Writing a Jewish Life chronicles novelist Lev Raphael's struggle to claim both his religious and sexual identities, and the happiness he subsequently found. Until he reached his mid-20s, the author felt alienated from other Jews, ambivalent about his homosexuality; or as he puts it, "twice strange ... in each [community], different, lesser, ashamed." A son of Holocaust survivors, Raphael grew up in an unmistakably Jewish but nonreligious home. However, as an adult he initiated his own affiliations with Judaism: He had a bar mitzvah at age 30, went to Israel twice, and fell in love with a Jewish man. It was "coming out as a Jew,' he writes, that "ultimately made it possible for me to come out as a gay man and then work at uniting the two identities." Attesting to his journey is the contrast between his confused childhood and the joyful domestic life he now shares with his lover, Gersh, and their two sons.

"Julia Howe (1819-1910) was a beautiful, studious New York heiress and aspiring poet when she married Bostonian Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, a hero of the Greek war of independence against the Turks and an internationally acclaimed pioneer in the education of the blind. Their marriage united two exceptional people. Together the Howes knew many of the key figures of their era, from Charles Dickens and Florence Nightingale in England, to Margaret Fuller, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, Horace Mann, Charles Sumner, and John Brown. But despite his philanthropic and abolitionist ideals, Dr. Howe did not support married women's work outside the home. He isolated Julia, opposed her literary ambitions, and wasted her inheritance. She defied him by continuing to publish poems and plays while raising their six children. She also secretly wrote a bold novel about a hermaphrodite, undiscovered until long after her death. And during the Civil War, she wrote the words to the most powerful and enduring anthem in the nation's history. Authorship of the 'Battle Hymn of the Republic' made her famous and revered. But she fought her own civil war at home, battling with her husband over her rights to equality, intellectual freedom, and a public voice. As soon as the war ended, she became a pacifist and suffragist leader. In the second half of her life, she came into her own as a tireless campaigner for women's rights and social reform. In this biography, Elaine Showalter tells the story of Howe's determined self-creation and vividly restores her to the pantheon of feminist intellectuals who changed the world"--Jacket

For me it begins in such an ordinary way ... with a gorilla, a blonde, and a gun ... Mid- 20th century Hollywood; 'Raymond Chandler's LA before Pilates and cell phones'. Clancy Sigal (who would later be the inspiration for Doris Lessing's 'Saul Green') is just back from fighting in the Second World War and an abortive solo attempt to assassinate Hermann Goering at the Nurenburg trials. Charming his way into a job as an agent with the Sam Jaffe agency, Sigal plunges into a chaotic Hollywood peopled by fast women, washed-up screenwriters, wily directors, and starstruck FBI agents trailing 'subversives'. He parties with the likes of Humphrey Bogart, Barbara Stanwyck, Tony Curtis and an anxious Peter Lorre, who becomes a drinking buddy. But this is the era of the Hollywood Blacklist and Sigal, like many of his contemporaries, is subpoenaed to testify before the HUAC. Will he give up the list of nine names, burning a hole in his pocket, to save his own skin? Hilarious, touching, intimate and revealing: Sigal's memoir reads like a forgotten hardboiled detective novel and has all the makings of an instant classic.

So, just how was Tarzan created? Eager to know the inside story about the legendary John Carter and the amazing cities and peoples of Barsoom? Perhaps your taste is more suited to David Innes and the fantastic lost world at the Earth?s core? Or maybe wrong-way Napier and the bizarre civilizations of cloud-enshrouded Venus are more to your liking? These pages contain all that you will ever want to know about the wondrous worlds and unforgettable characters penned by the master storyteller Edgar Rice Burroughs. ø Richard A. Lupoff, the respected critic and writer who helped spark a Burroughs revival in the 1960s, reveals fascinating details about the stories written by the creator of Tarzan. Featured here are outlines of all of Burroughs?s major novels, with descriptions of how they were each written and their respective sources of inspiration. This Bison Books edition includes a new foreword by fantasy writer Michael Moorcock, a new introduction by the author, a final chapter by Phillip R. Burger, as well as corrected text and an updated bibliography.

"Once upon a time there were three men who exemplified, without knowing it, my ideal in life. All of them became famous as writers, influential thinkers, and public figures. Their names are Clifton Fadiman, Lionel Trilling, and Jacques Barzun. They met in college, they remained aware of one another as friends or, if less than friends, companions and fellow crusaders on behalf of similar ideals. Although one of them never knew of my existence, the second ignored it, and the third treated me with formal kindness, without them I would have had no concrete model in my youth of what I wanted to become. Theirs was the universe in which I wished to have my being." With these words, Carolyn Heilbrun begins a personal, pointed, and surprisingly moving account of how a woman, destined to become one of the leading feminist critics of her day as well as one of our most popular mystery novelists, found the models for the life she aspired to in men who neither imagined nor countenanced women as their equals or colleagues. Remembering these three figures as they were when she hung upon their printed words and professorial presences, reappraising them now half a century later, Heilbrun vividly evokes what these remarkable individuals had to offer to an admiring young woman who could not acknowledge—and later would not accept—the impossibility of following in their paths. In the admired anthologies, magazine articles, and introductions through which Fadiman transmitted the world of high culture to an educated general public, he indicated no devotion to questions of female destiny; yet long before Heilbrun could imagine the life in the academy that was denied to Fadiman but would eventually be hers, his was the career to which she privately aspired. Later, in her days as a graduate student at Columbia, it was Trilling who would have the most powerful intellectual effect upon her, formulating as he did the tensions inherent in the desire to salvage what was of worth from a sad, almost moribund culture, even if he frankly admitted to no interest in teaching women or in considering their destinies beyond the domestic sphere. Only the courtly Barzun, also a mentor at Columbia, seemed capable of respecting female accomplishment and eschewing stereotyped views of women. Yet together, all three men unconsciously made Heilbrun's life as a feminist possible, by representing both what she wished to join and what she needed to struggle against. When Men Were the Only Models We Had is a loving, admiring, but stringent account of youthful enthusiasms, of the romance of ideas, of the intellectual brilliance of three unwitting mentors, and of the hopelessness of female ambition in the years before the feminist movement of the last three decades of the last century. And it is, in the end, a book that offers splendid proof that the models we once had are no longer the only ones before us.

Vera Caspary, the celebrated author of Laura , tells her own story in this captivating autobiography. With a career that spanned from the 1920s through 1970s, one that produced over twenty novels, in addition to her many credits for film and theater, Caspary centered her life around a passion for writing. From her early experiences at an advertisement agency--where she developed a correspondence school and invented its "famed" instructor--to the struggles of being gray-listed in the McCarthy Era, Caspary constantly found a way to turn her creative needs into viable work. Caspary recalls the rest of a full life, too, including her flirtation with communism, travels across Europe, and a marriage. Caspary's skillful writing makes her incredible depictions of people, and the times in which they lived, jump off the page.

The twelve contemporary fiction writers interviewed in Passion and Craft go beyond the merely autobiographical, revealing that, despite their differences, they share passionate devotion and discipline for their craft. Included are Richard Ford, winner in 1995 of both the Pulitzer Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award; Gina Berriault, 1997 winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award; Bobbie Ann Mason; T. Coraghessan Boyle; Rick Bass; Leonard Michaels; Christopher Tilghman; Thom Jones; Julia Alvarez; Andre Dubus; Jayne Anne Phillips; and Tobias Wolff. Their comments will interest readers devoted to their novels and stories, other writers, and aspiring writers.

Aram Saroyan tells of the intimate sides of the life of his father, Pulitzer Prize-Winning playwright and novelist William Saroyan.

""Returning from Europe to New York in l959, he soon found himself sought after, not for his fiction, to his dismay, but for his essays and reviews, by such high intellectual journals as Commentary, Partisan Review, NY Review of Books, which have been collected in Looking For Genet (Black Sparrow Press, l992). His reviews were never hackwork, though, and if occasionally unfair, even bitchy, were the product of his shrewd literary intelligence. I think he, himself, saw them primarily as performances, or entertainments. He would never have admitted it, but writing for money brought his splintered character into focus and coherence. Not only Esquire magazine, which published one of his stories, but Mademoiselle, placed him among the "hottest" writers of l963, including Anthony Powell, Dawn Powell, Robert Lowell, W.D. Snodgrass, James Baldwin, and William Gaddis, which could not but be flattering. But he remained uncomfortable with that part of his career. It was to escape this success as a literary critic that was sidetracking his unfinished novel that, after throwing a wild party and burning his furniture, he left New York with not much more money in his pocket than the landlord was paying him for vacating his apartment.""--