The Luck of Friendship: The Letters of Tennessee Williams and James Laughlin

The Luck of Friendship: The Letters of Tennessee Williams and James Laughlin
Author: James Laughlin
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Total Pages: 440
Release: 2018-03-13
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0393652742

The chronicle of Tennessee Williams and James Laughlin’s unlikely yet enduring literary and personal relationship. In December 1942, two guests at a Lincoln Kirstein mixer bonded over their shared love of Hart Crane’s poetry. One of them was James Laughlin, the founder of a small publishing company called New Directions, which he had begun only seven years earlier as a sophomore at Harvard. The other was a young playwright named Thomas Lanier Williams, or "Tennessee," as he had just started to call himself. A little more than a week after that first encounter, Tennessee sent a letter to Jay—as he always addressed Laughlin in writing— expressing a desire to get together for an informal discussion of some of Tennessee’s poetry. "I promise you it would be extremely simple," he wrote, "and we would inevitably part on good terms even if you advised me to devote myself exclusively to the theatre for the rest of my life." So began a deep friendship that would last for forty-one years, through critical acclaim and rejection, commercial success and failure, manic highs, bouts of depression, and serious and not-so-serious liaisons. Williams called Laughlin his "literary conscience," and New Directions serves to this day as Williams’s publisher, not only for The Glass Menagerie and his other celebrated plays but for his highly acclaimed novels, short stories, and volumes of poetry as well. Their story provides a window into the literary history of the mid-twentieth century and reveals the struggles of a great artist, supported in his endeavors by the publisher he considered a true friend.

Tennessee Williams 101

Tennessee Williams 101
Author: Augustin J Correro
Publisher: Arcadia Publishing
Total Pages: 133
Release: 2021-02-22
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1455625353

Like an alchemist, Tennessee would dip his pen in reality and make fiction out of it. This journey through his life focuses on the influence of specific people and places on selected works.

Christopher Isherwood Inside Out

Christopher Isherwood Inside Out
Author: Katherine Bucknell
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
Total Pages: 640
Release: 2024-08-26
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 1429951982

A stunningly intimate exploration of the writer and gay cultural icon and of his lifelong search for authenticity. The story of Christopher Isherwood’s life is one of pilgrimage: away from the constraints of inheritance and empire and toward authenticity and spiritual illumination. Isherwood—the author of Goodbye to Berlin, which inspired Cabaret, and A Single Man—was born the heir to a crumbling English estate. He died an icon of gay liberation in California while his partner of thirty years, Don Bachardy, painted his death portrait. Isherwood began his career depicting the psychological wreckage of World War I. While living in Berlin, he began to write his reputation-making fiction and (with W. H. Auden) plays inspired by the city’s nightlife, its artistic underbelly, its fevered politics. When Hitler took power, he fled with his German boyfriend, who was pursued and arrested by the Gestapo. Isherwood left Europe and found work as a screenwriter in Hollywood, where he became the disciple of a Hindu monk, Swami Prabhavananda. Together they translated the Bhagavad Gita. Isherwood shed his family ghosts and became a chief instigator of the cultural shift that made gay liberation possible. Every step of the journey served his writing; one of our greatest diarists, he recorded his experiences and transformed them in fiction and memoir. Katherine Bucknell charts the quest of the restless, penetrating, blackly comic mind through books, films, foreign lands, love affairs, and collaborations toward self-understanding and happiness. Here is Christopher Isherwood Inside Out.

Fire Island

Fire Island
Author: Jack Parlett
Publisher: Harlequin
Total Pages: 279
Release: 2022-06-14
Genre: History
ISBN: 0369720474

*A Town and Country Must-Read Book of Summer?* *A BUZZFEED BEST BOOK OF JUNE* *A Washington Post “Book to Read This Summer”* *AN ADVOCATE BEST LGBTQ+ BOOK OF 2022* *A USA Today "Book to Celebrate Pride Month"* *A New York Times "Editor's Pick"* *A Kirkus Reviews Hottest Book of Summer* A groundbreaking account of New York's Fire Island, chronicling its influence on art, literature, culture and queer liberation over the past century Fire Island, a thin strip of beach off the Long Island coast, has long been a vital space in the queer history of America. Both utopian and exclusionary, healing and destructive, the island is a locus of contradictions, all of which coalesce against a stunning ocean backdrop. Now, poet and scholar Jack Parlett tells the story of this iconic destination—its history, its meaning and its cultural significance—told through the lens of the artists and creators who sought refuge on its shores. Together, figures as divergent as Walt Whitman, Oscar Wilde, James Baldwin, Carson McCullers, Frank O'Hara, Patricia Highsmith and Jeremy O. Harris tell the story of a queer space in constant evolution. Transporting, impeccably researched and gorgeously written, Fire Island is the definitive book on an iconic American destination and an essential contribution to queer history.

The Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns

The Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns
Author: Francis Hutcheson Professor of Scottish Literature Gerard Carruthers
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 657
Release: 2024-02
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 019884624X

The Oxford Handbook of Robert Burns treats the extensive writing of and culture surrounding Scotland's national 'bard'. Robert Burns (1759-96) was a producer of lyrical verse, satirical poetry, in English and Scots, a song-writer and song-collector, a writer of bawdry, journals, commonplace books and correspondence. Sculpting his own image, his untutored rusticity was a sincere persona as much as it was not entirely accurate. Burns was an antiquarian, national patriot, pioneer of what today we would call 'folk culture', and a man of the Enlightenment and Romanticism. The Handbook considers Burns's reception in his own time and beyond, extending to his iconic status as a world-writer. Burns was important to the English Romantic poets, in the context of debates about Abolition in the US, in the Victorian era he was widely utilised as a model for different kinds of popular poetry and he has been utilised as a contestant in debates surrounding Scottish and, indeed, British politics, in peacetime and in wartime down to the present day. The writer's afterlife includes not only a large number of biographies but a whole culture of commemoration in art, architecture, fiction, material culture, museum-exhibition and even forged manuscripts and memorabilia as well as appearances, apparently, via Spiritualist seances. The politics of his work channel the fierce debates of late eighteenth-century Scottish ecclesiastical controversy as well as the ages of American, Agrarian and French revolutions. All of this ground is traversed in this Handbook, the largest critical compendium ever assembled about Robert Burns.

Indian Sun

Indian Sun
Author: Oliver Craske
Publisher: Hachette Books
Total Pages: 682
Release: 2020-04-07
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 0306874873

One of Library Journal's "Best Arts Books of 2020" The definitive biography of Ravi Shankar, one of the most influential musicians and composers of the twentieth century, told with the cooperation of his estate, family, and friends For over eight decades, Ravi Shankar was India's greatest cultural ambassador. He was a groundbreaking performer and composer of Indian classical music, who brought the music and rich culture of India to the world's leading concert halls and festivals, charting the map for those who followed in his footsteps. Renowned for playing Monterey Pop, Woodstock, and the Concert for Bangladesh-and for teaching George Harrison of The Beatles how to play the sitar-Shankar reshaped the musical landscape of the 1960s across pop, jazz, and classical music, and composed unforgettable scores for movies like Pather Panchali and Gandhi. In Indian Sun: The Life and Music of Ravi Shankar, writer Oliver Craske presents readers with the first full portrait of this legendary figure, revealing the personal and professional story of a musician who influenced-and continues to influence-countless artists. Craske paints a vivid picture of a captivating, restless workaholic-from his lonely and traumatic childhood in Varanasi to his youthful stardom in his brother's dance troupe, from his intensive study of the sitar to his revival of India's national music scene. Shankar's musical influence spread across both genres and generations, and he developed close friendships with John Coltrane, Philip Glass, Yehudi Menuhin, George Harrison, and Benjamin Britten, among many others. For ninety-two years, Shankar lived an endlessly colorful and creative life, a life defined by musical, emotional, and spiritual quests-and his legacy lives on. Benefiting from unprecedented access to Shankar's archives, and drawing on new interviews with over 130 subjects-including his second wife and both of his daughters, Norah Jones and Anoushka Shankar- Indian Sun gives readers unparalleled insight into a man who transformed modern music as we know it today.

Stairs to the Roof

Stairs to the Roof
Author: Tennessee Williams
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 136
Release: 2000
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 9780811214353

A play produced only twice in the 1940s and now published for the first time reveals that Tennessee Williams anticipated the themes of Star Trek by decades.

27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other Plays

27 Wagons Full of Cotton and Other Plays
Author: Tennessee Williams
Publisher: New Directions Publishing
Total Pages: 260
Release: 1966-01-17
Genre: Drama
ISBN: 081122080X

The thirteen one-act plays collected in this volume include some of Tennessee Williams's finest and most powerful work. They are full of the perception of life as it is, and the passion for life as it ought to be, which have made The Glass Menagerie and A Streetcar Named Desire classics of the American theater. Only one of these plays (The Purification) is written in verse, but in all of them the approach to character is by way of poetic revelation. Whether Williams is writing of derelict roomers in a New Orleans boarding house (The Lady of Larkspur Lotion) or the memories of a venerable traveling salesman (The Last of My Solid Gold Watches) or of delinquent children (This Property is Condemned), his insight into human nature is that of the poet. He can compress the basic meaning of life—its pathos or its tragedy, its bravery or the quality of its love—into one small scene or a few moments of dialogue. Mr. Williams's views on the role of the little theater in American culture are contained in a stimulating essay, "Something wild...," which serves as an introduction to this collection.

The Cultural Cold War

The Cultural Cold War
Author: Frances Stonor Saunders
Publisher: New Press, The
Total Pages: 458
Release: 2013-11-05
Genre: History
ISBN: 1595589147

During the Cold War, freedom of expression was vaunted as liberal democracy’s most cherished possession—but such freedom was put in service of a hidden agenda. In The Cultural Cold War, Frances Stonor Saunders reveals the extraordinary efforts of a secret campaign in which some of the most vocal exponents of intellectual freedom in the West were working for or subsidized by the CIA—whether they knew it or not. Called "the most comprehensive account yet of the [CIA’s] activities between 1947 and 1967" by the New York Times, the book presents shocking evidence of the CIA’s undercover program of cultural interventions in Western Europe and at home, drawing together declassified documents and exclusive interviews to expose the CIA’s astonishing campaign to deploy the likes of Hannah Arendt, Isaiah Berlin, Leonard Bernstein, Robert Lowell, George Orwell, and Jackson Pollock as weapons in the Cold War. Translated into ten languages, this classic work—now with a new preface by the author—is "a real contribution to popular understanding of the postwar period" (The Wall Street Journal), and its story of covert cultural efforts to win hearts and minds continues to be relevant today.