Author: Gay TalesePublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0
Book Description
Fame and Obscurity
Author: Gay TaleseEmbracing Obscurity
Author: AnonymousPublisher: B&H Publishing Group
ISBN: 1433677814
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 194
Book Description
Argues for a life based on humility, service, and sacrifice instead of the accepted worldview of a life valuing fame and recognition.
No Man's Son: A Flight from Obscurity to Fame
Author: Linda ChowdryPublisher:
ISBN: 9780578895215
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 390
Book Description
An immigrant's memoir recounting the life of a young Pakistani man who came to the U.S. with only a driving ambition to make a difference in his chosen industry, aviation. Through challenges and successes, Michael Chowdry soared to the very heights of the airline business. Driven by an entrepreneurial spirit, he unleashed his passion, ultimately building a successful airline, Atlas Air Cargo.
Halls of Fame
Author: John D'AgataPublisher: Graywolf Press
ISBN: 1555970494
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 218
Book Description
"John D'Agata is an alchemist who changes trash into purest gold." —Guy Davenport, Harper's John D'Agata journeys the endless corridors of America's myriad halls of fame and faithfully reports on what he finds there. In a voice all his own, he brilliantly maps his terrain in lists, collage, and ludic narratives. With topics ranging from Martha Graham to the Flat Earth Society, from the brightest light in Vegas to the artist Henry Darger, who died in obscurity, Halls of Fame hovers on the brink between prose and poetry, deep seriousness and high comedy, the subject and the self.
Nat Tate
Author: William BoydPublisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1608197263
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 74
Book Description
When William Boyd published his biography of New York modern artist Nat Tate, a huge reception of critics and artists arrived for the launch party, hosted by David Bowie, to toast the late artist's life. Little did they know that the painter Nat Tate, a depressive genius who burned almost all his output before his suicide, never existed. The book was a hoax, and the art world had fallen for it. Nat Tate is a work of art unto itself-an investigation of the blurry line between the invented and the authentic, and a thoughtful tour through the spirited and occasionally ludicrous American art scene of the 1950s. William Boyd is the author of nine novels, including A Good Man in Africa, winner of the Whitbread Award and the Somerset Maugham Award; An Ice-Cream War, winner of the John Llewellyn Rhys Memorial Prize and shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Brazzaville Beach, winner of the James Tait Black Memorial Prize; and Restless, winner of the Costa Novel of the Year Award. Praise for Nat Tate: "William Boyd's description of Tate's working procedure is so vivid that it convinces me that the small oil I picked up on Prince Street, New York, in the late '60s must indeed be one of the lost Third Panel Triptychs. The great sadness of this quiet and moving monograph is that the artist's most profound dread-that God will make you an artist but only a mediocre artist-did not in retrospect apply to Nat Tate."-David Bowie "A moving account of an artist too well understood by his time."-Gore Vidal
Banvard's Folly
Author: Paul CollinsPublisher: Macmillan + ORM
ISBN: 1466892056
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 340
Book Description
“Hearteningly strange . . . Collins exhumes little-known figures [and] recounts their perversely inspiring battles against the more logical ways of the world.” —The Onion Here are thirteen unforgettable portraits of forgotten people: men and women who might have claimed their share of renown but who, whether from ill timing, skullduggery, monomania, the tinge of madness, or plain bad luck—or perhaps some combination of them all—leapt straight from life into thankless obscurity. Collins brings them back to glorious life. John Banvard was an artist whose colossal panoramic canvasses (one behemoth depiction of the entire eastern shore of the Mississippi River was simply known as “The Three Mile Painting”) made him the richest and most famous artist of his day . . . before he decided to go head to head with P. T. Barnum. René Blondot was a distinguished French physicist whose celebrated discovery of a new form of radiation, called the N-Ray, went terribly awry. At the tender age of seventeen, William Henry Ireland signed “William Shakespeare” to a book and launched a short but meteoric career as a forger of undiscovered works by the Bard—until he pushed his luck too far. Collins’ love for what he calls the “forgotten ephemera of genius” give his portraits of these figures and the other ten men and women in Banvard’s Folly sympathetic depth and poignant relevance. Their effect is not to make us sneer or revel in schadenfreude; here are no cautionary tales. Rather, here are brief introductions—acts of excavation and reclamation—to people whom history may have forgotten, but whom now we cannot.
In the Shadow of Obscurity
Author: Pete ElmanPublisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 338
Book Description
"In the Shadow of Obscurity: Toiling in a Reluctant Society" is of historical value in content not only for people of color, but also for society. This book not only tells the stories of many of our great sports figures in history, it addresses their pain on the road to greatness. It is a must read to understand why we must stay focused, and make this society understand that we must all commit to a just society and make things better for generations to come.
The Virginity of Famous Men
Author: Christine SneedPublisher: Bloomsbury Publishing USA
ISBN: 1620406950
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 321
Book Description
The Virginity of Famous Men, award-winning story writer Christine Sneed's deeply perceptive collection on the human condition, features protagonists attempting to make peace with the choices--both personal and professional--they have so far made. In “The Prettiest Girls,” a location scout for a Hollywood film studio falls in love with a young Mexican woman who is more in love with the idea of stardom than with this older American man who takes her with him back to California. “Clear Conscience” focuses on the themes of family loyalty, divorce, motherhood, and whether “doing the right thing” is, in fact, always the right thing to do. In “Beach Vacation,” a mother realizes that her popular and coddled teenage son has become someone she has difficulty relating to, let alone loving with the same maternal fervor that once was second nature to her. The title story, “The Virginity of Famous Men,” explores family and fortune. Long intrigued by love and loneliness, Sneed leads readers through emotional landscapes both familiar and uncharted. These probing stories are explorations of the compassionate and passionate impulses that are inherent in--and often the source of--both abiding joy and serious distress in every human life.
A Writer's Life
Author: Gay TalesePublisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN: 0812977289
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 450
Book Description
The inner workings of a writer’s life, the interplay between experience and writing, are brilliantly recounted by a master of the art. Gay Talese now focuses on his own life—the zeal for the truth, the narrative edge, the sometimes startling precision, that won accolades for his journalism and best-sellerdom and acclaim for his revelatory books about The New York Times (The Kingdom and the Power), the Mafia (Honor Thy Father), the sex industry (Thy Neighbor’s Wife), and, focusing on his own family, the American immigrant experience (Unto the Sons). How has Talese found his subjects? What has stimulated, blocked, or inspired his writing? Here are his amateur beginnings on his college newspaper; his professional climb at The New York Times; his desire to write on a larger canvas, which led him to magazine writing at Esquire and then to books. We see his involvement with issues of race from his student days in the Deep South to a recent interracial wedding in Selma, Alabama, where he once covered the fierce struggle for civil rights. Here are his reflections on the changing American sexual mores he has written about over the last fifty years, and a striking look at the lives—and their meaning—of Lorena and John Bobbitt. He takes us behind the scenes of his legendary profile of Frank Sinatra, his writings about Joe DiMaggio and heavyweight champion Floyd Patterson, and his interview with the head of a Mafia family.But he is at his most poignant in talking about the ordinary men and women whose stories led to his most memorable work. In remarkable fashion, he traces the history of a single restaurant location in New York, creating an ethnic mosaic of one restaurateur after the other whose dreams were dashed while a successor’s were born. And as he delves into the life of a young female Chinese soccer player, we see his consuming interest in the world in its latest manifestation.In these and other recollections and stories, Talese gives us a fascinating picture of both the serendipity and meticulousness involved in getting a story. He makes clear that every one of us represents a good one, if a writer has the curiosity to know it, the diligence to pursue it, and the desire to get it right.Candid, humorous, deeply impassioned—a dazzling book about the nature of writing in one man’s life, and of writing itself.
After Fame
Author: Sam RivierePublisher: Faber & Faber
ISBN: 0571356931
Category : Poetry
Languages : en
Pages : 121
Book Description
After Fame is a discursive rendering of the Roman epigrammatist Martial's Book I. Its 118 poems, on themes such as work, friendship and public life, are modelled after the source material through a variety of 'treatments' - most notably machine translation (for which Latin still presents near-insurmountable difficulties), employing the results as scaffolding for poems that quickly improvise their way clear of their originals. As it progresses, the book is increasingly interrupted by reflections on authorship, technology, cultural complicity and the privileged, mediating role of the poet: all fixations of Martial's work that still resonate today. Pitched between translation and new writing, After Fame challenges the integrity of both categories, dramatising the obscurity of its source, refraining from easy equivalences, while insisting on its contemporary relevance.