The multitalented writers, directors, producers, and actors (as seen on The League, Transparent, and The Mindy Project) share the secrets of their lifelong partnership in this unique memoir. “A book that anyone will love . . . You can enjoy it even if you have no idea who the Duplass brothers are.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times Whether producing, writing, directing, or acting, the Duplass Brothers have made their mark in the world of independent film and television on the strength of their quirky and empathetic approach to storytelling. Now, for the first time, Mark and Jay take readers on a tour of their lifelong partnership in this unique memoir told in essays that share the secrets of their success, the joys and frustrations of intimate collaboration, and the lessons they’ve learned the hard way. From a childhood spent wielding an oversized home video camera in the suburbs of New Orleans to their shared years at the University of Texas in early-nineties Austin, and from the breakthrough short they made on a three-dollar budget to the night their feature film Baghead became the center of a Sundance bidding war, Mark and Jay tell the story of a bond that’s resilient, affectionate, mutually empowering, and only mildly dysfunctional. They are brutally honest about how their closeness sabotaged their youthful romantic relationships, about the jealousy each felt when the other stole the spotlight as an actor (Mark in The League, Jay in Transparent), and about the challenges they faced on the set of their HBO series Togetherness—namely, too much togetherness. But Like Brothers is also a surprisingly practical road map to a rewarding creative partnership. Rather than split all their responsibilities fifty-fifty, the brothers learned to capitalize on each other’s strengths. They’re not afraid to call each other out, because they’re also not afraid to compromise. Most relationships aren’t—and frankly shouldn’t be—as intense as Mark and Jay’s, but their brand of trust, validation, and healthy disagreement has taken them far. Part coming-of-age memoir, part underdog story, and part insider account of succeeding in Hollywood on their own terms, Like Brothers is as openhearted and lovably offbeat as Mark and Jay themselves. “Wright. Ringling. Jonas. I’m sure you could name a bunch of famous brother teams. They’re all garbage compared to Mark and Jay. I can’t wait for you to read this book.”—from the foreword by Mindy Kaling
Longlisted for the 2014 National Book Award Gathered here is a half century’s magnificent work by the former poet laureate of the United States and Pulitzer Prize winner whose haunting and exemplary style has influenced an entire generation of American poets. Beginning with the limited-edition volume Sleeping with One Eye Open, published in 1964, Mark Strand was hailed as a poet of piercing originality and elegance, and in the ensuing decades he has not swerved from his vision of how a poem should be shaped and what it should deliver. As he entered the middle period of his career, with volumes such as The Continuous Life (1990), Strand was already well-known for his ability to capture the subtle music of consciousness, and for creating painterly physical landscapes that could answer to the inner self: “And here the dark infinitive to feel, / Which would endure and have the earth be still / And the star-strewn night pour down the mountains / Into the hissing fields and silent towns.” In his later work, from Blizzard of One (1998) which won the Pulitzer Prize, through the sly, provocative riddles of his recent Almost Invisible (2012), Strand has delighted in reminding us that there is no poet quite like him for a dose of dark wit that turns out to be deep wisdom and self-deprecation. He has given voice to our collective imagination with a grandeur and comic honesty worthy of his great Knopf forebear Wallace Stevens. With this volume, we celebrate his canonical work.
Quick. Cheerful. With fire and spirit. This is Salute! Mark is a storyteller. A storyteller extraordinaire. His wit, wisdom and experiences transport each of us to different times, places, passages and moments in life with an amazing, rich imagination. We’ve been with him at Dee’s Hamburger Stand in a far less politically correct era. We’ve been with him in his living room as he scaled sofas, end table and recliners in a single bound. We’ve spent many a Sunday dinner with him in the Marine family’s dining room. And, he gave us a front-row seat for the moment that changed his life: the day he first cast eyes on Paula. His storytelling is seamless. It’s art. But most importantly, it’s Mark. Unbridled. Unvarnished. And, all served to us with a wink, a smile, a laugh, a lesson and a tinge of the devil-may-care.
DAYS OF GRACE tells the story of Ian Johns, a bleary and depressed thirty-one-year-old "professional student," who, in the throes of an early-life crisis brought on by his mother's untimely death from cancer, quits law school after surviving the rigors of its proverbially arduous first year to become an itinerant without a plan. With a voice and sensibility that can be likened to Lethem, Sedaris, Coupland and Kerouac, the book is unabashedly picaresque and Neo-Beat, written in a roman a clef and journalistic style which has been described as "modified stream-of-consciousness." It is at times dark and bittersweet but is relentlessly tinged with bright-sharp edges of humor. As we go forward with Ian on his travels and go back into the near-past to sit at his mother's deathbed in his childhood home, viewing the world through his admittedly cracked prism, we come away having learned something universal about ourselves, Y2K America and maybe even mortality itself.
I Hear Voices Provides a collection of insights and observations that span the human event horizon. Life, death and every dimension of experience and behavior in-between is chronicled in both a light-hearted and profound voice.
In this collection, Mark Todd explores the interaction of man and nature with respect and an obvious delight. Whether it's the grit and unrestrained passion of men laying the railroad or the hope-turne-to-despair of young love, Todd's narrative collection is a panoramic view of humanity in all its forms. It's watchful journeyed roads/ that can draw in our thoughts, / naked honestly fixed/ on what each bend brings, each/ lurch in the grade ahead./ Roads worth the traveling.
In the follow-up to his debut book, Chutin' the Bull, Mark George returns with a new collection of short pieces which some say strain the definition of humor. "Why do you keep putting out this drivel?" asked one critic. Is snoring legitimate as grounds for divorce? What if the offending party is a super-model? What do you mean her looks don't matter? What will Batman do when Gotham enacts strict gun-control measures? How do teacher and parents work together to stop their teenage son who self-identifies as a ninja warrior, internet-trained and fully armed? For answers to these penetrating questions join Mark George in his noble quest to understand human and animal behavior, tilting at windmills as only he can.
You are about to discover that living in the suburbs is a whole lot funnier than you ever thought possible. For this country’s 145,892,494 (give or take) suburbanites, Mark Falanga is an utterly deadpan (and thoroughly entertaining) spokesman. Mark Falanga is a slick urban dweller, at the top of his game professionally, with a gorgeous corporate executive wife and a hip coterie in the coolest neighborhood in the city. But when baby makes three, Mark and his family enter the twilight zone called the suburbs, where public schools are good, many wives stay home, and children ride their tricycles in the driveway. Nothing is the same ever again. With the dry wit of David Sedaris, and Dave Barry’s love of the absurd, Falanga details his new, suburban landscape from the point of view of a bewildered but gung-ho everyman. From the complex political pecking order in the neighborhood, with its ultracompetitive block parties and its consuming holiday-card rivalry, to the surprises lurking on every corner—such as the twelve-year-old pyromaniac next door and the suspiciously broad-shouldered “lady” on the commuter train—The Suburban You describes in slyly understated prose the vicissitudes of life in the ’burbs.
Now several years post-divorce, relationship expert and humorist Mark Miller has experienced more than five hundred first dates. In 500 Dates, composed of fifty-five humor essays, Miller features the highlights and lowlights of those dates. Among the true dating tales and revelations you will find in this book are: • How Miller and his date learned the limitations of a man being too emotionally expressive. (“Most guys consider revealing more about themselves emotionally and communicating on a deeper level nearly as enjoyable as falling face-first onto an ice pick—or spending the rest of eternity listening to Celine Dion music.") • Miller’s realization that sometimes men have to pay a heavy price for their dates’ previous relationship behavior.("At least six different times, God has matched me up with a woman who has had a long history of wild, impulsive, passionate, no-holds-barred sex. She invariably finds something lacking in that lifestyle and decides to make a change. Starting with the very next man she dates. Who is invariably me.") • Miller’s misguided social experiment to separate dating from status by spending less than $20 on the date, purchasing everything at a 99¢ store, and what he learned, as a result, about his date and himself. (“I realize now that on the journey of romance, thrift and creativity will take you only so far - for the rest of the trip, you'll need MasterCard.") • Revealed for the first time the inner workings of a man's brain. ("Cerebellum. Responsible for coordinating movement and maintaining balance. Used primarily when a man has had eight beers and is endeavoring to make his way to the bathroom without tripping over the dog and pulling the fish tank over on top of them.") • How Miller took his date to his ex-wife’s holiday party only to find his date and his ex-wife bonding like high school girlfriends. (“Pam would take Amy aside and present to her a list of all 273 of my failings, most of which, she confides to Amy, won’t become noticeable until month three of Amy’s being with me. Amy is stunned; she’d only been aware of 149 of my failings.”) But 500 Dates is about much more than dating. Its humor essays also cover romance, relationships, breakups, attraction, the nature of love, and how both men and women view the art, science, expectations, and reality of courtship and turning courtship into something deeper and longer lasting in the twenty-first century. Throughout these essays, a portion of which were previously published in various media, Miller provides a sense of hope about one’s romantic prospects. Readers will find that the end of a marriage, even a long-term one, does not mean the end of romance—or one's sense of humor.
Poems and Wondering Thoughts, the first publication of Psychology instructor, musician and part-time poet Mark Kavanaugh, gives the reader a look into a mind at full-tilt, sometimes off-tilt. Written over the course of 5 years and spanning the split-up of a relationship and the years of recovery to current times of lighter moments and softer breezes, these poems let the reader experience the “wonderings” of a man in pain, joy, love and anger. Presented in no particular order, the poems shed light on different stages of the author’s life, thinking, fleeting memories and attempts at understanding the world and the universe in which it swims.
This is a book of stories and songs and song-like stories celebrating American vernacular and the people who inhabit the land. The title of this remarkable book comes from a lyric about the terror of being buried alive, but it could as easily refer to tobacco in a pipe or the way good poems are made-compacted, but not too much. Mark Todd's poetry lives at the juncture of literature and folklore, a place of language revitalized by actual speech rhythms. Todd's welcoming voice-veering like life itself between sadness and hilarity-should be welcome everywhere poetry is heard.
Pulitzer Prize-winner Mark Strand gives us a poem in forty-five sections that—despite its wide range and shifting mood and tone—is all of a piece. Here Strand speaks candidly to the reader, conversing, offering urban wit and surrealist digressions that draw on our innermost sensations and the outermost reaches of our reality: Is what exists a souvenir of the time Of the great nought and deep night without stars The time before the universe began? When we look at each other and see nothing Is that not a confirmation that we are less Than meets the eye and embody some of The night of our origins? A timeless pursuit of timeless questions, Dark Harbor centers on uncertainty and the known, family and isolation, the possible and the real. The poems in this book are easily recognizable as the world of one of our most interesting and influential poets.
The multitalented writers, directors, producers, and actors (as seen on The League, Transparent, and The Mindy Project) share the secrets of their lifelong partnership in this unique memoir. “A book that anyone will love . . . You can enjoy it even if you have no idea who the Duplass brothers are.”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times Whether producing, writing, directing, or acting, the Duplass Brothers have made their mark in the world of independent film and television on the strength of their quirky and empathetic approach to storytelling. Now, for the first time, Mark and Jay take readers on a tour of their lifelong partnership in this unique memoir told in essays that share the secrets of their success, the joys and frustrations of intimate collaboration, and the lessons they’ve learned the hard way. From a childhood spent wielding an oversized home video camera in the suburbs of New Orleans to their shared years at the University of Texas in early-nineties Austin, and from the breakthrough short they made on a three-dollar budget to the night their feature film Baghead became the center of a Sundance bidding war, Mark and Jay tell the story of a bond that’s resilient, affectionate, mutually empowering, and only mildly dysfunctional. They are brutally honest about how their closeness sabotaged their youthful romantic relationships, about the jealousy each felt when the other stole the spotlight as an actor (Mark in The League, Jay in Transparent), and about the challenges they faced on the set of their HBO series Togetherness—namely, too much togetherness. But Like Brothers is also a surprisingly practical road map to a rewarding creative partnership. Rather than split all their responsibilities fifty-fifty, the brothers learned to capitalize on each other’s strengths. They’re not afraid to call each other out, because they’re also not afraid to compromise. Most relationships aren’t—and frankly shouldn’t be—as intense as Mark and Jay’s, but their brand of trust, validation, and healthy disagreement has taken them far. Part coming-of-age memoir, part underdog story, and part insider account of succeeding in Hollywood on their own terms, Like Brothers is as openhearted and lovably offbeat as Mark and Jay themselves. “Wright. Ringling. Jonas. I’m sure you could name a bunch of famous brother teams. They’re all garbage compared to Mark and Jay. I can’t wait for you to read this book.”—from the foreword by Mindy Kaling
In this lyric memoir, Mark Rudman explores his close but often fractious relationship with his mother, and presents a companion volume to his award-winning book Rider, which concerns his relationship with his rabbi stepfather. Sundays on the Phone centers on the poet's weekly Sunday morning phone calls from his mother and builds on the verse narrative that defines Rudman's unique role in twenty-first century poetry. These dialogues, both real and imagined, as well as the surrounding poems, are attuned to the emotional reverberations in every exchange between mother and son. We witness the brutal tensions in their relationship and their wit and passion. From the first pages, in which Rudman revisits his childhood and his memories of adjusting to his mother's second marriage, to the final pages, in which he slowly comes to terms with his mother's death, this is a compassionate and compelling portrait."--BOOK JACKET.
This volume contains a number of poems on a wide variety of topics, from History to Philosophy, and Society to Politics, as well as a good (and sometimes random) selection of thoughts, beliefs and comments - including a number from the author, his friends and colleagues.
Just like every story there must be a beginning. The same is true with poetry. "When Dreams Are Murdered," in essence, is the Genesis of the works of poetry by Mark Cisper. This is to say, it is not the true beginning except for the first six poems; salvaged from other sources after the original 91 pieces he wrote in 1991/92 while still in high school were lost. The time span in which these pieces were written is from 1991 to May 1993. This you will see is true for the author has included a Chronology at the end of the book; something he believes has never been done before in literature. This Chronology will demonstrate to you he exact date in which a piece was written; and at times will show several were written in a day as well as the gaps in time between pieces. One last note on the Chronology: you will see exactly when he began keeping track of dates. Let's begin the journey of the life and works of the Word Art of the Poet by the name of Mark Cisper.
In his brilliant new novel, the first since the widely enjoyed Getting Over Homer, Mark O'Donnell takes us on a wild and funny tour through the Christmas season's ultimate challenge: the day of too many parties. It's Christmas Eve Eve Eve Eve Eve in Manhattan--five days from the holiday Ground Zero--but Tad Leary, the most confused man on earth, doesn't know whether to celebrate or go crazy. He's just been fired, he's about to be evicted from his sublet, he's getting nowhere on his overdue folklore thesis, "Social Hierarchies of Imaginary Places," and on top of everything else--or rather underneath everything else--at age thirty-four (older than Christ), he's five-foot-one and still baby-faced, so he's treated like a child wherever he goes. Nonetheless, he's been invited to seven (a magic number one of his rivals is writing a thesis about) different Christmas parties that day, and he decides to explore every one of them for possible work, apartments, love, and just plain distraction. Tad's a walking punch bowl of joy and fear, goodwill and alienation, running a constant mental argument with himself throughout his long marathon. By midnight, he will have visited all parts of his past--from brunch with his rumpled Boston Irish parents and arguably more successful brothers, to dinner with his beautiful Swedish ex-girlfriend, to a fancy, colossal uptown bash where, by now dangerously looped, he bumps into an ex-boyfriend (more confusion!) looking as "glorious and golden as a roast turkey." A farcical, over-the-top feast of twisted one-liners and outrageous imagery, Let Nothing You Dismay depicts Tad's--and everyone's--struggle for survival, with a bracing combination of Darwinian theory and hallucinatory fairy-tale wonder. It's a Chekhov story told with P. G. Wodehouse flippancy, or a tale of Celtic mysticism as S. J. Perelman might have rendered it. Above all, the bright spots in this darkest night of the soul prove that comical epiphany isn't just for Christmas anymore.
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