"The facts and legends of New York's famed artistic hub told by one of its key participants"--

A disabled foreigner in Japan--a society historically hostile to difference--Kenny Fries spins a tale of exciting, bewildering adventure. As he visits Japanese gardens, experiences Noh and butoh, and meets artists and scholars, he also discovers disabled gods, one-eyed samurai, blind chanting priests, and A-bomb survivors. When he is diagnosed as HIV-positive, all his assumptions about Japan, the body, and mortality are shaken, and he must find a way to re-enter life on new terms.

From his extraordinary beginnings-his mother went into labor while gambling at a French casino-to escaping Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and ultimately hoping to conquer New York City, John Gruen writes a subtly revealing self-portrait in Callas Kissed Me...Lenny Too! As a boy unable to speak a single word of English, Gruen was determined to make a successful life for himself in America. Anxious to know what his adopted country was truly about, he ventured to the Midwest to attend the University of Iowa, where he emerged, five years later, as a more-or-less Americanized graduate student on his way to a PhD scholarship to the prestigious Institute of Fine Arts at New York University, and as the 20-year-old husband of ravishing fellow student and painter Jane Wilson. The story of the Gruens' life in New York City, from the 1950s to the present, explores a complex marriage and two parallel journeys of artistic growth. Gruen worked as a composer, photographer, and journalist; Wilson developed as a distinguished painter, though often supported the two with work as a fashion model. Life was always on the move for the couple. Though hardly well-connected and certainly not wealthy, the Gruens knew everyone during their many years in the artistic milieu of which they were an active part. From the many apartments they occupied in New York City to the countless dinner parties, nights at the Cedar bar, and weekends at their Hamptons barn, their life was a nonstop social whirlwind. There were chance encounters with Salvador Dalí, evenings spent pretending to be Chekhov characters at home with E.E. Cummings and Marion Morehouse, working vacations to Italy with the Leonard Bernsteins, and a long working visit to Gian Carlo Menotti's baronial Scottish estate. Their ever-expanding circle of acquaintances and friends also included Rudolf Nureyev, Maria Callas, Willem De Kooning, Francis Bacon, Judy Garland, Tennessee Williams, Bette Davis, Samuel Beckett, Lucien Freud, Andy Warhol, Robert Rauschenberg, Jasper Johns, and so many others. It was all quite head-spinning, at times producing hugely complicated situations, but throughout it all, John Gruen and Jane Wilson built successful careers based on hard work and a steady conviction that life should be lived to the fullest.

James Salter's exalted place in American letters is based largely on the intense admiration of other writers, but his work resonates far beyond the realm of fellow craftsmen, addressing themes--youth, war, erotic love, marriage, life abroad, friendship--that speak to us all. Following the publication of his first novel, Salter left behind a military career of great promise to write full-time and--through decades of searching, exacting work--became one of American literature's master stylists. Only months before he died, at the age of eighty-nine, he agreed to serve as the first Kapnick Writer-in-Residence at the University of Virginia, where he composed and delivered the three lectures presented in this book and introduced by his friend and fellow novelist, National Book Award-winning author John Casey. Salter speaks to us here with an easy intimacy, sharing his unceasing enchantment with the books that made up his reading life, including works by Balzac, Flaubert, Babel (whose prose is "like a handful of radium"), Dreiser, Celine, Faulkner. These talks provide an invaluable opportunity to see the way in which a great writer reads. They also offer a candid look at the writing life--the rejection letters, not one but two negative reviews in the New York Times for the same book, writing in the morning or at night and worrying about money during the long afternoons. Salter raises the question, Why does one write? For wealth? For admiration, or a sense of "importance"? Confronting a blank sheet that always offers too many choices, practicing a vocation that often demands one write instead of live, the answer for Salter was creating a style that captured experience, in a world where anything not written down fades away. -- Amazon.com.

Greenwich Village in the 1950s was a haven to which young poets, painters, and jazz musicians flocked. Among them was Hettie Cohen, who'd been born into a middle-class Jewish family in Queens and who'd chosen to cross racial barriers to marry the controversial black poet LeRoi Jones. Theirs was a bohemian life in the awakening East Village of underground publishing and jazz lofts, through which drifted such icons of the generation as Allen Ginsberg, Thelonious Monk, Jack Kerouac, Frank O'Hara, Billie Holiday, James Baldwin, and Franz Kline.

What sort of society could bind together Jacques Roubaud, Italo Calvino, Marcel Duchamp, and Raymond Queneau—and Daniel Levin Becker, a young American obsessed with language play? Only the Oulipo, the Paris-based experimental collective founded in 1960 and fated to become one of literature’s quirkiest movements. An international organization of writers, artists, and scientists who embrace formal and procedural constraints to achieve literature’s possibilities, the Oulipo (the French acronym stands for “workshop for potential literature”) is perhaps best known as the cradle of Georges Perec’s novel A Void, which does not contain the letter e. Drawn to the Oulipo’s mystique, Levin Becker secured a Fulbright grant to study the organization and traveled to Paris. He was eventually offered membership, becoming only the second American to be admitted to the group. From the perspective of a young initiate, the Oulipians and their projects are at once bizarre and utterly compelling. Levin Becker’s love for games, puzzles, and language play is infectious, calling to mind Elif Batuman’s delight in Russian literature in The Possessed. In recent years, the Oulipo has inspired the creation of numerous other collectives: the OuMuPo (a collective of DJs), the OuMaPo (marionette players), the OuBaPo (comic strip artists), the OuFlarfPo (poets who generate poetry with the aid of search engines), and a menagerie of other Ou-X-Pos (workshops for potential something ). Levin Becker discusses these and other intriguing developments in this history and personal appreciation of an iconic—and iconoclastic—group.

"Bound together for the first time, these two boyhood memoirs relate A. E. Hotchner's coming of age in the Midwest during the Depression"--Provided by publisher.

Kaysen's search for a diagnosis and cure for excruciating and incessant personal physical pain.

"An autobiography usually requires a justification. The great autobiographies-those by Benvenuto Cellini, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, and Henry Brooks Adams-were justified by their authors living in interesting times, harboring radically new ideas, or participating in great events. Joseph Epstein qualifies on none of these counts. His life has been quiet, lucky in numerous ways, and far from dramatic. But it has also been emblematic of the great changes in our country since World War II. He grew up in a petit-bourgeois, Midwestern milieu, and the city of Chicago looms large in his life. He drew a lucky ticket in the parent lottery and his was a happy boyhood spent on playgrounds and hanging around drug stores. At high school dances, he was the rhumba king and at drive-in movies he was never allowed to go as far with girls as he so ardently desired. At twenty-six, after two years in the army, he found himself married, the father or stepfather of four children, and living in New York on the meager salary of a magazine subeditor. He was ablaze with ambition and fettered by frustration. He broke out by moving to Little Rock, Arkansas, to direct the city's anti-poverty program at the height of the Civil Rights movement. His writing career blossomed, he began teaching at Northwestern University, and, for twenty-five years, edited one of great intellectual magazines. Never Say You've Had a Lucky Life is an intimate look at one life steeped in radical change: from a traditionally moral culture to a therapeutic one, from an era when the extended family was strong to its current diminished status, from print to digital life featuring the war of pixel on print, and on. But for all the seriousness of Epstein's themes, this book is memorable for its comic point of view and the constant reminder of how unpredictable, various, and wondrously rich life can be"--

In the 1960s, amid political upheaval and anti-war protests, a growing number of young Americans were creating their own visionary revolution by "tuning in, turning on, and dropping out." Cannabis was king, and the sacred mushrooms "psilocybin" and LSD were "tripping" the minds of thousands, led by psychologist/guru/pitchman Dr. Timothy Leary, the pied piper of the psychedelic drug scene.

"James Salter (born James Horowitz in 1925) has been known throughout his career as a "writer's writer," acclaimed by such literary greats as Susan Sontag, Richard Ford, John Banville, and Peter Matthiessen for his lyrical prose, his insightful and daring explorations of sex, and his examinations of the inner lives of women and men. Conversations with James Salter collects interviews published from 1972 to 2014 with the award-winning author of The Hunters, A Sport and a Pastime, Light Years, and All That Is. Gathered here are his earliest interviews following acclaimed but moderately selling novels, conversations covering his work as a screenwriter and award-winning director, and interviews charting his explosive popularity after publishing All That Is, his first novel after a gap of thirty-four years. These conversations chart Salter's progression as a writer, his love affair with France, his military past as a fighter pilot, and his lyrical explorations of gender relations.The collection contains interviews from Sweden, Chile, France, and Argentina appearing for the first time in English. Included as well are published conversations from the United States, Canada, and Australia, some of which are significantly extended versions, giving this collection an international scope of Salter's wide-ranging career and his place in world literature"--

Captures both the burlesque and the cruelties of one boy's experiences growing up Jewish in Guatemala, a country he finds irresistible despite its harshness

Andrei Codrescu proves a candid, witty, iconoclastic and exuberant commentator on his own colorful life.

Dubbed-some would say drubbed-the "godfather behind creative nonfiction" by Vanity Fair, Lee Gutkind takes the opportunity of these essays, and the rich material of his own life, to define, defend, and further expand the genre he has done so much to shape. The result is an explosive and hilarious memoir of Gutkind's colorful life as a motorcyclist, a medical insider, a sailor, a college professor, an over-aged insecure father, and a literary whipping boy. In Forever Fat Gutkind battles his weight, his ex-wives, his father, his rabbi, his psychiatrist, and his critics in a lifelong cross-country, cross-cultural search for stability and identity. And from Gutkind's battles, the reader emerges a winner, treated to a sometimes poignant, sometimes harrowing, sometimes uproarious, and always engrossing story of the simultaneous awakening of a man and his mission, and of the constant struggle, in literature and in life, to sort out memory and imagination. Here, enacted in technicolor terms, is the universal, symbolic truth that no matter how far you travel, over how many years, you will never completely shed the weighty baggage of adolescence. Yet, as Gutkind proves again and again, he has learned to describe his burden with an ever-lightening brilliance. Lee Gutkind is the founder and editor of the journal Creative Nonfiction. The author and editor of a dozen books, including the award-winning Many Sleepless Nights: The World of Organ Transplantation, he is a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and the director of the Mid-Atlantic Creative Nonfiction Writers' Conference at Goucher College.

The untold life story of All-of-a-Kind Family author Sydney Taylor, highlighting her dramatic influence on American children's literature.