The Liars' Club PDF Download

Author: Mary Karr
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN: 9780140179835
Category : Families
Languages : en
Pages : 340

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Book Description
The author, a poet, recounts her difficult childhood growing up in a Texas oil town.

Author: Gale, Cengage Learning
Publisher: Gale, Cengage Learning
ISBN: 1410351092
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 29

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Book Description

Author: Mary Karr
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062223089
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 256

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Book Description
Credited with sparking the current memoir explosion, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club spent more than a year at the top of the New York Times list. She followed with two other smash bestsellers: Cherry and Lit, which were critical hits as well. For thirty years Karr has also taught the form, winning teaching prizes at Syracuse. (The writing program there produced such acclaimed authors as Cheryl Strayed, Keith Gessen, and Koren Zailckas.) In The Art of Memoir, she synthesizes her expertise as professor and therapy patient, writer and spiritual seeker, recovered alcoholic and “black belt sinner,” providing a unique window into the mechanics and art of the form that is as irreverent, insightful, and entertaining as her own work in the genre. Anchored by excerpts from her favorite memoirs and anecdotes from fellow writers’ experience, The Art of Memoir lays bare Karr’s own process. (Plus all those inside stories about how she dealt with family and friends get told— and the dark spaces in her own skull probed in depth.) As she breaks down the key elements of great literary memoir, she breaks open our concepts of memory and identity, and illuminates the cathartic power of reflecting on the past; anybody with an inner life or complicated history, whether writer or reader, will relate. Joining such classics as Stephen King’s On Writing and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird, The Art of Memoir is an elegant and accessible exploration of one of today’s most popular literary forms—a tour de force from an accomplished master pulling back the curtain on her craft.

Author: Mary Karr
Publisher: Penguin
ISBN: 1101650745
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 290

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Book Description
From Mary Karr comes this gorgeously written, often hilarious story of her tumultuous teens and sexual coming-of-age. Picking up where the bestselling The Liars' Club left off, Karr dashes down the trail of her teen years with customary sass, only to run up against the paralyzing self-doubt of a girl in bloom. Fleeing the thrills and terrors of adolescence, she clashes against authority in all its forms and hooks up with an unforgettable band of heads and bona-fide geniuses. Parts of Cherry will leave you gasping with laughter. Karr assembles a self from the smokiest beginnings, delivering a long-awaited sequel that is both "bawdy and wise" (San Francisco Chronicle).

Author: Lidia Yuknavitch
Publisher: Hawthorne Books
ISBN: 0983304904
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 222

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Book Description
This is not your mother’s memoir. In The Chronology of Water, Lidia Yuknavitch, a lifelong swimmer and Olympic hopeful escapes her raging father and alcoholic and suicidal mother when she accepts a swimming scholarship which drug and alcohol addiction eventually cause her to lose. What follows is promiscuous sex with both men and women, some of them famous, and some of it S&M, and Lidia discovers the power of her sexuality to help her forget her pain. The forgetting doesn’t last, though, and it is her hard-earned career as a writer and a teacher, and the love of her husband and son, that ultimately create the life she needs to survive.

Author: Mary Karr
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061885479
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 582

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Book Description
The Liars' Club brought to vivid, indelible life Mary Karr's hardscrabble Texas childhood. Cherry, her account of her adolescence, "continued to set the literary standard for making the personal universal" (Entertainment Weekly). Now Lit follows the self-professed blackbelt sinner's descent into the inferno of alcoholism and madness—and to her astonishing resurrection. Karr's longing for a solid family seems secure when her marriage to a handsome, Shakespeare-quoting blueblood poet produces a son they adore. But she can't outrun her apocalyptic past. She drinks herself into the same numbness that nearly devoured her charismatic but troubled mother, reaching the brink of suicide. A hair-raising stint in "The Mental Marriott," with an oddball tribe of gurus and saviors, awakens her to the possibility of joy and leads her to an unlikely faith. Not since Saint Augustine cried, "Give me chastity, Lord—but not yet!" has a conversion story rung with such dark hilarity. Lit is about getting drunk and getting sober; becoming a mother by letting go of a mother; learning to write by learning to live. Written with Karr's relentless honesty, unflinching self-scrutiny, and irreverent, lacerating humor, it is a truly electrifying story of how to grow up—as only Mary Karr can tell it.

Author: Mary Karr
Publisher: Harper Collins
ISBN: 0061877786
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 116

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Book Description
Mary Karr describes herself as a black-belt sinner, and this -- her fourth collection of poems --traces her improbable journey from the inferno of a tormented childhood into a resolutely irreverent Catholicism. Not since Saint Augustine wrote "Give me chastity, Lord -- but not yet!" has anyone brought such smart-assed hilarity to a conversion story. Karr's battle is grounded in common loss (a bitter romance, friends' deaths, a teenage son's leaving home) as well as in elegies for a complicated mother. The poems disarm with the arresting humor familiar to readers of her memoirs, The Liars' Club and Cherry. An illuminating cycle of spiritual poems have roots in Karr's eight-month tutelage in Jesuit prayer practice, and as an afterword, her celebrated essay on faith weaves the tale of how the language of poetry, which relieved her suffering so young, eventually became the language of prayer. Those of us who fret that poetry denies consolation will find clear-eyed joy in this collection.

Author: Lisa Dale Norton
Publisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1429953071
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 148

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Book Description
Rich, funny, and moving personal narratives depend on a few key moments in time to anchor the story and give it impact. Shimmering Images teaches the aspiring memoirist how to locate key memories using Lisa's technique for finding, linking, and fleshing out those vibrant recollections of important moments and situations. Shimmering Images will address: *the difference between memoir and autobiography *how to claim your voice *the art of storytelling *honesty, truth, and compassion in writing *authentic dialogue and the need for specificity Readers will learn how to craft a short piece of narrative nonfiction grounded in their core memories and master a technique they can use over and over again for writing other narratives. A must-have book for anyone who has treasured Bird by Bird by Anne Lamott or Writing Down the Bones by Natalie Goldberg.

Author: Tobias Wolff
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
ISBN: 0802198600
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 304

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Book Description
The PEN/Faulkner Award–winning author recounts coming of age in 1950s Washington State with his mother and abusive stepfather in this classic memoir. This unforgettable memoir, by one of our most gifted writers, introduces us to the young Toby Wolff, by turns tough and vulnerable, crafty and bumbling, and ultimately winning. Separated by divorce from his father and brother, Toby and his mother are constantly on the move. As he fights for identity and self-respect against the unrelenting hostility of a new stepfather, his experiences are at once poignant and comical, and Wolff masterfully re-creates the frustrations, cruelties, and joys of adolescence. His various schemes—running away to Alaska, forging checks, and stealing cars—lead eventually to an act of outrageous self-invention that releases him into a new world of possibility. Praise for This Boy’s Life “Wolff writes in language that is lyrical without embellishment, defines his characters with exact strokes and perfectly pitched voices, [and] creates suspense around ordinary events, locating the deep mystery within them.” —Los Angeles Times Book Review “[This] extraordinary memoir is so beautifully written that we not only root for the kid Wolff remembers, but we also are moved by the universality of his experience.” —San Francisco Chronicle “A work of genuine literary art . . . as grim and eerie as Great Expectations, as surreal and cruel as The Painted Bird, as comic and transcendent as Huckleberry Finn.” —The Philadelphia Inquirer “Wolff’s genius is in his fine storytelling. This Boy’s Life reads and entertains as easily as a novel. Wolff’s writing and timing are superb, as are his depictions of those of us who endured the 50s.” —The Oregonian

Author: Jeannette Walls
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416544666
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 370

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Book Description
A triumphant tale of a young woman and her difficult childhood, The Glass Castle is a remarkable memoir of resilience, redemption, and a revelatory look into a family at once deeply dysfunctional and wonderfully vibrant. Jeannette Walls was the second of four children raised by anti-institutional parents in a household of extremes.