Afternoons with Emily

Afternoons with Emily
Author: Rose MacMurray
Publisher: Hachette+ORM
Total Pages: 391
Release: 2009-06-02
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0316077127

In mid-19th-century Amherst, Emily Dickinson is famous both for her notable family and for her reclusive ways, and only Miranda Chase, a smart girl with big plans for her own life, is allowed to enter the budding poet's very private world. At first, their Monday afternoon visits involve discussing books over piping hot cups of tea, but when Miranda begins exploring her own yearnings -- for love, for an education, even for a career -- she discovers that being a friend of Emily's is not without its dangers. The very charisma that has inspired her becomes a web of intrigue, and to escape it, Miranda will imperil her reputation, her independence, and even her dreams. Drawing on letters, poems, and everything that is known about Dickinson's life, Afternoons With Emily is a vivid portrait of America's most famous poet, a coming-of age story that spans the Civil War, and a tale of two brilliant women who each chose to break with convention and live life on their own terms.

Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz

Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz
Author: Gail Crowther
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2022-01-11
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1982138424

"A dual biography of poets, friends, and rivals Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton"--

She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons

She Read to Us in the Late Afternoons
Author: Kathleen Hill
Publisher: Delphinium
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2018-10-02
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 9781883285746

Beginning with a Best American award-winning narrative, Kathleen Hill’s memoir explores defining moments of a life illuminated by novels, read in Nigeria and France and at home in New York. As a child in a music class where a remarkable teacher watches over a classmate marked for tragedy, the author by chance reads Willa Cather’s novel, Lucy Gayheart, and is prepared against her will for death by drowning. And prepared for the teacher’s confessions to the class of a frustrated ambition to become a pianist, her regret for a life that will never be. Later, recently married and living in a newly independent Nigeria, a teacher now herself, the author gives Achebe’s Things Fall Apart to her students and is instructed by them in the violent legacy of colonialism. And loses her American innocence when she visits a nearby abandoned slave port and connects its rusting shackles with the students sitting before her. Reading A Portrait of a Lady, also in Nigeria, she ponders her own new marriage through the lens of Isabel Archer’s cautionary fate, remembers her own adolescent fear that reading might be a way of avoiding experience. A few years later, this time in a town in northern France, haunted by Madame Bovary, by Emma’s solitude and boredom, she puts aside Flaubert’s novel and discovers in Bernanos’ Diary of a Country Priest the poverty and suffering she had failed to see all around her. The memoir closes with a tender account of the author’s friendship with the writer, Diana Trilling, whose failing sight inspires a plan to read aloud Proust’s masterwork, an undertaking that takes six years to complete. Faced with Diana’s approaching death and the mysteries of her own life, the author wonders whether reading after all may not be experience at its most ardent, its most transforming.

The Summer Demands

The Summer Demands
Author: Deborah Shapiro
Publisher: Catapult
Total Pages: 224
Release: 2019-06-04
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1948226316

Taking place over a single summer at an abandoned Massachusetts summer camp, this “sun–saturated tale of love and longing” explores the sting of seduction and how desire and ambition can shift through time and experience (Chicago Tribune). After Emily inherits an abandoned summer camp in Massachusetts just before her fortieth birthday, she and her husband David move onto the property with grand plans to fix it up. Instead, Emily finds herself drifting, grieving her recent miscarriage and her own perceived lack of ambition, while David works in the city. Until the day Emily discovers that their new property includes an unexpected guest. Living undetected in one of the cabins is a magnetic twenty–two–year–old named Stella. Their immediate and intense connection expands and contracts over the course of an single summer, calling all of Emily’s relationships, including her marriage, into closer scrutiny. As the two women begin spending time together―talking and drinking, swimming in the lake, watching seductive French films through long afternoons―Emily finds herself playing at performing various roles relative to Stella: friend, mother, lover. Each encounter they share promises to bring Emily a little closer to an understanding of her own identity, but it also puts her marriage and future at risk. How much does she really know about Stella? Why is Stella here, and what does she want, and what might she take with her, if and when she leaves? Named one of the best books of the summer by O, The Oprah Magazine, this “sun–saturated tale of love and longing” is a “smart, funny, nuanced and seductive” read (Chicago Tribune). Startling yet dreamlike, The Summer Demands marks Deborah Shapiro as a master at capturing complex relationships and the electricity of what passes unsaid between people.

A Rose for Emily

A Rose for Emily
Author: Faulkner William
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2022-02-08
Genre:
ISBN: 9789356300149

The short tale A Rose for Emily was first published on April 30, 1930, by American author William Faulkner. This narrative is set in Faulkner's fictional city of Jefferson, Mississippi, in his fictional county of Yoknapatawpha County. It was the first time Faulkner's short tale had been published in a national magazine. Emily Grierson, an eccentric spinster, is the subject of A Rose for Emily. The peculiar circumstances of Emily's existence are described by a nameless narrator, as are her strange interactions with her father and her lover, Yankee road worker Homer Barron.

A Word for Love

A Word for Love
Author: Emily Robbins
Publisher: Penguin
Total Pages: 306
Release: 2018-01-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 0399185852

"A paean to unabashed, unbridled love." --Khaled Hosseini, New York Times-bestselling author of The Kite Runner A mesmerizing debut set in Syria on the cusp of the unrest, A Word for Love is the spare and exquisitely told story of a young American woman transformed by language, risk, war, and a startling new understanding of love. It is said there are ninety-nine Arabic words for love. Bea, an American exchange student, has learned them all: in search of deep feeling, she travels to a Middle Eastern country known to hold the "The Astonishing Text," an ancient, original manuscript of a famous Arabic love story that is said to move its best readers to tears. But once in this foreign country, Bea finds that instead of intensely reading Arabic she is entwined in her host family's complicated lives--as they lock the doors, and whisper anxiously about impending revolution. And suddenly, instead of the ancient love story she sought, it is her daily witness of a contemporary Romeo and Juliet-like romance--between a housemaid and policeman of different cultural and political backgrounds--that astonishes her, changes her, and makes her weep. But as the country drifts toward explosive unrest, Bea wonders how many secrets she can keep, and how long she can fight for a romance that does not belong to her. Ultimately, in a striking twist, Bea's own story begins to mirror that of "The Astonishing Text" that drew her there in the first place--not in the role of one of the lovers, as she might once have imagined, but as the character who lives to tell the story long after the lovers have gone. With melodic meditation on culture, language, and familial devotion. Robbins delivers a powerful novel that questions what it means to love from afar, to be an outsider within a love story, and to take someone else's passion and cradle it until it becomes your own.

After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America's Greatest Poet

After Emily: Two Remarkable Women and the Legacy of America's Greatest Poet
Author: Julie Dobrow
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 435
Release: 2018-10-30
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0393249271

“Scandal and pathos abound” (The New Yorker) in this riveting account of the mother and daughter who brought Emily Dickinson’s genius to light. Longlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography • Finalist for the Plutarch Award Despite Emily Dickinson’s renown, the story of the two women most responsible for her initial posthumous publication—Mabel Loomis Todd and her daughter, Millicent Todd Bingham—has remained in the shadows of the archives. Utilizing hundreds of overlooked letters and diaries to weave together three unstoppable women, Julie Dobrow reveals the intrigue of Dickinson’s literary beginnings, including Mabel’s tumultuous affair with Emily’s brother, Austin Dickinson, controversial editorial decisions, and a battle over the right to define the so-called Belle of Amherst.

These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson

These Fevered Days: Ten Pivotal Moments in the Making of Emily Dickinson
Author: Martha Ackmann
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 291
Release: 2020-02-25
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0393609316

A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice, this engaging, insightful portrayal of Emily Dickinson sheds new light on one of American literature’s most enigmatic figures. On August 3, 1845, young Emily Dickinson declared, “All things are ready” and with this resolute statement, her life as a poet began. Despite spending her days almost entirely “at home” (the occupation listed on her death certificate), Dickinson’s interior world was extraordinary. She loved passionately, was hesitant about publication, embraced seclusion, and created 1,789 poems that she tucked into a dresser drawer. In These Fevered Days, Martha Ackmann unravels the mysteries of Dickinson’s life through ten decisive episodes that distill her evolution as a poet. Ackmann follows Dickinson through her religious crisis while a student at Mount Holyoke, which prefigured her lifelong ambivalence toward organized religion and her deep, private spirituality. We see the poet through her exhilarating frenzy of composition, through which we come to understand her fiercely self-critical eye and her relationship with sister-in-law and first reader, Susan Dickinson. Contrary to her reputation as a recluse, Dickinson makes the startling decision to ask a famous editor for advice, writes anguished letters to an unidentified “Master,” and keeps up a lifelong friendship with writer Helen Hunt Jackson. At the peak of her literary productivity, she is seized with despair in confronting possible blindness. Utilizing thousands of archival letters and poems as well as never-before-seen photos, These Fevered Days constructs a remarkable map of Emily Dickinson’s inner life. Together, these ten days provide new insights into her wildly original poetry and render an “enjoyable and absorbing” (Scott Bradfield, Washington Post) portrait of American literature’s most enigmatic figure.

Death in the Floating City

Death in the Floating City
Author: Tasha Alexander
Publisher: Minotaur Books
Total Pages: 282
Release: 2012-10-16
Genre: Fiction
ISBN: 1250011035

The Huffington Post calls Tears of Pearl author Tasha Alexander "one to watch—and read" and her new Lady Emily mystery set in Venice proves it! Years ago, Emily's childhood nemesis, Emma Callum, scandalized polite society when she eloped to Venice with an Italian count. But now her father-in-law lies murdered, and her husband has vanished. There's no one Emma can turn to for help but Emily, who leaves at once with her husband, the dashing Colin Hargreaves, for Venice. There, her investigations take her from opulent palazzi to slums, libraries, and bordellos. Emily soon realizes that to solve the present day crime, she must first unravel a centuries old puzzle. But the past does not give up its secrets easily, especially when these revelations might threaten the interests of some very powerful people.

Forgiving God

Forgiving God
Author: Hilary Yancey
Publisher: FaithWords
Total Pages: 146
Release: 2018-04-03
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1546033009

A young mother's life is forever changed and her faith in God is broken when her son in diagnosed with complex physical disabilities. Restore and grow your faith as you read about Hilary Yancey's personal journey back to God. Three months into her pregnancy with her first child, Hilary Yancey received a phone call that changed everything. As she learned the diagnosis-cleft lip and palate, a missing right eye, possible breathing complications-Hilary began to pray in earnest. Even in the midst of these findings, she prayed that God would heal her son. God could do a miracle unlike anything she had seen. Only when Hilary held her baby, Jack, in her arms for the first time did she realize God had given her something drastically different than what she had demanded. Hilary struggled to talk to God as she sat for six weeks beside Jack's crib in the NICU. She consented to surgeries and learned to care for a breathing tube and gastronomy button. In her experience with motherhood Hilary had become more familiar with the sound of her son's heart monitor than the sound of his heartbeat. Later, during surgeries and emergency trips back to the hospital with her crying, breathless boy, Hilary reproached the stranger God had become. Jack was different. Hilary was not the mother she once imagined. God was not who Hilary knew before. But she could not let go of one certainty-she could see the image of Christ in Jack's face. Slowly, through long nights of wrestling and longer nights of silence, Hilary cut a path through her old, familiar faith to the God behind it. She discovered that it is by walking out onto the water, where the firm ground gives way, that we can find him. And meeting Jesus, who rises with his scars to proclaim new life, is never what you once imagined.