4889 results for "Love"

Make me commissioner: I know what's wrong with baseball and how to fix it

Leavy, Jane
Jane Leavy has always loved baseball. Her grandmother lived one long, loud foul ball away from Yankee Stadium--the same grandmother who took young Jane to Saks Fifth Avenue and bought her her first baseball glove. It's no coincidence that Leavy was covering the game she loved for the Washington Post by the late 1970s. As a pioneering female sportswriter, she eventually turned her talent to books, penning three of the all-time best baseball biographies about three of the all-time best players: Sandy Koufax, Mickey Mantle, and Babe Ruth. But when she went searching for a fourth biographical subject, she realized that baseball had faltered. The Moneyball era of the last two decades obsessed over data and slowed the game down to a crawl, often at the expense of thrills, skills, and surprise. Major League Baseball has begun to address issues too long ignored, yet the questions linger: how much have these efforts helped to improve the game and reassert its place in American culture? Leavy takes a whirlwind tour of the country seeking answers to these questions, talking with luminaries like Joe Torre, Dave Roberts, Jim Palmer, Dusty Baker, and more. What Leavy uncovers is not only what's wrong with baseball--and how to fix it--but also what's right with baseball, and how it illuminates characters, tells stories, and fires up the imagination of those who love it and everyone who could discover it anew.
Grand Central Publishing 2025-09-09 369 pages

Then again: travels in search of my younger self

Kurtz, Irma (Columnist)
For fans of Lorna Sage and Paula Fox, a unique memoir from Irma Kurtz, the acclaimed author of 'The Great American Bus Ride' and internationally renowned agony aunt. "A girl of indisputable gifts, she should of course use them someday to make a beautiful home and raise a family in elegant surroundings..." School psychologist's report on Irma Kurtz, 1950. In 1954 eighteen-year-old Irma Kurtz left New Jersey to travel across Europe, intent on transforming herself and changing the world. She looked to the Old World for an alternative destiny to that mapped out by the traditional expectations at home. On her post-war Grand Tour she found what she believed in: Art and Culture and Beauty and Love, and some horror as a Jewish girl encountering the seat of much of her family's destruction. Years later, sifting through a cardboard box filled with memories at her mother's house, she rediscovered the journal of her first journey, the one that marked the beginning of a life of writing and living abroad. Gripped by intense recollections of sailing across the Atlantic, and intrigued by the exuberant remarks of her adventurous younger self, she decided to leave her London home and retrace her footsteps, this time with herself as a guide. Testing her theory that older women are invisible, Kurtz's journey is peppered with acute observations of human behaviour, not to mention some sharp advice for her ghostly travel companion, a teenager who thinks she knows it all, yet is blind to what lies ahead of her. Part-memoir, part-travelogue, this unique book contrasts the experience of two very different travellers, offering an insight into what has endured, and what has been lost, in the life of one woman and the altered environment of Europe at the dawn of a new millennium. Beautifully written, moving and funny, Then Again is time-travel at its best, revealing the pains and pleasures of growing older and wiser.
Fourth Estate 2003 360 pages

You can be the Stainless Steel Rat: an interactive game book

Harrison, Harry
(This is a choose your own adventure book)You are the stainless steel rat......well, almost. The newest recruit in the Special Corps, you take your orders from the legendary Slippery Jim diGriz. Rogue. Rascal. And master-criminal turned cop. Linked by a hi-tech mind-meld, he'll be with you every step of the way. But you deal with his heckling.Your kidnap the mad scientist Professor Geisteskrank from the planet Skraldespand. Why, you ask? Because he's invented a device that could end life as we know (and love) it in the entire universe.Oh yes, and did we mention that the planet Skraldespand is a prison planet and home to the felonious refuse of a thousand human and alien worlds? Good luck. You're going to need it.
Grafton 1985 173 pages

The stallion

Robbins, Harold
Loren Hardeman and Angelo Perino are two men united by their shared vision, daring, and arrogance. But Perino committed the unpardonable sin: he had become necessary to Hardeman, having helped him retain control over Bethlehem Motors when his grandson, Loren Hardeman III, made his power grab. Beaten savagely by thugs hired by Loren III, fired abruptly by Loren I, Angelo Perino wed the love of his life and fled to New York. Now Perino and Loren III, still bitter enemies, have forged an uneasy truce that brings Perino back to Bethlehem Motors. Loren III, who falls back on his family's name and money, and Perino, who relies on talent, charisma, and prowess in the bedroom, lock horns once more.
Simon & Schuster 1996 364 pages

The wall: a novel

Adler, H. G.
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PUBLISHERS WEEKLY Compared by critics to Kafka, Joyce, and Musil, H. G. Adler is becoming recognized as one of the towering figures of twentieth-century fiction. Nobel Prize winner Elias Canetti wrote that “Adler has restored hope to modern literature,” and the first two novels rediscovered after his death, Panorama and The Journey, were acclaimed as “modernist masterpieces” by The New Yorker . Now his magnum opus, The Wall, the final installment of Adler’s Shoah trilogy and his crowning achievement as a novelist, is available for the first time in English. Drawing upon Adler’s own experiences in the Holocaust and his postwar life, The Wall , like the other works in the trilogy, nonetheless avoids detailed historical specifics. The novel tells the story of Arthur Landau, survivor of a wartime atrocity, a man struggling with his nightmares and his memories of the past as he strives to forge a new life for himself. Haunted by the death of his wife, Franziska, he returns to the city of his youth and receives confirmation of his parents’ fates, then crosses the border and leaves his homeland for good. Embarking on a life of exile, he continues searching for his place within the world. He attempts to publish his study of the victims of the war, yet he is treated with curiosity, competitiveness, and contempt by fellow intellectuals who escaped the conflict unscathed. Afflicted with survivor’s guilt, Arthur tries to leave behind the horrors of the past and find a foothold in the present. Ultimately, it is the love of his second wife, Johanna, and his two children that allows him to reaffirm his humanity while remembering all he’s left behind. The Wall is a magnificent epic of survival and redemption, powerfully told through stream of consciousness and suffused with daydream, fantasy, memory, nightmare, and pure imagination. More than a portrait of a Holocaust survivor’s journey, it is a universal novel about recovering from the traumas of the past and finding a way to live again. Praise for The Wall “[A] majestic novel . . . Adler’s prose is tidal, surge after narrative surge rushing forward and then enigmatically receding, the moment displaced by memory, and memory by introspective soliloquy.” —Cynthia Ozick, The New York Times Book Review “A towering meditation on the self and spirit . . . The writing is sonorous and so entirely devastating that the reader is compelled to pore over every word.” — Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Masterful and utterly unique.” —The Jerusalem Post “Haunting and utterly heart-wrenching . . . a literary masterpiece.” —Historical Novels Review “An epic novel . . . an unforgettable portrait.” —The Jewish Week “[A] pensive portrait of a man struggling to find a place in the world after enduring transformative calamity . . . an eloquent record of suffering—and perhaps of redemption as well.” — Kirkus Reviews Praise for H. G. Adler’s novels The Journey and Panorama, translated by Peter Filkins “Modernist masterpieces worthy of comparison to those of Kafka or Musil.” — The New Yorker “Haunting . . . as remarkable for its literary experimentation as for its historical testimony.” —San Francisco Chronicle , on Panorama
Modern Library 2015-09-08 656 pages

More, Now, Again A Memoir of Addiction

Elizabeth Wurtzel
Wurtzel pub. her groundbreaking memoir of depression, Prozac Nation, at the age of 26. It was a worldwide success, but no success could staunch her continuous battle with depression. The absence of fulfillment in the wake of success became yet another seemingly insurmountable hurdle. Her doctor prescribed Ritalin to boost the effects of her anti-depression medication, and it worked. But she reached the point where she couldn t go more than 5 minutes without a fix of Ritalin, then cocaine, & then more Ritalin. In this harrowing account, she contemplates what it means to be in love within something in your blood that takes over your body, becomes the life force within you -- & could kill you. Recounts a courageous fight back to a life worth living.
DIANE Publishing Company 2004-02 333 pages

Beyond the pale

Dykewomon, Elana
Beyond the Pale -- winner of the Lambda Literary Award -- tells the stories of two Jewish women living through times of darkness and inhumanity in the early 20th century, capturing their undaunted love and courage in luminous and moving prose. The richly textured novel details Gutke Gurvich's odyssey from her apprenticeship as a midwife in a Russian shtetl to her work in the suffrage movement in New York. Interwoven with her tale is that Chava Meyer, who was attended by Gurvich at her birth and grew up to survive the pogrom that took the lives of her parents. Throughout the book, historical background plays a large part: Jewish faith and traditions, the practice of midwifery, the horrific conditions in prerevolutionary Russia and New York sweatshops, and the determined work of labor unionists and suffragists.
Raincoast Books 2003 406 pages

Anna of all the Russias: the life Anna Akhmatova

Feinstein, Elaine
"Anna Akhmatova began writing in the years before World War I, a time when, according to Akhmatova herself, "to think of a woman as a poet was absurd." Her genius would rise above categorization, but this biography makes clear how heavily she paid for the political and personal passions that informed it. A fierce poise, forged by Anna's lonely childhood, carried her through her father's resistance to her writing - which prompted her to change her name from Gorenko to Akhmatova, a name taken from a Tartar ancestor - and her flawed but passionate love affairs. We see Akhmatova's work banned from 1925 until 1940, and banned again following World War II, when the Union of Soviet Writers labeled her "half nun, half harlot." We see her steadfast resistance to Stalin during her hopeful but unsuccessful attempt to win her son's release from prison. We see her abiding loyalty to such friends as Mandelstam, Shostakovich and Pasternak as they faced Stalinist oppression.
Phoenix 2006 322 pages

Flesh

Szalay, David
'A revelatory novel' Sunday Times 'Brilliance on every page' Samantha Harvey, author of Orbital A propulsive, hypnotic novel about a man who is unravelled by a series of events beyond his grasp. Fifteen-year-old Istvan lives with his mother in a quiet apartment complex in Hungary. New to the town and shy, he is unfamiliar with the social rituals at school and soon becomes isolated, with his neighbour - a married woman close to his mother's age - as his only companion. These encounters shift into a clandestine relationship that Istvan himself can barely understand, and his life soon spirals out of control. As the years pass, he is carried gradually upwards on the twenty-first century's tides of money and power, moving from the army to the company of London's super-rich, with his own competing impulses for love, intimacy, status and wealth winning him unimaginable riches, until they threaten to undo him completely. Spare and penetrating, Flesh is the finest novel yet by a master of realism, asking profound questions about what drives a life- what makes it worth living, and what breaks it. Chosen as a 'Best Book of 2025' by the Guardian , Observer , Financial Times , Daily Telegraph and Daily Mail ' Flesh is a wonderful novel - so brilliant and wise on chance, love, sex, money' David Nicholls, author of One Day 'It's been a long time since I've been swallowed whole by a novel the way I was by this one ... So much searing insight into the way we live now' Observer 'Compelling and elegant, merciless and poignant. David Szalay is an extraordinary writer ' Tessa Hadley
Jonathan Cape 2025-03-06 349 pages

The reservoir

Duchovny, David
"The Reservoir follows an unexceptional man in an exceptional time. We see our present-day pandemic world and New York City through the eyes of a former Wall Street veteran, Ridley, as he, in his enforced quarantined solitude, looks back upon his life. He examines his wins, his failures, the gnawing questions-his career, his divorce, his estranged daughter-and wonders what it all means and who he really is. Sitting and brooding night after night, gazing out his huge picture window high above the Central Park Reservoir, Ridley spots a flashing light in an apartment across the park as if a lonely quarantined person is signaling him in Morse code. His determination to find out who this mystery woman is, this fellow quarantine damsel in distress trapped in her own Fifth Avenue tower, leads him on an epic quest that will ultimately tempt him with either delusional madness or the fulfillment of his own mythic fate. Is he a dying man going mad or an everyman metamorphosing into a hero? Or both? We accompany Ridley as he leaves the safety of his apartment window to save the Fifth Avenue femme fatale and descends into a dangerous, increasingly surreal world of global conspiracies, madness, and sickness of this viral time; beyond that, into the enduring mysteries of love and fatherhood; and deeper still, into the bedrock mystery of life itself. As Ridley's actions grow more and more uncharacteristic, he realizes the key to all the mysteries of now, and even all of history, seem to lie deep beneath the freezing waters of the reservoir. The Reservoir is a twisted rom-com for our distanced time, when the merest touch could kill and conspiracy theories propagate like viruses-a contemporary union of Death in Venice, Rear Window, and The Plague"--
Akashic Books 2022 128 pages

Invasions: stories

Gimpelevich, Calvin
Fiction. LGBTQIA Studies. 2019 Lambda Literary Award finalist for Transgender Fiction. A body-swapping personal trainer and her trans girlfriend turn to a life of crime. A man mourning his dead lover becomes trapped in the mind of the leader of a bathhouse raid. A trans man, recovering from top surgery paid for with a stolen credit card, finds strange connection and condemnation among his fellow patients. The fifteen stories in this debut fiction collection from author Calvin Gimpelevich move in the borderlands between realism and surrealism, investigating gender, class, relationships, and the powers we still hold within spaces of powerlessness. They articulate the invasions we commit, the invitations we receive to cross over into another person's world. "INVASIONS blew my mind. Flipping between speculative worlds deeply rooted in realness and emotion and more familiar landscapes that tip on the edges of personal apocalypses, Gimpelevich's writing is strong and sure, taking us places we really haven't been. I'm hooked."--Michelle Tea "In INVASIONS, Calvin Gimpelevich writes fearlessly about trans and queer bodies, sex, and the possibilities of gender. In these edgy, strange stories, characters transform, transition, and transgress to discover themselves and, sometimes, each other."--Carter Sickels "Gimpelevich's stories are so firmly controlled, immaculate lakes with roiling depths that unapologetically probe interlocking webs of queerness, class, protection, disability, transness, addiction, race, and love. This is one of the most gripping, crisp, and moving collections of short fiction I have read in a long time."--Casey Plett "INVASIONS flows from experiences that border on the divergent and taboo--polyamory, secret queer encounters--into the surreal, the unreal, the fluidity of moving from body to body. Gimpelevich writes with a rhythm that sings like a rock ballad; we have no idea where he might take us next and we don't much care as long as we get to come along."--Afrose Fatima Ahmed, City Arts
Instar Books 2018 176 pages

The Beatles Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine

Bruce Spizer
The Beatles Magical Mystery Tour and Yellow Submarine is the latest installment in the Beatles Album Series by Beatles historian Bruce Spizer. The book covers the songs and projects undertaken by the Beatles shortly after completion of their album Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band in April 1967. In following ten months, the group wrote and recorded the song "All You Need Is Love" for the Our World TV program that was broadcast by satellite throughout the world, wrote the songs for and filmed the TV spectacular Magical Mystery Tour , wrote the songs for their feature length cartoon film Yellow Submarine , and recorded the songs "Lady Madonna" and "Across The Universe" before heading to India to study transcendental meditation in mid-February 1968. The book covers these remarkable achievements from the British, American, and Canadian perspectives, and includes chapters on the packaging of the albums and the writing and recording of the songs. It also has chapters on how the Beatles influenced our world, the friendly rivalry between the Beatles and the Rolling Stones, the Beatles Saturday morning cartoons, dozens of fan recollections, and more. The book has over 150 images.
498 Productions, LLC 2021-10-12 208 pages

They went another way: a Hollywood memoir

Kaplan, Bruce Eric
"A darkly comic memoir about being a working creative person in a world that is growing ever more dysfunctional, by acclaimed New Yorker cartoonist and television writer Bruce Eric Kaplan In January of 2022, Bruce Eric Kaplan found himself confused and upset by the state of the world and the state of his life as a television writer in Los Angeles. He started a journal to keep from going mad. That journal is now They Went Another Way. The book's through line traces his trying to get a television project set up in the increasingly Byzantine world of Hollywood. But as he details the project's ups and downs, Kaplan finds himself not only ruminating on show business, but also on today's political and social issues, on old movies and TV shows and music, on his family, on his friends, on his past, on his failing heating system, and on all the dead birds that kept showing up in his backyard. This hilarious and surprisingly moving book is about life-about art, about love, about alienation, about connection, about ugliness and beauty, about disappointment and wonder and hope. In short, it is about everything. And if it's not, it almost is"--
Henry Holt and Company 2024-10-22 261 pages

God's grace

Malamud, Bernard
God's Grace (1982), Bernard Malamud's last novel, is a modern-day dystopian fantasy, set in a time after a thermonuclear war prompts a second flood -- a radical departure from Malamud's previous fiction. The novel's protagonist is paleolosist Calvin Cohn, who had been attending to his work at the bottom of the ocean when the Devastation struck, and who alone survived. This rabbi's son -- a "marginal error" -- finds himself shipwrecked with an experimental chimpanzee capable of speech, to whom he gives the name Buz. Soon other creatures appear on their island-baboons, chimps, five apes, and a lone gorilla. Cohn works hard to make it possible for God to love His creation again, and his hopes increase as he encounters the unknown and the unforeseen in this strange new world. With God's Grace , Malamud took a great risk, and it paid off. The novel's fresh and pervasive humor, narrative ingenuity, and tragic sense of the human condition make it one of Malamud's most extraordinary books. "Is he an American Master? Of course. He not only wrote in the American language, he augmented it with fresh plasticity, he shaped our English into startling new configurations." --Cynthia Ozick
Farrar, Straus and Giroux 2005-04-15 223 pages

The Jewish wedding now

Diamant, Anita
Newly revised and updated, the definitive guide to planning a Jewish wedding, written by bestselling novelist Anita Diamant--author of The Red Tent and The Boston Girl--and one of the most respected writers of guides to contemporary Jewish life. This complete, easy-to-use guide explains everything you need to know to plan your own Jewish wedding in today's ever-changing world where the very definition of what constitutes a Jewish wedding is up for discussion. With enthusiasm and flair, Anita Diamant provides choices for every stage of a wedding--including celebrations before and after the ceremony itself--providing both traditional and contemporary options. She explains the Jewish tradition of love and marriage with references drawn from Biblical, Talmudic, and mystical texts and stories. She guides you step by step through planning the ceremony and the party that follows--from finding a rabbi and wording the invitation to organizing a processional and hiring a caterer. Samples of wedding invitations and ketubot (marriage contracts) are provided for inspiration and guidance, as well as poems that can be incorporated into the wedding ceremony or party and a variety of translations of traditional texts. "There is no such thing as a generic Jewish wedding," writes Anita Diamant, "no matter what the rabbi tells you, no matter what the caterer tells you, no matter what your mother tells you." Complete, authoritative, and indispensable, The Jewish Wedding Now provides personalized options--some new, some old--to create a wedding that combines spiritual meaning and joyous celebration and reflects your individual values and beliefs--
Scribner 2017 224 pages

The Italian teacher

Rachman, Tom
***SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA NOVEL AWARD*** 'Wickedly funny, deeply touching . . . I confess this was the first of Rachman's novels I'd read but I was so swept away by it that I raced out to buy the other three' PATRICK GALE 'Relentlessly entertaining' Daily Mail Rome, 1955 The artists are gathering together for a photograph. In one of Rome's historic villas, a party glitters with socialites and patrons. Bear Bavinsky, creator of vast, masculine, meaty canvases, is their god. He is at the centre of the picture. His wife, Natalie, edges out of the shot. From the side of the room watches little Pinch - their son. At five years old he loves Bear almost as much as he fears him. After Bear abandons their family, Pinch will still worship him, while Natalie faces her own wars with the art world. Trying to live up to his father's name - one of the twentieth century's fiercest and most controversial painters - Pinch never quite succeeds. Yet by the end of a career of twists and compromises, he enacts an unexpected rebellion that will leave forever his mark upon the Bear Bavinsky legacy. What makes an artist? In The Italian Teacher , Tom Rachman displays a nuanced understanding of art and its demons. Moreover, in Pinch he achieves a portrait of vulnerability and frustrated talent that - with his signature humour and humanity - challenges the very idea of greatness.
riverrun 2019 377 pages