Nonfiction storytelling is at its best in this anthology of excerpts from memoirs by thirty authors--some eminent, some less well known--who grew up tough and talented in working-class America. Their stories, selected from literary memoirs published between 1982 and 2014, cover episodes from childhood to young adulthood within a spectrum of life-changing experiences. Although diverse ethnically, racially, geographically, and in sexual orientation, these writers share a youthful precocity and determination to find opportunity where little appeared to exist. All of these perspectives are explored within the larger context of economic insecurity--a needed perspective in this time of growing inequality. These memoirists grew up in families that led "hardscrabble" lives in which struggle and strenuous effort were the norm. Their stories offer insight on the realities of class in America, as well as inspiration and hope. | Author: Nancy C. Atwood, Roger Atwood | Publisher: University Of Georgia Press | Publication Date: Sep 01, 2019 | Number of Pages: 336 pages | Language: English | Binding: Paperback/Biography & Autobiography | ISBN-10: 0820355321 | ISBN-13: 9780820355320
A down-and-out samurai named Ryudo Konosuke struggles through his hardscrabble life in early 19th-century Japan. In early 19th-century Japan, a down-and-out samurai named Ryudo Konosuke struggles through his hardscrabble life. His dear departed mother’s last hope was for him to live his life as a splendid warrior, but a cruel curse repels and distorts any metal that gets near him. Will he ever be able to wield a sword, much less live the life of an honorable samurai? It is said that a samurai’s spirit rests in their sword—and Konosuke can’t even pick one up thanks to a cruel curse that repels anything made of metal that gets near him. Destitute and hopeless, he decides to end it all. But when a beautiful and mysterious woman saves his life and his soul, it is the beginning of Ryudo’s journey into a strange world of magic that exists a step away from his own. Product DetailsISBN-13: 9781974742745 Media Type: Paperback Publisher: Viz Media Publication Date: 01-16-2024 Pages: 200 Series: Steel of the Celestial Shadows - #1About the Author Daruma Matsuura was born in 1984 in Kanagawa prefecture. Her debut series, Kasane, was serialized in 2013 and made into a live-action film in 2018. Other works include Imakako and Utakata to Tomoshibi. Steel of the Celestial Shadows is currently being serialized in Big Comic Superior from Shogakukan. Her favorite sushi is uni.
Photographer Dmitry Markov grew up Pushkino, a hardscrabble industrial town north of Moscow where, for Markov and many of his childhood friends, sniffing
\"A rousing adventure yarn full of danger and heart and humor.\" --Richard RussoAn instant classic for fans of Jane Smiley and Kitchens of the Great Midwest: when two hardscrabble young boys think they've committed a crime, they flee into the Northwoods of Wisconsin. Will the adults trying to find and protect them reach them before it's too late?It's the summer of 1994 in Claypot, Wisconsin, and the lives of ten-year-old Fischer \"Fish\" Branson and Dale \"Bread\" Breadwin are shaped by the two fathers they don't talk about.One night, tired of seeing his best friend bruised and terrorized by his no-good dad, Fish takes action. A gunshot rings out and the two boys flee the scene, believing themselves murderers. They head for the woods, where they find their way onto a raft, but the natural terrors of Ironsforge gorge threaten to overwhelm them.Four adults track them into the forest, each one on a journey of his or her own. Fish's mother Miranda, a wise woman full of fierce faith; his granddad, Teddy, who knows the woods like the back of his hand; Tiffany, a purple-haired gas station attendant and poet looking for connection; and Sheriff Cal, who's having doubts about a life in law enforcement.The adults track the boys toward the novel's heart-pounding climax on the edge of the gorge and a conclusion that beautifully makes manifest the grace these characters find in the wilderness and one another. This timeless story of loss, hope, and adventure runs like the river itself amid the vividly rendered landscape of the Upper Midwest.
Return To Hardscrabble Road is a work of fiction in the historical and interpersonal drama subgenres. It is suitable for the general adult reading audience and contains some scenes of violence and the use of explicit language. Penned by author George Weinstein, the story centers on the same initial group of characters as those of Hardscrabble Road, the author’s previous novel, but the work can be read as a standalone as the MacLeod brothers return home from military service when their father dies. Far from a heartfelt family reunion, the appearance of Papa’s siblings sparks a violent new era for the family and a fight for the central protagonist Roger to rise above it all and become the man he wants to be. This was an emotionally charged work that really elevates the family drama genre with its brutal honesty and no-holds-barred narrative style. It is never overly graphic or sensationalized, but the emotions and experiences that Roger and his family undergo at the hands of evil-minded relations really hits hard on the reader’s psyche and make for harrowing and highly engaging reading. I also felt that the dialogue was a particular triumph of this work as it served to bring important events to the fore without the need for huge chunks of prose, and kept readers engaged in the present moment. Overall, I would not hesitate to recommend Return To Hardscrabble Road for fans of the previous novel, and newcomers to the accomplished emotional storytelling skills of author George Weinstein.
In a bleak Mississippi farmhouse in 1918, Leona Pinson gives birth to an illegitimate son whose father she refuses to name, but who will, she is convinced, return from the war to rescue her from a hardscrabble life with a distant mother, a dangerous brother, and a dwarf aunt. When, instead, her lover returns with a wife in tow, her dreams are shattered. As her brother’s violence escalates and her aunt flees, Leona must rely on the help of Luther Biggs, the son of Leona’s grandfather and one of his former slaves, to protect her child. Told against the backdrop of the deprivation of World War I, the tragedies of the influenza epidemic, and the burden of generations of betrayal, That Pinson Girl unfolds in lyrical, unflinching prose, engaging the timeless issues of racism, sexism, and poverty. Product DetailsISBN-13: 9781646034185 Media Type: Paperback Publisher: Regal House Publishing Publication Date: 02-06-2024 Pages: 278About the Author A seventh-generation Mississippian and a child of the hill country she writes about in That Pinson Girl, Gerry Wilson came of age during the turbulent civil rights era. Her story collection, Crosscurrents and Other Stories, was nominated for the Mississippi Institute of Arts and Letters Fiction Award. Gerry is a recipient of a Mississippi Arts Commission Literary Arts Fellowship. Her stories have appeared in numerous journals. That Pinson Girl is her first novel.
My, Mycroft. And I thought you were above acts of unfounded imagination and assumption. SH
Sketching lives very similar to her own, Berlin’s stories of hardscrabble lives resemble Raymond Carver’s – while also invoking some of Proust’s spirit
Lyn Gardner: The Sheffield revival of A Taste of Honey should help us better remember an unfairly neglected playwright – but here's plenty of footage to be going on with
We grew up among the hills of central Appalachia, where the land is rugged and untamed and the people are hardscrabble, resilient, and wildly hospitable. Yet outside perception is often full of condescension and derision. That’s ok. The people here are used to being underestimated because of where we’re from and the way we talk. But we like rooting for an underdog, and we’re always rooting for the people of Appalachia. Being from the only state wholly enclosed in the Appalachian region, we’re quite protective about the traditional pronunciation of the name here. So while folks outside may say Appalachia other ways, app-uh-latch-uh is a hill we will die on. Details Letterpress Printed Printed on 110lb, 100% Cotton Lettra Paper Individually Numbered 10% of sale price goes to support foster care Frame it Custom or Stick Frame Allow 4-6 weeks for custom frames Size 13" x 20" Origin Honest Made in Mass.
\"Wordsworth, Whitman, William Carlos Williams, and the Beats in their respective generations moved poetry toward a more natural language. Bukowski moved it a little farther.\" -Los Angeles Times Book Review In what is widely hailed as the best of his many novels, Charles Bukowski details the long, lonely years of his own hardscrabble youth in the raw voice of alter ego Henry Chinaski. From a harrowingly cheerless childhood in Germany through acne-riddled high school years and his adolescent discoveries of alcohol, woman, and the Los Angeles Public Library's collection of D.H. Lawrence, Ham on Rye offers a crude, brutal, and savagely funny portrait of an outcast's coming-of-age during the desperate days of the Great Depression.
In 1868, Jacob Kaufmann, the nineteen-year-old son of a German farmer, stepped off a ship onto the shores of New York. His brother Isaac soon followed, and together they joined an immigrant community of German Jews selling sewing items to the coal miners and mill workers of western Pennsylvania. After opening merchant tailor shops in Pittsburgh’s North and South sides, the Kaufmann brothers caught the wave of a new type of merchandising—the department store—and launched what would become their retail dynasty with a downtown storefront at Fifth Avenue and Smithfield Street. In just two decades, Jacob and his brothers had ascended Pittsburgh’s economic and social ladder, rising from hardscrabble salesmen into Gilded Age multimillionaires. Generous and powerful philanthropists, the Kaufmanns left an indelible mark on the city and western Pennsylvania. From Edgar and Liliane’s famous residence, the Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece called Fallingwater, to the Kaufmann clock, a historic landmark that inspired the expression “meet me under the clock,” to countless fond memories for residents and shoppers, the Kaufmann family made important contributions to art, architecture, and culture. Far less known are the personal tragedies and fateful ambitions that forever shaped this family, their business, and the place they called home. Kaufmann’s recounts the story of one of Pittsburgh’s most beloved department stores, pulling back the curtain to reveal the hardships, triumphs, and complicated legacy of the prominent family behind its success. Product DetailsISBN-13: 9780822967132 Media Type: Paperback Publisher: University of Pittsburgh Press Publication Date: 10-17-2023 Pages: 263 Product Dimensions: 5.70(w) x 8.70(h) x 0.90(d)About the Author Marylynne Pitz is an award-winning journalist covering art, architecture, books, and history. She was a member of the news team that won the Pulitzer Prize for coverage of the Tree of Life shooting in 2018. She has won five Golden Quills, an Inland Press Association award for investigative reporting, and a Matrix Award. A native of Indianapolis, she has lived in Pittsburgh since 1980.Laura Malt Schneiderman is a journalist and web developer in Pittsburgh. She has won seven Golden Quills and was part of a team that won the Scripps Howard Edward J. Meeman Award in 2011. Originally from Saint Louis, she has worked in journalism in Washington, DC, and Pennsylvania.Table of Contents Table of Contents Preface vii 1 From Peddlers to Prosperity 3 2 A Gilded Age Lifestyle 22 3 The Rise of a Merchant Prince 32 4 Cracks in a Marriage 49 5 Profits and Golden Roses 59 6 The Prime of Edgar and Liliane 78 7 The Fellowship and Fallingwater 92 8 Mr. Kaufmann Goes to Washington 110 9 Kaufmann's Wages War 117 10 Sweet Home California 125 11 Edgar Raises the Curtain 141 12 The Collapse of a Marriage 155 13 Kaufmann's, the May Company, and Malls 166 14 Time-Honored Traditions 177 15 The Death of Downtown Department Stores 188 Acknowledgments 211 Notes 213 Bibliography 247 Index 255 Show More
Not only are the nearly century-old Steiners some of the oldest log cabins in the country still standing, they’re also some of the most distinctive. Their A-frames and straight, strong timbers are set off by doorways made with snow-bent trees and rockers made of tree roots—hardscrabble artistry made of mismatched parts.
Before she became an internationally celebrated opera star, Kiri Te Kanawa struggled to earn money to pay for her singing lessons. She worked as a telephone operator and performed at weddings and in night clubs to save the money she needed to travel from New Zealand to London. From those hardscrabble beginnings, she rose to dazzle critics and audiences alike with her performances of the classic operatic works by legendary composers such as Mozart, Strauss, and Verdi. She made her debut at Covent Garden in 1970, but it was a last-minute substitution in 1974 — as an understudy for the role of Desdemona in Verdi's Otello at New York's Metropolitan Opera House — that propelled her into opera's exclusive legion of greats when she was barely 30 years of age. Her lush and lyrical soprano so entranced England's royal family that she was personally invited to perform at the wedding ceremony of Prince Charles and Lady Diana -- before a live television audience of some 600 million -- and later for Queen Elizabeth's Golden Jubilee. She was also honored as a Dame Commander of the British Empire by the Queen. Having made her mark in performances across the globe, Te Kanawa, a deeply patriotic New Zealander with a strong Maori heritage, is now helping to mentor other talented young New Zealand singers and musicians through her Kiri Te Kanawa Foundation.
A pioneering marine biologist takes us down into the deep ocean to understand bioluminescence--the language of light that helps life communicate in the darkness--and what it tells us about the future of life on Earth in this "thrilling blend of hard science and high adventure" (The New York Times Book Review). NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY BOOKLIST - "Edith Widder's story is one of hardscrabble optimism, two-fisted exploration, and groundbreaking research. She's done things I dream of doing."--James Cameron Edith Widder's childhood dream of becoming a marine biologist was almost derailed in college, when complications from a surgery gone wrong caused temporary blindness. A new reality of shifting shadows drew her fascination to the power of light--as well as the importance of optimism. As her vision cleared, Widder found the intersection of her two passions in oceanic bioluminescence, a little-explored scientific field within Earth's last great unknown frontier: the deep ocean. With little promise of funding or employment, she leaped at the first opportunity to train as a submersible pilot and dove into the darkness. Widder's first journey into the deep ocean, in a diving suit that resembled a suit of armor, took her to a depth of eight hundred feet. She turned off the lights and witnessed breathtaking underwater fireworks: explosions of bioluminescent activity. Concerns about her future career vanished. She only wanted to know one thing: Why was there so much light down there? Below the Edge of Darkness takes readers deep into our planet's oceans as Widder pursues her questions about one of the most important and widely used forms of communication in nature. In the process, she reveals hidden worlds and a dazzling menagerie of behaviors and animals, from microbes to leviathans, many never before seen or, like the legendary giant squid, never before filmed in their deep-sea lairs. Alongside Widder, we experience life-and-death equipment malfunctions and witness breakthroughs in technology and understanding, all set against a growing awareness of the deteriorating health of our largest and least understood ecosystem. A thrilling adventure story as well as a scientific revelation, Below the Edge of Darkness reckons with the complicated and sometimes dangerous realities of exploration. Widder shows us how when we push our boundaries and expand our worlds, discovery and wonder follow. These are the ultimate keys to the ocean's salvation--and thus to our future on this planet. Product DetailsISBN-13: 9780525509240 Media Type: Hardcover Publisher: Random House Publishing Group Publication Date: 07-27-2021 Pages: 352 Product Dimensions: 6.30(w) x 9.10(h) x 1.30(d)About the Author Edith Widder, Ph.D., is an oceanographer, a marine biologist, and the co-founder, CEO, and senior scientist at the Ocean Research & Conservation Association, a nonprofit organization where she is focusing her passion for saving the ocean into developing innovative technologies to preserve and protect the ocean’s most precious real estate: its estuaries. She has given three TED talks; has been awarded a prestigious MacArthur Fellowship from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, as well as the Explorer’s Club Citation of Merit; and is the first recipient of the Captain Don Walsh Award for Ocean Exploration established by the Marine Technology Society and the Society of Underwater Technology.Read an Excerpt Read an Excerpt Chapter 1 Seeing Light is what, exactly? For something that has no mass, it sure carries a lot of existential weight. It is both an energy source and an information carrier. It can be injurious and it can be healing. It is one thing that can manifest as two things—a wave in the future and a particle in the past. In a vacuum, it travels at the maximum speed allowed by the universe, and it does so without ever decaying. It gives up its energy only when it interacts with other particles, like those that make up the visual pigments in our eyes, and it is through these interactions that we interpret the world around us. For most life-forms on Earth, light is the paramount stimulus that makes life as we know it possible. Green plants harness energy from light to synthesize sugar from carbon dioxide and water. In the process, oxygen is generated as a by-product. As magic tricks go, forming food and breathable air from what seems like nothing is hard to beat. Still, it’s not especially flashy. Creating dazzling light from food and air, however, is very flashy. That’s the magic of bioluminescence. Of course, to appreciate that particular alchemy, you need something equally miraculous: vision. Being able to see provides a huge advantage in the game of life; it is for this evolutionary reason that 95 percent of all animal species on Earth have eyes. These range from microscopic, such as some single-celled algae that have an eye no bigger than one-tenth the diameter of a human hair, to giant squid with an eye the size of your head. The different ways that such disparate eyes see the world reveal much about the biological needs of their owners. In fact, figuring out what different eyes are best adapted to see is such a valuable tool for probing the nature of life that it has become a whole field of study called visual ecology. If you compare the life of a giant squid inhabiting the deep sea with that of microscopic plankton living in sunlit surface waters, the difference in eye size makes sense: a giant eye collects many more photons than a tiny one and is therefore better adapted for living in a dim light environment. But what about another deep-sea inhabitant, the cockeyed squid? Its name derives from its mismatched eyes: the left eye is giant and bulging and directed upward toward the sunlight, while the right eye is smaller, recessed, and aimed downward into the inky depths. This seemingly makes no sense—until you learn that bioluminescent light organs encircle the small eye. While the large eye hunts overhead for dim, distant silhouettes of prey against a dark, lead-gray background, the bottom eye can use its built-in flashlights to illuminate more proximate prey. Clearly, to understand the visual ecology of the largest living space on Earth, one needs to appreciate the nature and function of bioluminescence alongside the nature and function of eyes. It is inevitable that when we try to figure out what different animals see, we relate it to what we can see. That is a major challenge in the deep ocean, though, where our very presence alters the visual environment. It’s difficult to envision a place you are unable to observe in its natural state. Our eyes are adapted for a much brighter existence, which means that when we explore darkness, we must bring artificial lights so intense that to visual systems adapted to the deep sea, they are probably as bright as looking directly into the sun. Since it is such a challenge to observe animals in this realm without disturbing them, sometimes the best way to gain insight into their lives is to learn as much as possible about their eyes. The most important questions to ask about eyes are: What information do they accept, and what do they exclude? All eyes act as filters, allowing in only data streams about the outside world that optimize their owner’s chances for survival. Anything that doesn’t serve that purpose falls under the banner of too much information. Spending time and energy on producing ultraviolet receptors, for example, and processing and interpreting their output is counterproductive if UV light plays no useful role in detecting vital stuff like food, mates, or predators. Thinking about eyes and what they do and don’t see is a mind-stretching exercise. We are blind to so many things in our world—some because of biological constraints, and many more because we simply don’t know how to look. Environmentalist Rachel Carson once said, “One way to open your eyes to unnoticed beauty is to ask yourself, What if I had never seen this before? What if I knew I would never see it again? ” An even better way to achieve heightened visual awareness is to lose sight and then regain it. As Joni Mitchell sang, “Don’t it always seem to go, that you don’t know what you’ve got till it’s gone?” That Joni Mitchell song, “Big Yellow Taxi,” was released my first year in college. I started at Tufts University in the fall of 1969 as a biology major, with the aim of becoming a marine biologist. But before I had completed my first semester, it was clear that goal would be unattainable without medical intervention. During my precollege physical, I mentioned a pain I’d been having down the back of my left leg. Since I was pretty active—a skier and skater in the winter and a water skier in the summer—I figured I must have pulled a muscle. X-rays revealed otherwise: My back was broken. The doctor illustrated the extent of the break by making two fists with his hands, stacking one on top of the other, and then sliding the top one halfway off the bottom one. The slippage was pinching a nerve going down my left leg, causing the intense and persistent pain I felt whenever I sat down. I’m pretty sure I know when I broke it. I spent a lot of my childhood climbing up into and jumping out of trees in our leafy suburban neighborhood just outside Boston. My favorite tree was an old misshapen willow down by the pond near our house. Its trunk ramped up at a forty-five-degree angle away from the water and then branched into two large horizontal limbs, each with thick vertical branches that created separate “rooms” that made it the perfect pirate ship, tree house, or castle. The limbs were about seven feet off the ground: a comfortable jump that I made hundreds of times with ease. But I remember one Sunday, when I was eight or nine years old and dressed for Sunday school in some stupid frilly dress I hated, the jump didn’t go as planned. When we came back from church, I couldn’t change into m
Photographer Dmitry Markov grew up Pushkino, a hardscrabble industrial town north of Moscow where, for Markov and many of his childhood friends, sniffing
Book Review for “Zorrie” by Laird Hunt. Summary: “As a girl, Zorrie Underwood’s modest and hardscrabble home county was the only constant in her young life. After losing both her parents, Zor…
A national bestseller from the "prolific and exceptionally insightful" (Globe and Mail) Roxane Gay, Difficult Women is a collection of stories of rare force that paints a wry, beautiful, haunting vision of modern America. Difficult Women tells of hardscrabble lives, passionate loves, and quirky and vexed human connection. The women in these stories live lives of privilege and of poverty, are in marriages both loving and haunted by past crimes or emotional blackmail. A pair of sisters have been inseparable ever since they were abducted together as children, and, grown now, must negotiate the elder sister's marriage. A woman married to a twin pretends not to realize when her husband and his brother impersonate each other. A stripper putting herself through college fends off the advances of an overzealous customer. A black engineer moves to Upper Michigan for a job and faces the malign curiosity of her colleagues and the difficulty of leaving her past behind. From a girls' fight club to a wealthy subdivision in Florida where neighbors conform, compete, and spy on each other, Gay gives voice to a chorus of unforgettable women in a scintillating collection reminiscent of Merritt Tierce, Anne Enright, and Miranda July. Product DetailsISBN-13: 9780802127372 Media Type: Paperback Publication Date: 11-14-2017 Pages: 272 Product Dimensions: 8.20h x 5.40w x 1.10dAbout the Author ROXANE GAY is also the New York Times bestselling author of the memoir Hunger; the story collection Difficult Women; the novel An Untamed State, which was a finalist for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize; the essay collection Bad Feminist; and several comic books in Marvel's Black Panther: World of Wakanda series. She is a recipient of the PEN Center USA Freedom to Write Award, among other honors. She divides her time between Indiana and Los Angeles.
Bestel hier Emily Wilde's Encyclopaedia of Faeries (Paperback) van Heather Fawcett. Vandaag besteld, morgen in huis. Voor alle YA boeken zit je bij So Many Pages goed.
Dimensions (Overall): 8.1 Inches (H) x 5.4 Inches (W) x .9 Inches (D) Weight: .75 Pounds Suggested Age: 22 Years and Up Number of Pages: 368 Genre: Fiction + Literature Genres Sub-Genre: Coming of Age Publisher: John Scognamiglio Book Format: Paperback Author: Elizabeth Hardinger Language: English Street Date: September 29, 2020 TCIN: 79627222 UPC: 9781496720450 Item Number (DPCI): 247-39-9368 Origin: Made in the USA or Imported If the item details above aren’t accurate or complete, we want to know about it. Report incorrect product info.
About Out of This Place A powerful novel in verse captures the voices of three teens as they struggle against hardscrabble realities — and move toward their dreams. Luke spends his days hanging out at the beach, working shifts at the local supermarket, and trying to stay out of trouble at school. His mate Bongo gets wasted, blocking out memories of the little brother that social services took away from his addict mom and avoiding the stepdad who hits him. And Casey, the girl they both love, longs to get away from her strict, controlling father and start anew in a place where she can be free. But even after they each find a way to move on and lead very different lives, can they outrun their family stories — and will they ever be able to come together again? Set in Australia and narrated in alternating points of view, here is an affecting look at the evolving lives of three friends from talented author Emma Cameron.
Yvonne Valleau Wildman joined the RCAF and trained as a photographer, serving at Vulcan, Alberta in World War Two.
Vinyl LP pressing. 2023 release. Little Songs is the highly anticipated album from Canadian singer-songwriter, Colter Wall. On Little Songs, fans of Wall's will find the same hardscrabble voice they've loved over the years connecting the contemporary world to the values, hardships, and celebrations of rural life. The album is produced by Wall and Patrick Lyons, and features 8 new original songs, as well as two fan-favorite covers - Hoyt Axton's \"Evangelina\" and Ian Tyson's \"The Coyote & The Cowboy.\"
An American masterpiece and iconic novel of the West by National Book Award and Pulitzer Prize winner Wallace Stegner--a deeply moving narrative of one family and the traditions of our national past. Lyman Ward is a retired professor of history, recently confined to a wheelchair by a crippling bone disease and dependant on others for his every need. Amid the chaos of 1970s counterculture he retreats to his ancestral home of Grass Valley, California, to write the biography of his grandmother: an elegant and headstrong artist and pioneer who, together with her engineer husband, made her own journey through the hardscrabble West nearly a hundred years before. In discovering her story he excavates his own, probing the shadows of his experience and the America that has come of age around him. Product DetailsISBN-13: 9781101872765 Media Type: Paperback Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group Publication Date: 11-04-2014 Pages: 672 Product Dimensions: 5.20(w) x 7.90(h) x 1.20(d)About the Author Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) was the author of, among other novels, Remembering Laughter, 1937; The Big Rock Candy Mountain, 1943; Joe Hill, 1950; All the Little Live Things, 1967 (Commonwealth Club Gold Medal); A Shooting Star, 1961; Angle of Repose, 1971 (Pulitzer Prize); The Spectator Bird, 1976 (National Book Award, 1977); Recapitulation, 1979; and Crossing to Safety, 1987. His nonfiction includes Beyond the Hundredth Meridian, 1954; Wolf Willow, 1963; The Sound of Mountain Water (essays), 1969; The Uneasy Chair: A Biography of Bernard DeVoto, 1974; and Where the Bluebird Sings to the Lemonade Springs: Living and Writing in the West (1992). Three of his short stories have won O. Henry Prizes, and in 1980 he received the Robert Kirsch Award from the Los Angeles Times for his lifetime literary achievements. His Collected Stories was published in 1990.Read an Excerpt Read an Excerpt Grass Valley Now I believe they will leave me alone. Obviously Rodman came up hoping to find evidence of my incompetence--though how an incompetent could have got this place renovated, moved his library up, and got himself transported to it without arousing the suspicion of his watchful children, ought to be a hard one for Rodman to answer. I take some pride in the way I managed all that. And he went away this afternoon without a scrap of what he would call data. So tonight I can sit here with the tape recorder whirring no more noisily than electrified time, and say into the microphone the place and date of a sort of beginning and a sort of return: Zodiac Cottage, Grass Valley, California, April 12, 1970. Right there, I might say to Rodman, who doesn't believe in time, notice something: I started to establish the present and the present moved on. What I established is already buried under layers of tape. Before I can say I am, I was. Heraclitus and I, prophets of flux, know that the flux is composed of parts that imitate and repeat each other. Am or was, I am cumulative, too. I am everything I ever was, whatever you and Leah may think. I am much of what my parents and especially my grandparents were--inherited stature, coloring, brains, bones (that part unfortunate), plus transmitted prejudices, culture, scruples, likings, moralities, and moral errors that I defend as if they were personal and not familial. Even places, especially this house whose air is thick with the past. My antecedents support me here as the old wistaria at the corner supports the house. Looking at its cables wrapped two or three times around the cottage, you would swear, and you could be right, that if they were cut the place would fall down. Rodman, like most sociologists and most of his generation, was born without the sense of history. To him it is only an aborted social science. The world has changed, Pop, he tells me. The past isn't going to teach us anything about what we've got ahead of us. Maybe it did once, or seemed to. It doesn't any more. Probably he thinks the blood vessels of my brain are as hardened as my cervical spine. They probably discuss me in bed. Out of his mind, going up there by himself . . . How can we, unless . . . helpless . . . roll his wheelchair off the porch who'd rescue him? Set himself afire lighting a cigar, who'd put him out? . . . Damned old independent mule-headed . . . worse than a baby. Never consider the trouble he makes for the people who have to look after him . . . House I grew up in, he says. Papers, he says, thing I've always wanted to do . . . All of Grandmother's papers, books, reminiscences, pictures, those hundreds of letters that came back from Augusta Hudson's daughter after Augusta died . . . A lot of Grandfather's relics, some of Father's, some of my own . . . Hundred year chronicle of the family. All right, fine. Why not give that stuff to the Historical Society and get a fat tax deduction? He could still work on it. Why box it all up, and himself too, in that old crooked house in the middle of twelve acres of land we could all make a good thing out of if he'd consent to sell? Why go off and play cobwebs like a character in a Southern novel, out where nobody can keep an eye on him? They keep thinking of my good, in their terms. I don't blame them, I only resist them. Rodman will have to report to Leah that I have rigged the place to fit my needs and am getting along well. I have had Ed shut off the whole upstairs except for my bedroom and bath and this study. Downstairs we use only the kitchen and library and the veranda. Everything tidy and shipshape and orderly. No data. So I may anticipate regular visits of inspection and solicitude while they wait for me to get a belly full of independence. They will look sharp for signs of senility and increasing pain--will they perhaps even hope for them? Meantime they will walk softly, speak quietly, rattle the oatbag gently, murmuring and moving closer until the arm can slide the rope over the stiff old neck and I can be led away to the old folks' pasture down in Menlo Park where the care is so good and there is so much to keep the inmates busy and happy. If I remain stubborn, the decision may eventually have to be made for me, perhaps by computer. Who could argue with a computer? Rodman will punch all his data onto cards and feed them into his machine and it will tell us all it is time. I would have them understand that I am not just killing time during my slow petrifaction. I am neither dead nor inert. My head still works. Many things are unclear to me, including myself, and I want to sit and think. Who ever had a better opportunity? What if I can't turn my head? I can look in any direction by turning my wheelchair, and I choose to look back. Rodman to the contrary notwithstanding, that is the only direction we can learn from. Increasingly, after my amputation and during the long time when I lay around feeling sorry for myself, I came to feel like the contour bird. I wanted to fly around the Sierra foothills backward, just looking. If there was no longer any sense in pretending to be interested in where I was going. I could consult where I've been. And I don't mean the Ellen business. I honestly believe this isn't that personal. The Lyman Ward who married Ellen Hammond and begot Rodman Ward and taught history and wrote certain books and monographs about the Western frontier, and suffered certain personal catastrophes and perhaps deserved them and survives them after a fashion and now sits talking to himself into a microphone--he doesn't matter that much any more. I would like to put him in a frame of reference and comparison. Fooling around in the papers my grandparents, especially my grandmother, left behind, I get glimpses of lives close to mine, related to mine in ways I recognize but don't completely comprehend. I'd like to live in their clothes a while, if only so I don't have to live in my own. Actually, as I look down my nose to where my left leg bends and my right leg stops, I realize that it isn't backward I want to go, but downward. I want to touch once more the ground I have been maimed away from. In my mind I write letters to the newspapers, saying Dear Editor, As a modern man and a one-legged man, I can tell you that the conditions are similar. We have been cut off, the past has been ended and the family has broken up and the present is adrift in its wheelchair. I had a wife who after twenty-five years of marriage took on the coloration of the 1960s. I have a son who, though we are affectionate with each other, is no more my true son than if he breathed through gills. That is no gap between the generations, that is a gulf. The elements have changed, there are whole new orders of magnitude and kind. This present of 1970 is no more an extension of my grandparents' world, this West is no more a development of the West they helped build, than the sea over Santorin is an extension of that once-island of rock and olives. My wife turns out after a quarter of a century to be someone I never knew, my son starts all fresh from his own premises. My grandparents had to live their way out of one world and into another, or into several others, making new out of old the way corals live their reef upward. I am on my grandparents' side. I believe in Time, as they did, and in the life chronological rather than in the life existential. We live in time and through it, we build our huts in its ruins, or used to, and we cannot afford all these abandonings. And so on. The letters fade like conversation. If I spoke to Rodman in those terms, saying that my grandparents' lives seem to me organic and ours what? hydroponic? he would ask in derision what I meant. Define my terms. How do you measure the organic residue of a man or a generation? This is all metaphor. If you can't measure it, it doesn't exist. Rodman is a great measurer. He is interested in change, all right, but only as a process; and he is interested in values, but only as data. X people believe one way, Y people another,
This welcome study delivers a long-overdue analysis of the works of Ann Petry (1908-1997), a major mid-twentieth-century African American author. Primarily known as the sole female member of the "Wright School of Social Protest," Petry has been most recognized for her 1946 novel The Street, about a woman's struggle to raise her son in a hardscrabble Harlem neighborhood. Keith Clark moves beyond assessments of Petry as a sort of literary descendent of Richard Wright to acclaim her innovative approaches to gender performance, sexuality, and literary technique. Engaging a variety of disciplinary frameworks, including gothic criticism, masculinity and gender studies, queer theory, and psychoanalytic theory, Clark offers fresh readings of Petry's three novels and collection of short stories. Clark explores, for example, Petry's use of terror in The Street, where both blacks and whites appear physically and psychically monstrous. He also identifies the use of dark comedy and the macabre in her startling depictions of race, class, gender construction, and sexual identity in the stories "The Bones of Louella Brown" and "The Witness." Petry's overlooked second novel, Country Place--set in a deceptively serene, bucolic Connecticut hamlet--camouflages a world as palsied and nightmarish as the Harlem of her previous work. While confirming the black feminist dimensions of Petry's writing, Clark also assesses the writer's representations of an array of black and white masculine behaviors--some socially sanctioned, others transgressive and taboo--in her unheralded masterpiece, The Narrows, and her widely anthologized short story, "Like a Winding Sheet." Expansive in scope, The Radical Fiction of Ann Petry foregrounds and analyzes Petry's unique concerns and agile techniques, re-introducing and situating her among more celebrated male contemporaries. Product DetailsISBN-13: 9780807150665 Media Type: Hardcover Publisher: LSU Press Publication Date: 06-03-2013 Pages: 264 Product Dimensions: 8.60h x 5.70w x 1.10dAbout the Author Keith Clark is the author of Black Manhood in James Baldwin, Ernest J. Gaines, and August Wilson and the editor of Contemporary Black Men's Fiction and Drama. He is an associate professor of English and African American studies at George Mason University.
This quiet, Anne Tyler-esque novel is a reminder that gentler times were not always gentle, that life is filled with hardship even without existential threats.
