74 results for "Memoir"

The Memoirs of Josephine Mutzenbacher

Felix Salten
The Austrian erotic classic that'll make any parent think twice about taking their young ones to meet a beloved children's book author. Written by Felix Salten (Bambi), The Memoirs of Josephine Mutzenbacher is the story of a young girl and her many amorous encounters, with friends, family, and the local priest, culminating in her establishing a career as a high-priced courtesan. The author of Bambi first published this work in 1906.
Disruptive Publishing 2005-03 192 pages

Three War Stories

David Mamet
Spanning centuries and continents, Mamet uses war and its players to explore, among other themes, redemption and forgiveness as they unfold in the context of conflict in the form of three novellas. In The Redwing , the first of the three novellas, a 19th Century Secret Service naval officer turned prisoner, then novelist and finally memoirist recounts his own transformations during the course of his service and imprisonment. The protagonist in Notes on Plain Warfare examines religion through the prism of the American Indian wars. Finally, The Handle and the Hold is a vivid, dialogue-driven tale of two ex-military men who steal a plane in the month before the Israeli War of Independence. Finely wrought, Mamet eloquently depicts the psychological brutality conflict raises in the landscape of the mind.
Argo Navis 2013 240 pages

Schizo: a novel

Sheff, Nic
The fascinating, shocking, and ultimately quite hopeful story of one teen’s downward spiral into mental illness by the bestselling author of Tweak and son of David Sheff (author of Beautiful Boy , the memoir adapted into a movie of the same name starring Steve Carell and Timothée Chalamet). Miles is the ultimate unreliable narrator—a teen recovering from a schizophrenic breakdown who believes he is getting better . . . when in reality he is growing worse. Driven to the point of obsession to find his missing younger brother, Teddy, and wrapped up in a romance that may or may not be the real thing, Miles is forever chasing shadows. As Miles feels his world closing around him, he struggles to keep it open, but what you think you know about his world is actually a blur of gray, and the sharp focus of reality proves startling. Written by Nic Sheff, son of David Sheff (author of Beautiful Boy, the memoir adapted into a movie of the same name starring Steve Carell and Timothée Chalamet), Schizo is the fascinating, and ultimately quite hopeful, story of one teen's downward spiral into mental illness as he chases the clues to a missing brother. Perfect for fans of Thirteen Reasons Why , The Perks of Being a Wallflower , and It’s Kind of a Funny Story . “This spare book is a well-written, but painful, read, as readers come to understand the hopelessness Miles feels about his life and his future.”— VOYA “In his first novel, memoirist Sheff ( Tweak ) provides an insightful perspective on one teen’s struggle with mental illness.”— Publishers Weekly
Speak 2015-09-08 272 pages

Family History

Dani Shapiro
From the author of the best-selling memoir Slow Motion (“Chilling . . . her vision is unblinking”—New York Times Book Review; “Riveting . . . a breathtaking combination of candor and bravado”—San Francisco Chronicle), a ferociously paced new novel about a woman losing control of her life, her marriage, and her kids, and discovering that you can do everything right and still find the world you’ve made slipping away. Rachel Jensen has it all: a husband she adores, challenging work in art restoration, a terrific teenage daughter, and a new baby on the way. Then her infant son is injured in an accident in her daughter’s arms, and that accident begets a terrifying lie. Set in a small Massachusetts town, Family History is about a family spiraling toward disintegration, the terrible force of guilt in children, and a mother’s nightmarish realization that she cannot protect her own child. As the life the Jensens have so carefully built begins its slow collapse, we see with excruciating clarity the frailty of our strongest allegiances and the precarious ledge upon which our most vital relations—marriage, parenthood—are balanced. Family History blazes through this intimate and highly charged territory with stunning velocity, and marks a bold new step forward for the prodigiously gifted Dani Shapiro.
Random House Large Print 2003 429 pages

Scab vendor: confessions of a tattoo artist

Shaw, Jonathan
"Jonathan Shaw's Scab Vendor: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist is a surreal, multi-generational roller coaster ride through the underbelly of modern culture, charting the course of a life measured by extremes, and all the people, places, and events that shaped that life into a survivor's tale of epic proportions. In its pages, Shaw takes the reader deep, not only into the recesses of his extraordinary mind and adventures, but also into the strange and magical process of memoir-writing itself. If truth is indeed stranger than fiction, then, as Shaw's friend and literary mentor Charles Bukowski once told him, much of this book would have to be lived before it could be written. In that sense, Scab Vendor: Confessions of a Tattoo Artist is much more than a fascinating chronicle of a popular outlaw artist's creative evolution. It is a multicolored, cinematic, modern-day Odyssey, written in blood, ink, and tears--a kaleidoscopic, visionary roadmap to the journey of the human soul."--Page 4 of cover.
Turner Publishing Company 2017 463 pages

The Autobiography of St. Teresa of Avila By St. Teresa of Avila - Illustrated

St. Teresa Of Avila
How is this book unique? Font adjustments & biography included Unabridged (100% Original content) Formatted for e-reader Illustrated About The Autobiography of St. Teresa Of Avila by St. Teresa Of Avila In this landmark of Christian mysticism, the revered Carmelite nun presents moving accounts of her profound religious experiences and ultimate union with God. St. Teresa wrote this memoir at the behest of her confessor. It offers a warm, accessible account of her transformation into an impassioned leader and reformer of church doctrine.St. Teresa recounts her childhood and education in sixteenth-century Spain, her physical afflictions and spiritual crises, her many visions and mystical encounters, and her determination to embrace the contemplative life. In describing the ascent of the soul, she explains the core of her theology as a four-stage process that progresses from mental prayer to divine rapture. Next to Don Quixote, this timeless work constitutes Spain's most popular prose classic. It forms an excellent introduction to the saint's other writings and to the Christian tradition of mystical literature.
Independently Published 2017-02-18 275 pages

Here But Not Here A Love Story

Lillian Ross
In this fascinating and beautiful memoir, the renowned New Yorker writer Lillian Ross tells a remarkable love story of the passionate life she shared for forty years with William Shawn, The New Yorker's famous editor. "All enduring love between two people, however startling or unconventional, feels unalterable, predestined, compelling, and intrinsically normal to the couple immersed in it, so I would have to say that I had an intrinsically normal life for over four decades with William Shawn. . . . I have a lasting sense of the normalcy of it all. It was a normalcy that Bill Shawn was able to create for himself and for me against all normal odds." Shawn was married, yet Ross and Shawn created a home together a dozen blocks south of the Shawns' apartment, raised a child, and lived with discretion. Their lives intertwined from the 1950s until Shawn's death, in 1992. Ross describes how they met and the intense connection between them; how Shawn worked with some of the best writers of the period; how, to escape their developing liaison, Ross moved to Hollywood, and there wrote the famous pieces that became Picture, the classic story of the making of a movie--John Huston's The Red Badge of Courage--only to return to New York and to the relationship. The love of Shawn and Ross for each other made it impossible for them ever to part. ---- This book is a gem, an exquisitely told real-life story more potent than fiction.
Random House Value Publishing 1999-08-31

The Last Flight of Poxl West

Daniel Torday
Poxl West fled the Nazis' onslaught in Czechoslovakia. He escaped their clutches again in Holland. He pulled Londoners from the Blitz's rubble. He wooed intoxicating, unconventional beauties. He rained fire on Germany from his RAF bomber. Poxl West is the epitome of manhood and something of an idol to his teenage nephew, Eli Goldstein, who reveres him as a brave, singular, Jewish war hero. Poxl fills Eli's head with electric accounts of his derring-do, adventures and romances, as he collects the best episodes from his storied life into a memoir. He publishes that memoir, Skylock, to great acclaim, and its success takes him on the road, and out of Eli's life. With his uncle gone, Eli throws himself into reading his opus and becomes fixated on all things Poxl. But as he delves deeper into Poxl's history, Eli begins to see that the life of the fearless superman he's adored has been much darker than he let on, and filled with unimaginable loss from which he may have not recovered. As the truth about Poxl emerges, it forces Eli to face irreconcilable facts about the war he's romanticized and the vision of the man he's held so dear. Daniel Torday's debut novel, "The Last Flight of Poxl West, " beautifully weaves together the two unforgettable voices of Eli Goldstein and Poxl West, exploring what it really means to be a hero, and to be a family, in the long shadow of war.
Thorndike Press, a part of Gale, Cengage Learning 2015 421 pages

Antiquities

Ozick, Cynthia
'A strange and compelling new book from one of America's greatest living authors' Times Literary Supplement 'As cunning and rich as anything Ozick's written' Wall Street Journal 'One of our era's central writers. About a man ensnared by history, Antiquities is at once a warning against the hazards of nostalgia and an invitation to take a longer view of how we got to where we are' The New Yorker 'Ozick's prose urges the breathless reader along, her love of language rolling excitedly through her sentences like an ocean wave' New York Review of Books I remember nothing. I remember everything. I believe everything. I believe nothing. In 1949, Lloyd Wilkinson Petrie returns as a Trustee to the long-defunct boarding school that he attended as a child. There he is preparing a memoir about the subtle anti-Semitism that pervaded the school, about his fascination with the Egyptian archaeological adventures of his distant cousin, about the passions of a boyhood friendship with named Ben-Zion Elefantin, a mystifying older pupil. In this novella, and the three stories published alongside it, one of our most preeminent writers weaves together myth and mania, history and illusion to capture the shifting meanings of the past.
Weidenfeld & Nicolson 2022-04-14 253 pages

Novels and stories of the 1970s & 80s

Malamud, Bernard
"This capstone novel in Library of America's Bernard Malamud edition brings together his three final novels: The Tenants, about the growing tension between two male writers--one Jewish, the other Black--who are the only inhabitants of a crumbling Manhattan tenement house; Dubin's Lives, a revealing study in the perils and promise of love in middle age thought to be Malamud's most autobiographical work; and God's Grace, a postapocalyptic tale of upended evolution in which redemption depends on the lone human survivor's ability to find common ground with a talking chimp. Edited by Malamud's definitive biographer, the volume is rounded out with thirteen masterful short stories and the memoir 'Long Work, Short Life' as well as a fascinating autobiographic sketch, 'A Lost Bar-Mitzvah,' published here for the first time."--Dust jacket.
The Library of America 2023-03-28 899 pages

Telling times: writing and living, 1950-2008

Gordimer, Nadine
Never before has Gordimer, awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1991, published such a comprehensive collection of her nonfiction. Telling Tales represents the full span of her works in that field-from the twilight of white rule in South Africa to the fight to overthrow the apartheid regime, and most recently, her role over the past seven years in confronting the contemporary phenomena of violence and the dangers of HIV. The range of this book is staggering, and the work in totality celebrates the lively perseverance of the life-loving individual in the face of political tumult, then the onslaught of a globalized world. The abiding passionate spirit that informs "A South African Childhood," a youthful autobiographical piece published in The New Yorker in 1954, can be found in each of the book's ninety-one pieces that span a period of fifty-five years. Returning to a lifetime of nonfiction work has become an extraordinary experience for Gordimer. She takes from one of her revered great writers, Albert Camus, the conviction that the writer is a "responsible human being" attuned not alone to dedication to the creation of fiction but to the political vortex that inevitably encompasses twentieth- and twenty-first-century life. Born in 1923, Gordimer, who as a child was ambitious to become a ballet dancer, was recognized at fifteen as a writing prodigy. Her sensibility was as much shaped by wide reading as it was to eye-opening sight, passing on her way to school the grim labor compounds where black gold miners lived. These twin decisives-literature and politics-infuse the book, which includes historic accounts of the political atmosphere, firsthand, after the Sharpeville Massacre of 1960 and the Soweto uprising of 1976, as well as incisive close-up portraits of Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu, among others. Gordimer revisits the eternally relevant legacies of Tolstoy, Proust, and Flaubert, and engages vigorously with contemporaries like Susan Sontag, Octavio Paz, and Edward Said. But some of her most sensuous writing comes in her travelogues, where the politics of Africa blend seamlessly with its awe-inspiring nature-including spectacular recollections of childhood holidays beside South Africa's coast of the Indian Ocean and a riveting account of her journey the length of the Congo River in the wake of Conrad. Gordimer's body of work is an extraordinary vision of the world that harks back to the sensibilities-political, moral, and social-of Dickens and Tolstoy, but with a decidedly vivid contemporary consciousness. Telling Times becomes both a literary exploration and extraordinary document of social and political history in our times.
Bloomsbury 2011-04-18 742 pages

Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man

Norman Mailer
By general consensus, Pablo Picasso is the most brilliant and influential artist of this century. Despite this supreme position in the history of art, he has nonetheless eluded and frustrated critics. Getting an intimate sense of the character of Picasso appears almost impossible; his macho posture and his incomparable range of styles seem designed to keep everyone who is interested in him at a distance. Who better than another legendary artist, Norman Mailer, to enter inside so enigmatic and protean a mind? In Portrait of Picasso as a Young Man, Mailer sets out to capture the meaning of Picasso's life and art and explores in bold fashion the originality of his ambition. Commenting upon much of the critical work on Picasso that has appeared over the years, Mailer's biography brings us closer to the young artist than we have ever been before. Much at the heart of Mailer's interpretation in Picasso's first great love, Fernande Olivier, with whom the artist lived for seven years--a period that included Picasso's most revolutionary works, from the explosive innovations of Les Demoiselles d'Avignon to the mysteries of Cubism itself. To understand Picasso in these years, Mailer argues, it is necessary to follow his relationship with the extraordinary Fernande, who is here given her own voice by way of excerpts from her candid memoirs, hitherto unpublished in English. Since this period also includes Picasso's friendships with Apollinaire and Gertrude Stein, the book evokes the charm and special character of bohemian life in Paris in the early 1900s.
Knopf Canada 1996 320 pages

Ruby of Cochin

Daniel, Ruby,Johnson, Barbara
Filled with rich descriptions of Jewish life that spans several centuries in this exotic culture, this ethnographic work is both the story of all the Jews of Cochin, India, and the tale of one woman. It contains historical legends and folk tales, colorful renditions of celebrations in Cochin, and translations of women's songs from Malayalam, the language of the local Jews. It is also Ruby's own memoir of her dramatic life in India. A woman of strong and enviable character, she chose not the traditional path of marriage, instead attending college and joining the Women's Royal Indian Navy.
Jewish Pubn Society 2001 240 pages

The Best of Robert Silverberg

Robert A. Silverberg
From the Inside Flap The Best of Robert Silverberg: Stories of Six Decades is a landmark volume that offers exactly what its title promises: the finest short work of one of the finest writers ever to grace the field of science fiction. Updated and expanded from 2004's Phases of the Moon, this mammoth collection contains twenty-six stories and novellas, along with a generous amount of introductory material. The result is the definitive one-volume overview of an extraordinary career. The earliest story, "The Macauley Circuit," was published in 1957, the latest, "The Prisoner," in 2010. In between these narrative bookends are some of the most astonishing fictional creations of the modern era, many of them winners of major awards. Included among these are "Good News from the Vatican," "Sailing to Byzantium," "Passengers," and "Enter a Soldier. Later, Enter Another," as well as two of the most remarkable novellas you will ever encounter: "Nightwings" and "Born with the Dead." Supplementing these award-winners are such bona fide classics as "Sundance," "Schwartz Between the Galaxies," "Capricorn Games," and "To See the Invisible Man." And the list goes on. Intelligent, exhilarating, and endlessly re-readable, The Best of Robert Silverberg: Stories of Six Decades is an irreplaceable volume, one that no one with an interest in modern science fiction or in serious, ambitious fiction of any sort can afford to miss. Product Description The Best of Robert Silverberg: Stories of Six Decades is a landmark volume that offers exactly what its title promises: the finest short work of one of the finest writers ever to grace the field of science fiction. Updated and expanded from 2004's Phases of the Moon, this mammoth collection contains twenty-six stories and novellas, along with a generous amount of introductory material. The result is the definitive one-volume overview of an extraordinary career. The earliest story, 'The Macauley Circuit,' was published in 1957, the latest, 'The Prisoner,' in 2010. In between these narrative bookends are some of the most astonishing fictional creations of the modern era, many of them winners of major awards. Included among these are 'Good News from the Vatican,' 'Sailing to Byzantium,' 'Passengers,' and 'Enter a Soldier. Later, Enter Another,' as well as two of the most remarkable novellas you will ever encounter: 'Nightwings' and 'Born with the Dead.' Supplementing these award-winners are such bona fide classics as 'Sundance,' 'Schwartz Between the Galaxies,' 'Capricorn Games,' and 'To See the Invisible Man.' And the list goes on. Intelligent, exhilarating, and endlessly re-readable, The Best of Robert Silverberg: Stories of Six Decades is an irreplaceable volume, one that no one with an interest in modern science fiction--or in serious, ambitious fiction of any sort--can afford to miss. From Publishers Weekly Starred Review. This well-chosen retrospective, which adds three stories to the 2004 limited-edition collection Phases of the Moon, spans 56 years of SFWA Grand Master Silverberg's writing life, starting in his early career with 1954's The Road to Nightfall and ending with 2010's The Prisoner. In 26 elegantly conceived and written stories, protagonists travel through time, philosophize, question their morals and faith, and pursue unknowable, elusive women. The narrator of Nightwings endures a crisis of faith over his order's age-old vigil against alien invasion. In The Far Side of the Bell-Shaped Curve a time traveler tries to manipulate his time line to keep the woman he desires. A bereaved husband in Born with the Dead pursues his wife beyond death to her very peculiar afterlife. Francisco Pizarro and Socrates engage in a battle of wits in Enter a Soldier. Later, Enter Another. Thanks to Silverberg's commentary on each decade and story—wry, candid, and unencumbered by false modesty—the anthology also functions as a memoir of a great career in genre literature. (Dec.)
Pocket Books 1980-08-02 258 pages

A cross and a star: memoirs of a Jewish girl in Chile

Agosín, Marjorie
In this unique memoir, renowned poet, fiction writer, critic, and activist Marjorie Agosin writes in the voice of her mother, Frida, the daughter of European Jewish immigrants, living in Chile in the years before, during, and after World War II. Frida recounts stories from her family's Jewish/Chilean history: of her father, who had to leave Vienna in 1920 because he fell in love with a Christian cabaret dancer; of her paternal grandmother, who came to Chile later with a number tattooed on her arm; and of her great grandmother, an immigrant from Odessa, who learned to speak Spanish in Chile and loved the language so much that she repeated its harmonious sounds even in her sleep. Frida's stories of the past soften the realities of present times, when some immigrants from Germany still display portraits of Hitler m their homes and Jews still remain, after two generations, strangers in their own land. These stories are permeated with the shadow of faraway war in Europe, which haunts Frida's dreams and is a vivid presence in the everyday life in this Chilean town. For Frida the cross and the star of the title come to define two worlds that are for her distinct, yet inexorably entwined. Agosin's poetic reflections reveal a culture and a landscape little-known outside of her native land, explore the boundaries of "voice", and create a moving testament to endurance and to the power of memory and of words.
Garnet 1997 16 pages