to expand how culture is taught. This is why I became an academic: to excite students about world culture.
Wole Soyinka, the Nobel Prize laureate from Nigeria, was steeped in both Yoruba traditions and Greek tragedy as well as Shakespeare.
This combination of influences shaped his adaptation of The Bacchae, by the ancient Greek playwright Euripides.
He brings this play into the modern world of slavery, using White and Black actors. At the same time, he captures the original’s blend of ritual and performance.
This explosive mixture is the most compelling study I know in what theater can do: mobilize bodies in front of an audience. It also shows how theater can bridge vast historical and cultural differences.
Wole Soyinka has translated-in both language and spirit-a great classic of ancient Greek theater. He does so with a poet's ear for the cadences and rhythms of chorus and solo verse as well as a commanding dramatic use of the central social and religious myth. In his hands The Bacchae becomes a communal feast, a tumultuous celebration of life, and a robust ritual of the human and social psyche. "The Bacchae is the rites of an extravagant banquet, a monstrous feast," Soyinka writes. "Man reaffirms his indebtedness to earth, dedicates himself to the demands of continuity, and invokes the energies…
Rachel is a heart-minded professional specializing in current and relevant approaches in support of individuals and workplaces following a loss or trauma. She is a best-selling author, seasoned keynote speaker, and business consultant. She began her career serving in management of Fortune 500 companies, overcoming her own adversity following the sudden death of her husband while raising a 2-year-old. She was immediately confronted with the see-saw created when personal and professional trajectories collide, giving her the opportunity to provide invaluable insights about loss. Her books include best-selling Living with Loss One Day at a Time, Finding Peace, and Grief in the Workplace: A Comprehensive Guide for Being Prepared.
I would highly recommend this book to anyone who has suffered multiple losses of loved ones, whether it be a spouse, family member, or friend. Nancy Saltzman's story will enter into your soul and give you the strength of a woman who lost her husband and two children in a plane crash. She shares her story of love, loss, and rebuilding of a future as a radical survivor of cancer and loss of her family. Her spirit and desire to live life to the fullest are prominent in her story.
"Radical Survivor" chronicles elementary school principal Nancy Saltzman's extraordinary saga as a two-time cancer survivor who lost her entire family in a small plane crash. Told with honesty, insight and laugh out loud flashes of humor, Radical Survivor traverses the full spectrum of human emotions. Several aspects of this book make it unique among memories. *The book is enriched by letters to the author interwoven with narrative throughout the book. Most of the notes were received after the death of her family, but some are mementos from her husband and entries from her son's journals. *The author has experienced an…
I always look for an escape from reality, but it’s not always because the world gets exhausting and I need a change of scenery. Sometimes, I’m looking to learn. As an autistic person, people can be very confusing to me. I love a book that throws something new at me to try and figure out how a certain person functions, or why they think/feel the way they do, and if I can’t do it on my own, I can discuss the book with friends and family and create a discussion through the medium of storytelling and novel writing. Autism can be very debilitating at times, so an escape is always a handy thing to have!
If you want an escape to a mystery with a plot twist you’ll never see coming, then this one’s sure to be a treat! A well-kept family secret comes to light, and it’s nothing like you’d expect. This was maybe the first book to ever inspire me as a writer, particularly for my current series—a past that no one wants to come to light, but through perseverance and fresh curiosity, the main character of this book doesn’t stop until he has all the answers, all the while dealing with his own issues.
When Josh explores his grandmother's house he finds an attic up a closed-off staircase. In it is a collection of strange drawings by his uncle, Patrick, who died suddenly in his teens. But he has no grave, and his name is never spoken.
And Josh begins to uncover the dark truth his family has hidden for forty years.....
'Truth or Dare doesn't let up - and hits you with a final twist.' Daily Telegraph
I’ve loved F. Scott Fitzgerald’s stories ever since I read The Great Gatsby as a teenager. After that, I devoured all of his works, thanks to a membership in one of those book subscription services where you have to send back monthly book selections if you don’t want them. I read almost all his short stories, all his novels, including the unfinished The Last Tycoon, and everything I could find on him and his wife Zelda.When The Great Gatsby entered the public domain a couple years ago, I started daydreaming of how I'd love to revisit the story from a fresh perspective, which led me to penning Daisy.
No look at F. Scott Fitzgerald would be complete without a good biography of his life.
This book does the job, capturing with copious quotes from Fitzgerald and those who knew him the tortured creative life of this golden boy of 1920s literature. What struck me most was how insecure Fitzgerald was about his class status all through his life, how he always felt like the outsider among the rich and famous he came to hobnob with.
It explains a lot about how his most famous protagonist, Jay Gatsby, came to be—in many ways, he’s a stand-in for Fitzgerald himself, a man in search of acceptance who never gives up on the one great love of his life—Daisy in Gatsby’s story, Zelda in Fitzgerald’s.
The standard work on Fitzgerald, revised, enlarged, and updated; Since its first publication in 1981, Some Sort of Epic Grandeur has stood apart from other biographies of F. Scott Fitzgerald for its thoroughness and volume of information. It is regarded today as the basic work on Fitzgerald and the preeminent source for the study of the novelist. In this second revised edition, Matthew J. Bruccoli provides new evidence discovered since its original edition. This new edition of Some Sort of Epic Grandeur improves, augments, and updates the standard biography of F. Scott Fitzgerald.
I was born in Macon, Georgia, in 1942. My father was a druggist and my mother a housewife until his illness put her to work as a newspaper reporter and eventually as a school teacher. After spending four years in the U.S. Air Force I earned a B.A. and a M.A. in English. After teaching English for thirty-one years, I retired in 2006. My wife and I live in Savannah and have two daughters, five grandchildren, and a black Lab. Among the many novels that I taught during my years as an English professor, the five on my list were invariably the ones to which my students most actively responded.
Also by Dreiser, An American Tragedy, 1925, is the slow-moving and heavy-handed but steadily engrossing and ultimately overwhelming account of a poor boy so bewitched by a beautiful rich girl that he commits literal murder and loses his own life in his struggle to have her.
This landmark 1925 novel about a social climber who murders his pregnant lover is both a riveting crime story and a devastating commentary on the American dream. A VINTAGE CLASSIC.
Theodore Dreiser was inspired by a true story to write this novel about an ambitious, socially insecure young man who finds himself caught between two very different women--and two very different visions of what his life could be. Clyde Griffiths was born poor and is poorly educated, but his prospects begin to improve when he is offered a job by a wealthy uncle who owns a shirt factory. Soon he…
