Showing results by publisher "Audible studios" in Authors

The saga of John Kennedy Toole is one of the greatest stories of American literary history. In Butterfly in the Typewriter, Cory MacLauchlin draws on scores of new interviews with friends, family, and colleagues as well as full access to the extensive Toole archive at Tulane University, capturing his upbringing in New Orleans, his years in New York City, his frenzy of writing in Puerto Rico, his return to his beloved city, and his descent into paranoia and depression.

Early one autumn afternoon in pursuit of an elusive book on her shelves, Susan Hill encountered dozens of others that she had never read, or forgotten she owned, or wanted to read for a second time. The discovery inspired her to embark on a year-long voyage through her books, forsaking new purchases in order to get to know her own collection again. A book which is left on a shelf for a decade is a dead thing, but it is also a chrysalis, packed with the potential to burst into new life.

Meri Duniya Mere Dost is a collection of Hindi translations of Singh’s writings that consists of personal notes, memoirs, articles, philosophical musings and some wit from this beloved author whose career has spanned multiple decades. The work consists of five sections, each dedicated to an aspect of Singh’s life, giving us a glimpse of his world, his memories, his thoughts, and his eccentricities.

He prepared therefore for the meditative journey that proves most excruciating in Limbo, a rounding through the past, a trip back! It is a venture full of perils. To meditate on TV might prove equal to writing a recollection of an enemy one has never met and cannot quite believe in. Indeed, how to conceive of an enemy who is without personal animosity? It was like writing a memoir of an oxymoron. Limbo set its tasks.

An intimate portrait of the lives and writings of the Brontë sisters, drawn from the objects they possessed. In this unique and lovingly detailed biography of a literary family that has enthralled readers for nearly two centuries, Victorian literature scholar Deborah Lutz illuminates the complex and fascinating lives of the Brontës through the things they wore, stitched, wrote on, and inscribed.

Jeffrey Tambor (Arrested Development, The Larry Sanders Show) is "Maura", the Pfefferman Family patriarch turned matriarch. Here, he discusses the discovery of personal authenticity, what it's like to inhabit the psyche of a transitioning woman on her "maiden voyage", and his newfound appreciation for getting his nails done.

In Russian literary marriages, the wives of some of the most famous authors of all time did not resent taking a "secondary position", although to call their position secondary does not do justice to the vital role these women played in the creation of some of the greatest literary works in history. Living under restrictive regimes, many of these women battled censorship and preserved the writers' illicit archives, often risking their own lives to do so. They established a tradition all their own, unmatched in the West.

In My Struggle with Faith, Girzone recounts the long, complicated, and often painful process he went through as he sought to find peace with his beliefs. He writes about hard decisions that set him on unexpected paths and about the immense feelings of loneliness he experienced in making those choices. In thoughtful and thought-provoking reflections he brings to life the years of searching and the deep, critical thinking that gave him the courage to embrace his beliefs, opening a world of excitement and adventure for him.

When Lucy Mangan was little, stories were everything. They opened up new worlds and cast light on all the complexities she encountered in this one. She was whisked away to Narnia and Kirrin Island and Wonderland. She ventured down rabbit holes and womble burrows into midnight gardens and chocolate factories. She wandered the countryside with Milly-Molly-Mandy and played by the tracks with the Railway Children.

Raymond Chandler was one of the most original and enduring crime novelists of the 20th century. Yet much of his pre-writing life, including his unconventional marriage, has remained shrouded in mystery. In this compelling, wholly original book, Judith Freeman sets out to solve the puzzle of who Chandler was and how he became the writer who would create in Philip Marlowe an icon of American culture.

Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet is based on interviews, letters, and an extraordinary collection of unpublished papers that had never before been examined. Delmore Schwartz was only 24 in 1938 when his first book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, was published. He received praise from T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams.

The poetry was in the prose; it stayed and sprung its rhythms, chorded its ideas, concentrated its images. Every other novel claims to be written in 'poetic prose'; the real thing, when you come across it, is actually shocking. Nam Le takes the listener on a thrilling intellectual ride in this sharp, bold essay. Encompassing identity politics, metaphysics, the relationship between life and art, and the ‘Australianness’ of Malouf’s work, it is unlike anything else written about one of Australia’s most acclaimed writers.

In this lyrical meditation about the why of writing poetry, Joy Harjo reflects on significant points of illumination, experience, and questioning from her 50 years as a poet. Comprised of intimate vignettes that take us through the author’s life journey as a youth in the late 1960s, a single mother, and a champion of Native nations, this book offers a fresh understanding of how poetry functions as an expression of purpose, spirit, community, and memory.

Hunter S. Thompson, "smart hillbilly"; boy of the South; born and bred in Louisville, Kentucky; son of an insurance salesman and a stay-at-home mom; public school-educated; jailed at 17 on a bogus petty robbery charge; member of the US Air Force (airman second class); copy boy for Time; writer for The National Observer; et cetera.

"How lucky I was, arriving in New York just as everything was about to go to hell." That would be in the autumn of 1972, when a very young and green James Wolcott arrived from Maryland, full of literary dreams, equipped with a letter of introduction from Norman Mailer, and having no idea what was about to hit him. Landing at a time of accelerating municipal squalor and, paradoxically, gathering cultural energy in all spheres as "Downtown" became a category of art and life unto itself, he embarked upon his sentimental education, seventies New York style.

In this deeply personal book, the celebrated Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat reflects on art and exile. Inspired by Albert Camus and adapted from her own lectures for Princeton University’s Toni Morrison Lecture Series, here Danticat tells stories of artists who create despite (or because of) the horrors that drove them from their homelands. Combining memoir and essay, these moving and eloquent pieces examine what it means to be an artist from a country in crisis.

A lyrical and authentic book that recounts the story of a border-town family in Brownsville, Texas in the 1980s, as each member of the family desperately tries to assimilate and escape life on the border to become "real" Americans, even at the expense of their shared family history. This is really un-mined territory in the memoir genre that gives in-depth insight into a previously unexplored corner of America.

In The Lives of Michel Foucault, David Macey quotes the iconic French philosopher as speaking “nostalgically...of 'an unforgettable evening on LSD, in carefully prepared doses, in the desert night, with delicious music, [and] nice people'". This came to pass in 1975, when Foucault spent Memorial Day weekend in Southern California at the invitation of Simeon Wade - ostensibly to guest-lecture at the Claremont Graduate School where Wade was an assistant professor, but in truth to explore what he called the Valley of Death.

This is the story of an independent woman who is a model for our time—photographer Toby Molenaar. It begins in Holland during World War II, when her country is decimated by the occupying German army and she is literally left to starve. As a little girl, she learns to be self-sufficient—survival is the order of the day. Courage, indomitable spirit, an open mind, and accountability only to herself are the stuff of this fascinating and inspirational story.

Ben Mattlin lives a normal, independent life. Why is that interesting? Because Mattlin was born with spinal muscular atrophy, a congenital weakness from which he was expected to die in childhood. Not only did Mattlin live through childhood, he became one of the first students in a wheelchair to attend Harvard, from which he graduated and became a professional writer. His advantage?