Getting a Life

Getting a Life
Author: Sidonie Smith
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 432
Release: 1996
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 9780816624904

Various encounters helped us transform what was originally just a response to a trendy 1980s phrase--Get A life!--into the pointed yet heterogeneous engagement with everyday practices that we believe this collection represents. Papers submitted for the session on the everyday uses of autobiography at the Modern Language Association's convention in 1992 enabled us to connect with scholars around the country.

Reading Jazz

Reading Jazz
Author: Robert Gottlieb
Publisher: Vintage
Total Pages: 1087
Release: 2014-02-19
Genre: Music
ISBN: 0307797279

"Comprehensive and intelligently organized. . . . Jazz aficionados . . . should be grateful to have so much good writing on the subject in one place."--The New York Times Book Review "Alluring. . . . Capture[s] much of the breadth of the music, as well as the passionate debates it has stirred, more vividly than any other jazz anthology to date."--Chicago Tribune No musical idiom has inspired more fine writing than jazz, and nowhere has that writing been presented with greater comprehensiveness and taste than in this glorious collection. In Reading Jazz, editor Robert Gottlieb combs through eighty years of autobiography, reportage, and criticism by the music's greatest players, commentators, and fans to create what is at once a monumental tapestry of jazz history and testimony to the elegance, vigor, and variety of jazz writing. Here are Jelly Roll Morton, recalling the whorehouse piano players of New Orleans in 1902; Whitney Balliett, profiling clarinetist Pee Wee Russell; poet Philip Larkin, with an eloquently dyspeptic jeremiad against bop. Here, too, are the voices of Billie Holiday and Charles Mingus, Albert Murray and Leonard Bernstein, Stanley Crouch and LeRoi Jones, reminiscing, analyzing, celebrating, and settling scores. For anyone who loves the music--or the music of great prose--Reading Jazz is indispensable. "The ideal gift for jazzniks and boppers everywhere. . . . It gathers the best and most varied jazz writing of more than a century."--Sunday Times (London)

Up Till Now

Up Till Now
Author: William Shatner
Publisher: Macmillan
Total Pages: 388
Release: 2009-04-28
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1429937971

After almost sixty years as an actor, William Shatner has become one of the most beloved entertainers in the world. And it seems as if Shatner is everywhere. In Up Till Now, Shatner sits down with readers and offers the remarkable, full story of his life and explains how he got to be, well, everywhere. It was the original Star Trek series, and later its films, that made Shatner instantly recognizable, called by name---or at least by Captain Kirk's name---across the globe. But Shatner neither began nor has ended his career with that role. From the very start, he took his skills as an actor and put them to use wherever he could. He straddled the classic world of the theater and the new world of television, whether stepping in for Christopher Plummer in Shakespeare's Henry V or staring at "something on the wing" in a classic episode of The Twilight Zone. And since then, he's gone on to star in numerous successful shows, such as T.J. Hooker,Rescue 911, and Boston Legal. William Shatner has always been willing to take risks for his art. What other actor would star in history's first---and probably only---all-Esperanto-language film? Who else would share the screen with thousands of tarantulas, release an album called Has Been, or film a racially incendiary film in the Deep South during the height of the civil rights era? And who else would willingly paramotor into a field of waiting fans armed with paintball guns, all waiting for a chance to stun Captain...er, Shatner? In this touching and very funny autobiography, William Shatner's Up Till Now reveals the man behind these unforgettable moments, and how he's become the worldwide star and experienced actor he is today. "It is now Bill Shatner's universe---we just live in it."---New York Daily News

Reading Autobiography Now

Reading Autobiography Now
Author: Sidonie Smith
Publisher: U of Minnesota Press
Total Pages: 374
Release: 2024-07-09
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 145297201X

A user-friendly guide to reading, writing, and theorizing autobiographical texts and practices for students, scholars, and practitioners of life narrative The boom in autobiographical narratives continues apace. It now encompasses a global spectrum of texts and practices in such media as graphic memoir, auto-photography, performance and plastic arts, film and video, and online platforms. Reading Autobiography Now offers both a critical engagement with life narrative in historical perspective and a theoretical framework for interpreting texts and practices in this wide-ranging field. Hailed upon its initial publication as “the Whole Earth Catalog of autobiography studies,” this essential book has been updated, reorganized, and expanded in scope to serve as an accessible and contemporary guide for scholars, students, and practitioners. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson explore definitions of life narrative, probe issues of subjectivity, and outline salient features of autobiographical acts and practices. In this updated edition, they address emergent topics such as autotheory, autofiction, and autoethnography; expand the discussions of identity, relationality, and agency; and introduce new material on autobiographical archives and the profusion of “I”s in contemporary works. Smith and Watson also provide a helpful toolkit of strategies for reading life narrative and an extensive glossary of mini-essays analyzing key theoretical concepts and dozens of autobiographical genres. An indispensable exploration of this expansive, transnational, multimedia field, Reading Autobiography Now meticulously unpacks the heterogeneous modes of life narratives through which people tell their stories, from traditional memoirs and trauma narratives to collaborative life narrative and autobiographical comics.

Book

Book
Author: John Agard
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Total Pages: 145
Release: 2015
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 076367236X

Books contain countless tales--but what if Book told its own story? From clay tablets to e-readers, here is a quirky, kid-friendly look at the book. Books are one of humankind's greatest forms of expression, and now Book, in a witty, idiosyncratic voice, tells us the inside story. A wonderfully eccentric character with strong opinions and a poetic turn of phrase, Book tells of a journey from papyrus scrolls to medieval manuscripts to printed paper and beyond--pondering, along the way, many bookish things, including the evolution of the alphabet, the library (known to Egyptians as "the healing place of the soul"), and even book burning. With bold, black-and-white illustrations by Neil Packer, Book is a captivating work of nonfiction by one of England's leading poets.

Book: My Autobiography

Book: My Autobiography
Author: John Agard
Publisher: Candlewick Press
Total Pages: 146
Release: 2015-10-06
Genre: Juvenile Nonfiction
ISBN: 0763678872

Books contain countless tales—but what if Book told its own story? From clay tablets to e-readers, here is a quirky, kid-friendly look at the book. Books are one of humankind’s greatest forms of expression, and now Book, in a witty, idiosyncratic voice, tells us the inside story. A wonderfully eccentric character with strong opinions and a poetic turn of phrase, Book tells of a journey from papyrus scrolls to medieval manuscripts to printed paper and beyond—pondering, along the way, many bookish things, including the evolution of the alphabet, the library (known to Egyptians as "the healing place of the soul"), and even book burning. With bold, black-and-white illustrations by Neil Packer, Book is a captivating work of nonfiction by one of England's leading poets.

Reading Jackie

Reading Jackie
Author: William Kuhn
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 450
Release: 2011-11-29
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0307744655

Jacqueline Kennedy Onassis never wrote a memoir, but she told her life story and revealed herself in intimate ways through the nearly 100 books she brought into print as an editor at Viking and Doubleday during the last two decades of her life. Many Americans regarded Jackie as the paragon of grace, but few knew her as the woman sitting on her office floor laying out illustrations, or flying to California to persuade Michael Jackson to write his autobiography. William Kuhn provides a behind-the-scenes look at Jackie at work: commissioning books and nurturing authors, helping to shape stories that spoke to her. Based on archives and interviews with her authors, colleagues, and friends, Reading Jackie reveals the serious and the mischievous woman underneath the glamorous public image.

Writing Home

Writing Home
Author: Eli Goldblatt
Publisher: SIU Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2012-04-12
Genre: Language Arts & Disciplines
ISBN: 0809330865

In this engrossing memoir, poet and literacy scholar Eli Goldblatt shares the intimate ways reading and writing influenced the first thirty years of his life—in the classroom but mostly outside it. Writing Home: A Literacy Autobiography traces Goldblatt’s search for home and his growing recognition that only through his writing life can he fully contextualize the world he inhabits. Goldblatt connects his educational journey as a poet and a teacher to his conception of literacy, and assesses his intellectual, emotional, and political development through undergraduate and postgraduate experiences alongside the social imperatives of the era. He explores his decision to leave medical school after he realized that he could not compartmentalize work and creative life or follow in his surgeon father’s footsteps. A brief first marriage rearranged his understanding of gender and sexuality, and a job teaching in an innercity school initiated him into racial politics. Literacy became a dramatic social reality when he witnessed the start of the national literacy campaign in postrevolutionary Nicaragua and spent two months finding his bearings while writing poetry in Mexico City. Goldblatt presents a thoughtful and exquisitely crafted narrative of his life to illustrate that literacy exists at the intersection of individual and social life and is practiced in relationship to others. While the concept of literacy autobiography is a common assignment in undergraduate and graduate writing courses, few books model the exercise. Writing Home helps fill that void and, with Goldblatt’s emphasis on “out of school” literacy, fosters an understanding of literacy as a social practice.

An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading

An Autobiography of the Autobiography of Reading
Author: Dionne Brand
Publisher: University of Alberta
Total Pages: 73
Release: 2020-01-28
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 1772125156

The geopolitics of empire had already prepared me for this...coloniality constructs outsides and insides—worlds to be chosen, disturbed, interpreted, and navigated—in order to live something like a real self. Internationally acclaimed poet and novelist Dionne Brand reflects on her early reading of colonial literature and how it makes Black being inanimate. She explores her encounters with colonial, imperialist, and racist tropes; the ways that practices of reading and writing are shaped by those narrative structures; and the challenges of writing a narrative of Black life that attends to its own expression and its own consciousness.