Showing results by publisher "Random House Audio" in Art & Literature

As an adult, National Public Radio foreign correspondent Jacki Lyden has spent her life on the front lines of some of the world's most dangerous war zones. As a child, she lived in a war zone of a different kind. Her mother, Dolores, suffered from what is now called manic depression. In her manic phases, Dolores became Marie Antoinette or the Queen of Sheba, exotically delusional, yet to young Jacki also transcendent, even inspiring. In time, Jacki grew to accept, even relish, Dolores' bizarre episodes, marveling at her mother's creative energy and using it to fuel her own.

Born in the Bronx, Guy Trebay was raised in an atmosphere of privilege on Long Island’s North Shore after his entrepreneurial father struck business gold with Hawaiian Surf, a wildly successful cologne company that capitalized on the optimism of the 1960s as marketed to “an adventurous new breed of men.’’ But behind the facade of material prosperity lay the emotional disarray of a household dominated by a charismatic, con artist father, a glamorous yet lost and careless mother, a family haunted by tragedy.

It's fall, 1959, and Homer "Sonny" Hickam and his fellow Rocket Boys are in their senior year at Big Creek High, launching handbuilt rockets that soar thousands of feet into the West Virginia sky. But in a season traditionally marked by celebrations of the spirit, Coalwood finds itself at a painful crossroads. The strains can be felt within the Hickam home, where a beleaguered Homer, Sr., is resorting to a daring but risky plan to keep the mine alive, and his wife, Elsie, is feeling increasingly isolated from both her family and the townspeople.

True West: Sam Shepard’s Life, Work, and Times is the story of an American icon, a lasting portrait of Sam Shepard as he really was, revealed by those who knew him best. This sweeping biography charts Shepard’s long and complicated journey from a small town in Southern California to become an internationally known playwright and movie star. The only son of an alcoholic father, Shepard crafted a public persona as an authentic American archetype: the loner, the cowboy, the drifter, the stranger in a strange land.

With the publication of her first book of poems in her sixty-third year, Amy Clampitt rose meteorically to fame, launching herself from obscurity to the upper ranks of American poetry all but overnight, and living a whirlwind eleven years, until her death in 1994. Years later, as renowned poetry scholar Willard Spiegelman wades into her papers and poems, he discovers a woman of dazzling intellect, staunch progressive politics, and an inexhaustible sense of wonder for the world and the words we’ve invented to describe it.

Vir Sanghvi's has been an interesting life—one that took him to Oxford, movie and political journalism, television and magazines—and he depicts it with the silky polish his fans expect of him. In A Rude Life, he turns his dispassionate observer's gaze on himself, and in taut prose tells us about all that he's experienced and nothing more, for he's still a private man. He unhurriedly recounts memories from his childhood and college years, moving on to give us an understanding of how he wrote his biggest stories, while giving us an insider's view into the politics and glamour.

Shahid is widely regarded as one of the finest poets from the Indian subcontinent, and his works are admired across the world, touching millions of lives. A pioneer of ghazal writing in English, he wrote extensively about loss, nostalgia, and home. A witness to the conflict that ravaged his homeland Kashmir, a loss he lamented in his collection The Country Without a Post Office, Shahid has today become a symbol of hope in a violent world.

An intimate peek into the life of the soldier-turned-lyricist Anand Bakshi, from his formative years in undivided Punjab to eventually moving to Bombay and landing his first film Bhala Aadmi in 1958. Along the way, he lost his mother, his place of birth, and his home and wealth, but his zeal to stand up and walk after every stumble and his desire to become a film artist never abated. He eventually rose to become one of the most revered and sought-after lyricists in Hindi cinema, writing nearly 3300 songs in about 630 films over the next five decades.

Before Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Trevor Noah, and Doonesbury, there was Art Buchwald. For more than fifty years, from 1949 to 2006, Art Buchwald’s Pulitzer Prize-winning column of political satire and biting wit made him one of the most widely read American humorists and a popular player in the Washington world of Ethel and Ted Kennedy, Ben Bradlee, and Katharine Graham. Dean Acheson, former U.S. Secretary of State, called Buchwald the “greatest satirist in the English language since Pope and Swift.”

Almost everyone yearns to know their parents more thoroughly before they die, to solve some of those lifelong mysteries. Maybe, just maybe, those answers will help you live your own life. But life doesn’t stop to wait. In his fifties, New Yorker writer Tad Friend is grappling with being a husband and a father as he tries to grasp who he is as a son. Torn between two families, he careens between two stages in life. On some days he feels vigorous, on the brink of greatness when he plays tournament squash.

Die Autobiografie eines der herausragendsten und streitbarsten Schriftstellers der Nachkriegsliteratur. Stefan Heym (1913-2001) ist eine Jahrhundertfigur. Sein Leben war aufs Engste mit der Geschichte des 20. Jahrhunderts verwoben: Er floh vor den Nationalsozialisten, wurde in die USA eingebürgert, unterstützte die amerikanischen Invasionstruppen bei der psychologischen Kriegsführung, übersiedelte 1953 in die DDR und leistete trotzdem Widerstand gegen die SED.

Zwei Autorinnen von internationalem Rang sind fast drei Jahrzehnte lang, von 1962 bis 1990, miteinander im Austausch: über das Schreiben, den Literaturbetrieb im Osten wie im Westen, über die Männer, die Kinder, die Arbeit im Garten und die politischen Systeme, in denen sie leben. Letztere sind es wohl, die diese Freundschaft an ein Ende bringen, nach vielen Jahren des vertrauensvollen Miteinanders. Streng und verspielt, heiter und verzweifelt, schnoddrig und ehrlich - Sarah Kirsch und Christa Wolf beim Schreiben und Leben zuzuhören ist ein Geschenk.

Bei einer Kreuzfahrt betritt man eine eigene Welt, eine schwimmende Rundum-sorglos-Oase. Den Reisenden erwarten Pool, Bar, Shopping-Gelegenheiten, Tanzabende und der reibungslose Übergang von einer Mahlzeit zur anderen. Wen das lückenlose Glück des Bordlebens unterfordert, der kann bei Landausflügen das Abenteuer suchen. Oder das muntere Zusammenspiel von Russen, Amerikanern, Schwaben und Sachsen beobachten. Zu erleben gibt es jedenfalls mehr als genug. Und wer könnte schöner davon erzählen als Wladimir Kaminer, Kreuzfahrer aus Leidenschaft?

Martha Gellhorn was a strong-willed, self-made, modern woman whose journalism, and life, were widely influential at the time and cleared a path for women who came after her. An ardent anti-fascist, she wrote about real people doing real things with intelligence and passion. She is most famous, to her enduring exasperation, as Ernest Hemingway's third wife. Long after their divorce, her short tenure as "Mrs. Hemingway" from 1940 to 1945 invariably eclipsed her writing and, consequently, she never received her full due.

This intellectual biography of Tagore, perhaps the first of its kind, portrays him as a man who was deeply skeptical, self-critical, tormented by conflicts in his inner life, aware of the historical significance of his times and continually interacting with adversaries and friends across the world; someone who built on the heritage of the 19th-century renaissance in India and became one of the makers of the modern Indian mind.

The making of a writer Ruskin Bond's first full-fledged autobiographical book covers his formative years,' till the age of 21. The world of Anglo-India, with all its conflicting pulls, comes alive as he tells his story. His earliest memoirs are bitter-sweet, and relate to Jamnager where he lives till he is six. The happy hours spent in exploring the Ram Vilas Palace grounds and playing with his younger sister Ellen and the palace children are overshadowed by the acrimonious relationship between his parents.

Mirza Mohammad Asadullah Khan Ghalib began writing poetry in Persian at the age of nine and the pre-eminent poet of the time, Mir, predicted a great future for the precocious genius when he was shown his verse. But success and material rewards did not come to Ghalib easily, for the times were against him, and he did not suffer fools gladly even if they occupied positions of importance.

Since 1949, when Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Max Frankel began to write for The New York Times, readers have looked to his work as a lens through which they could witness America's role in a rapidly changing world. In this vivid and unforgettable memoir, Frankel chronicles the times of his extraordinary life as he experienced them...within the context of the news stories that defined an era.

In this inspiring and unflinchingly honest debut memoir, Anya interrogates her memories of her family and examines what it means to be our parents’ children. What do we inherit, and what can we choose to leave behind? How do we escape the ghosts of someone else’s past? And can we learn to love our parents not as our parents, but simply as people? Universal and personal; heartbreaking and redemptive, My Dead Parents helps us to see why sometimes those who love us best hurt us most.

Jorge Ramos, an Emmy award-winning journalist, Univision's longtime anchorman and widely considered the "voice of the voiceless" within the Latino community, was forcefully removed from an Iowa press conference in 2015 by then-candidate Donald Trump after trying to ask about his plans on immigration. In this personal manifesto, Ramos sets out to examine what it means to be a Latino immigrant, or just an immigrant, in present-day America. With current research and statistics, a journalist nose for a story, and his own personal experience, Ramos shows us the changing face of America.