Truth Comes in Blows is distinguished editor and critic Ted Solotaroff's richly textured account of a coming-of-age at once quintessentially American and especially vexed. Planted between him and his entry into adulthood, autonomy, and the wider world was Ben Solotaroff - as hard a father to placate, comprehend, and, finally, defy as can be found in the annals of the American memoir. Tough, shrewd, seductive, and impossibly overbearing, Ben Solotaroff was a self-made man carried to the edge - "almost all ego and almost no conscience." Against this formidable scion of the fierce Solotaroff clan stood Ted's mother, Rose, product of the cultivated Weisses of Cream Ridge, New Jersey, and Manhattan's Upper West Side.

Ramses was the best dog in the world, the cleverest, friendliest, most expres-sive, understanding, amusing dog that ever was, and it was only a happy coincidence that he happened to be ours.

At the end of the millennium, the leading British industry magazine, The Bookseller, selected the ten people who had most influenced its century. Tom Maschler—described as "the most important publisher in Britain; the most innovative, adventurous, and newsworthy"—was one of them. It went on to say that for nearly 20 years, "he made publishing glamorous." Over the course of his career, Maschler launched the careers of Thomas Pynchon, Joseph Heller, Gabriel García Márquez, Julian Barnes, Ian McEwan, Martin Amis, and Bruce Chatwin, among others. From the party where Norman Mailer stabbed his wife to the porch where Ernest Hemingway shot himself, this frank and fascinating memoir affords a rare glimpse into the golden days of British publishing. An extraordinary literary memoir by one great publishers of the 20th century.

For the Earth to move to the next vibration, says Richard Grossinger, consciousness must change in profound ways, and these involve core elements of humanity: evil, grief, bliss, and compassion. 2013 locates these elements in often unlikely places and seeks their nature and capacity for change. With playfulness and precision, 2013 tackles the questions of creation and existence in their twenty-first-century incarnation. In these intellectual field notes, the author's absorbing style combines memoir with scientific deconstruction, metaphysical ontology, and experimental prose that recalls the Black Mountain school to draw transcendental insight from the ephemeral space-time we call daily life. Moving with equal ease between matters cosmic and earthly, Grossinger details existence as an exhilarating adventure always pushing us toward a higher state in this wide-ranging, humorous, and heartfelt book. Including an informal course in psychic development, 2013 sheds light on the ephemera of planets and iPods, politics and Zen, Buddy Holly and road trips in its study of the elements of psychic development that could transform humankind and the Earth.

"And so, in her seventies, she sat down to recreate the world of her childhood, a world structured around strong parental authority and deep religious commitment. When it first appeared in 1908, her memoir received rave reviews for its sensitive and faithful depiction of the Jewish world of the nineteenth century. A second volume devoted to her years of married life quickly followed." "Now available for the first time in English translation, Wengeroff's memoir is the earliest record of Eastern European Jewish life written by a woman. Pauline spreads out before us the richness of Judaism and Jewish folk life, the joy and pain of marriage and motherhood, and the personal losses that she, as a Jewish woman, had suffered at the hands of great historical forces."--BOOK JACKET.

Finding Words explores the subtle beauty and stark challenges of family, the complexities of adult friendships, the struggle to center a life on what is meaningful and nourishing, and the holiness to be found in ordinary moments. Moving and accessible, Finding Words is a great gift for friends and family. In addition to being one of those cherished "night table books," it is ideal as a book club selection and also provides thoughtful content for a unique and powerful adult education program. Acclaimed poet and award-winning playwright, Feld is author of the beloved memoir, A Spiritual Life (SUNY Press, revised 2007); her poetry has been featured in numerous anthologies and in several new groundbreaking prayer books. As educator and scholar-in-residence, she has helped clergy and communities across North America use poetry as a powerful means of spiritual expression and has pioneered the field of writing as a spiritual practice.

Leaving Russia: A Jewish Story is a memoir of coming-of-age and struggling to leave the USSR. Shrayer chronicles the triumphs and humiliations of a Soviet childhood and expresses the dreams and fears of a Jewish family that never gave up its hopes for a better life. Narrated in the tradition of Tolstoy’s confessional trilogy and Nabokov’s autobiography, this is a searing account of the KGB’s persecution of refuseniks, a poet’s rebellion against totalitarian culture, and Soviet fantasies of the West during the Cold War. Shrayer’s remembrances are set against a rich backdrop of politics, travel, and ethnic conflict on the brink of the Soviet empire’s collapse. His story offers generous doses of humor and tenderness, counterbalanced with longing and violence. Leaving Russia is a love story in which a young Jew’s love is unrequited and his heart is forever broken by his homeland.

Published here for the very first time through our House Sparrow Press imprint, Through the Billboard Promised Land Without Ever Stopping is Derek Jarman's only piece of narrative fiction. Written in 1971, it is a surreal, fabular, lyrical work - a literary fairytale acid-trip road movie hybrid - the energies and details of which influenced much of his later work across media. The richly poetic story, a cinematic prose quest, tracks the journey of a blind young King and his valet, disguised as beggars, who set out in no particular direction and with no particular purpose. Departing from Fargo, across the frontier of Movietown, along the Superhighway and picnicking on the Lawns of Paradise, they encounter vivid characters like Pierrot, Borgia Ginz and Topaz, an Emperor who 'smiles with the art of mirrors', as well as a Sphinx with 'Silence is Golden' written in her eyes. The story serves as a foundational text, laying out many of the themes, images and styling of Jarman's work in painting, film and design whilst also being haunted by the then emerging ecological crisis in its juxtaposition of the beauty of nature with the reckless consumption of modernity. This edition features facsimile images of the story's handwritten drafts from Jarman's archive, a link to an exclusive audio recording of Jarman himself reading the story in full, and is comprehensively informed by a vivid foreword from Philip Hoare, a deeply researched afterword by Jarman scholar Declan Wiffen, and a warm memoir by the artist Michael Ginsborg, a close friend of Jarman's throughout the period of the story's writing

Capturing a behind-the-scenes glimpse into the world of science fiction, this unique autobiography by Robert Silverberg shows how famous stories in this genre were conceived and written. Chronicling his career as one of the most important American science fiction writers of the 20th century, this account reveals how he rose to prominence as the pulp era was ending--and the genre was beginning to take on a more sophisticated tone--to eventually be named a Grand Master by the Science Fiction Writers of America. Stating that this will be his only autobiographical work, Silverberg's book includes rare photos, ephemera from his own archives, and a complete bibliography of his works, from novels and short story collections to nonfiction.

This scarce antiquarian book is a facsimile reprint of the original. Due to its age, it may contain imperfections such as marks, notations, marginalia and flawed pages. Because we believe this work is culturally important, we have made it available as part of our commitment for protecting, preserving, and promoting the world's literature in affordable, high quality, modern editions that are true to the original work.

This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important, and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the "public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.

Rabbi Jacob Agus' (1911-1986) intellectual production spanned nearly a half century and covered an enormous historical and conceptual range, from the biblical to the modern era. Best known as an important Jewish scholar, he also held important rabbinic, teaching, and public positions. Although born and raised within an orthodox setting, Agus was strongly influenced by American liberalism and his work displayed modernizing sympathies, reservations about nationalism--including some forms of Zionism--and often severe criticisms of kabbalah. Agus crafted a unique, quite American, modernizing vision that ardently sought to remain in touch with the wellsprings of the rabbinic tradition while remaining open to the intellectual and moral currents of his own time.The Essential Agus brings together a sampling of Agus' most important published and unpublished material in one easily accessible volume. It will be an invaluable resource for students and researchers seeking to experience Agus' intellectual legacy.

"A contentious, deeply moving ode to friendship, love, and urban life in the spirit of Fierce Attachments A memoir of self-discovery and the dilemma of connection in our time, The Odd Woman and the City explores the rhythms, chance encounters, and ever-changing friendships of urban life that forge the sensibility of a fiercely independent woman who has lived out her conflicts, not her fantasies, in a city (New York) that has done the same. Running steadily through the book is Vivian Gornick's exchange of more than twenty years with Leonard, a gay man who is sophisticated about his own unhappiness, whose friendship has "shed more light on the mysterious nature of ordinary human relations than has any other intimacy" she has known. The exchange between Gornick and Leonard acts as a Greek chorus to the main action of the narrator's continual engagement on the street with grocers, derelicts, and doormen; people on the bus, cross-dressers on the corner, and acquaintances by the handful. In Leonard she sees herself reflected plain; out on the street she makes sense of what she sees. Written as a narrative collage that includes meditative pieces on the making of a modern feminist, the role of the flaneur in urban literature, and the evolution of friendship over the past two centuries, The Odd Woman and the City beautifully bookends Gornick's acclaimed Fierce Attachments, in which we first encountered her rich relationship with the ultimate metropolis"--

Traveling Heavy is a deeply moving, unconventional memoir by the master storyteller and cultural anthropologist Ruth Behar. Through evocative stories, she portrays her life as an immigrant child and later, as an adult woman who loves to travel but is terrified of boarding a plane. With an open heart, she writes about her Yiddish-Sephardic-Cuban-American family, as well as the strangers who show her kindness as she makes her way through the world. Compassionate, curious, and unafraid to reveal her failings, Behar embraces the unexpected insights and adventures of travel, whether those be learning that she longed to become a mother after being accused of giving the evil eye to a baby in rural Mexico, or going on a zany pilgrimage to the Behar World Summit in the Spanish town of Béjar. Behar calls herself an anthropologist who specializes in homesickness. Repeatedly returning to her homeland of Cuba, unwilling to utter her last goodbye, she is obsessed by the question of why we leave home to find home. For those of us who travel heavy with our own baggage, Behar is an indispensable guide, full of grace and hope, in the perpetual search for connection that defines our humanity.

The evidence at hand: an autobiography—complete with their mother’s edits—written by his brilliant and disturbingly religious sister; a story featuring actual childhood events, but published by his mother as fiction; the transcript of a hypnotherapy session from his adolescence; and perjured court documents hidden in a drawer for decades. These are the clues Robin Hemley gathers when he sets out to reconstruct the life of his older sister Nola, who died at the age of twenty-five after several years of treatment for schizophrenia. Armed with these types of clues, Hemley quickly discovers that finding the truth in any life—even one’s own—is a fragmented and complex task. Nola: A Memoir of Faith, Art, and Madness is much more than a remembrance of a young woman who was consumed her entire life by a passion for finding and understanding God; it is also a quest to understand what people choose to reveal and conceal, and an examination of the enormous toll mental illness takes on a family. Finally, it is a revelation of the alchemy that creates a writer: confidence in the unknowable, distrust of the proven, tortuous devotion to the fine print in life, and sacrifice to writing itself as it plays the roles of confessor, scourge, and creator. Upon its first release in 1998, Nola won ForeWord ’s Book of the Year Award for biography/memoir, the Washington State Book Award for biography/memoir, and the Independent Press Book Award for autobiography/memoir.

"From Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Maxine Kumin, a timeless memoir of life, love, and poetry. Maxine Kumin left an unrivaled legacy as a pioneering poet and feminist. The Pawnbroker's Daughter charts her journey from a childhood in the Jewish community in Depression-era Philadelphia, where Kumin's father was a pawnbroker, to Radcliffe College, where she comes into her own as an intellectual and meets the soldier-turned-Los Alamos scientist who would become her husband; to her metamorphosis from a poet of "light verse" to a "poet of witness"; to her farm in rural New England, the subject and setting of much of her later work. Against all odds, Kumin channels her dissatisfaction with the life that is expected of her as a wife and a mother into her work as a feminist and one of the most renowned and remembered twentieth-century American poets" --

Sonia Landau was born in 1914. During the German occupation in 1941 she was displaced together with her family to the Warsaw Ghetto where she endured two tormented years. She eventually escaped the Ghetto and became active in the Resistance movement, later assuming the name Krystyna Zywulska. In 1943 she was arrested and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Zywulska wrote “Empty Water” twenty years after completing her first memoir “I Survived Auschwitz”. Aware that people still did not understand much of what had taken place in the Ghetto and Resistance, she decided to voice her experience once again, revealing the crime, contempt and shame she encountered. She penned one of the most distinctly balanced accounts of the time—describing good and bad, purity and depravity in Germans, Poles and Jews. She also demonstrated how, under horrible conditions, the definition of good and bad becomes relative. Each day, trying to maintain the pretence of normality despite inhuman conditions, Sonia’s mother put a pot on the stove, although she had no food to cook. She boiled just plain water and served it to her family, enough to cheat their hunger and repel and deceive the ubiquitous fear. Zywulska’s experiences during those two years in the Ghetto can enlighten us all. Her account tells of her daring escape from the Ghetto and brave participation in the Polish Resistance. Empty Water takes place during the horror of Hitler’s crematoria but provides layers of nuances that make it difficult to fall into the trap of easy judgments of good and evil. Zywulska emerges from her experiences convinced that human life is the greatest treasure of all. This book is testament to her belief.

Don't Tell Sybil is a libidinous memoir by a master raconteur. George Melly (1926-2007) was impossible to ignore in London cultural circles between the 1950s and 90s. He first came to attention as a jazz singer, notable for risqué songs performed with verve rather than with great technical ability. An arresting personality, Melly dressed the part: his outrageous suits became a mark, and his talents as a raconteur soon brought him fame as a TV talkshow guest (usually late-night shows, for reasons of propriety). His cheerful bisexuality, recounted throughout his three volumes of autobiography, scandalized and then delighted a public whose own sexual attitudes changed over the decades they describe. Don't Tell Sybil is a supplementary volume of autobiography which treats in more detail Melly's youthful and long-lasting attraction to Surrealism, and his equally lengthy friendship with the contradictory character who headed up the English Surrealist group, E.L.T. Mesens. Their adventures form the core of this book--adventures of which Mesens did not want his wife, Sybil, to learn, hence the book's title. Mesens was a perfect subject, an artist and prankster who could be as punctilious and stingy as the most respectable bourgeois. Anecdotes of the artists who showed at Mesens' gallery, such as Schwitters and Magritte, pepper the narrative, a hugely affectionate memoir by a character who was truly larger than life. This new edition is augmented with previously unpublished photographs relating to Melly and English Surrealism.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS: A Cultural Memoir and Other Essays is a collection of previously unpublished writing by National Post columnist Barbara Kay. This wide-ranging selection includes original essays - notably the title essay, a mini-memoir of the cultural and intellectual influences that shaped Kay's worldview - as well as a discursive ramble through the bizarre subculture of the pit bull advocacy movement. In between, readers familiar with Kay's weekly columns over the last ten years will find elaborated commentaries on her niche subjects: the negative impact of feminism on our public institutions and families, the erosion of academic integrity in the universities and our politically correct "rights" culture's sub-version of social and civic reciprocity in Canadian communities.