I Am an Open Book, My Side of the Story: A memoir full of short stories and poems

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Author :
Publisher : America Star Books
ISBN 13 : 1683943643
Total Pages : 68 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (839 download)

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Book Synopsis I Am an Open Book, My Side of the Story: A memoir full of short stories and poems by : Kristen M. Bass

Download or read book I Am an Open Book, My Side of the Story: A memoir full of short stories and poems written by Kristen M. Bass and published by America Star Books. This book was released on 2011-10-03 with total page 68 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: All of her life she was silent. A twin brother born of downs-syndrome and a mother struggling with mental illness. Kristen’s life seems to be headed for a road of depression and despair. This book isn’t intended to solicit sympathy but to show you how a girl launched into a gleam of hope and turned her sorrows into triumph. Sit back, and enjoy while she open’s herself up and tells you her side of the story.

Lessons on Expulsion

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Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 1555977782
Total Pages : 91 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (559 download)

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Book Synopsis Lessons on Expulsion by : Erika L. Sánchez

Download or read book Lessons on Expulsion written by Erika L. Sánchez and published by . This book was released on 2017-07-11 with total page 91 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An award-winning and hard-hitting new voice in contemporary American poetry The first time I ever came the light was weak and carnivorous. I covered my eyes and the night cleared its dumb throat. I heard my mother wringing her hands the next morning. Of course I put my underwear on backwards, of course the elastic didn't work. What I wanted most at that moment was a sandwich. But I just nursed on this leather whip. I just splattered my sheets with my sadness. —from “Poem of My Humiliations” “What is life but a cross / over rotten water?” Poet, novelist, and essayist Erika L. Sánchez’s powerful debut poetry collection explores what it means to live on both sides of the border—the border between countries, languages, despair and possibility, and the living and the dead. Sánchez tells her own story as the daughter of undocumented Mexican immigrants and as part of a family steeped in faith, work, grief, and expectations. The poems confront sex, shame, race, and an America roiling with xenophobia, violence, and laws of suspicion and suppression. With candor and urgency, and with the unblinking eyes of a journalist, Sánchez roves from the individual life into the lives of sex workers, narco-traffickers, factory laborers, artists, and lovers. What emerges is a powerful, multifaceted portrait of survival. Lessons on Expulsion is the first book by a vibrant, essential new writer now breaking into the national literary landscape.

Transnational, National, and Personal Voices

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Author :
Publisher : LIT Verlag Münster
ISBN 13 : 9783825882785
Total Pages : 268 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (827 download)

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Book Synopsis Transnational, National, and Personal Voices by : Begoña Simal González

Download or read book Transnational, National, and Personal Voices written by Begoña Simal González and published by LIT Verlag Münster. This book was released on 2004 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "The growing heterogeneity of Asian American and Asian diasporic voices has also given rise to variegated theoretical approaches to these literatures. This book attempts to encompass both the increasing awareness of diasporic and transnational issues, and more ""traditional"" analyses of Asian American culture and literature. Thus, the articles in this collection range from investigations into the politics of literary and cinematic representation, to ""digging"" into the past through ""literary archeology"", or analyzing how ""consequential"" bodies can be in recent literature by Asian American and Asian diasporic women writers. The book closes with an interview with critic and writer Shirley Lim, where she insightfully deals with these ""transnational, national, and personal"" issues. Elisabetta Marino is Assistant Professor of English literature at the University of Rome ""Tor Vergata"". Her main fields of interest are Asian American and Asian British literature, children's literature, Italian American literature. Begoña Simal is Assistant Professor of English literature at the Universidade da Coruña, Spain. She has published critical work on both Asian American literature and comparative ""cross-ethnic"" studies. "

Ordinary Light

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Publisher : Knopf
ISBN 13 : 0307962660
Total Pages : 370 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (79 download)

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Book Synopsis Ordinary Light by : Tracy K. Smith

Download or read book Ordinary Light written by Tracy K. Smith and published by Knopf. This book was released on 2015-03-31 with total page 370 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: National Book Award Finalist From the dazzlingly original Pulitzer Prize-winning poet hailed for her “extraordinary range and ambition” (The New York Times Book Review): a quietly potent memoir that explores coming-of-age and the meaning of home against a complex backdrop of race, faith, and the unbreakable bond between a mother and daughter. The youngest of five children, Tracy K. Smith was raised with limitless affection and a firm belief in God by a stay-at-home mother and an engineer father. But just as Tracy is about to leave home for college, her mother is diagnosed with cancer, a condition she accepts as part of God’s plan. Ordinary Light is the story of a young woman struggling to fashion her own understanding of belief, loss, history, and what it means to be black in America. In lucid, clear prose, Smith interrogates her childhood in suburban California, her first collision with independence at Harvard, and her Alabama-born parents’ recollections of their own youth in the Civil Rights era. These dizzying juxtapositions—of her family’s past, her own comfortable present, and the promise of her future—will in due course compel Tracy to act on her passions for love and “ecstatic possibility,” and her desire to become a writer. Shot through with exquisite lyricism, wry humor, and an acute awareness of the beauty of everyday life, Ordinary Light is a gorgeous kaleidoscope of self and family, one that skillfully combines a child’s and teenager’s perceptions with adult retrospection. Here is a universal story of being and becoming, a classic portrait of the ways we find and lose ourselves amid the places we call home.

A Lucky Man

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Publisher : Graywolf Press
ISBN 13 : 1555979955
Total Pages : 288 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (559 download)

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Book Synopsis A Lucky Man by : Jamel Brinkley

Download or read book A Lucky Man written by Jamel Brinkley and published by Graywolf Press. This book was released on 2018-05-01 with total page 288 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION In the nine expansive, searching stories of A Lucky Man, fathers and sons attempt to salvage relationships with friends and family members and confront mistakes made in the past. An imaginative young boy from the Bronx goes swimming with his group from day camp at a backyard pool in the suburbs, and faces the effects of power and privilege in ways he can barely grasp. A teen intent on proving himself a man through the all-night revel of J’Ouvert can’t help but look out for his impressionable younger brother. A pair of college boys on the prowl follow two girls home from a party and have to own the uncomfortable truth of their desires. And at a capoeira conference, two brothers grapple with how to tell the story of their family, caught in the dance of their painful, fractured history. Jamel Brinkley’s stories, in a debut that announces the arrival of a significant new voice, reflect the tenderness and vulnerability of black men and boys whose hopes sometimes betray them, especially in a world shaped by race, gender, and class—where luck may be the greatest fiction of all.

The Song Poet

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Publisher : Metropolitan Books
ISBN 13 : 1627794956
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.6/5 (277 download)

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Book Synopsis The Song Poet by : Kao Kalia Yang

Download or read book The Song Poet written by Kao Kalia Yang and published by Metropolitan Books. This book was released on 2016-05-10 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: From the author of The Latehomecomer, a powerful memoir of her father, a Hmong song poet who sacrificed his gift for his children's future in America In the Hmong tradition, the song poet recounts the story of his people, their history and tragedies, joys and losses; extemporizing or drawing on folk tales, he keeps the past alive, invokes the spirits and the homeland, and records courtships, births, weddings, and wishes. Following her award-winning book The Latehomecomer, Kao Kalia Yang now retells the life of her father Bee Yang, the song poet, a Hmong refugee in Minnesota, driven from the mountains of Laos by American's Secret War. Bee lost his father as a young boy and keenly felt his orphanhood. He would wander from one neighbor to the next, collecting the things they said to each other, whispering the words to himself at night until, one day, a song was born. Bee sings the life of his people through the war-torn jungle and a Thai refugee camp. But the songs fall away in the cold, bitter world of a Minneapolis housing project and on the factory floor until, with the death of Bee's mother, the songs leave him for good. But before they do, Bee, with his poetry, has polished a life of poverty for his children, burnished their grim reality so that they might shine. Written with the exquisite beauty for which Kao Kalia Yang is renowned, The Song Poet is a love story -- of a daughter for her father, a father for his children, a people for their land, their traditions, and all that they have lost.

Why I Write

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Publisher : Renard Press Ltd
ISBN 13 : 1913724263
Total Pages : 15 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (137 download)

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Book Synopsis Why I Write by : George Orwell

Download or read book Why I Write written by George Orwell and published by Renard Press Ltd. This book was released on 2021-01-01 with total page 15 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: George Orwell set out ‘to make political writing into an art’, and to a wide extent this aim shaped the future of English literature – his descriptions of authoritarian regimes helped to form a new vocabulary that is fundamental to understanding totalitarianism. While 1984 and Animal Farm are amongst the most popular classic novels in the English language, this new series of Orwell’s essays seeks to bring a wider selection of his writing on politics and literature to a new readership. In Why I Write, the first in the Orwell’s Essays series, Orwell describes his journey to becoming a writer, and his movement from writing poems to short stories to the essays, fiction and non-fiction we remember him for. He also discusses what he sees as the ‘four great motives for writing’ – ‘sheer egoism’, ‘aesthetic enthusiasm’, ‘historical impulse’ and ‘political purpose’ – and considers the importance of keeping these in balance. Why I Write is a unique opportunity to look into Orwell’s mind, and it grants the reader an entirely different vantage point from which to consider the rest of the great writer’s oeuvre. 'A writer who can – and must – be rediscovered with every age.' — Irish Times

Strange Relation

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Publisher : Paul Dry Books
ISBN 13 : 1589882504
Total Pages : 218 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (898 download)

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Book Synopsis Strange Relation by : Rachel Hadas

Download or read book Strange Relation written by Rachel Hadas and published by Paul Dry Books. This book was released on with total page 218 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[A] thoughtful and lucid tale of love, companionship, and heartbreaking illness." —Lydia Davis In 2004 Rachel Hadas's husband, George Edwards, a composer and professor of music at Columbia University, was diagnosed with early-onset dementia at the age of sixty-one. Strange Relation is her account of "losing" George. Her narrative begins when George's illness can no longer be ignored, and ends in 2008 soon after his move to a dementia facility (when, after thirty years of marriage, she finds herself no longer living with her husband). Within the cloudy confines of those difficult years, years when reading and writing were an essential part of what kept her going, she "tried to keep track…tried to tell the truth." "If only all doctors and nurses and social workers who care for the chronically ill could read this book. If only patients and family members stricken with such losses could receive what this book can give them. While Strange Relation relates one illness and the life of one family, it is also, poetically, about all illnesses, all families, all struggles, all living. The art achieves the dual life of the universal and the particular, marking it as timeless, making it for us all necessary."—Rita Charon, MD, PhD, Program in Narrative Medicine, Columbia University "Rachel Hadas's own wonderfully resonant poems, along with the rich collection of verse and prose by other writers that she weaves into her story, clarify and illuminate over and over again this thoughtful and lucid tale of love, companionship, and heartbreaking illness—illness that, as she shows us so well, is at once frighteningly alien and also deeply a part of our unavoidable vulnerability as mortal beings. Beautifully written, totally engrossing, and very sad."—Lydia Davis "Strange Relation is a deeply moving, deeply personal, beautifully written exploration of how the power of grief can be met with the power of literature, and how solace can be found in the space between them."—Frank Huyler "A poignant memoir of love, creativity and human vulnerability. Rachel Hadas brings a poet's incisive eye to the labyrinth of dementia."—Danielle Ofri, MD, PhD, author of Medicine in Translation and Singular Intimacies "Like an elegy, Strange Relation is about loss and grief. Like all elegies, it also memorializes and celebrates. Rachel Hadas, in the course of her personal narrative, cites accounts of dementia, in its social and personal meanings."—Robert Pinsky "Brilliant and tough-minded, poignant but clear-headed, Rachel Hadas shines a steady light on her experience as the wife of an accomplished composer who, at a comparatively early age, descended into dementia. Strange Relation never sacrifices truth for easy answers. Instead, Hadas uses literature to chart a course through wrenching complexities. This lauded and exceptional poet shows how language itself, the very thing her husband loses, became her shield as she crossed the ravaged lands of decision-making, making new discoveries, new friends, and new sense of the world. Strange Relation snaps with bravery, intelligence, and Hadas' tart, candid wisdom."—Molly Peacock "Strange Relation is a beautifully written and piercingly honest account of life with a brilliant man as he descends into dementia, in his sixties."—Reeve Lindbergh

Crying in the Bathroom

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Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0593296958
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (932 download)

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Book Synopsis Crying in the Bathroom by : Erika L. Sánchez

Download or read book Crying in the Bathroom written by Erika L. Sánchez and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2023-07-11 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Equal parts pee-your-pants hilarity and break your heart poignancy- like the perfect brunch date you never want to end!"--America Ferrera, Emmy award-winning actress in Ugly Betty From the New York Times bestselling author of I Am Not Your Perfect Mexican Daughter, an utterly original memoir-in-essays that is as deeply moving as it is hilarious Growing up as the daughter of Mexican immigrants in Chicago in the nineties, Erika Sánchez was a self-described pariah, misfit, and disappointment—a foul-mouthed, melancholic rabble-rouser who painted her nails black but also loved comedy, often laughing so hard with her friends that she had to leave her school classroom. Twenty-five years later, she’s now an award-winning novelist, poet, and essayist, but she’s still got an irrepressible laugh, an acerbic wit, and singular powers of perception about the world around her. In these essays, Sánchez writes about everything from sex to white feminism to debilitating depression, revealing an interior life rich with ideas, self-awareness, and perception. Raunchy, insightful, unapologetic, and brutally honest, Crying in the Bathroom is Sánchez at her best—a book that will make you feel that post-confessional high that comes from talking for hours with your best friend.

Crying in H Mart

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Author :
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0525657754
Total Pages : 257 pages
Book Rating : 4.5/5 (256 download)

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Book Synopsis Crying in H Mart by : Michelle Zauner

Download or read book Crying in H Mart written by Michelle Zauner and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2021-04-20 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: #1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the indie rock sensation known as Japanese Breakfast, an unforgettable memoir about family, food, grief, love, and growing up Korean American—“in losing her mother and cooking to bring her back to life, Zauner became herself” (NPR). • CELEBRATING OVER ONE YEAR ON THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER LIST In this exquisite story of family, food, grief, and endurance, Michelle Zauner proves herself far more than a dazzling singer, songwriter, and guitarist. With humor and heart, she tells of growing up one of the few Asian American kids at her school in Eugene, Oregon; of struggling with her mother's particular, high expectations of her; of a painful adolescence; of treasured months spent in her grandmother's tiny apartment in Seoul, where she and her mother would bond, late at night, over heaping plates of food. As she grew up, moving to the East Coast for college, finding work in the restaurant industry, and performing gigs with her fledgling band--and meeting the man who would become her husband--her Koreanness began to feel ever more distant, even as she found the life she wanted to live. It was her mother's diagnosis of terminal cancer, when Michelle was twenty-five, that forced a reckoning with her identity and brought her to reclaim the gifts of taste, language, and history her mother had given her. Vivacious and plainspoken, lyrical and honest, Zauner's voice is as radiantly alive on the page as it is onstage. Rich with intimate anecdotes that will resonate widely, and complete with family photos, Crying in H Mart is a book to cherish, share, and reread.

The Long Goodbye

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Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 1101486554
Total Pages : 320 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (14 download)

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Book Synopsis The Long Goodbye by : Meghan O'Rourke

Download or read book The Long Goodbye written by Meghan O'Rourke and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2011-04-14 with total page 320 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "Anguished, beautifully written... The Long Goodbye is an elegiac depiction of drama as old as life." -- The New York Times Book Review From one of America's foremost young literary voices, a transcendent portrait of the unbearable anguish of grief and the enduring power of familial love. What does it mean to mourn today, in a culture that has largely set aside rituals that acknowledge grief? After her mother died of cancer at the age of fifty-five, Meghan O'Rourke found that nothing had prepared her for the intensity of her sorrow. In the first anguished days, she began to create a record of her interior life as a mourner, trying to capture the paradox of grief-its monumental agony and microscopic intimacies-an endeavor that ultimately bloomed into a profound look at how caring for her mother during her illness changed and strengthened their bond. O'Rourke's story is one of a life gone off the rails, of how watching her mother's illness-and separating from her husband-left her fundamentally altered. But it is also one of resilience, as she observes her family persevere even in the face of immeasurable loss. With lyricism and unswerving candor, The Long Goodbye conveys the fleeting moments of joy that make up a life, and the way memory can lead us out of the jagged darkness of loss. Effortlessly blending research and reflection, the personal and the universal, it is not only an exceptional memoir, but a necessary one.

The Literary World

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Author :
Publisher :
ISBN 13 :
Total Pages : 1250 pages
Book Rating : 4.:/5 (334 download)

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Book Synopsis The Literary World by :

Download or read book The Literary World written by and published by . This book was released on 1886 with total page 1250 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

International Who's Who of Authors and Writers 2004

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Publisher : Psychology Press
ISBN 13 : 9781857431797
Total Pages : 644 pages
Book Rating : 4.4/5 (317 download)

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Book Synopsis International Who's Who of Authors and Writers 2004 by : Europa Publications

Download or read book International Who's Who of Authors and Writers 2004 written by Europa Publications and published by Psychology Press. This book was released on 2003 with total page 644 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Accurate and reliable biographical information essential to anyone interested in the world of literature TheInternational Who's Who of Authors and Writersoffers invaluable information on the personalities and organizations of the literary world, including many up-and-coming writers as well as established names. With over 8,000 entries, this updated edition features: * Concise biographical information on novelists, authors, playwrights, columnists, journalists, editors, and critics * Biographical details of established writers as well as those who have recently risen to prominence * Entries detailing career, works published, literary awards and prizes, membership, and contact addresses where available * An extensive listing of major international literary awards and prizes, and winners of those prizes * A directory of major literary organizations and literary agents * A listing of members of the American Academy of Arts and Letters

Contemporary American Poetry

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Author :
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0140586180
Total Pages : 289 pages
Book Rating : 4.1/5 (45 download)

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Book Synopsis Contemporary American Poetry by : Various

Download or read book Contemporary American Poetry written by Various and published by Penguin. This book was released on 1989-01-18 with total page 289 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Within the pages of this anthology, now in its second edition, you’ll find 39 American poets from across the twentieth century. In his introduction, editor and Guggenheim fellow Donald Hall, describes the face of American poetry as "subjective." The American poem “reveals through images not particular pain, but general subjective life . . . The poet uses fantasy and distortion to express feeling.”

Apropos of Nothing

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Publisher : Simon and Schuster
ISBN 13 : 1951627377
Total Pages : 312 pages
Book Rating : 4.9/5 (516 download)

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Book Synopsis Apropos of Nothing by : Woody Allen

Download or read book Apropos of Nothing written by Woody Allen and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2020-03-23 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Long-Awaited, Enormously Entertaining Memoir by One of the Great Artists of Our Time—Now a New York Times, USA Today, Los Angeles Times, and Publisher’s Weekly Bestseller. In this candid and often hilarious memoir, the celebrated director, comedian, writer, and actor offers a comprehensive, personal look at his tumultuous life. Beginning with his Brooklyn childhood and his stint as a writer for the Sid Caesar variety show in the early days of television, working alongside comedy greats, Allen tells of his difficult early days doing standup before he achieved recognition and success. With his unique storytelling pizzazz, he recounts his departure into moviemaking, with such slapstick comedies as Take the Money and Run, and revisits his entire, sixty-year-long, and enormously productive career as a writer and director, from his classics Annie Hall, Manhattan, and Annie and Her Sisters to his most recent films, including Midnight in Paris. Along the way, he discusses his marriages, his romances and famous friendships, his jazz playing, and his books and plays. We learn about his demons, his mistakes, his successes, and those he loved, worked with, and learned from in equal measure. This is a hugely entertaining, deeply honest, rich and brilliant self-portrait of a celebrated artist who is ranked among the greatest filmmakers of our time.

A House of My Own

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Author :
Publisher : Vintage
ISBN 13 : 0385351348
Total Pages : 400 pages
Book Rating : 4.3/5 (853 download)

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Book Synopsis A House of My Own by : Sandra Cisneros

Download or read book A House of My Own written by Sandra Cisneros and published by Vintage. This book was released on 2015-10-06 with total page 400 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the PEN Center USA Literary Award for Creative Nonfiction From Chicago to Mexico, the places Sandra Cisneros has lived have provided inspiration for her now-classic works of fiction and poetry. But a house of her own, a place where she could truly take root, has eluded her. In this jigsaw autobiography, made up of essays and images spanning three decades-and including never-before-published work-Cisneros has come home at last. Written with her trademark lyricism, in these signature pieces the acclaimed author of The House on Mango Street and winner of the 2019 PEN/Nabokov Award for Achievement in International Literature shares her transformative memories and reveals her artistic and intellectual influences. Poignant, honest, and deeply moving, A House of My Own is an exuberant celebration of a life lived to the fullest, from one of our most beloved writers.

Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?

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Author :
Publisher : Open Road + Grove/Atlantic
ISBN 13 : 0802194753
Total Pages : 152 pages
Book Rating : 4.8/5 (21 download)

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Book Synopsis Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? by : Jeanette Winterson

Download or read book Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? written by Jeanette Winterson and published by Open Road + Grove/Atlantic. This book was released on 2012-03-06 with total page 152 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A New York Times bestseller: The “magnificent” memoir by one of the bravest and most original writers of our time—“A tour de force of literature and love” (Vogue). One of the New York Times’ “50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years” Jeanette Winterson’s bold and revelatory novels have established her as a major figure in world literature. Her internationally best-selling debut, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, tells the story of a young girl adopted by Pentecostal parents, and has become a staple of required reading in contemporary fiction classes. Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a “singular and electric” memoir about a life’s work to find happiness (The New York Times). It is a book full of stories: about a girl locked out of her home, sitting on the doorstep all night; about a religious zealot disguised as a mother who has two sets of false teeth and a revolver in the dresser, waiting for Armageddon; about growing up in a north England industrial town now changed beyond recognition; about the universe as a cosmic dustbin. It is the story of how a painful past, rose to haunt the author later in life, sending her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her biological mother. It is also a book about the power of literature, showing how fiction and poetry can form a string of guiding lights, or a life raft that supports us when we are sinking. Witty, acute, fierce, and celebratory, Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal? is a tough-minded story of the search for belonging—for love, identity, home, and a mother.