The author of The Group , the groundbreaking bestseller and 1964 National Book Award finalist that shaped a generation of women, brings reminiscences of her girlhood to this intimate and illuminating memoir How I Grew is Mary McCarthy's intensely personal autobiography of her life from age thirteen to twenty-one. Orphaned at six, McCarthy was raised by her maternal grandparents in Seattle, Washington. Although her official birthdate is in 1912, it wasn't until she turned thirteen that, in McCarthy's own words, she was "born as a mind." With detail driven by an almost astonishing memory recall, McCarthy gives us a masterful account of these formative years. From her wild adolescence--including losing her virginity at fourteen--through her eventual escape to Vassar, the bestselling novelist, essayist, and critic chronicles her relationships with family, friends, lovers, and the teachers who would influence her writing career. Filled with McCarthy's penetrating insights and trenchant wit, this is an unblinkingly honest and fearless self-portrait of a young woman coming of age--and the perfect companion to McCarthy's Memories of a Catholic Girlhood .

"When Ernest Hemingway died on July 2, 1961, Mary Hemingway asked the Hemingway's good friend, journalist Leonard Lyons, to announce the death of the Nobel Prize-winner to stunned readers and admirer everywhere. Both Hemingways admired Lyons for his fidelity to the truth, that "he would get the story right." (As it turns out the "truth" was not quite what it seemed, since Mary initially denied that her husband's death was suicide.) This memoir recounts the quarter-century long friendship between Hemingway and Leonard Lyons, which eventually came to include Lyons's wife and three sons. In this short book Jeffrey Lyons recounts visits to Hemingway in Cuba (where "Papa" first taught him how to shoot a gun) as well as nights out with the great writer at such popular New York watering holes as the Stork Club and Toots Shor's. Throughout the book Hemingway comes across as a hard-working, generous, and thoughtful man of letters, and not the gruff, hard drinking beast perpetually looking for a fight that he was often perceived as. This is a book about friendship, loyalty, and trust between a famed novelist and a working journalist and his family"--

The greatest living writer of espionage fiction (Houston Chronicle) returns with his most suspenseful and stylish novel yet, in which an international news correspondent's secret life leads him to become a target for assassination.

"Until someone tells you, you never know in whose dreams you appear..." - From the prologue of To Catch the Lightning What is the price of our dreams? Beginning in the late 1890s, Edward Sheriff Curtis undertook the seemingly overwhelming odyssey of capturing the past, of documenting and photographing the fading way of life of the American Indian. In To Catch the Lightning , Alan Cheuse has created a remarkable portrait of the man who would become a legend. Drawn on his epic journey by a series of female muses, Curtis turns his lens on a landscape of unparalleled beauty and tradition. Curtis@ desire to complete his destiny as foretold by Chief Joseph, to photograph all of the hundreds of western American Indian tribes, is a haunting tale of the struggle between ambition and duty. The architect of the finest lasting visual record of a culture close to extinction, Curtis stands as a testament to the power of the sacrifices we make for the dreams that compel us. With the ear of a poet and the eye of a historian, Cheuse has crafted a masterwork of American historical fiction. Lyrical, beautifully written, and impressively researched, To Catch the Lightning is a novel of the American spirit. PRAISE FOR TO CATCH THE LIGHTNING: "To Catch the Lightning is a story of loss - of choices made and prices paid, of the future coming fast and the past disappearing faster. Cheuse@s narrative is refracted through multiple voices, each distinct, but each containing its own poetic precision. A wonderful, wonderful book of quiet power and great beauty." - Karen Joy Fowler, author of Wit@s End and The Jane Austen Book Club "To Catch the Lightning tells Curtis@ story vividly and eloquently. It is a great American story, about a life spent preserving and honoring those elements of life which are most respected and beloved. Alan Cheuse is to be congratulated for this vivid novel." - William Kittredge, author of The Willow Field and The Next Rodeo "Bravo to Cheuse for this incarnation of a major and unfairly forgotten American artist, capturing an era so crucial in native American, and therefore American history. I found it immediate and innovative." - Diane Johnson, author of Le Divorce and Lulu in Marrakech "The photography and cinema of Edward Curtis exist at the intersection of art, history, anthropology, and technology. He was an essentially American kind of genius, and Alan Cheuse has transformed his life into compelling fiction that digs deep into the mystery and sacrifice and selfishness of creative vision." - Charles Frazier, author of Cold Mountain and Thirteen Moons "... the narrative brims with keen insight." - Publishers Weekly "Curtis devoted his life to creating the most significant and comprehensive retrospective of American Indian culture, which he viewed as @one of the great races of mankind.@ Curtis correctly predicted that the culture was near extinction ... and much of his work remains the only recorded history of a civilization even then becoming the stuff of legend." - ForeWord Magazine Catch Alan Cheuse in your town: Key West, FL: January - Key West Lit

A contemporary Frankenstein that defies expectations, this is a thrilling novel, couched in luminous, captivitating prose, about a journalist, Cédric Allyn-Weberson, who suffers a horrific accident, paralyzing him from the neck down. An ideal candidate for a body transplant, Cédric survives the surgery but has both physical and existential trouble with his recovery and adaptation: encountering his lover with a new body, discovering the life history of his donor, and attempting to understand the mind-body relationship as he lives it.

Poppy, newly recruited cub reporter at the Downingham Post, is determined to prove to the editor that he's wrong in his belief that 'Women are a nuisance in the office'. He certainly doesn't think she's a nuisance when it's time for the tea round - a job which never fails to fall to the only female reporter. What Poppy lacks in experience, she makes up for in spirit and ambition. She'll make the Downingham Post the best regional newspaper there is - even if she occasionally gets the names wrong in court hearings. Life, for a single professional woman in the post-war years, certainly has its challenges - from finding a room, when the tyrannical landlady doesn't consider Poppy to be quite respectable, to changing her editor's deeply entrenched ways. This semi-autobiographical novel, recounted with Monica Dickens's wit, warmth and wry observation, will charm all who read it.

In the course of the same old race I find myself writing about knowing some people--how fame seems to set some people apart from us, once known: I was astonished by Ernest Hemingway's small, weak handshake when we were introduced at Scribners by John Hall Wheelock and by the jolt of force with which Elie Wiesel squeezed my hand. How long ago seems knowing, too: when I first meet Isaac Singer he asks me, "Who is Mr. Saul Bellow?" We're on the Upper West Side in his apartment next to the funeral parlor. A yellow parakeet hops around on Singer's bald forehead. Singer's great comic story of faith, "Gimpel the Fool," has only recently been published from Yiddish into English in a translation by Saul Bellow. They're both still a long way from Stockholm. "Do you know him? Can you tell me who this Mr. Bellow is?" he asks. It was not always possible to guess Singer's motives in acting as though he was not impressed with worldly reputations. His features of a medieval Polish saint, even to a faint white-haired tonsure effect around the crown of his skull, were backlit by the glowing monitor from his mischievous incubus.--from the Preface These are Richard Elman's candid snapshots in prose of the various, mostly literary celebrities he encountered during his four decades as a working writer and journalist--among them Isaac Bashevis Singer, Tillie Olsen, Bernard Malamud, Faye Dunaway, Hunter S. Thompson, and other important artists and writers who were Elman's teachers and, occasionally, adversaries. Engagingly written and never superficial, these portraits and anecdotes in many cases strike to the center of each subject's art. To many readers, these persons are just "names"; Elman brings them to life while never simplifying or overdramatizing their work.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. One of Library Journal 's Best Books of 2020. One of our most beloved writers reassess the electrifying works of literature that have shaped her life I sometimes think I was born reading . . . I can’t remember the time when I didn’t have a book in my hands, my head lost to the world around me. Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader is Vivian Gornick’s celebration of passionate reading, of returning again and again to the books that have shaped her at crucial points in her life. In nine essays that traverse literary criticism, memoir, and biography, one of our most celebrated critics writes about the importance of reading—and re-reading—as life progresses. Gornick finds herself in contradictory characters within D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers , assesses womanhood in Colette’s The Vagabond and The Shackle , and considers the veracity of memory in Marguerite Duras’s The Lover . She revisits Great War novels by J. L. Carr and Pat Barker, uncovers the psychological complexity of Elizabeth Bowen’s prose, and soaks in Natalia Ginzburg, “a writer whose work has often made me love life more.” After adopting two cats, whose erratic behavior she finds vexing, she discovers Doris Lessing’s Particularly Cats . Guided by Gornick’s trademark verve and insight, Unfinished Business is a masterful appreciation of literature’s power to illuminate our lives from a peerless writer and thinker who “still read[s] to feel the power of Life with a capital L.”

This novel holds within its pages an unusual love story that spans three decades and three continents. When Max first meets Esther, she is a young Australian girl filled with passion for life and boundless enthusiasm. His love for her continues through all the changes that take place in her life - her move from London, where they meet, to Jerusalem where she explores the Judaism that until then was just on the fringe of her life; the literary prize she wins that brings her back into his orbit; her commitment to Israel that breaks their relationship; and then finally, a coincidental meeting in the middle of a war in Lebanon. Max never stops loving Esther, even as she matures from a naive girl to a woman of depth and wisdom. Love takes many forms, and readers will experience all the complexities of emotion as they discover the ties that bind a man to a woman.

When Cosmo Landesman's American parents decided to move their young family to London in the swinging sixties, it was not to pursue a quieter life on this side of the pond. Quite the reverse: it was out of unbridled, unashamed lust for fame and fortune. But things did not go according to plan, and as a child Cosmo found himself charged with raising his starstruck parents and trying to cope with the publicity stunt of their 'open marriage'. Over the years he wrote press releases, blurbs and proposals for their plays, film treatments, novels, book ideas and demo tapes. He found himself playing the roll of creative midwife, personal manager, publicist, psychoanalyst and apologist. Not any more. In this hilarious memoir he finally lays bare his extraordinary childhood and the twists and turns of his parents' bizarre desire for the spotlight - and how they were always doomed to failure.