Please read this piece by award-winning novelist Jesmyn Ward. Source: Jesmyn Ward on Her Husband’s Death and Grief During COVID-19 | Vanity Fair
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CANDID PORTRAITS OR GHOSTWRITTEN FLUFF: THE HISTORY OF THE CELEBRITY BOOK Jeffrey Davies looks at the history of the celebrity book, whether it be “a memoir, an essay collection, a cookbook, a book of poetry, or a self-help book.” He discusses the rise of the ghostwriter, what happens when celebrity culture and science clash (for
Yesterday I came across the article Readers’ Regrets: The Books We Wish We Read in 2019. It prompted me to take a look at my own shelves for the books I regret not having read in 2019. Here are 10 of them, listed in no particular order. (Links that describe the book are to either
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Here are some of the articles that got me thinking over the past week. On Impact Stephen King experienced (celebrated doesn’t seem like the appropriate word) an anniversary last week: 20 years since the automobile accident that nearly killed him. He wrote this article for The New Yorker a year after the accident. The Weird,
Kalish, Mildred Armstrong. Little Heathens: Hard Times and High Spirits on an Iowa Farm During the Great Depression Bantam Books, 2007 Some time around 1930, when the author was “little more than five years old” (p. 6), she, her mother, her baby sister, and her two brothers went to live with her mother’s parents in
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Hood, Ann. Comfort: A Journey Through GriefNew York: Norton, 2008ISBN 978-0-393-06456-8 Highly Recommended When Ann Hood’s five-year-old daughter Grace died suddenly in 2002 from a virulent form of strep, everyone tried to comfort Ann with platitudes like “She’s in a better place” or “Time heals.” But Hood did not find these cliches comforting. And everyone
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Introductory Notes Natalie Goldberg grew up on Long Island, New York. She studied Buddhism with a teacher in Minnesota for 17 years. At about the same time that she began her Zen studies she also began writing and painting, and those three activities have coalesced into an active philosophy of living creatively. Natalie Goldberg has
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Gilbert, Elizabeth. Eat, Pray, LoveNew York: Viking, 2006ISBN 978-07394-7418-1 Penguin Audiobooks, narrated by Elizabeth Gilbert Recommended After a very messy divorce, writer Elizabeth Gilbert found herself in a deep depression. With her publisher’s advance for the book she would write in her bank account, she set off on a year’s trip around the world in search
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Didion, Joan. The Year of Magical ThinkingNew York: Knopf, 2005ISBN 1-4000-4314-X HighBridge Audio, narrated by Barbara Caruso Highly Recommended On the evening of December 30, 2003, Joan Didion’s husband of 40 years, John Gregory Dunne, sat down to dinner in their apartment in New York City. Didion and Dunne had just come home from visiting their
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Patchett, Ann. Truth and Beauty: A FriendshipNew York: HarperCollins, 2004ISBN 0-06-057214-0 Harper Audio, narrated by Ann Patchett Ann Patchett and Lucy Grealy both attended college at Sarah Lawrence at the same time, although they were not friends there. Ann tells us that at Sarah Lawrence everyone–students and faculty–knew Lucy as a tremendously talented poet. Everyone also knew
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