Showing results by publisher "Random House Audio" in Authors

An intimate portrait of a celebrated magic life and the famous and infamous who dropped in, summered, traveled with, played with, and the decades of friendship with everyone from Truman Capote and Robert Penn Warren to the Kennedys, the Bernsteins, Alexander Calder, John Hersey, and Lillian Hellman.

Shirley Jackson is one of the most important American authors of the last hundred years and among our greatest chroniclers of the female experience. This extraordinary compilation of personal correspondence has all the hallmarks of Jackson’s beloved fiction: flashes of the uncanny in the domestic, sparks of horror in the quotidian, and the veins of humor that run through good times and bad.

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 Mafia, the sex industry, and, focusing on his own family, the American immigrant experience.

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.

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.

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.

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.

E. Lynn Harris writes the memoir of his life - from his childhood in Arkansas as a closeted gay boy through his struggling days as a self-published author to his rise as a New York Times best-selling author. In What Becomes of the Brokenhearted, Harris shares an extraordinary life touched by loneliness and depression, but, more important, he reveals the triumphant life of a small-town dreamer who was able through writing to make his dreams - and more - come true.

Die Biografie "Ingeborg Bachmann" von Joachim Hoell stellt die Lebens- und Werkgeschichte der bedeutendsten österreichischen Schriftstellerin des 20. Jahrhunderts umfassend dar: Von ihrer prägenden Kindheit in Klagenfurt während des Nazi-Regimes über ihre Beziehung zu Paul Celan, Hans Werner Henze und Max Frisch bis hin zu ihrem tragischen Tod in Rom.

Friedrich Schiller: Jugendliches Genie, Revolutionär, Dichter. Rüdiger Safranski entstaubt in seiner großen Schiller-Biographie eine der schwungvollsten Gestalten unserer Literatur. Friedrich Schiller läutete mit seinem Enthusiasmus die Epoche der deutschen Geistesgeschichte ein, die man später den "Deutschen Idealismus" genannt hat. Mit diesem großen Buch über Schillers Leben und Denken könnte seine Renaissance beginnen.

100 Jahre musste gewartet werden, denn Mark Twain hatte verfügt, dass seine Autobiographie erst 100 Jahre nach seinem Tod veröffentlicht werden darf...