A New York Memoir

A New York Memoir PDF Author: Richard Goodman
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 1412814928
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 143

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Book Description
A New York Memoir is about a life lived in New York City over a period of thirty years. The memoir begins in 1975, with author Richard Goodman's arrival in New York, an intimidated newcomer. It follows him through the years as he encounters some of the remarkable people one meets in New York, while harkening back to the inspiration the city provides, especially for artists and young writers. The memoir follows the author as he witnesses tragedies and then ruminates on growing old in New York. It tells of the joys and the difficulties of living in this remarkable city. A New York Memoir is, essentially, a long love letter to the city. Like all great loves, this volume reflects passion, promise, hope, pain, regret and, ultimately, the author's pride. This includes true stories of love, work, marriage, raising a child, becoming a writer, death, and friendship. Most of the stories in this effort take place there; those that do not are highly influenced by New York. The author has seen New York at its best and at its worst, when was it rich and freewheeling and when it fell on hard times and almost collapsed. He's seen it grievously wounded, and seen it pick itself back up again with the help of the entire world and with its own limitless moxie. This is a very personal story set against the backdrop of a massive city of unmatchable energy and of sheer, brute authority and inspiration. The book ends with a long remembrance of the author's mother who came to New York after many travails and was rescued by the city. This is the story of Richard Goodman's encounter with New York. ** See Richard Goodman read an excerpt from A New York Memoir entitled, "Elegy for an English Bike," here.

A New York Memoir

A New York Memoir PDF Author: Richard Goodman
Publisher: Transaction Publishers
ISBN: 1412814928
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 143

Get Book Here

Book Description
A New York Memoir is about a life lived in New York City over a period of thirty years. The memoir begins in 1975, with author Richard Goodman's arrival in New York, an intimidated newcomer. It follows him through the years as he encounters some of the remarkable people one meets in New York, while harkening back to the inspiration the city provides, especially for artists and young writers. The memoir follows the author as he witnesses tragedies and then ruminates on growing old in New York. It tells of the joys and the difficulties of living in this remarkable city. A New York Memoir is, essentially, a long love letter to the city. Like all great loves, this volume reflects passion, promise, hope, pain, regret and, ultimately, the author's pride. This includes true stories of love, work, marriage, raising a child, becoming a writer, death, and friendship. Most of the stories in this effort take place there; those that do not are highly influenced by New York. The author has seen New York at its best and at its worst, when was it rich and freewheeling and when it fell on hard times and almost collapsed. He's seen it grievously wounded, and seen it pick itself back up again with the help of the entire world and with its own limitless moxie. This is a very personal story set against the backdrop of a massive city of unmatchable energy and of sheer, brute authority and inspiration. The book ends with a long remembrance of the author's mother who came to New York after many travails and was rescued by the city. This is the story of Richard Goodman's encounter with New York. ** See Richard Goodman read an excerpt from A New York Memoir entitled, "Elegy for an English Bike," here.

A Voice from Old New York

A Voice from Old New York PDF Author: Louis Auchincloss
Publisher: Houghton Mifflin
ISBN: 9780547341538
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 203

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Book Description
A posthumously published self-assessment by the former president of the Academy of Arts and Letters includes coverage of such topics as his father's depression and the dynamics of life inside and outside of his society circles. By the author of The Rector of Justin.

Apropos of Nothing

Apropos of Nothing PDF Author: Woody Allen
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1951627377
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 319

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Book Description
The Long-Awaited, Enormously Entertaining Memoir by One of the Great Artists of Our Time—Now a New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, and Publisher’s Weekly Bestseller. In this candid and often hilarious memoir, the celebrated director, comedian, writer, and actor offers a comprehensive, personal look at his tumultuous life. Beginning with his Brooklyn childhood and his stint as a writer for the Sid Caesar variety show in the early days of television, working alongside comedy greats, Allen tells of his difficult early days doing standup before he achieved recognition and success. With his unique storytelling pizzazz, he recounts his departure into moviemaking, with such slapstick comedies as Take the Money and Run, and revisits his entire, sixty-year-long, and enormously productive career as a writer and director, from his classics Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Annie and Her Sisters to his most recent films, including Midnight in Paris. Along the way, he discusses his marriages, his romances and famous friendships, his jazz playing, and his books and plays. We learn about his demons, his mistakes, his successes, and those he loved, worked with, and learned from in equal measure. This is a hugely entertaining, deeply honest, rich and brilliant self-portrait of a celebrated artist who is ranked among the greatest filmmakers of our time.

Poseur

Poseur PDF Author: Marc Spitz
Publisher: Da Capo Press
ISBN: 0306821753
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
Marc Spitz assumed that if he lived like his literary and rock 'n' roll heroes, he would become a great artist, too. He conveniently overlooked the fact that many of them died young, broke, and miserable. In his candid, wistful, touching, and hilarious memoir, Poseur, the music journalist, playwright, author, and blogger recounts his misspent years as a suburban kid searching for authenticity, dangerous fun, and druggy, downtown glory: first during New York's last era of risk and edge, the pre-gentrification '90s, and finally as a flamboyant and notorious rock writer, partying and posing during the music industry's heady, decadent last gasp. Part profane, confidential tell-all and part sweetly frank coming-of-age tale, this dirty, witty memoir finds Spitz careening through the scene, meeting and sometimes clashing with cultural icons like Courtney Love, Jeff Buckley, Rivers Cuomo of Weezer, Chloëevigny, Kim Deal, The Dandy Warhols, Guns N' Roses, Ryan Adams, Paul Rudd, Coldplay, Pavement, Peter Dinklage, Julie Bowen, The Strokes, Trent Reznor, Chuck Klosterman, Interpol, and Franz Ferdinand, as well as meeting heroes like Allen Ginsberg, Shirley Clarke, Joe Strummer, and Morrissey. Along the way he finds literary guru Gordon Lish is a long-lost relative, and erstwhile pal and sensation JT LeRoy is an even bigger poseur. Spitz refuses to give up the romantic ghost until a post-9/11 breakdown and an improbable new love (fellow music writer Lizzy Goodman) finally help him strike the hardest pose of all: his true self. /DIV

The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance

The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance PDF Author: Elna Baker
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101148772
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 239

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Book Description
"A wickedly funny debut. Baker is both self-absorbed and generous, whip-smart and naïve; she apologizes for none of it."—People It's lonely being a Mormon in New York City. Every year, Elna Baker attends the New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance. This year, her Queen Bee costume (which involves a funnel stinger stuck to her butt) isn't attracting the attention she'd anticipated. So once again, Elna finds herself alone, standing at the punch bowl, stocking up on Oreos, a virgin in a room full of thirty-year-old virgins doing the Funky Chicken. But loneliness is nothing compared to what Elna feels when she loses eighty pounds, finds herself suddenly beautiful... and in love with an atheist. Brazenly honest, The New York Regional Mormon Singles Halloween Dance is Elna Baker's hilarious and heartfelt chronicle of her attempt to find love in a city full of strangers and see if she can steer clear of temptation and just get by on God.

In the Key of New York City

In the Key of New York City PDF Author: Rebecca McClanahan
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781597098502
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
Against the advice of family and friends, a middle-aged couple leaves their home and jobs in North Carolina to pursue a long-held desire: to live in New York City. As they struggle to find work and forge friendships in a city of strangers, Rebecca decides to take her mother's advice to "make a home wherever you land." She finds it in surprising ways: in overheard conversations on park benches and subway stations, in songs and cries sifted through apartment walls, in the oil-spilled rainbow colors of the pigeons who mate on the window air conditioner, and in encounters with street people dispensing unexpected wisdom. The 9/11 attacks and a serious cancer surgery turn her attention inward: to memories of marital affairs and separation, the deaths of mentors and friends, and to the books and poems that have always sustained her. Inner and outer landscapes merge, her life touching the lives of the now-familiar strangers. Alternating between brief vignettes and sustained narratives, Rebecca McClanahan tracks the heartbeat of New York, finding in each face she meets the cumulative loss, joy, and stubborn resilience of a city that has claimed her for its own.

Difficult Women

Difficult Women PDF Author: David Plante
Publisher: New York Review of Books
ISBN: 1681371502
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 209

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Book Description
David Plante's dazzling portraits of three influential women in the literary world, now back in print for the first time in decades. Difficult Women presents portraits of three extraordinary, complicated, and, yes, difficult women, while also raising intriguing and, in their own way, difficult questions about the character and motivations of the keenly and often cruelly observant portraitist himself. The book begins with David Plante’s portrait of Jean Rhys in her old age, when the publication of The Wide Sargasso Sea, after years of silence that had made Rhys’s great novels of the 1920s and ’30s as good as unknown, had at last gained genuine recognition for her. Rhys, however, can hardly be said to be enjoying her new fame. A terminal alcoholic, she curses and staggers and rants like King Lear on the heath in the hotel room that she has made her home, while Plante looks impassively on. Sonia Orwell is his second subject, a suave exploiter and hapless victim of her beauty and social prowess, while the unflappable, brilliant, and impossibly opinionated Germaine Greer sails through the final pages, ever ready to set the world, and any erring companion, right.

Runaway Waltz

Runaway Waltz PDF Author: Frederic Morton
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1439104646
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 236

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Book Description
One of the most revered essayists and novelists of his generation, Frederic Morton has captured with matchless immediacy the glamour of Vienna before World War I and the storied opulence of the Rothschild family in his bestselling and award-winning works. Now, in his first book in more than fifteen years, he delivers a luminous look at his own unique pursuit of the American dream. Like many Austrian boys in 1936, the author idolizes Fritz Austerlitz, the Austrian American who went to Hollywood and emerged as Fred Astaire. When his family is forced to flee Vienna, Fritz Mandelbaum becomes Fred Morton and immigrates to New York City. Though he does not learn English until he is sixteen years old, Morton nonetheless goes on to succeed as a writer. The author sets out ten scenes from his pilgrim life and his remarkable road to success: from watching a poorly dubbed Astaire in Vienna to delivering apricot tarts as a baker's assistant in New York; from Salt Lake City where as a young English instructor he met Vladimir Nabokov to a Christmas spent with the Rothschilds at Château Mouton. Runaway Waltz is a soulful, beautifully written portrait of one man's extraordinary quest for fulfillment and enduring transformation.

Blow Your House Down

Blow Your House Down PDF Author: Gina Frangello
Publisher: Catapult
ISBN: 1640093176
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 336

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Book Description
A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A Good Morning America Recommended Book • A LitReactor Best Book of the Year • A BuzzFeed Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Lit Hub Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Rumpus Most Anticipated Book of the Year • A Bustle Most Anticipated Book of the Month "A pathbreaking feminist manifesto, impossible to put down or dismiss. Gina Frangello tells the morally complex story of her adulterous relationship with a lover and her shortcomings as a mother, and in doing so, highlights the forces that shaped, silenced, and shamed her: everyday misogyny, puritanical expectations regarding female sexuality and maternal sacrifice, and male oppression." —Adrienne Brodeur, author of Wild Game Gina Frangello spent her early adulthood trying to outrun a youth marked by poverty and violence. Now a long-married wife and devoted mother, the better life she carefully built is emotionally upended by the death of her closest friend. Soon, awakened to fault lines in her troubled marriage, Frangello is caught up in a recklessly passionate affair, leading a double life while continuing to project the image of the perfect family. When her secrets are finally uncovered, both her home and her identity will implode, testing the limits of desire, responsibility, love, and forgiveness. Blow Your House Down is a powerful testimony about the ways our culture seeks to cage women in traditional narratives of self-sacrifice and erasure. Frangello uses her personal story to examine the place of women in contemporary society: the violence they experience, the rage they suppress, the ways their bodies often reveal what they cannot say aloud, and finally, what it means to transgress "being good" in order to reclaim your own life.

Primates of Park Avenue

Primates of Park Avenue PDF Author: Wednesday Martin
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1476762716
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 272

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Book Description
"Like an urban Dian Fossey, Wednesday Martin decodes the primate social behaviors of Upper East Side mothers in a brilliantly original and witty memoir about her adventures assimilating into that most secretive and elite tribe. After marrying a man from the Upper East Side and moving to the neighborhood, Wednesday Martin struggled to fit in. Drawing on her background in anthropology and primatology, she tried looking at her new world through that lens, and suddenly things fell into place. She understood the other mothers' snobbiness at school drop-off when she compared them to olive baboons. Her obsessional quest for a Hermes Birkin handbag made sense when she realized other females wielded them to establish dominance in their troop. And so she analyzed tribal migration patterns; display rituals; physical adornment, mutilation, and mating practices; extra-pair copulation; and more. Her conclusions are smart, thought-provoking, and hilariously unexpected. Every city has its Upper East Side, and in Wednesday's memoir, readers everywhere will recognize the strange cultural codes of powerful social hierarchies and the compelling desire to climb them. They will also see that Upper East Side mothers want the same things for their children that all mothers want--safety, happiness, and success--and not even sky-high penthouses and chauffeured SUVs can protect this ecologically released tribe from the universal experiences of anxiety and loss. When Wednesday's life turns upside down, she learns how deep the bonds of female friendship really are. Intelligent, funny, and heartfelt, Primates of Park Avenue lifts a veil on a secret, elite world within a world--the exotic, fascinating, and strangely familiar culture of privileged Manhattan motherhood"--