Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen

Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen PDF Author: Larry McMurtry
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 143912759X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 212

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Book Description
In a lucid, brilliant work of nonfiction, Larry McMurtry has written a family portrait that also serves as a larger portrait of Texas itself, as it was and as it has become. Using an essay by the German literary critic Walter Benjamin that he first read in Archer City's Dairy Queen, McMurtry examines the small town way of life that big oil and big ranching have nearly destroyed. He praises the virtues of everything from a lime Dr. Pepper to the lost art of oral storytelling, and describes the brutal effect of the sheer vastness and emptiness of the Texas landscape on Texans, the decline of the cowboy, and the reality and the myth of the frontier.​ McMurtry writes frankly and with deep feeling about his own experiences as a writer, a parent, and a heart patient, and he deftly lays bare the raw material that helped shape his life's work: the creation of a vast, ambitious, fictional panorama of Texas in the past and the present. Throughout, McMurtry leaves his readers with constant reminders of his all-encompassing, boundless love of literature and books.

Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen

Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen PDF Author: Larry McMurtry
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 143912759X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 212

Get Book Here

Book Description
In a lucid, brilliant work of nonfiction, Larry McMurtry has written a family portrait that also serves as a larger portrait of Texas itself, as it was and as it has become. Using an essay by the German literary critic Walter Benjamin that he first read in Archer City's Dairy Queen, McMurtry examines the small town way of life that big oil and big ranching have nearly destroyed. He praises the virtues of everything from a lime Dr. Pepper to the lost art of oral storytelling, and describes the brutal effect of the sheer vastness and emptiness of the Texas landscape on Texans, the decline of the cowboy, and the reality and the myth of the frontier.​ McMurtry writes frankly and with deep feeling about his own experiences as a writer, a parent, and a heart patient, and he deftly lays bare the raw material that helped shape his life's work: the creation of a vast, ambitious, fictional panorama of Texas in the past and the present. Throughout, McMurtry leaves his readers with constant reminders of his all-encompassing, boundless love of literature and books.

The Texanist

The Texanist PDF Author: David Courtney
Publisher: University of Texas Press
ISBN: 1477312978
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 120

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Book Description
A collection of Courtney's columns from the Texas Monthly, curing the curious, exorcizing bedevilment, and orienting the disoriented, advising "on such things as: Is it wrong to wear your football team's jersey to church? When out at a dancehall, do you need to stick with the one that brung ya? Is it real Tex-Mex if it's served with a side of black beans? Can one have too many Texas-themed tattoos?"--Amazon.com.

Dairy Queens

Dairy Queens PDF Author: Meredith Martin
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674059476
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
In a lively narrative that spans more than two centuries, Meredith Martin tells the story of a royal and aristocratic building type that has been largely forgotten today: the pleasure dairy of early modern France. These garden structures—most famously the faux-rustic, white marble dairy built for Marie-Antoinette’s Hameau at Versailles—have long been dismissed as the trifling follies of a reckless elite. Martin challenges such assumptions and reveals the pivotal role that pleasure dairies played in cultural and political life, especially with respect to polarizing debates about nobility, femininity, and domesticity. Together with other forms of pastoral architecture such as model farms and hermitages, pleasure dairies were crucial arenas for elite women to exercise and experiment with identity and power. Opening with Catherine de’ Medici’s lavish dairy at Fontainebleau (c. 1560), Martin’s book explores how French queens and noblewomen used pleasure dairies to naturalize their status, display their cultivated tastes, and proclaim their virtue as nurturing mothers and capable estate managers. Pleasure dairies also provided women with a site to promote good health, by spending time in salubrious gardens and consuming fresh milk. Illustrated with a dazzling array of images and photographs, Dairy Queens sheds new light on architecture, self, and society in the ancien régime.

Sacagawea's Nickname

Sacagawea's Nickname PDF Author: Larry McMurtry
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 9781590170991
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 196

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Book Description
In these 11 essays, all originally published in "The New York Review of Books," McMurtry brings his unique narrative gift and dry humor to a variety of western topics.

Horseman, Pass By

Horseman, Pass By PDF Author: Larry McMurtry
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451606575
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 197

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Book Description
From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Lonesome Dove comes the novel that became the basis for the film Hud, starring Paul Newman. In classic Western style Larry McMurtry illustrates the timeless conflict between the modernity and the Old West through the eyes of Texas cattlemen. Horseman, Pass By tells the story of Homer Bannon, an old-time cattleman who epitomizes the frontier values of honesty and decency, and Hud, his unscrupulous stepson. Caught in the middle is the narrator, Homer's young grandson Lonnie, who is as much drawn to his grandfather’s strength of character as he is to Hud's hedonism and materialism. When first published in 1961, Horseman, Pass By caused a sensation in Texas literary circles for its stark, realistic portrayal of the struggles of a changing West in the years following World War II. Never before had a writer managed to encapsulate its environment with such unsentimental realism. Today, memorable characters, powerful themes, and illuminating detail make Horseman, Pass By vintage McMurtry.

Roads

Roads PDF Author: Larry McMurtry
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439129010
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 220

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Book Description
As he crisscrosses America—driving in search of the present, the past, and himself—Larry McMurtry shares his fascination with this nation's great trails and the culture that has developed around them. Ever since he was a boy growing up in Texas only a mile from Highway 281, Larry McMurtry has felt the pull of the road. His town was thoroughly landlocked, making the highway his "river, its hidden reaches a mystery and an enticement. I began my life beside it and I want to drift down the entire length of it before I end this book." In Roads, McMurtry embarks on a cross-country trip where his route is also his destination. As he drives, McMurtry reminisces about the places he's seen, the people he's met, and the books he's read, including more than 3,000 books about travel. He explains why watching episodes of The Mary Tyler Moore Show might be the best way to find joie de vivre in Minnesota; the scenic differences between Route 35 and I-801; which vigilantes lived in Montana and which hailed from Idaho; and the histories of Lewis and Clark, Sitting Bull, and Custer that still haunt Route 2 today. As it makes its way from South Florida to North Dakota, from eastern Long Island to Oregon, Roads is travel writing at its best.

The Last Kind Words Saloon: A Novel

The Last Kind Words Saloon: A Novel PDF Author: Larry McMurtry
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0871407876
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 141

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Book Description
New York Times Bestseller Named one of the Best Books of the Year by the Seattle Times The Last Kind Words Saloon marks the triumphant return of Larry McMurtry to the nineteenth-century West of his classic Lonesome Dove. In this "comically subversive work of fiction" (Joyce Carol Oates, New York Review of Books), Larry McMurtry chronicles the closing of the American frontier through the travails of two of its most immortal figures, Wyatt Earp and Doc Holliday. Tracing their legendary friendship from the settlement of Long Grass, Texas, to Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show in Denver, and finally to Tombstone, Arizona, The Last Kind Words Saloon finds Wyatt and Doc living out the last days of a cowboy lifestyle that is already passing into history. In his stark and peerless prose McMurtry writes of the myths and men that live on even as the storied West that forged them disappears. Hailed by critics and embraced by readers, The Last Kind Words Saloon celebrates the genius of one of our most original American writers.

Piece of My Mind

Piece of My Mind PDF Author: Edmund Wilson
Publisher: Macmillan
ISBN: 0374526710
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description
From the author of To the Finland Station comes a deeply personal and incisive memoir, A Piece of My Mind. Edmund Wilson, often considered to be the greatest American literary critic of the twentieth century, reflects back on life in his sixth decade with this insightful intellectual autobiography that covers topics ranging from Religion, War, the USA, Europe, Russia, Jews, Education, Science, Sex, and much more, all examined with his characteristic wit and intelligence.

The Evening Star

The Evening Star PDF Author: Larry McMurtry
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1451607725
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 644

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Book Description
The earthy humor and the powerful emotional impact that set McMurtry's Terms of Endearment apart from other novels now rise to brilliant new heights with The Evening Star. McMurtry takes us deep into the heart of Texas, and deep into the heart of one of the most memorable characters of our time, Aurora Greenway—along with her family, friends, and lovers—in a tale of affectionate wit, bittersweet tenderness, and the unexpected turns that life can take. This is Larry McMurtry at his very best: warm, compassionate, full of comic invention, an author so attuned to the feelings, needs, and desires of his characters that they possess a reality unique in American fiction.

In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas

In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas PDF Author: Larry McMurtry
Publisher: Liveright Publishing
ISBN: 163149354X
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 204

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Book Description
This landmark collection, brimming with his signature wit and incomparable sensibility, is Larry McMurtry’s classic tribute to his home and his people. Before embarking on what would become one of the most prominent writing careers in American literature, spanning decades and indelibly shaping the nation’s perception of the West, Larry McMurtry knew what it meant to come from Texas. Originally published in 1968, In a Narrow Grave is the Pulitzer Prize–winning author’s homage to the past and present of the Lone Star State, where he grew up a precociously observant hand on his father’s ranch. From literature to rodeos, small-town folk to big city intellectuals, McMurtry explores all the singular elements that define his land and community, revealing the surprising and particular challenges in the “dying . . . rural, pastoral way of life.” “The gold standard for understanding Houston’s brash rootlessness and civic insecurities” (Douglas Brinkley, New York Times Book Review), In a Narrow Grave offers a timeless portrait of the vividly human, complex, full-blooded Texan.