Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors

Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors PDF Author: Franz Kafka
Publisher: Schocken
ISBN: 0804150788
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 528

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Book Description
"These magnificent letters, meticulously set up and annotated, show us aspects of Kafka that were only hinted at in earlier collections and help us trace his development from unhappy young law student and insurance administrator to novelist and short-story writer of originality and genius." --Publishers Weekly "When we turn from Kafka's books to his letters we have a series of self-portraits desperate and courageous, always eager and warm in feeling; the self is lit by fantasy and, of course, by drollery. His candor is of the kind that flies alongside him in the air. He was a marvelous letter writer." --V.S. Pritchett, The New York Review of Books "These letters are like messages from the underground, from the dark side of the moon, presenting aspects of Kafka that would have died with his friends. We meet alternately Kafka the artist, friend, son, father figure, marriage counselor, literary critic, insurance official. . . . A full portrait, and a significant contribution to Kafka scholarship." --Smithsonian Magazine "An inside view of a writer who, perhaps more than any other novelist or poet in our century, stands at the center of our culture." --Robert Alter, The New York Times Book Review

Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors

Letters to Friends, Family, and Editors PDF Author: Franz Kafka
Publisher: Schocken
ISBN: 0804150788
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 528

Get Book

Book Description
"These magnificent letters, meticulously set up and annotated, show us aspects of Kafka that were only hinted at in earlier collections and help us trace his development from unhappy young law student and insurance administrator to novelist and short-story writer of originality and genius." --Publishers Weekly "When we turn from Kafka's books to his letters we have a series of self-portraits desperate and courageous, always eager and warm in feeling; the self is lit by fantasy and, of course, by drollery. His candor is of the kind that flies alongside him in the air. He was a marvelous letter writer." --V.S. Pritchett, The New York Review of Books "These letters are like messages from the underground, from the dark side of the moon, presenting aspects of Kafka that would have died with his friends. We meet alternately Kafka the artist, friend, son, father figure, marriage counselor, literary critic, insurance official. . . . A full portrait, and a significant contribution to Kafka scholarship." --Smithsonian Magazine "An inside view of a writer who, perhaps more than any other novelist or poet in our century, stands at the center of our culture." --Robert Alter, The New York Times Book Review

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka PDF Author: Franz Kafka
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691222606
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 424

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Book Description
Franz Kafka: The Office Writings brings together, for the first time in English, Kafka's most interesting professional writings, composed during his years as a high-ranking lawyer with the largest Workmen's Accident Insurance Institute in the Czech Lands of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. Franz Kafka (1883-1924) is commonly recognized as the greatest German prose writer of the twentieth century. It is less well known that he had an established legal career. Kafka's briefs reveal him to be a canny bureaucrat, sharp litigator, and innovative thinker on the social, political, and legal issues of his time. His official preoccupations inspired many of the themes and strategies of the novels and stories he wrote at night. These documents include articles on workmen's compensation and workplace safety; appeals for the founding of a psychiatric hospital for shell-shocked veterans; and letters arguing relentlessly for a salary adequate to his merit. In adjudicating disputes, promoting legislative programs, and investigating workplace sites, Kafka's writings teem with details about the bureaucracy and technology of his day, such as spa elevators in Marienbad, the challenge of the automobile, and the perils of excavating in quarries while drunk. Beautifully translated, with valuable commentary by two of the world's leading Kafka scholars and one of America's most eminent civil rights lawyers, the documents cast rich light on the man and the writer and offer new insights to lovers of Kafka's novels and stories.

Kurt Vonnegut

Kurt Vonnegut PDF Author: Kurt Vonnegut
Publisher: Delacorte Press
ISBN: 0345535391
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 464

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Book Description
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY Newsweek/The Daily Beast • The Huffington Post • Kansas City Star • Time Out New York • Kirkus Reviews This extraordinary collection of personal correspondence has all the hallmarks of Kurt Vonnegut’s fiction. Written over a sixty-year period, these letters, the vast majority of them never before published, are funny, moving, and full of the same uncanny wisdom that has endeared his work to readers worldwide. Included in this comprehensive volume: the letter a twenty-two-year-old Vonnegut wrote home immediately upon being freed from a German POW camp, recounting the ghastly firebombing of Dresden that would be the subject of his masterpiece Slaughterhouse-Five; wry dispatches from Vonnegut’s years as a struggling writer slowly finding an audience and then dealing with sudden international fame in middle age; righteously angry letters of protest to local school boards that tried to ban his work; intimate remembrances penned to high school classmates, fellow veterans, friends, and family; and letters of commiseration and encouragement to such contemporaries as Gail Godwin, Günter Grass, and Bernard Malamud. Vonnegut’s unmediated observations on science, art, and commerce prove to be just as inventive as any found in his novels—from a crackpot scheme for manufacturing “atomic” bow ties to a tongue-in-cheek proposal that publishers be allowed to trade authors like baseball players. (“Knopf, for example, might give John Updike’s contract to Simon and Schuster, and receive Joan Didion’s contract in return.”) Taken together, these letters add considerable depth to our understanding of this one-of-a-kind literary icon, in both his public and private lives. Each letter brims with the mordant humor and openhearted humanism upon which he built his legend. And virtually every page contains a quotable nugget that will make its way into the permanent Vonnegut lexicon. • On a job he had as a young man: “Hell is running an elevator throughout eternity in a building with only six floors.” • To a relative who calls him a “great literary figure”: “I am an American fad—of a slightly higher order than the hula hoop.” • To his daughter Nanny: “Most letters from a parent contain a parent’s own lost dreams disguised as good advice.” • To Norman Mailer: “I am cuter than you are.” Sometimes biting and ironical, sometimes achingly sweet, and always alive with the unique point of view that made him the true cultural heir to Mark Twain, these letters comprise the autobiography Kurt Vonnegut never wrote. Praise for Kurt Vonnegut: Letters “Splendidly assembled . . . familiar, funny, cranky . . . chronicling [Vonnegut’s] life in real time.”—Kurt Andersen, The New York Times Book Review “[This collection is] by turns hilarious, heartbreaking and mundane. . . . Vonnegut himself is a near-perfect example of the same flawed, wonderful humanity that he loved and despaired over his entire life.”—NPR “Congenial, whimsical and often insightful missives . . . one of [Vonnegut’s] very best.”—Newsday “These letters display all the hallmarks of Vonnegut’s fiction—smart, hilarious and heartbreaking.”—The New York Times Book Review

Letters from Tove

Letters from Tove PDF Author: Tove Jansson
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 1452963827
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 639

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Book Description
A virtual memoir in letters by the beloved creator of the Moomins Tove Jansson’s works, even her famed Moomin books, fairly teem with letters of one kind or another, from messages bobbing in bottles to whole epistolary novels. Fortunately for her countless readers, her life was no different, unfolding as it did in the letters to family, friends, and lovers that make up this volume, a veritable autobiography over the course of six decades—and the only one Jansson ever wrote. And just as letters carry a weight of significance in Jansson’s writing, those she wrote throughout her life reflect the gravity of her circumstances, the depth of her thoughts and feelings, and the critical moments of humor, sadness, and grace that mark an artist’s days. These letters, penned with characteristic insight and wit, provide an almost seamless commentary on Jansson’s life within Helsinki’s bohemian circles and on her island home. Shifting between hope and despair, yearning and happiness, they describe her immersion in art studies and her ascension to fame with the Moomins. They speak frankly of friendship and love, loneliness and solidarity, and also of politics, art, literature, and society. They summon a particular place and time reflected through a mind finely attuned to her culture, her world, and her own nature—all clearly put into biographical and historical context by the volume’s editors, both longtime friends of Tove Jansson—and, in the end, draw a complex, intimate self-portrait of one of the world’s most beloved authors.

Letters For My Brothers: 4th Ed.

Letters For My Brothers: 4th Ed. PDF Author: Megan Rohrer
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1312461144
Category : Female-to-male transsexuals
Languages : en
Pages : 162

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Book Description
In today's fast paced world, the internet can provide quick answers to personal questions. But when an individual raised by society to live, breathe and look at the world with female eyes transitions to male, some of the most enlightening, helpful and profound advice can only come in retrospect. Letter to my Brothers, features essays from respected transmen mentors who share the wisdom they wish they would have known at the beginning of their journey into manhood.

The Legacy Letters

The Legacy Letters PDF Author: Tuesday's Children
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101543302
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
Ten years after the tragic events of September 11, 2001, the family members of one hundred of the individuals lost on that terrible day look back-and forward-in this inspiring collection of letters. Filled with love, resilience, humor, wonder, and encouragement, the letters offer a unique perspective on the events of the unforgettable day that forever changed our world. The authors of these letters are adolescents, teens, young adults, spouses, parents, siblings, nieces, and grandparents. They are first- generation Americans, citizens of other nations, and lifelong New Yorkers. But they all share one thing: They honor their loved ones by living their lives with purpose, and a promise to never forget. These courageous family members share their grief and loss-and hope- speaking in their own words, with love, courage, and strength enough to inspire us all.

Franz Kafka

Franz Kafka PDF Author: Sander L. Gilman
Publisher: Reaktion Books
ISBN: 9781861892546
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 164

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Book Description
"This short and readable critical biography emphasizes the relationship between Franz Kafka's life and works as read through his culture and his understanding of his own 'body'. Kafka's writings, letters and diaries provide a window into his ongoing attempt to create an identity for himself in a world where being a Central European Jew dictated an uneasy fate. Sander L. Gilman stresses the image and role of the Jew in Kafka's world of the 'modern' and how Kafka responded to these attitudes, actions and stereotypes." "Gilman also looks at the impact of psychoanalysis on Kafka and his works. The book contains much material that elucidates how Kafka reshaped such experiences of the world in his literary texts. It examines the creation of the 'Kafka-myth' after his death, presenting material emerging from the subsequent eighty years, including work by such illustrious minds as Walter Benjamin and Ted Hughes."--BOOK JACKET.

Letters from Cuba

Letters from Cuba PDF Author: Ruth Behar
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 0525516492
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
Pura Belpré Award Winner Ruth Behar's inspiring story of a Jewish girl who escapes Poland to make a new life in Cuba, where she works to rescue the rest of her family The situation is getting dire for Jews in Poland on the eve of World War II. Esther's father has fled to Cuba, and she is the first one to join him. It's heartbreaking to be separated from her beloved sister, so Esther promises to write down everything that happens until they're reunited. And she does, recording both the good--the kindness of the Cuban people and her discovery of a valuable hidden talent--and the bad: the fact that Nazism has found a foothold even in Cuba. Esther's evocative letters are full of her appreciation for life and reveal a resourceful, determined girl with a rare ability to bring people together, all the while striving to get the rest of their family out of Poland before it's too late. Based on Ruth Behar's family history, this compelling story celebrates the resilience of the human spirit in the most challenging times.

The Summer of Letting Go

The Summer of Letting Go PDF Author: Gae Polisner
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1616204400
Category : Juvenile Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321

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Book Description
Just when everything seems to be going wrong, hope—and love—can appear in the most unexpected places. Summer has begun, the beach beckons—and Francesca Schnell is going nowhere. Four years ago, Francesca’s little brother, Simon, drowned, and Francesca’s the one who should have been watching. Now Francesca is about to turn sixteen, but guilt keeps her stuck in the past. Meanwhile, her best friend, Lisette, is moving on—most recently with the boy Francesca wants but can’t have. At loose ends, Francesca trails her father, who may be having an affair, to the local country club. There she meets four-year-old Frankie Sky, a little boy who bears an almost eerie resemblance to Simon, and Francesca begins to wonder if it’s possible Frankie could be his reincarnation. Knowing Frankie leads Francesca to places she thought she’d never dare to go—and it begins to seem possible to forgive herself, grow up, and even fall in love, whether or not she solves the riddle of Frankie Sky.

As Always, Julia

As Always, Julia PDF Author: Joan Reardon
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
ISBN: 0547504837
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 432

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Book Description
With her outsize personality, Julia Child is known around the world by her first name alone. But despite that familiarity, how much do we really know of the inner Julia? Now more than 200 letters exchanged between Julia and Avis DeVoto, her friend and unofficial literary agent memorably introduced in the hit movie Julie & Julia, open the window on Julia’s deepest thoughts and feelings. This riveting correspondence, in print for the first time, chronicles the blossoming of a unique and lifelong friendship between the two women and the turbulent process of Julia’s creation of Mastering the Art of French Cooking, one of the most influential cookbooks ever written. Frank, bawdy, funny, exuberant, and occasionally agonized, these letters show Julia, first as a new bride in Paris, then becoming increasingly worldly and adventuresome as she follows her diplomat husband in his postings to Nice, Germany, and Norway. With commentary by the noted food historian Joan Reardon, and covering topics as diverse as the lack of good wine in the United States, McCarthyism, and sexual mores, these astonishing letters show America on the verge of political, social, and gastronomic transformation.