In Roomanitarian, popular author, actor, musician, and spoken-word artist Henry Rollins returns to the combative prose that has won him critical acclaim and a legion of devoted fans. The book is divided into three parts: The first section, "Walking the Chasm,” written in the form of a poem, epitomizes Rollins’s beautifully stark, hard-hitting style. The second part, "Ended," is a series of short prose pieces reminiscent of Solipsist. Finally, the biting humor and social commentary Rollins is renowned for is on full display in "To Ann Hitler with Love," a series of mock love letters to a fictional woman who bears a striking resemblance to conservative pundit Ann Coulter.

The photographs inSTREETwere taken by Carrie Boretz in New York City from the mid-1970s through the 1990s. It is common knowledge that the city was on rocky ground for many of those years but these are not pictures filled with drama or strife. Instead Boretz was always more interested in the subtle and familiar moments of everyday life in the various neighborhoods where she lived, before much of the graffiti was scrubbed away and the city sanitized and reborn to what it has since become. For so many living in and visiting New York today, it is forgotten or altogether not known how different so many parts of the city were during that time. Many of these pictures show the reality of the streets then, where every day workers, the homeless, the affluent, and tourists all shared the common space, providing examples of how one of the greatest cities in the world was one often filled with contradictions. But there is also a timeless element to these images as children still play in the parks, streets, and schoolyards, commuters still face the elements daily as they wait, there are still regular demonstrations and parades, and the whole spectrum of the joys and pitfalls of humanity are still visible most anywhere a person looks. For Boretz nothing was scripted, it all played out right before her. As Patti Smith said, "You need no rationale, no schooling. It's love at first sight. You see something and you have to capture it. Instinctive, bang, you feel one with it." Indeed, Boretz doesn't have a philosophy about shooting other than trusting her instinct: she saw, she shot, she moved on, always looking for moments that made her heart beat faster. It was the continual rush of knowing that at any time she could come upon something real and beautiful. That is why and how she shot and why and how herSTREETis so special.

Bianca Bienenfeld was a seventeen-year-old lycee student when she was seduced both intellectually and sexually by her philosophy professor, Simone de Beauvoir, in 1938. The following year de Beauvoir passed Bianca on to her "essential partner", Jean-Paul Sartre. The three formed a menage a trois until 1940, when Bianca was suddenly abandoned by her dual mentors and lovers. Their lack of concern for Bianca's fate as a Jew in occupied France made the abrupt break even more shattering for her. She began to suffer periodic bouts of severe depression linked not only to the Nazi horrors, but to the betrayal by de Beauvoir and Sartre. After World War II, Bianca Bienenfeld (now married to Bernard Lamblin) resumed a platonic friendship with de Beauvoir that lasted more than forty years, but the pain of the old, perturbing affair flooded back when, in 1990, she read de Beauvoir's posthumously published Letters to Sartre and War Journal. The intimate content of these books referred directly to Bianca in a tone of ridicule and contempt, and she finally discovered the full extent of de Beauvoir's deception. Now Bianca explodes with the true story behind her earlier relationship with the high priests of existentialism. Published here in English for the first time, her memoir reveals what it was like to be a third party in the "contingent" affairs of de Beauvoir and Sartre. Bianca's compelling narrative is not written out of revenge or retaliation. Rather, it is an eloquent, candid account of how de Beauvoir and Sartre influenced the shape of her life and how she survived a disgraceful affair that, when broken, almost broke her. Bianca's unique perspective on de Beauvoir and Sartre is the centralfocus of the book, but not the sole one. She writes about her love for her husband Bernard, who helped her recover. She also describes life during the dark times of German occupation, and recounts witnessing the battle of Vercors during the French Resistance. Her well-crafted and poignant memoir will appeal to scholars and general readers alike.

Showing how history imprints itself on private lives, this memoir presents the author's sensuous, harrowing, and remarkable life. It moves from Berlin during the Great War to the artists' set on the Cote d'Azur, through lovers, mentors, seducers and friends, and from genteel yet shabby poverty to comfort in London's Chelsea.

"After discovering photography as a teenager through her high school's photo club, Lillian rejects her parents' expectations of college and marriage and moves to New York City in 1955. When a small gallery exhibits partially nude photographs of Lillian and her daughter, Samantha, Lillian is arrested, thrust into the national spotlight, and targeted with an obscenity charge. Mother and daughter's sudden notoriety changes the course of both of their lives and especially Lillian's career as she continues a lifelong quest for artistic legitimacy and recognition. Narrated by Samantha, Feast Your Eyes reads as a collection of Samantha's memories, interviews with Lillian's friends and lovers, and excerpts from Lillian's journals and letters--a collage of stories and impressions, together amounting to an astounding portrait of a mother and an artist dedicated, above all, to a vision of beauty, truth, and authenticity"--Provided by publisher.

Provides a poetic commentary on the illusions and realities of life and love.

In his critically acclaimed Rewrites, Neil Simon talked about his beginnings - his early years of working in television, his first real love, his first play, his first brush with failure, and, most moving of all, his first great loss. Simon's same willingness to open his heart of the reader permeates The Play Goes On. This second act takes the reader from the mid-1970s to the present, a period in which Simon wrote some of his most popular and critically acclaimed plays, including the Brighton Beach trilogy and Lost in Yonkers, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize. Simon experienced enormous professional success during this time, but in his personal life he struggled to find that same sense of happiness and satisfaction. After the death of his first wife, he and his two young daughters left New York for Hollywood. There he remarried, and when that foundered he remarried again. Told with his characteristic humor and unflinching sense of irony, The Play Goes On is rich with stories of how Simon's art came to imitate his life. Simon's forty-plus plays make up a body of work that is a long-running memoir in its own right, yet here, in a deeper and more personal book than his first volume, Simon offers a revealing look at an artist in crisis but still able and willing to laugh at himself. -- from back cover.-- Provided by publisher.

Marjorie Perloff writes: “Among the great modernist poets, Mina Loy was surely the greatest wit, the most sophisti- cated commentator on the vagaries of love, the one whose brittle and sardonic laughter continues . . . to pursue us.” Stories and Essays of Mina Loy is the first book-length volume of Mina Loy’s narrative writings and critical work ever published. This volume brings together her short fiction, as well as hybrid works that include modernized fairy tales, a Socratic dialogue, and a ballet. Loy’s narratives address issues such as abortion and poverty, and what she called “the sex war” is an abiding theme throughout. Stories and Essays of Mina Loy also contains dramatic works that parody the bravado and misogyny of Futurism and demonstrate Loy’s early, effective use of absurdist technique. Essays and commentaries on aesthetics, historical events, and religion complete this beguiling collection, cementing Mina Loy’s place as one of the great writers of the twentieth century.

Marjorie Agosín writes of a beloved childhood nanny: "Since I was Jewish she baptized me with holy water brought forth from the fonts of nearby churches. She told me to stay very still so I wouldn't sprout horns. . . . I was somewhere between taciturn and happy gazing into the mirror as if approaching the edge of a cliff . . . and I watched myself in the deep, transparent veil of this night of all nights." Many of the themes expressed in this vignette--cultural dissonance, family, and community--are poetically intertwined throughout The Alphabet in My Hands . Agosín takes us on a personal journey of discovery that is as much internal reflection as it is an exodus across continents and decades. Agosín's childhood and early adolescence were spent with her Jewish family in Chile. While her family raised her to regard her Jewish heritage with loving awareness, they also participated in the dominant Catholic culture--an aunt organized Easter egg hunts and her mother admired the beauty of Chile's Catholic churches. The young Agosín became keenly aware of her dual identity in her country, both as a participant and an outsider. The second half of The Alphabet in My Hands recounts the events that forced her family to emigrate to America: the overthrow of Salvador Allende by General Augusto Pinochet. Agosín writes of her new life in Athens, Georgia, of the sudden loss of all that was familiar. Ostracized as an emigrant--a "non-white" with a strange foreign accent--her high school years were made even more painful by the news from Chile: prisoners taken and classmates disappearing or shot. Years later, Agosín goes back to Chile and she travels there with her own children. As she stares down at her old homeland from the plane, she writes: "Why do I love this place that forced us into exile, that punished my father for being a Jew?" And in the final chapter of The Alphabet in My Hands , this award-winning poet addresses two important topics: her current residence in New England and the central role of writing and literature in her life.

"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"--

Howard Engel has written the perfect parody of a present day Christmas in the suburbs. In his irreverant yet delightfully nostalgic style, Howard Engel tells a story of family, laughter and love. Engel's ear for the rhythm of Thomas' original book combined with his hilarious accounts of uncles, aunts and cousins stuffed into an overcrowded living room, draining the punch bowl and scavenging for presents, brilliantly captures the comic and nostalgic moments of the season.

A New York Times “Books for Summer Reading” selection Winner of the 2003 National Jewish Book Award for History By the time he died in 1993 at the age of 73, Irving Howe was one of the twentieth century’s most important public thinkers. Deeply passionate, committed to social reform and secular Jewishness, ardently devoted to fiction and poetry, in love with baseball, music, and ballet, Howe wrote with such eloquence and lived with such conviction that his extraordinary work is now part of the canon of American social thought. In the first comprehensive biography of Howe’s life, historian Gerald Sorin brings us close to this man who rose from Jewish immigrant poverty in the 1930s to become one of the most provocative intellectuals of our time. Known most widely for his award-winning book World of Our Fathers, a rich portrayal of the East European Jewish experience in New York, Howe also won acclaim for his prodigious output of illuminating essays on American culture and as an indefatigable promoter of democratic socialism as can be seen in the pages of Dissent, the journal he edited for nearly forty years. Deeply devoted to the ideal of democratic radicalism and true equality, Howe was constantly engaged in a struggle for decency and basic fairness in the face of social injustice. In the century of Auschwitz, the Gulag, and global inter-ethnic mass murder, it was difficult to sustain political certainties and take pride in one's humanity. To have lived a life of conviction and engagement in that era was a notable achievement. Irving Howe lived such a life and Gerald Sorin has done a masterful job of guiding us through it in all its passion and complexity.

A courageously revealing--and occasionally shocking--autobiography from the founding editor-in-chief of Lear's magazine in which she vividly recounts the love affairs, suicide attempts, substance abuse, and mental illness that she kept hidden behind her dazzling and successful career.

There was a time not very long ago when "going out" was only for the rich and the reckless. At the turn of the century, "going out" became part of everyday life as vaudeville halls, photograph parlors, penny arcades, nickelodeons, nightclubs, dance halls, world's fair midways, amusement parks, ballparks, and movie palaces opened their doors to the people of the city. The new amusement centers welcomed women, men, and children, native-born and immigrant, rich, poor, and middling. Only African Americans were excluded or segregated in the audience, though they were overrepresented on stage. Going Out chronicles the twentieth-century entertainment revolution that changed forever the ways we live, work, and play. In a matter of decades, a new public world of amusements was created where ethnic, class, and neighborhood differences were subordinated to the common pursuit of a good time. Clerks and bankers, sales girls and society ladies "turkey trotted" to ragtime in nightclubs and dance halls; "shot the chute" and clutched one another in "barrels of love"; visited "Darkest Africa" on the world's fair midways; and sat together in the dark watching pictures move on a screen. In Going Out, we meet the colorful characters who invented show business: Thomas Alva Edison, who was astonished when his phonograph made money playing music (he had designed it to take business dictation); Benjamin Franklin Keith, the circus grifter who opened a dime museum in Boston in the 1880s and within a decade owned the world's largest vaudeville theater circuit; Adolph Zukor and Marcus Loew, the New York furriers who made millions in the early picture-show business; and the dozens of small-time show businessmen who rode the rails with their "shows" in their trunks. And we hear the stories of the early black performers and their struggles to maintain their dignity and livelihood while audiences demanded their public humiliation. Going Out is a history of twentieth-century show business and of the new American public that assembled in the city's wondrous pleasure palaces, parks, and theaters. The book concludes with an account of the fall or relocation of this entertainment world, as central city amusement parks, movie palaces, and ballparks were uprooted and transported to the suburbs in the decades following World War II.

This collection of essays explores some poetico-philosophical questions that have long been circulating in the Cixousian universe: love's labours lost and found, feminine hours, autobiographies of writing, and animal-human family ties.

This novel by Nobel Prize–winning author Patrick Modiano is one of the most seductive and accessible in his oeuvre: the story of a man’s memories of fleeing responsibility, finding love, and searching for meaning in an uncertain world The narrator of Villa Triste , an anxious, roving, stateless young man of eighteen, arrives in a small French lakeside town near Switzerland in the early 1960s. He is fleeing the atmosphere of menace he feels around him and the fear that grips him. Fear of war? Of imminent catastrophe? Of others? Whatever it may be, the proximity of Switzerland, to which he plans to run at the first sign of danger, gives him temporary reassurance. The young man hides among the other summer visitors until he meets a beautiful young actress named Yvonne Jacquet, and a strange doctor, René Meinthe. These two invite him into their world of soirees and late-night debauchery. But when real life beckons once again, he finds no sympathy from his new companions. Modiano has written a haunting novel that captures lost youth, the search for identity, and ultimately, the fleetingness of time.

The manager's name was Love. His first-floor flat was diagonally across the private road and the rose beds from ours. Each weekday morning, at eight fifteen, he hooked open his lattice-paned bedroom window and did exercises, in a white sleeveless vest and white drawers. So begins the extraordinary life story of one of Britain's most celebrated writers, Frederic Raphael. Going Up is a journey from Chicago to Putney, to Charterhouse, on up to Cambridge, and beyond to Hollywood and France, recording experiences that were absorbed in his opulent novels and screenplays. Raphael is the author of over twenty novels, the most celebrated being The Glittering Prizes and its sequels, following the aspirations and changing lives of a group of Cambridge students through to middle age. The Glittering Prizes became a critically acclaimed six-part BBC television series for which Raphael would win a Royal Television Society Writer of the Year Award. He also won an Oscar for his screenplay for the 1965 movie Darling.Going Up is a dazzling piece of virtuoso prose writing that is fabulously indiscreet but also deeply moving, and punctuated throughout by Raphael's indefatigable wit and incomparable erudition.

More than three decades have passed since Robert Kennedy was assassinated seeking the Democratic nomination for the presidency. During that time, a powerful legend has grown around him, decreeing that he would have quickly ended the Vietnam War, violence in the cities, and racial and social injustice across the land. Millions of Americans continue to believe that legend. Drawing on his striking interpretation of RFK's character, award-winning historian Ronald Steel examines the life against the legend that Kennedy consciously helped create.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER From #1 internationally bestselling author Santa Montefiore comes a gripping new novel of enduring love and devastating secrets, sweeping across England during WWII to Australia five decades later, based on a true story. Rupert promised he was going to come back. All Florence had to do was wait. Cornwall, 1944 When Rupert Dash is declared missing, presumed dead during the Battle of Arnhem, his wife, Florence, is devastated. She can’t accept that he has gone from her life forever, and so when she finds a poem called ‘Wait for Me’ hidden in an old book, she believes it’s a sign from her husband. A promise that he will return to her. London, 1988 Since childhood Max has suffered from a recurring nightmare. Surrounded by the horrific chaos of war, he has an urgent mission he knows he must complete. But time after time, the dream ends with him awaking in terror, his heart pounding from the horror of the battlefield. Desperate to understand why he is haunted by such terrible visions, Max embarks on a journey that leads him to Cornwall and a man named Rupert Dash. Melbourne, 1995 Florence receives a letter from someone she has never met, who lives on the other side of the world. This stranger says he remembers a life that belonged to another before him. Could this be the one person Florence has waited fifty-one years to meet again?

Leib Goldkorn, aged musician, first appeared almost a quarter-century ago in The Steinway Quintet. Now Leib has replaced his magic flute with his phallus: it is love, longing, and the quest for sexual fulfillment that must stave off both his own death and the imminent destruction of the Jews. In Ice he rescues the celebrated skater Sonja Henie from Hitler's clutches. In Fire his paramour is Carmen Miranda. And in Water he engages in a South Sea Island intrigue with a famous swimming star of the 1940s. Meanwhile, in the present, Leib seeks consummation with three other inamoratas: Clara, his wife; Hustler model Miss Crystal Knight; and the critic Michiko Kakutani (causing a real-life literary scandal). In this "wickedly funny" (Elle) and no less heartbreaking novel, Leib Goldkorn emerges as one of American literature's most enduring, and endearing, creations. A New York Times Notable Book; a Los Angeles Times Best Book of the Year.