The Oxford Book of American Literary Anecdotes PDF Download

Author: Donald Hall
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195033885
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 388

View

Book Description
A companion volume to The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, this volume covers the whole range of American literary history from the 17th century to the present. Taken from biographies, letters, memoirs, and table-talk, the stories form an irreverent history of American literature.

Author: John Gross
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199543410
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 400

View

Book Description
In The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, master anthologist John Gross brings together a delectable smorgasbord of literary tales, offering striking new insight into some of the most important writers in history. Many of the anecdotes here are funny, others are touching, outrageous, sinister, inspiring, or downright weird. They show writers from Chaucer to Bob Dylan acting both unpredictably and deeply in character. The range is wide--this is a book which finds room for Milton and Shakespeare, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, Kurt Vonnegut and P. G. Wodehouse, Chinua Achebe and Salman Rushdie, James Baldwin and Tom Wolfe. It is also a book in which you can find out which great historian's face was once mistaken for a baby's bottom, which film star experienced a haunting encounter with Virginia Woolf not long before her death, and what Agatha Christie really thought of her popular character Hercule Poirot. It is in short an unrivalled collection of literary gossip offering intimate glimpses into the lives of authors ranging from Shakespeare to Philip Roth--a book not just for lovers of literature, but for anyone with a taste for the curiosities of human nature.

Author: Robert Hendrickson
Publisher: Penguin Group
ISBN: 9780140157895
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 292

View

Book Description
Who was the original Mother Goose? What was Mark Twain's recipe for a publisher? Why did John Cheever write many of his stories in his boxer shorts? Hendrickson provides the answers to these questions and many more in the most extensive collection of its kind ever published.

Author: Kafū Nagai
Publisher: Columbia University Press
ISBN: 9780231500241
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 296

View

Book Description
Nagai Kafu is one of the greatest modern Japanese writers, but until now his classic collection, American Stories, based on his sojourn from Japan to Washington State, Michigan, and New York City in the early years of the twentieth century, has never been available in English. Here, with a detailed and insightful introduction, is an elegant translation of Kafu's perceptive and lyrical account. Like de Tocqueville a century before, Kafu casts a fresh, keen eye on vibrant and varied America—world fairs, concert halls, and college campuses; saloons, the immigrant underclass, and red-light districts. Many of his vignettes involve encounters with fellow Japanese or Chinese immigrants, some of whom are poorly paid laborers facing daily discrimination. The stories paint a broad landscape of the challenges of American life for the poor, the foreign born, and the disaffected, peopled with crisp individual portraits that reveal the daily disappointments and occasional euphorias of modern life. Translator Mitsuko Iriye's introduction provides important cultural and biographical background about Kafu's upbringing in rapidly modernizing Japan, as well as literary context for this collection. In the first story, "Night Talk in a Cabin," three young men sailing from Japan to Seattle each reveal how poor prospects, shattered confidence, or a broken heart has driven him to seek a better life abroad. In "Atop the Hill," the narrator meets a fellow Japanese expatriate at a small midwestern religious college, who slowly reveals his complex reasons for leaving behind his wife in Japan. Caught between the pleasures of America's cities and the stoicism of its small towns, he wonders if he can ever return home. Kafu plays with the contradictions and complexities of early twentieth-century America, revealing the tawdry, poor, and mundane underside of New York's glamour in "Ladies of the Night" while celebrating the ingenuity, cosmopolitanism, and freedom of the American city in "Two Days in Chicago." At once sensitive and witty, elegant and gritty, these stories provide a nuanced outsider's view of the United States and a perfect entrance into modern Japanese literature.

Author: Mark Wish
Publisher: Coolest Stories Press
ISBN: 1737573911
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 235

View

Book Description
America's most talented storytellers share their most courageous, compelling, unputdownable work in a collection made for story lovers. Praised early on by Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk author Ben Fountain and The Weight of Blood author Laura McHugh, COOLEST AMERICAN STORIES is a new annual short story anthology whose guiding philosophy is that a collection of interesting "full meal" short stories could, as one @JustCoolStories Twitter follower put it, "make America cool again." Toward this end, COOLEST AMERICAN STORIES 2022 features a previously unpublished story by the multi-major-book-award-winning author of Blacktop Wasteland S. A. Cosby; the timeless, previously unpublished short story that led Tina Brown to sign Frances Park's When My Sister Was Cleopatra Moon; and Pulitzer Prize finalist Lee Martin's heartfelt rendering of married life that apparently was too startling for the editors of several university-affiliated literary magazines. And since interesting storytelling―rather than a list of publishing credits―matters most to story-hungry readers, COOLEST AMERICAN STORIES 2022 also includes a page-turner about dating in Hollywood written by MFA student Megan Ritchie; Brooklyn native D.Z. Stone's very first published fiction, a hilarious love story that celebrates the power of women; a heartbreaking account of adult siblinghood authored by David Ebenbach―among others in this treasure trove of unputdownable, sharply written, sometimes comic, sometimes frightening, always suspenseful stories loaded with twists and turns. "Coolest American Stories 2022 is a helluva lot of fun. These stories bump and brim with rambunctious energy and show that the American short story is alive and well. Many thanks to Mark Wish and Elizabeth Coffey for this breath―or let's call it a gale―of fresh literary air." --Ben Fountain, winner of the PEN/Hemingway Award and the National Book Critics’ Circle Award, author of Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk "Extraordinarily rich storytelling from fresh, vibrant voices―Coolest American Stories promises to be an annual force." --Laura McHugh, internationally bestselling author of The Weight of Blood and What’s Done in Darkness "Love short stories? This collection is for you. Not yet sure how to feel about short stories? This collection is definitely for you. Whoever you are, wherever you are: read these stories!" --Lori Ostlund, Flannery O’Connor Award winner and author of After the Parade and The Bigness of the World

Author: Edward Eggleston
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Readers
Languages : en
Pages : 172

View

Book Description

Author: Joyce Carol Oates
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195092622
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 788

View

Book Description
This volume offers a survey of American short fiction in 59 tales that combine classic works with 'different, unexpected gems', which invite readers to explore a wealth of important pieces by women and minority writers. Authors include: Amy Tan, Alice Adams, David Leavitt and Tim O'Brien.

Author: Washington Irving
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : American essays
Languages : en
Pages : 402

View

Book Description

Author: Benjamin Nugent
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
ISBN: 1416565515
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 210

View

Book Description
Most people know a nerd when they see one but can't define just what a nerd is. American Nerd: The Story of My People gives us the history of the concept of nerdiness and of the subcultures we consider nerdy. What makes Dr. Frankenstein the archetypal nerd? Where did the modern jock come from? When and how did being a self-described nerd become trendy? As the nerd emerged, vaguely formed, in the nineteenth century, and popped up again and again in college humor journals and sketch comedy, our culture obsessed over the designation. Mixing research and reportage with autobiography, critically acclaimed writer Benjamin Nugent embarks on a fact-finding mission of the most entertaining variety. He seeks the best definition of nerd and illuminates the common ground between nerd subcultures that might seem unrelated: high-school debate team kids and ham radio enthusiasts, medieval reenactors and pro-circuit Halo players. Why do the same people who like to work with computers also enjoy playing Dungeons & Dragons? How are those activities similar? This clever, enlightening book will appeal to the nerd (and antinerd) that lives inside all of us.

Author: Andre Bernard
Publisher: Little, Brown
ISBN: 0446931268
Category : Reference
Languages : en
Pages : 808

View

Book Description
From Hank Aaron to King Zog, Mao Tse-Tung to Madonna, Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes features more than 2,000 people from around the world, past and present, in all fields. These short anecdotes provide remarkable insight into the human character. Ranging from the humorous to the tearful, they span classical history, recent politics, modern science and the arts. Bartlett's Book of Anecdotes is a gold mine for anyone who gives speeches, is doing research, or simply likes to browse. As an informal tour of history and human nature at its most entertaining & instructive, this is sure to be a perennial favorite for years to come.