Showing results by author "Pat Conroy" in All Categories

On February 2, 2002, Stephen King, Pat Conroy, John Grisham, and Peter Straub gathered at New York's Town Hall for a very special evening. These four best selling authors stepped up to the microphone to raise money for one of the most recognizable voices in audiobooks, Frank Muller, an actor who sustained terrible injuries from a motorcycle accident. All profits will be donated to The Wavedancer Foundation, a nonprofit organization that supports artists who fall prey to illness or injury.

Against the sumptuous backdrop of Charleston, South Carolina, South of Broad gathers a unique cast of sinners and saints. Leopold Bloom King, our narrator, is the son of an amiable, loving father who teaches science at the local high school. His mother, an ex-nun, is the high school principal and a well-known Joyce scholar. After Leo's older brother commits suicide at the age of 13, the family struggles with the shattering effects of his death, and Leo, lonely and isolated, searches for something to sustain him

Pat Conroy is without doubt America's favorite storyteller, a writer who portrays the anguished truth of the human heart and the painful secrets of families in richly lyrical prose and unforgettable narratives. Now, in Beach Music, he tells of the dark memories that haunt generations, in a story that spans South Carolina and Rome and reaches back into the unutterable terrors of the Holocaust.

Pat Conroy discusses his latest book, My Reading Life, as well as his experience narrating. About My Reading Life: best-selling author Pat Conroy acknowledges the books that have shaped him and celebrates the profound effect reading has had on his life. In My Reading Life, Conroy revisits a life of passionate reading.

Most kids write stories. Only a few of them grow up to be successful authors. But before there was Carrie, there was Jhonathan and the Witchs. And before there was Rabbit Angstrom, Toyota Dealer, there was Manuel Cirarro, famous detective. Could we have seen the seeds of success in Stephen King's and John Updike's juvenilia? A funny and surprisingly informative gathering of childhood creations by today's most celebrated writers.

During one unforgettable season as a Citadel cadet, Pat Conroy becomes part of a basketball team that is ultimately destined to fail. And yet for a military kid who grew up on the move, the Bulldogs provide a sanctuary from the cold, abrasive father who dominates his life- and a crucible for becoming his own man.

Pat Conroy's father, Donald Patrick Conroy, was a towering figure in his son's life. The Marine Corps fighter pilot was often brutal, cruel, and violent; as Pat says, "I hated my father long before I knew there was an English word for 'hate.'" As the oldest of seven children who were dragged from military base to military base across the South, Pat bore witness to the toll his father's behavior took on his siblings, and especially on his mother, Peg. She was Pat's lifeline to a better world - that of books and culture.

During one unforgettable season as a Citadel cadet, Pat Conroy becomes part of a basketball team that is ultimately destined to fail. And yet for a military kid who grew up on the move, the Bulldogs provide a sanctuary from the cold, abrasive father who dominates his life- and a crucible for becoming his own man.

Tom, Luke et Savannah Wingo ont été élevés à la dure, entre joies et tragédies, par un père pêcheur de crevettes, alcoolique et violent, et une mère fantasque et mythomane. C'est cette vie-là que va raconter Tom à la psychiatre Susan Lowenstein après la énième tentative de suicide de sa soeur, désormais installée à New York.

A collection of fables in the literary tradition of Italo Calvino, Lost Cantos of the Ouroboros Caves brings together medicine men, monks, immortals, witches, seekers, souls in various stages of their cycles in and out of lived-life, and the occasional talking animal, all searching for the meaning of it all and each other. Each fable is a meditation on love, death, growth, pain, identity, self, spirit, and the natural world, as seen from the perspectives of the primal, the celestial, or the spiritual.

A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life by Pat Conroy is a new nonfiction collection of letters, interviews, and magazine articles spanning Conroy's long literary career, supplemented by touching pieces from the beloved author's many friends. The book collects some of Conroy's most charming pieces of short nonfiction, many of them addressed directly to his listeners, with his habitual greeting: "Hey, out there".

A collection of fables in the literary tradition of Italo Calvino (if he were a Taoist seeker), Lost Cantos of the Ouroboros Caves brings together medicine men, monks, immortals, witches, seekers, souls in various stages of their cycles in and out of lived-life, and the occasional talking animal, all searching for the meaning of it all and each other.

From the American South to the ancient ruins of Rome, and from the horrors of the Holocaust to the lingering trauma of Vietnam, Beach Music sings with life's pain and glory. Jack McCall, an American expatriate in Rome with his young daughter, is trying to find some peace after his wife's suicide. But when his sister-in-law begs him to return home, he finds himself drawn into a painful, intimate search for the one haunting secret in his family's past that can heal his anguished heart.

Pat Conroy, the beloved American storyteller, is also a vora­cious reader. He has for years kept a notebook in which he notes words or phrases, just from a love of language. But read­ing for him is not simply a pleasure to be enjoyed in off-hours or a source of inspiration for his own writing. It would hardly be an exaggeration to claim that reading has saved his life, and if not his life then surely his sanity.