Author: Patricia Highsmith Publisher: Liveright Publishing ISBN: 1324091002 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 1413
Book Description
New York Times • Times Critics Top Books of 2021 The Times (of London) • Best Books of the Year Excerpted in The New Yorker Profiled in The Los Angeles Times Publishing for the centenary of her birth, Patricia Highsmith’s diaries “offer the most complete picture ever published” of the canonical author (New York Times). Relegated to the genre of mystery during her lifetime, Patricia Highsmith is now recognized as one of “our greatest modernist writers” (Gore Vidal). Beloved by fans who were unaware of the real psychological turmoil behind her prose, the famously secretive Highsmith refused to authorize a biography, instead sequestering herself in her Switzerland home in her final years. Posthumously, her devoted editor Anna von Planta discovered her diaries and notebooks in 1995, tucked in a closet—with tantalizing instructions to be read. For years thereafter, von Planta meticulously culled from over eight thousand pages to help reveal the inscrutable figure behind the legendary pen. Beginning with her junior year at Barnard in 1941, Highsmith ritualistically kept a diary and notebook—the former to catalog her day, the latter to brainstorm stories and hone her craft. This volume weaves diary and notebook simultaneously, exhibiting precisely how Highsmith’s personal affairs seeped into her fiction—and the sheer darkness of her own imagination. Charming yet teetering on the egotistical, young “Pat” lays bare her dizzying social life in 1940s Greenwich Village, barhopping with Judy Holliday and Jane Bowles, among others. Alongside Flannery O’Conner and Chester Himes, she attended—at the recommendation of Truman Capote—the Yaddo artist colony in 1948, where she drafted Strangers on a Train. Published in 1950 and soon adapted by Alfred Hitchcock, this debut novel brought recognition and brief financial security, but left a heartsick Highsmith agonizing: “What is the life I choose?” Providing extraordinary insights into gender and sexuality in mid-twentieth-century America, Highsmith’s diaries convey her euphoria writing The Price of Salt (1951). Yet her sophomore novel would have to be published under a pseudonym, so as not to tarnish her reputation. Indeed, no one could anticipate commercial reception for a novel depicting love between two women in the McCarthy era. Seeking relief from America, Highsmith catalogs her peripatetic years in Europe, subsisting on cigarettes and growing more bigoted and satirical with age. After a stay in Positano with a new lover, she reflects in her notebooks on being an expat, and gleefully conjures the unforgettable The Talented Mr. Ripley (1955); it would be this sociopathic antihero who would finally solidify her true fame. At once lovable, detestable, and mesmerizing, Highsmith put her turbulent life to paper for five decades, acutely aware there must be “a few usable things in literature.” A memoir as significant in our own century as Sylvia Plath’s journals and Simone de Beauvoir’s writings were to another time, Patricia Highsmith: Her Diaries and Notebooks is an historic work that chronicles a woman’s rise against the conventional tide to unparalleled literary prominence.
Author: Patricia Highsmith Publisher: Liveright Publishing ISBN: 1324092955 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 796
Book Description
Essential for understanding Patricia Highsmith’s transgressive life and prophetic work, this volume is also “one of the most observant and ecstatic accounts . . . about being young and alive in New York City” (Dwight Garner,—New York Times). Before Alfred Hitchcock adapted her debut novel, Strangers on a Train, for the big screen; before her suave and sociopathic Thomas Ripley snaked his way into the canon of psychological suspense; and before The Price of Salt became a cult classic of romantic obsession, who was Patricia Highsmith? Focused on her formative years in Manhattan, this condensed edition of Highsmith’s monumental Diaries and Notebooks reveals “Pat” at her most passionate and florescent. Beginning in 1941 at Barnard College and encompassing the Texas native’s adventurous twenties,?The New York Years intertwines scenes from her dizzying social life—rife with sleepless nights barhopping in the queer underground Greenwich Village scene, always juggling too many lovers—with an intimate self-portrait of a young artist who by day dispassionately wrote comics for a paycheck. Amid all the hangovers and the breakups, she read voraciously and honed her craft with verve. Laid bare in this perennial reader’s edition are the bold, hilarious, romantic, tragic, and maddeningly contradictory observations of one of “our greatest modernist writers” (Gore Vidal).
Author: Albert Camus Publisher: Vintage ISBN: 0525567216 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 226
Book Description
The Nobel Prize winner's most influential and enduring personal writings, newly curated and introduced by acclaimed Camus scholar Alice Kaplan. Albert Camus (1913-1960) is unsurpassed among writers for a body of work that animates the wonder and absurdity of existence. Personal Writings brings together, for the first time, thematically-linked essays from across Camus's writing career that reflect the scope and depth of his interior life. Grappling with an indifferent mother and an impoverished childhood in Algeria, an ever-present sense of exile, and an ongoing search for equilibrium, Camus's personal essays shed new light on the emotional and experiential foundations of his philosophical thought and humanize his most celebrated works.
Author: Ingo Farin Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 0262535157 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 376
Book Description
Heidegger scholars consider the philosopher's recently published notebooks, including the issues of Heidegger's Nazism and anti-Semitism. For more than forty years, the philosopher Martin Heidegger logged ideas and opinions in a series of notebooks, known as the “Black Notebooks” after the black oilcloth booklets into which he first transcribed his thoughts. In 2014, the notebooks from 1931 to 1941 were published, sparking immediate controversy. It has long been acknowledged that Heidegger was an enthusiastic supporter of the Nazi Party in the early 1930s. But the notebooks contain a number of anti-Semitic passages—often referring to the stereotype of “World-Jewry”—written even after Heidegger became disenchanted with the Nazis themselves. Reactions from the scholarly community have ranged from dismissal of the significance of these passages to claims that the anti-Semitism in them contaminates all of Heidegger's work. This volume offers the first collection of responses by Heidegger scholars to the publication of the notebooks. In essays commissioned especially for the book, the contributors offer a wide range of views, addressing not only the issues of anti-Semitism and Nazism but also the broader questions that the notebooks raise. Contributors Babette Babich, Andrew Bowie, Steven Crowell, Fred Dallmayr, Donatella Di Cesare, Michael Fagenblat, Ingo Farin, Gregory Fried, Jean Grondin, Karsten Harries, Laurence Paul Hemming, Jeff Malpas, Thomas Rohkrämer, Tracy B. Strong, Peter Trawny, Daniela Vallega-Neu, Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, Nancy A. Weston, Holger Zaborowski
Author: Katja Happe Publisher: Walter de Gruyter GmbH & Co KG ISBN: 3110687739 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 921
Book Description
In summer 1942 the Germans escalated the systematic deportations of Jews from Western and Northern Europe to the extermination camps. In most of the countries under German control, the occupying forces initially focused on arresting foreign and stateless Jews, thereby securing the cooperation of local authorities. However, before long the entire Jewish population was targeted for deportation. This volume documents the parallels and differences in the persecution of Jews in occupied Norway, Denmark, the Netherlands, Belgium, Luxembourg and France in the period from summer 1942 to liberation; it records the implementation of the systematic deportation and murder of Jews from Western and Northern Europe, and it also records the rescue of more than 5,000 Danish Jews. In letters and diary entries the persecuted Jews describe their attempts to flee, life in hiding, the transit camps, and deportation transports that often took several days. In Westerbork camp in the occupied Netherlands, Bob Cahen, himself an inmate, recorded in his diary the arrival in the camp of 17,000 Jews from across the Netherlands in October 1942: ‘People arrived here herded like livestock. Some were buried beneath their luggage, others without any possessions at all, not even properly dressed. Women in poor health who had been hauled out of bed in thin nightgowns, children in undergarments and barefoot, the elderly, the ill, the infirm – more and more new people came to the camp.’ The sources in the volume show how the perpetrators attempted to dupe their victims regarding the destination of the transports, and how Jewish organizations attempted to alleviate the suffering of the deportees. The documents additionally illustrate how the resistance movement gained momentum during this period. Learn more about the PMJ on https://pmj-documents.org/
Author: Andrzej Bobkowski Publisher: Yale University Press ISBN: 0300176716 Category : Travel Languages : en Pages : 698
Book Description
A Polish writer's experience of wartime France, a cosmopolitan outsider's perspective on politics, culture, and life under duress When the aspiring young writer Andrzej Bobkowski, a self-styled cosmopolitan Pole, found himself caught in occupied France in 1940, he recorded his reflections on culture, politics, history, and everyday life. Published after the war, his notebooks offer an outsider's perspective on the hardships and ironies of the Occupation. In the face of war, Bobkowski celebrates the value of freedom and human life through the evocation--in a daringly untragic mode--of ordinary existence, the taste of simple food, the beauty of the French countryside. Resisting intellectual abstractions, his notes exude a young man's pleasure in physical movement--miles clocked on country roads and Parisian streets on his trusty bike--and they reveal the emergence of an original literary voice. Bobkowski was recognized in his homeland as a master of modern Polish prose only after Communism ended. He remains to be discovered in the English-speaking world.
Author: Marianne Rachel Sanua Publisher: Wayne State University Press ISBN: 9780814328576 Category : Education Languages : en Pages : 494
Book Description
Going Greek offers an unprecedented look at the relationship between American Jewish students and fraternity life during its heyday in the first half of the twentieth century. More than secret social clubs, fraternities and sororities profoundly shaped the lives of members long after they left college—often dictating choices in marriage as well as business alliances. Widely viewed as a key to success, membership in these self-governing, sectarian organizations was desirable but not easily accessible, especially to non-Protestants and nonwhites. In Going Greek Marianne Sanua examines the founding of Jewish fraternities in light of such topics as antisemitism, the unique challenges faced by Jewish students on campuses across the United States, responses to World War II, and questions pertaining to assimilation and/or identity reinforcement. The book covers a vast array of information, from the many famous people who belonged to Jewish fraternities to the songs they sang. Snobbery within the fraternities—what behavior constituted the "proper image" for an American Jew—comes up for discussion, but so does the increasing awareness of Jewish students toward issues of social justice. For several generations of leaders in the national Jewish community, fraternities were central to their lives. Going Greek thus provides historians and biographers with a window onto an important aspect of American Jewish cultural experience.
Author: Victor Serge Publisher: New York Review of Books ISBN: 1681372703 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 673
Book Description
Available for the first time, Victor Serge's intimate account of the last decade of his life gives a vivid look into the Franco-Russian revolutionary's life, from his liberation from Stalin's Russia to his "Mexico Years," when he wrote his greatest works. In 1936, Victor Serge—poet, novelist, and revolutionary—left the Soviet Union for Paris, the rare opponent of Stalin to escape the Terror. In 1940, after the Nazis marched into Paris, Serge fled France for Mexico, where he would spend the rest of his life. His years in Mexico were marked by isolation, poverty, peril, and grief; his Notebooks, however, brim with resilience, curiosity, outrage, a passionate love of life, and superb writing. Serge paints haunting portraits of Osip Mandelstam, Stefan Zweig, and “the Old Man” Trotsky; argues with André Breton; and, awaiting his wife’s delayed arrival from Europe, writes her passionate love letters. He describes the sweep of the Mexican landscape, visits an erupting volcano, and immerses himself in the country’s history and culture. He looks back on his life and the fate of the Revolution. He broods on the course of the war and the world to come after. In the darkest of circumstances, he responds imaginatively, thinks critically, feels deeply, and finds reason to hope. Serge’s Notebooks were discovered in 2010 and appear here for the first time in their entirety in English. They are a a message in a bottle from one of the great spirits, and great writers, of our shipwrecked time.
Author: Jean-Paul Sartre Publisher: University of Chicago Press ISBN: 9780226735115 Category : Philosophy Languages : en Pages : 620
Book Description
In the famous conclusion to Being and Nothingness, Jean-Paul Sartre announced that he would devote his next philosophical work to moral problems. Although he worked on this project in the late 1940s, Sartre never completed it to his satisfaction, and it remained unpublished until after his death in 1980. Presented here for the first time in English, Notebooks for an Ethics is Sartre's attempt to articulate a moral philosophy. In the Notebooks he addresses any number of themes and topics relevant to an effort to formulate a concrete and revolutionary socialist ethics, among them the differences between force and violence, the relationship of means and ends, and the relationship of oppression and alienation. Most important, he tries to show that there can be an authentic mutual recognition among free individuals where no one steals another's freedom. While remaining committed to the basic principles of Being and Nothingness, Sartre here seeks to locate the foundation for action in history and society. The Notebooks thus form an important bridge between the early existentialist Sartre and the later Marxist social thinker of the Critique of Dialectical Reason. Sartre grapples anew with such central issues as "authenticity" and the relation of alienation and freedom to moral values. In dealing with fundamental modes of relating to the Other, among them violence, entreaty, demand, appeal, refusal, and revolt, he highlights the notions of conversion and creation as they figure in the necessary transition from individualism to historical consciousness. The Notebooks themselves are complemented here by two appendixes, one on "the good and subjectivity", the other on the problem of blacks in theUnited States as a case study of oppression.
Author: Claude McKay Publisher: University of Illinois Press ISBN: 9780252028823 Category : Poetry Languages : en Pages : 468
Book Description
Containing more than three hundred poems, including nearly a hundred previously unpublished works, this unique collection showcases the intellectual range of Claude McKay (1889-1948), the Jamaican-born poet and novelist whose life and work were marked by restless travel and steadfast social protest. McKay's first poems were composed in rural Jamaican creole and launched his lifelong commitment to representing everyday black culture from the bottom up. Migrating to New York, he reinvigorated the English sonnet and helped spark the Harlem Renaissance with poems such as "If We Must Die." After coming under scrutiny for his communism, he traveled throughout Europe and North Africa for twelve years and returned to Harlem in 1934, having denounced Stalin's Soviet Union. By then, McKay's pristine "violent sonnets" were giving way to confessional lyrics informed by his newfound Catholicism. McKay's verse eludes easy definition, yet this complete anthology, vividly introduced and carefully annotated by William J. Maxwell, acquaints readers with the full transnational evolution of a major voice in twentieth-century poetry.
Author: Patricia Highsmith
Author: Patricia Highsmith
Author: Albert Camus
Author: Ingo Farin
Author: Katja Happe
Author: Andrzej Bobkowski
Author: Marianne Rachel Sanua
Author: Victor Serge
Author: Jean-Paul Sartre
Author: Claude McKay