Showing results by publisher "Audible studios" in Literary History & Criticism

This first comprehensive biography of Jewish American writer and humorist Harry Golden (1903-1981) - author of the 1958 national best seller Only in America - illuminates a remarkable life intertwined with the rise of the civil rights movement, Jewish popular culture, and the sometimes precarious position of Jews in the South and across America during the 1950s.

Adam Lennard had never been a sleep-talker until, one night while fast asleep, he yelled, "Enough with the cheese! Enough!" From that night, Adam's exclamations grew exponentially in topic, crudeness, and downright hilarity, and his wife, Karen Slavick-Lennard, had the good sense to write it all down.

When Robert Howard is assigned James Joyce's A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man in his Catholic high school, his teacher, a Jesuit priest, announces, "Other people may read about it, but you are LIVING it!" As promised, the young Howard, growing up in 1970s Detroit, feels an intense identification with the protagonist of Joyce's first novel, Stephen Dedalus.

Critical Mass is a treasure trove of sparkling, spiky prose and a fascinating portrait of our lives and cultural times over the past decades. In an age where a great deal of back scratching and softball pitching pass for criticism, James Wolcott’s fearless essays and reviews offer a bracing taste of the real critical thing.

Reading was so important to Marcel Proust that it sometimes seems he was unable to create a personage without a book in hand. Everybody in his work reads: servants and masters, children and parents, artists and physicians. In this wonderfully entertaining audiobook, scholar and biographer Anka Muhlstein, the author of Balzac’s Omelette, draws out these themes in Proust's work and life, thus providing exciting highlights of some of the finest work in French literature.

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.

Lovers of the printed book, arise! Thirty of today’s top writers are here to tell you you’re not alone. In Bound to Last, an amazing array of authors comes to the passionate defense of the printed book with spirited, never-before-published essays celebrating the hardcover or paperback they hold most dear - not necessarily because of its contents, but because of its significance as a one-of-a-kind, irreplaceable object.

Thomas Jefferson was an avid book-collector, a voracious reader, and a gifted writer - a man who prided himself on his knowledge of classical and modern languages and whose marginal annotations include quotations from Euripides, Herodotus, and Milton. And yet there has never been a literary life of our most literary president.

Humor is the most celebrated of all Jewish responses to modernity. In this book, Ruth Wisse evokes and applauds the genius of spontaneous Jewish joking - as well as the brilliance of comic masterworks by writers like Heinrich Heine, Sholem Aleichem, Isaac Babel, S. Y. Agnon, Isaac Bashevis Singer, and Philip Roth. At the same time, Wisse draws attention to the precarious conditions that call Jewish humor into being - and the price it may exact from its practitioners and audience.

American Libraries editor in chief Leonard Kniffel offers a compelling collection of interviews with prominent figures--all of whom have special connections to libraries. From President Barack Obama to actress Julie Andrews; from basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to former First Lady and librarian Laura Bush and many others, stars of literature, politics, entertainment, and the public arena speak with Kniffel about the ways libraries have been critical in their lives.

What is sentimentality, and where did it come from? For acclaimed scholar and biographer Fred Kaplan, the seeds were planted by the British moral philosophers of the eighteenth century. The Victorians gained from them a theory of human nature, a belief in the innateness of benevolent moral instincts; sentiment, in turn, emerged as a set of shared moral feelings in opposition to both scientific realism and the more ego-driven energies of Romanticism.

Arriving at the port of New York in 1882, a 27-year-old Oscar Wilde quipped he had "nothing to declare but my genius." But as this sparkling narrative reveals, Wilde was, rarely for him, underselling himself. A chronicle of his sensational eleven-month speaking tour of America, Declaring His Genius offers an indelible portrait of both Oscar Wilde and the Gilded Age. Neither Wilde nor America would ever be the same.

Penned by one of Nichol’s numerous literary collaborators, this account reveals the close connections among the writer’s various activities, particularly how the autobiographical inquiries and Freudian dream theory linked with the young poet’s biographical self-awareness. The audiobook demonstrates how the subject’s main psychoanalytic client was his own writing, following Nichol as he explored its slips, accidental puns, and "unintended" meanings and implications for the communal future of the human species - both in high literature and comical prime time television.

In The Sketch-Book of Geoffrey Crayon (1820-21), Irving explores the uneasy relationship of an American writer to English literary traditions. In two sketches, he experiments with tales transplanted from Europe, thereby creating the first classic American short stories: "Rip Van Winkle" and "The Legend of Sleepy Hollow".

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.

Among the unconventional attitudes of the Beat writers as they rebelled against the conformism of the late 1940s and 1950s was their relaxed stance on sexuality. At a time when gay people were considered mentally ill or criminal, the Beats celebrated spontaneity and freedom in thought, word, and action. They were queer in the fullest sense of the word: their fluid sexuality challenged all sexual and romantic conventions.

You’ve read the books. You’ve seen the films. Now get inside the heads of your favorite Twilight characters (just like Edward can!) in The Psychology of Twilight. Explore the minds and motives of Bella, Edward, Jacob, and more with a deeper look at the series that’s captured the hearts and psyches of millions. Find out: How Edward and Jacob match up in an evolutionary psychology smackdown for Bella’s and our affection. Whether Bella’s motorcycle-riding and cliff diving in New Moon are suicidal or her salvation. Why vampires and werewolves aren’t so different after all (at least psychologically)The emotional appeal of love stories like Bella and Edward’s. Why being a part of Twilight fandom is good for your psychological health. Snuggle up on the closest chaise, and get ready to revisit the Twilight Saga with some professional help.

Forensic expert Wagner has crafted a volume that stands out from the plethora of recent memoirs of contemporary scientific detectives. By using the immortal and well-known Sherlock Holmes stories as her starting point, Wagner blends familiar examples from Doyle's accounts into a history of the growth of forensic science, pointing out where fiction strayed from fact.

Arthur Black's voice is unmistakable on the radio and on the page. His is the voice of reason, with a generous helping of funny; the voice that scolds us for our universal human quirks, but who says it with the tone and words that make us laugh out loud at ourselves and our neighbors. A Chip Off the Old Black, Black's latest collection of stories, will knock a sense of humor into any reader, boasting nearly 100 tales featuring everything from yarnbombing to Bambi.

Michael Reynolds recreates the milieu that forged one of America's greatest and most influential writers. He reveals the fraught foundations of Hemingway's persona: his father's self-destructive battle with depression and his mother's fierce independence and spiritualism. He brings Hemingway through World War I, where he was frustrated by being too far away from the action and glory, despite his being wounded and nursed to health by Agnes Von Kurowsky - the older woman with whom he fell terribly in love.