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After decades of teaching in graduate school as well as a career in acting, and writing 11 produced plays in NYC, then writing films & television in Hollywood, and later becoming the author of 8 published books—both fiction and non-fiction, and marriage and motherhood—I began to reflect on a long and adventurous life, which led to writing a memoir.
I first read this book decades ago and never forgot it.
When the Russian poets under Stalin, not allowed to write or publish their own poems, once met secretly in Mandelstam’s kitchen to recite their poems. The only food was one boiled egg, which sat on the table between the few poets. And no one ate the egg! Integrity above poverty and famine. Stalin was responsible for sending creatives to Siberia, where so many died- including Osip Mandelstam.
The widow of the great Russian poet and martyr, Osip Mandelstam, gives us the most luminous record of the purges in Russia in the 1930s under Stalin. A wife who kept her husband’s legacy alive by memorizing his entire body of work yet tells the story of these hellish times with humor and heart.
'Suddently, at about one o'clock in the morning, there was a sharp, unbearably explicit knock on the door. 'They've come for Osip', I said'.
In 1933 the poet Osip Mandelstam- friend to Boris Pasternak and Anna Akhmatova- wrote a spirited satire denouncing Josef Stalin. It proved to be a sixteen-line death sentence. For his one act of defiance he was arrested by the Cheka, the secret police, interrogated, exiled and eventually re-arrested. He died en route to one of Stalin's labour camps.
His wife, Nadezhda (1899-1980) was with him on both occasions when he was arrested, and she loyally accompanied…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
After decades of teaching in graduate school as well as a career in acting, and writing 11 produced plays in NYC, then writing films & television in Hollywood, and later becoming the author of 8 published books—both fiction and non-fiction, and marriage and motherhood—I began to reflect on a long and adventurous life, which led to writing a memoir.
As an undergraduate, I loved this memoir of C. G. Jung, which led me years later to obtain a graduate degree in Jungian Psychology.
The most accessible of Jung’s writings are recorded and edited by Aniela Jaffe, who was trained by Jung. This unique memoir reveals not only the origin of Jung’s psychological discoveries but the man behind the genius. With humor and heart, Jung, in his 80's, looks back on a remarkable life and work.
Ahead of his time, Jung leaves a valuable and timeless legacy for today.
'I can understand myself only in the light of inner happenings. It is these that make up the singularity of my life, and with these my autobiography deals' Carl Jung
An eye-opening biography of one of the most influential psychiatrists of the modern age, drawing from his lectures, conversations, and own writings.
In the spring of 1957, when he was eighty-one years old, Carl Gustav Jung undertook the telling of his life story. Memories, Dreams, Reflections is that book, composed of conversations with his colleague and friend Aniela Jaffe, as well as chapters written in his own hand,…
After decades of teaching in graduate school as well as a career in acting, and writing 11 produced plays in NYC, then writing films & television in Hollywood, and later becoming the author of 8 published books—both fiction and non-fiction, and marriage and motherhood—I began to reflect on a long and adventurous life, which led to writing a memoir.
Maxwell, an American actress who later studied with C. G. Jung and became a Jungian psychologist, reflects on her life from America to marriage and a life in Scotland, and her perspective on life and the world.
I return to this unsentimental wisdom of an intelligent and remarkable woman facing the later years of a life well lived.
Playwright and Jungian analyst Florida Scott-Maxwell explores the unique predicament of one's later years: when one feels both cut off from the past and out of step with the present; when the body rebels at activity but the mind becomes more passionate than ever. Written when Maxwell was in her eighties, The Measure of My Days offers a panoramic vision of the issues that haunt us throughout our lives: the struggle to achieve goodness; how to maintain individuality in a mass society; and how to emerge--out of suffering, loss, and limitation--with something approaching wisdom. Maxwell's incredible wisdom, humanity, and dignity…
A magisterial history of Indigenous North America that places the power of Native nations at its center, telling their story from the rise of ancient cities more than a thousand years ago to fights for sovereignty that continue today
After decades of teaching in graduate school as well as a career in acting, and writing 11 produced plays in NYC, then writing films & television in Hollywood, and later becoming the author of 8 published books—both fiction and non-fiction, and marriage and motherhood—I began to reflect on a long and adventurous life, which led to writing a memoir.
Some years ago in Hollywood, Bradbury introduced my first film premiere as a Hollywood screenwriter, The Christmas Wife. Ten years later, I met again with Ray Bradbury at a Film Festival and was amazed that this elder author remembered both me and my first film.
One of America’s best authors of science fiction leaves this memoir of his life and work. It is not only an entertaining read, but a tool for writers in any genre desiring to fulfill their potential.
I’m the author of the short story collection I Meant It Once. I often say it’s a book about being a mess in your twenties, but to speak more personally, writing it was a necessity, a way to make sense of both the intensity and mundanity of my own experiences. I love a book where you can palpably feel the author working to make sense of their own life, through language—and, in turn, sorting out what it is for any of us to be a person. Books like these are essential reading when life feels thorny, beautiful, and impossible to make sense of, and all you can do is try to write it down.
I don’t set much store by orderly chronology, in life or writing—as might be clear from my book, where old memories live vividly alongside the present moment!
More interesting to me is how memory accumulates and morphs over time, and how stories live in our minds. Needless to say I adore Julavits’s non-chronological diary The Folded Clock (and what a title)! In gorgeously detailed individual sections, she immerses us in her life without regard for the precise sequence of events. We’re left with a beautiful jumble, which is surely truer than how life is anyway.
Rereading her childhood diaries, Heidi Julavits hoped to find incontrovertible proof that she was always destined to be a writer. Instead, they “revealed me to possess the mind of a phobic tax auditor.” Thus was born a desire to try again, to chronicle her daily life—now as a forty-something woman, wife, mother, and writer. A meditation on time and self, youth and aging, friendship and romance, faith and fate, and art and ambition, in The Folded Clock one of the most gifted prose stylists in American letters explodes the typically confessional diary form with…
Literary agents often say they are looking for books about ‘quirky’ female protagonists. I’m more entertained by female characters who feel real to me. When I write, I make myself uncomfortable a lot of the time, trying to express the many ways people both disguise and reveal the truth. I blame my devotion to my parents for this because when I left home in Massachusetts for college in the foreign land of Indiana, studied for a year in China, then studied in Italy, then worked in Taiwan, then moved to Japan, and later to Singapore, I wrote them copious descriptive, emotional letters. My parents are gone now, but in a way, I’m still doing that.
There are similarities between this novel and mine – the woman at its heart is an American named Lilia, she’s had adventures, and she is taking stock. But then the fascinating differences begin. She is 81, not 57; she’s had marriages and children; above all, the narrative about Lilia is only one layer of the story, as within the book is another book, the diary of a man she had an affair with when very young, and she annotates his revelations with her own. This resonant novel’s strata – like limestone folds, the sediment of a life brought back to the surface – give Lilia, initially hard and sharp, more and more texture as the story unfolds.
Richly expansive and deeply moving, an intimate novel of secret lives and painful histories from one of the finest storytellers we have
'This brilliant novel examines lives lived, losses accumulated, and the slipperiness of perception. Yiyun Li writes deeply, drolly, and with elegance about history, even as it's happening. She is one of my favorite writers, and Must I Go is an extraordinary book.' Meg Wolitzer
Lilia Liska is 81. She has shrewdly outlived three husbands, raised five children and seen the arrival of seventeen grandchildren. Now she has turned her keen attention to a strange little book published by…
Elsie has two feet in the 20th century. Smith has one foot in the 19th. Their marriage, founded on physical attraction, is built on sand as all around them the earth of Europe also starts to quake. Prised apart by emotional conflict and the loss of two children they are…
I pride myself on my independence and sense of adventure. I started traveling the world with my family when I was 3 and I haven’t stopped since. When you travel, you have to cope with new situations on a daily basis and navigate different obstacles to meet your needs. An interest in adventure and how people cope with new situations are the biggest reasons why I have a passion for books dealing with overcoming obstacles. Before I retired to Spain, I was a teacher of students between 10 and 15 years old. I chose two of the books I recommended to read to my students when I was a teacher.
This book captured me from start to finish. Like my book, this story is told in a gripping journal format. A meteor knocks the moon off its orbit and this causes catastrophic consequences on earth. Summer turns to a bitterly cold winter and Miranda and her two brothers and mother must figure out how they will survive in such harsh conditions. Having enough food to survive is a constant concern. This book helps us realize that when things get really awful, all that matters is food, water, staying warm, and remaining together as a family. All other concerns fall away.
New York Times bestseller! A heart-stopping post-apocalyptic thriller that's "absorbing from first to last page."*
When a meteor knocks the moon closer to earth, Miranda, a high school sophomore, takes shelter with her family.
Told in a year’s worth of journal entries, Life as We Knew It chronicles the human struggle to hold on to the most important resource of all—hope—in an increasingly desperate and unfamiliar world.
As August turns dark and wintery in northeastern Pennsylvania, Miranda, her two brothers, and their mother retreat to the unexpected safe haven of their sunroom, where they subsist on stockpiled food and limited…
The topic of immigration is deeply in my heart because I am an immigrant myself. I came from El Salvador to the United States when I was 14 years old. Now, I am a teacher in an elementary school. Most of my students are immigrants or children of immigrants. Children and families immigrate around the world looking for better opportunities. These books were written by immigrant authors or authors who had lived closely with immigrants. The stories are real and describe the authentic journey, and experiences of children and families traveling from their native countries to the United States.
Journals are important to write our feelings, hopes, and dreams. In this wonderful book, Amada uses her journal to write about her journey from Mexico to Los Angeles. Amada records her fears, hopes, and dreams for their new life in her diary. What if she can’t learn English? How can she leave her best friend? Along the way, Amada learns that with her family's love and her belief in herself, she can weather any change.
One night, Amada overhears her parents whisper about moving from Mexico to Los Angeles, where greater opportunity awaits. As she and her family make the journey north, Amada records her fears, hopes, and dreams for their new life in her diary. What if she can’t learn English? How can she leave her best friend? Along the way, Amada learns that with her family's love and her belief in herself, she can weather any change. With humor and insight, Pérez recounts the story of her family’s immigration to America. Maya Christina Gonzalez' vibrant artwork captures every detail of their journey.
Social history has always been my passion: unless you know how people thought, felt and lived, even down to how they dressed and ate, it is often impossible to understand why they acted as they did. And no period is as fascinating to me as the inter-war years; after WW1, the greatest conflict the world had ever seen, the upcoming generations determined to break barriers, discard the last vestiges of what they saw as hidebound custom, to invent new, freer ways of writing, painting, dancing - and to have fun. And for most of this post-war generation, there was nowhere like Paris.
This three-volume epic that begins in 1918 and ends shortly before its author’s death in 1957 gives an unrivalled picture of the social and political mores that governed a certain section of English society.
Channon, a conscientious Member of Parliament for much of his life, was a crashing snob with a gift for observation and occasional piercing insights into his own character. He knew ‘everybody’ and his accounts of their intimate behavior – and his own – is compelling.
The Sunday Times bestselling edition of Chips Channon's remarkable diaries.
Born in Chicago in 1897, 'Chips' Channon settled in England after the Great War, married into the immensely wealthy Guinness family, and served as Conservative MP for Southend-on-Sea from 1935 until his death in 1958. His career was unremarkable. His diaries are quite the opposite. Elegant, gossipy and bitchy by turns, they are the unfettered observations of a man who went everywhere and who knew everybody. Whether describing the antics of London society in the interwar years, or the growing scandal surrounding his close friends Edward VIII and Wallis Simpson…
Nominated for the Shamus Award for Best Original Paperback, and winner of the Beverly Hills Book Award.
Francis Hoyt, arrogant, athletic, brilliant, manipulative and ruthless is a master burglar who specializes in stealing high-end silver and jewelry. He's never been caught in the act. Recently retired Connecticut state investigator Charlie…
I am a historian, and I am fascinated by the interplay and tensions between our moral and material lives. In my books, I try to recover how people in earlier periods thought about good and bad and why they acted the way they did. I try to understand how norms and customs change over time and how we came to think of our own as “normal,” which was all but normal not so long ago. I do not believe historians should play being prophets, but I do believe history can help us make better sense of the present.
As a historian, I constantly try to get into the hearts and minds of people in the past.
For socialist East Germany, these diaries by the writer Brigitte Reimann let us see what it meant to be a woman in the GDR, to live and love, to build socialism, and then, in 1961, to see the Berlin Wall close off one’s world suddenly.
I enjoyed success too early, married the wrong man, and hung out with the wrong people; too many men have liked me, and I've liked too many men.
Frank and refreshing, Brigitte Reimann's collected diaries provide a candid account of life in socialist Germany. With an upbeat tempo and amusing tone, I Have No Regrets contains detailed accounts of the author's love affairs, daily life, writing, and reflections. Like the heroines in her stories, Reimann was impetuous and outspoken, addressing issues and sensibilities otherwise repressed in the era of the German Democratic Republic. She followed the state's call for…
