New York, ville où se mêlent ambition, plaisir et légèreté selon Fitzgerald, un labyrinthe où la folie et le rêve se côtoient dans l'univers de Miller, un monde de jeunesse et de dynamisme pour Charyn - trois écrivains américains offrent leur vision très personnelle de cette ville au magnétisme irrésistible.
…a sometimes witty, sometimes instructive, sometimes despairing, always passionate rave—Sailing With Purpose is a one of a kind book. An ideal sort of book to present any man struggling with the meaning of life, whether young or old, this book describes the life of man, its purpose, and its end in a manner like no other. An ideal book for any father to give any son, or any son to give any father—whether they sail or not—Sailing with Purpose is the sort of book that may very well, in spite of itself, change a man's life…
This complete and up-to-date synopsis of the assassination of JFK (the actors, witnesses and investigators) weighs the different theories and looks at the drama as both a detective story and a defining moment in American mass psychology.
A New York native looks back on his Lower East Side youth in a trilogy from the New York Times–bestselling author and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright. After making a splash with his first novel, I Can Get It for You Wholesale—published in 1937 and praised by the likes of Hemingway and Fitzgerald—Jerome Weidman had a long and prolific career as a fiction writer and playwright. In the 1970s he published three wise, funny, and nostalgic novels about the Lower East Side roots of a colorful character named Benny Kramer. For the first time, the trilogy is available in a single volume, with a foreword by Alistair Cooke. Fourth Street East: When Benny Kramer’s father came to the United States, he was hungry, broke, and ignorant. Handed a banana and told it was “American food,” he scarfed it down, peel and all. By the time he died, he was no richer, but much wiser, and everything he learned he imparted to his son. Growing up on New York’s Lower East Side between the wars, Benny’s life was just as chaotic as his neighborhood. How many young boys have seen a man decapitated by a horse? How many know blacksmiths who got tangled up in a multiple homicide? How many win an elocution contest, only to find out it was rigged by the mob? For Benny, these are everyday events, remembered with biting wit and fond affection. “This is all much more than noodle soup nostalgia—there’s humor, and stamina, and if middle age has rubbed off here and there, it has also lent a certain wisdom.” —Kirkus Reviews Last Respects: For most of his life, Benny Kramer’s mother was an inescapable presence in his life. But on the day of her death, her body disappears on its way from hospital to morgue. While scouring New York in search of her body, Benny remembers the first adventure his mother sent him on, fifty years before. At the height of Prohibition, his mother gives him a simple task: deliver eighteen bottles of bootlegged hooch to a wedding. Along the way, the would-be rumrunner encounters sinister slumlords, a sadistic rabbi, and enough slapstick obstacles to give the Marx Brothers fits. Reliving each moment as he searches for his mother, Benny comes to understand that this is just another day in the life of a boy desperate to find his mother’s love. “The last respects are paid with comic tumult and an acute compassion. Weidman at the apex.” —Kirkus Reviews Tiffany Street: Though his trip from New York to Philadelphia is for business, Benny Kramer has also planned a rendezvous—not with a mistress, but with one of the city’s finest doctors. Kramer plans to enlist him in a noble purpose: keeping his son out of Vietnam. The doctor won’t provide this service to just anyone, but he and Benny have a mutual friend in the incomparable Sebastian Roon. Benny and Seb have been friends since the Depression, when they shared countless adventures across New York’s Lower East Side. Now Benny’s counting on that friendship to ensure the same life of endless possibilities for his son. “Highly readable.” —Chicago Tribune
Sea-steading goes directly to the core of why some people sail, and why some people would choose to make the sea their home. Filled with theoretical inquiry as well as practical tips.
Ce roman constitue le premier volet d'une trilogie policière remarquable par son ton vif, alerte, retentissant et amusant, grâce aux personnages bien campés et au rebondissement des situations souvent cocasses.
A definitive look at the symbiotic relationship between Vonnegut's writing and American culture. Kurt Vonnegut's death in 2007 marked the passing of a major force in American life and letters. Jerome Klinkowitz, one of the earliest and most prolific authorities on Vonnegut, examines the long dialogue between the author and American culture—a conversation that produced fourteen novels and hundreds of short stories and essays. Kurt Vonnegut's America integrates discussion of the fiction, essays, and lectures with personal exchanges and biographical sketches to map the complex symbiotic relationship between Vonnegut's work and the cultural context from which it emerged—and which it in turn helped shape. Following an introduction characterizing Vonnegut as Klinkowitz came to know him over the course of their friendship, this study charts the impact of Vonnegut on American society and of that society on Vonnegut for more than a half-century to illustrate how each informed the other. Among his artistic peers, Vonnegut was uniquely gifted at anticipating and articulating the changing course of American culture. Kurt Vonnegut's America shows us that Vonnegut achieved greatness by passing his own test—opening the eyes of his audience to help them better understand their roles and possibilities in the common culture they both shared and crafted.
Meet one of the most unscrupulous businessmen in American literature—from a New York Times–bestselling novelist and Pulitzer Prize–winning playwright. Set in Manhattan’s garment district, Jerome Weidman’s debut novel, I Can Get It for You Wholesale, was a scathing satire of capitalist greed as personified by the shameless scoundrel Harry Bogen, who “became an archetypal figure in American literature: the abrasive young man who would do anything to get ahead” (The New York Times). Weidman’s prose was praised by no less than F. Scott Fitzgerald, who called the book “[a] break-through into completely new and fresh literary terrain; a turning point in the American novel,” and Ernest Hemingway, who enthused: “I think [Weidman] can write just a little better than anybody else that’s around.” The book was a sensation and spawned an “equally hard-driving” sequel, What’s in It for Me?, as well as a movie version and a musical starring Elliott Gould as Harry and featuring Barbra Streisand’s Broadway debut (The New York Times). As relevant today as when they were first published in the 1930s, both novels are now available in a single volume, featuring a foreword by Alistair Cooke. I Can Get It for You Wholesale: The stage for this savagely comic novel is Manhattan’s cutthroat garment district, where six thousand manufacturers of dresses are crammed into a few blocks. Their factories are cramped, noisy, and incredibly profitable—and Harry Bogen is going to take them for all they’re worth. A classic conniver, he knows that it’s easier, and a hell of a lot more fun, to turn a buck by lying than by telling the truth. First he convinces the shipping clerks—the pack animals of the garment industry—to go on strike. With the dress manufacturers brought to their knees, Harry will be there to pick them up again. His conscience might be conflicted, if he had one in the first place. “A slick job of writing, as hard-boiled as a twelve-minute egg.” —The New York Times What’s in It for Me?: In this sharp-witted sequel, Harry Bogen is again up to his old tricks. After Harry built his empire and became king of the garment district, he blew it up, leaving his partners in jail and securing the whole of the fortune for himself. It takes only three months for Harry to find that retirement does not suit him. His latest scheme starts with an order for one thousand dresses, bought at cut-rate price from a vendor who can’t afford not to sell. From there, Harry raises the stakes, juggling deals and spinning stories as fast as he possibly can. Will he secure himself fortune everlasting, or will this Napoleon meet his Waterloo?
When Theodore Dreiser first published Sister Carrie in 1900 it was suppressed for its seamy plot, colloquial language, and immorality—for, as one reviewer put it, its depiction of "the godless side of American life." It was a side of life experienced firsthand by Dreiser, whose own circumstances often paralleled those of his characters in the turbulent, turn-of-the-century era of immigrants, black lynchings, ruthless industrialists, violent labor movements, and the New Woman. This masterful critical biography, the first on Dreiser in more than half a century, is the only study to fully weave Dreiser's literary achievement into the context of his life. Jerome Loving gives us a Dreiser for a new generation in a brilliant evocation of a writer who boldly swept away Victorian timidity to open the twentieth century in American literature. Dreiser was a controversial figure in his time, not only because of his literary efforts, which included publication of the brutal and heartbreaking An American Tragedy in 1925, but also because of his personal life, which featured numerous sexual liaisons, included membership in the communist party, merited a 180-page FBI file, and ended in Hollywood. The Last Titan paints a full portrait of the mature Dreiser between the two world wars—through the roaring twenties, the stock market crash, and the Depression—and describes his contact with important figures from Emma Goldman and H.L. Mencken to two presidents Roosevelt. Tracing Dreiser's literary roots in Hawthorne, Emerson, Thoreau, and especially Whitman, Loving has written what will surely become the standard biography of one of America's best novelists.
Aldous Huxley began as a poet. He perfected the voice of the modern satirical poet of ideas, who used art against itself to produce a parodic poetry of breakdowns, collapses, stalemates, and dead ends best suited to the apparent pointlessness of the post-war era. His cleverest, most irreverent poems are contrapuntal: they, in effect, silence venerable poets and cancel traditional formats. Huxley's poetic personas either fail to preserve conventional forms or purposely sabotage them. By 1920, Huxley became the parodic equivalent of the formative intelligences (i.e., Dante, Goethe, and Lucretius) who once synthesized their respective eras positively. In this book, author Jerome Meckier explicates most of Huxley's poems, including Leda, his masterpiece, an ironical modern myth. Meckier traces Huxley's development in terms of the poets he inserted in five of his eleven novels, along with their poems. These poets mostly fail as poets, their different stances falling apart one after another. But Huxley began to detect a spiritual significance underlying the creative urge. This allowed him to rehabilitate many of the Romantic and Victorian poets he formerly ridiculed as frauds and liars. Eventually, he celebrated mystical contemplation as silent poetry, positing a utopia in which everyone is a poet to the limits of his or her potentiality. Huxley became the perennial philosopher, a neo-Brahmin: the sage-like figure he initially personified parodically. His paradigmatic career took him from a Pyrrhonic silencing of outmoded poems and poets to the advocacy of a poetry of silence. (Series: "Human Potentialities". Studien zu Aldous Huxley & zeitgenossischer Kultur/Studies in Aldous Huxley & Contemporary Culture - Vol. 11)
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