Author: William C. Spengemann
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780300028867
Category : Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 254

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Book Description

Author: Nancy Bachrach
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307455416
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 258

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Book Description
The story is so improbable, it can only be true: A brilliant woman with a long history of mental illness—who once proclaimed herself to be "the center of the universe" — is miraculously cured by accidental carbon monoxide poisoning aboard the family boat. Nancy Bachrach warns readers, “Don’t try this at home” in her darkly humorous memoir about “the second coming” of her mother — the indomitable Lola, whose buried family secrets had been driving her crazy. Aching and tender, unflinching and wry, The Center of the Universe is a multigenerational mother-daughter story—a splendid, funny, lyrical memoir about family, truth, and the resilience of love.

Author: Arnaud Schmitt
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351701010
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 291

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Book Description
Taking a fresh look at the state of autobiography as a genre, The Phenomenology of Autobiography: Making it Real takes a deep dive into the experience of the reader. Dr. Schmitt argues that current trends in the field of life writing have taken the focus away from the text and the initial purpose of autobiography as a means for the author to communicate with a reader and narrate an experience. The study puts autobiography back into a communicational context, and putting forth the notion that one of the reasons why life writing can so often be aesthetically unsatisfactory, or difficult to distinguish from novels, is because it should not be considered as a literary genre, but as a modality with radically different rules and means of evaluation. In other words, not only is autobiography radically different from fiction due to its referentiality, but, first and foremost, it should be read differently.

Author: Sidonie Smith
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
ISBN: 0816669856
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 410

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Book Description
projects, and an extensive bibliography. --Book Jacket.

Author: Alexander Chee
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 1328764419
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 297

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Book Description
Named a Best Book of 2018 by New York Magazine, the Washington Post, Publisher's Weekly, NPR, and Time, among many others, this essay collection from the author of The Queen of the Night explores how we form identities in life and in art. As a novelist, Alexander Chee has been described as “masterful” by Roxane Gay, “incendiary” by the New York Times, and "brilliant" by the Washington Post. With his first collection of nonfiction, he’s sure to secure his place as one of the finest essayists of his generation as well. How to Write an Autobiographical Novel is the author’s manifesto on the entangling of life, literature, and politics, and how the lessons learned from a life spent reading and writing fiction have changed him. In these essays, he grows from student to teacher, reader to writer, and reckons with his identities as a son, a gay man, a Korean American, an artist, an activist, a lover, and a friend. He examines some of the most formative experiences of his life and the nation’s history, including his father’s death, the AIDS crisis, 9/11, the jobs that supported his writing ​— ​Tarot-reading, bookselling, cater-waiting for William F. Buckley ​— ​the writing of his first novel, Edinburgh, and the election of Donald Trump. By turns commanding, heartbreaking, and wry, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel asks questions about how we create ourselves in life and in art, and how to fight when our dearest truths are under attack. Named a Best Book by: Time, Washington Post, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, Wired, Esquire, Buzzfeed, New York Public Library, Boston Globe, Paris Review, Mother Jones,The A.V. Club, Out Magazine, Book Riot, Electric Literature, PopSugar, The Rumpus, My Republica, Paste, Bitch, Library Journal, Flavorwire, Bustle, Christian Science Monitor, Shelf Awareness, Tor.com, Entertainment Cheat Sheet, Roads and Kingdoms, Chicago Public Library, Hyphen Magazine, Entropy Magazine, Chicago Review of Books, The Coil, iBooks, and Washington Independent Review of Books Winner of the Publishing Triangle's Randy Shilts Award for Gay Nonfiction * Recipient of the Lambda Literary Trustees' Award * Finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay * Finalist for a Lambda Literary Award for Gay Memoir/Biography

Author: Roy Pascal
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1317379675
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 214

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Book Description
Originally published in 1960. Is there an art of autobiography? What are its origins and how has it come to acquire the form we know today? For what does the autobiographer seek, and why should it be so popular? This study suggests some of the answers to these questions. It takes the view that autobiography is one of the dominant and characteristic forms of literary self-expression and deserves examination for its own sake. This book outlines a definition of the form and traces its historical origins and development, analyses its ‘truth’ and talks about what sort of self-knowledge it investigates.

Author: Jimmy Santiago Baca
Publisher: Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN: 1555848907
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 276

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Book Description
The Pushcart Prize–winning poet’s memoir of his criminal youth and years in prison: a “brave and heartbreaking” tale of triumph over brutal adversity (The Nation). Jimmy Santiago Baca’s “astonishing narrative” of his life before, during, and immediately after the years he spent in the maximum-security prison garnered tremendous critical acclaim. An important chronicle that “affirms the triumph of the human spirit,” it went on to win the prestigious 2001 International Prize (Arizona Daily Star). Long considered one of the best poets in America today, Baca was illiterate at the age of twenty-one when he was sentenced to five years in Florence State Prison for selling drugs in Arizona. This raw, unflinching memoir is the remarkable tale of how he emerged after his years in the penitentiary—much of it spent in isolation—with the ability to read and a passion for writing poetry. “Proof there is always hope in even the most desperate lives.” —Fort Worth Star-Telegram “A hell of a book, quite literally. You won’t soon forget it.” —The San Diego U-T “This book will have a permanent place in American letters.” —Jim Harrison, New York Times–bestselling author of A Good Day to Die

Author: Patrick Anderson
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1351720996
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 315

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Book Description
Autobiography of a Disease documents, in experimental form, the experience of extended life-threatening illness in contemporary US hospitals and clinics. The narrative is based primarily on the author’s sudden and catastrophic collapse into a coma and long hospitalization thirteen years ago; but it has also been crafted from twelve years of research on the history of microbiology, literary representations of illness and medical treatment, cultural analysis of MRSA in the popular press, and extended autoethnographic work on medicalization. An experiment in form, the book blends the genres of storytelling, historiography, ethnography, and memoir. Unlike most medical memoirs, told from the perspective of the human patient, Autobiography of a Disease is told from the perspective of a bacterial cluster. This orientation is intended to represent the distribution of perspectives on illness, disability, and pain across subjective centers—from patient to monitoring machine, from body to cell, from caregiver to cared-for—and thus makes sense of illness only in a social context.

Author: William C. Spengemann
Publisher: New Haven : Yale University Press
ISBN:
Category : Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 280

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Book Description

Author: Adetayo Alabi
Publisher: Routledge
ISBN: 1000428869
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 246

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Book Description
Oral Forms of Nigerian Autobiography and Life Stories discusses the oral life stories and poems that Africans, particularly the Yoruba people, have told about the self and community over hundreds of years. Disproving the Eurocentric argument that Africans didn’t produce stories about themselves, the author showcases a vibrant literary tradition of oral autobiographies in Africa and the diaspora. The oral auto/biographies studied in this book show that stories and poems about individuals and their communities have always existed in various African societies and they were used to record, teach, and document history, culture, tradition, identity, and resistance. Genres covered in the book include the panegyric, witches’ and wizards’ narratives, the epithalamium tradition, the hunter’s chant, and Udje of the Urhobo. Providing an important showcase for oral narrative traditions this book will be of interest to students, scholars, and researchers in African and Africana studies, literature and auto/biographical studies.