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The Last Days of Roger Federer and Other Endings
by Geoff DyerOne of Esquire's best books of spring 2022An extended meditation on late style and last works from "one of our greatest living critics" (Kathryn Schulz, New York).When artists and athletes age, what happens to their work? Does it ripen or rot? Achieve a new serenity or succumb to an escalating torment? As our bodies decay, how do we keep on? In this beguiling meditation, Geoff Dyer sets his own encounter with late middle age against the last days and last works of writers, painters, footballers, musicians, and tennis stars who’ve mattered to him throughout his life. With a playful charm and penetrating intelligence, he recounts Friedrich Nietzsche’s breakdown in Turin, Bob Dylan’s reinventions of old songs, J. M. W. Turner’s paintings of abstracted light, John Coltrane’s cosmic melodies, Bjorn Borg’s defeats, and Beethoven’s final quartets—and considers the intensifications and modifications of experience that come when an ending is within sight. Throughout, he stresses the accomplishments of uncouth geniuses who defied convention, and went on doing so even when their beautiful youths were over. <p><p>Ranging from Burning Man and the Doors to the nineteenth-century Alps and back, Dyer’s book on last things is also a book about how to go on living with art and beauty—and on the entrancing effect and sudden illumination that an Art Pepper solo or Annie Dillard reflection can engender in even the most jaded and ironic sensibilities. Praised by Steve Martin for his “hilarious tics” and by Tom Bissell as “perhaps the most bafflingly great prose writer at work in the English language today,” Dyer has now blended criticism, memoir, and humorous banter of the most serious kind into something entirely new. The Last Days of Roger Federer is a summation of Dyer’s passions, and the perfect introduction to his sly and joyous work.
The Last Days of Socrates
by PlatoEuthyphro/Apology/Crito/Phaedo'Nothing can harm a good man either in life or after death'The trial and condemnation of Socrates on charges of heresy and corrupting young minds is a defining moment in the history of classical Athens. In tracing these events through four dialogues, Plato also developed his own philosophy of a life guided by self-responsibility. Euthyphro finds Socrates outside the court-house, debating the nature of piety, while the Apology is his robust rebuttal of the charges against him. In the Crito, awaiting execution in prison, Socrates counters the arguments of friends urging him to escape. Finally, in the Phaedo, he is shown calmly confident in the face of death.Translated by HUGH TREDENNICK and HAROLD TARRANT with an Introduction and notes by HAROLD TARRANT
The Last Days of Sylvia Plath
by Carl RollysonIn her last days, Sylvia Plath struggled to break out from the control of the towering figure of her husband Ted Hughes. In the antique mythology of his retinue, she had become the gorgon threatening to bring down the House of Hughes. Drawing on recently available court records, archives, and interviews, and reevaluating the memoirs of the formidable Hughes contingent who treated Plath as a female hysteric, Carl Rollyson rehabilitates the image of a woman too often viewed solely within the confines of what Hughes and his collaborators wanted to be written. Rollyson is the first biographer to gain access to the papers of Ruth Tiffany Barnhouse at Smith College, a key figure in the poet’s final days. Barnhouse was a therapist who may have been the only person to whom Plath believed she could reveal her whole self. Barnhouse went beyond the protocols of her profession, serving more as Plath’s ally, seeking a way out of the imprisoning charisma of Ted Hughes and friends he counted on to support a regime of antipathy against her. The Last Days of Sylvia Plath focuses on the train of events that plagued Plath’s last seven months when she tried to recover her own life in the midst of Hughes’s alternating threats and reassurances. In a siege-like atmosphere a tormented Plath continued to write, reach out to friends, and care for her two children. Why Barnhouse seemed, in Hughes’s malign view, his wife’s undoing, and how biographers, Hughes, and his cohort parsed the events that led to the poet’s death, form the charged and contentious story this book has to tell.
The Last Draft: A Novelist's Guide to Revision
by Sandra ScofieldThe definitive handbook for the novelist who is ready to revise This wise and friendly guide shows writers how to turn first-draft manuscripts into the novels of their dreams. A critic, longtime teacher, and award-winning novelist, Sandra Scofield illustrates how to reread a work of fiction with a view of its subject and vision, and how to take it apart and put it back together again, stronger and deeper. Scofield builds her explanations around helpful concepts like narrative structure, character agency, and core scenes, using models from classic and contemporary writers. The detailed, step-by-step plan laid out in The Last Draft offers invaluable advice to both novice and experienced writers alike. In Scofield, they will find a seasoned, encouraging mentor to steer them through this emotional and intellectual journey.
A Last Elizabethan Journal V3: Being A Record Of Those Things Most Talked Of During The Years 1591-1610 (Routledge Library Editions Ser.)
by G.B. HarrisonFirst Published in 1999. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
The Last Fifty Pages: The Art and Craft of Unforgettable Endings
by James BellWhat are the secrets for writing a great ending for your novel? How do you leave readers so satisfied that they'll want another book by you—right now? What tools and techniques can shape your last fifty pages into a powerful, unforgettable experience?
Last Laughs: Perspectives on Women and Comedy (Routledge Library Editions: Comedy)
by Regina BarrecaFirst published in 1988, the 19 original essays (and three "Sylvia" cartoons) included in this volume deal with the gender-specific nature of comedy. This pioneering collection observes the creation of women’s comedy from a wide range of standpoints: political, sociological, psychoanalytical, linguistic, and historical. The writers explore the role of women’s comedy in familiar and unfamiliar territory, from Austen to Weldon, from Behn to Wasserstein. The questions they raise will lead to a redefinition of the genre itself.
Last Looks, Last Books: Stevens, Plath, Lowell, Bishop, Merrill (The A. W. Mellon Lectures in the Fine Arts #56)
by Helen VendlerModern American poets writing in the face of deathIn Last Looks, Last Books, the eminent critic Helen Vendler examines the ways in which five great modern American poets, writing their final books, try to find a style that does justice to life and death alike. With traditional religious consolations no longer available to them, these poets must invent new ways to express the crisis of death, as well as the paradoxical coexistence of a declining body and an undiminished consciousness. In The Rock, Wallace Stevens writes simultaneous narratives of winter and spring; in Ariel, Sylvia Plath sustains melodrama in cool formality; and in Day by Day, Robert Lowell subtracts from plenitude. In Geography III, Elizabeth Bishop is both caught and freed, while James Merrill, in A Scattering of Salts, creates a series of self-portraits as he dies, representing himself by such things as a Christmas tree, human tissue on a laboratory slide, and the evening/morning star. The solution for one poet will not serve for another; each must invent a bridge from an old style to a new one. Casting a last look at life as they contemplate death, these modern writers enrich the resources of lyric poetry.
The Last Love of George Sand: A Literary Biography
by Evelyne Bloch-DanoGeorge Sand is one the most celebrated writers and controversial personalities of nineteenth-century France; she is as famous for her bohemian lifestyle as for her written work. The Last Love of George Sand portrays the writer, political activist, and cultural figure as she starts a new chapter in her ever-surprising life: the mature years with her last lover, the young and talented engraver Alexandre Manceau. A turning point came for George Sand in 1849. After her political involvement in the revolution of 1848, Sand retreated to her country property, Nohant, with her son Maurice and started writing new plays. One day, Maurice introduced her to Alexandre Manceau, a young and shy artist thirteen years her junior. At forty-five, she was at the pinnacle of her career. She had a long history of tumultuous love affairs with famous artists such as Musset, Chopin, and Mérimée, but she had never experienced a peaceful and balanced relationship. With Manceau, Sand discovered that she could be loved, and fall in love herself, without drama. Their relationship would last fifteen years, and prove to be the most prolific period of Sand's life, with fifty books published including the novels Elle et lui, inspired by her relationship with Musset, and Le dernier amour, written just ten days after Manceau died of tuberculosis. Although much has been written about George Sand, most of the previous biographies are focused on her more turbulent times. In The Last Love of George Sand, Evelyne Bloch-Dano looks back on Sand's life from the vantage point of her years with Manceau.
The Last Man and Gothic Sympathy (Elements in the Gothic)
by Michael CameronThis Element explores the theme of 'Gothic sympathy' as it appears in a collection of 'Last Man' novels. A liminal site of both possibility and irreconcilability, Gothic sympathy at once challenges the anthropocentric bias of traditional notions of sympathetic concern, premising compassionate relations with other beings – animal, vegetal, etc. – beyond the standard measure of the liberal-humanist subject, and at the same time acknowledges the horror that is the ineluctable and untranslatable otherness accompanying, interrupting, and shaping such a sympathetic connection. Many examples of 'Last Man' fiction explore the dialectical impasse of Gothic sympathy by dramatizing complicated relationships between a lone liberal-humanist subject and other-than-human or posthuman subjects that will persist beyond humanity's extinction. Such confrontations as they appear in Mary Shelley's The Last Man, H.G. Wells's The Time Machine, and Richard Matheson's I Am Legend will be explored.
The Last Mile (Comprehension Power Readers)
by Modern PressThe story of a Pony Express rider with a very smart horse.
Last Night's Reading: Illustrated Encounters with Extraordinary Authors
by Kate GavinoAn irresistible illustrated collection of charming, wise, and hilarious quotations from your favorite authorsWhy do we go to book readings? For a chance to see the authors we love come to life off the page, answering our questions and proving to be the brilliant, witty people we catch glimpses of through their work. Illustrator Kate Gavino (author of Sanpaku) captures the wonder of this experience firsthand. At every reading she attends, Kate hand-letters the event&’s most memorable quote alongside a charming portrait of the author. In Last Night&’s Reading, Kate takes us on her journey through the literary world, sharing illustrated insight from more than one hundred of today&’s greatest writers—including Zadie Smith, Junot Diaz, Lev Grossman, Elizabeth Gilbert, and many more—on topics ranging from friendship and humor to creativity and identity. A celebration of authors, reading, and bookstores, this delightful collection is an advice book like no other and a love letter to the joy of seeing your favorite author up close and personal.&“Instead of putting together a lengthy play-by-play of the event she witnessed, Gavino records the best quote, and accompanies it with a colorful sketch of the author. It sounds simple, but the results are striking and unforgettable.&” –Flavorwire"A witty love letter to the literary world." –The Boston Globe
The Last of an Age: The Making and Unmaking of a Sixteenth-Century Ottoman Poet
by Sooyong KimIn The Last of an Age, Sooyong Kim explores the relationship between social change and the development of an Ottoman literary canon in the course of the sixteenth century by examining the work and reception of a popular poet, Zati (1471–1546). Kim argues that a newly emergent group of bureaucratic literati, through the production of authoritative biographical dictionaries, ultimately relegated Zati to a lesser literary age, driven by a self-fashioning that privileged broad linguistic ability, above all else, with poetry serving as the main vehicle for demonstrating that. This study is interdisciplinary in approach, taking insights from literary studies, cultural history, and social theory. It adds to the scholarship on the rise of early modern Ottoman canons in the fields of visual arts and music and complements recent work on court patronage. Framed by ongoing critiques of canon formation among specialists of early modern Europe and late imperial China, the study offers a comparative perspective on those issues.
The Last of the Mohicans (SparkNotes Literature Guide Series)
by SparkNotesThe Last of the Mohicans (SparkNotes Literature Guide) by James Fenimore Cooper Making the reading experience fun! Created by Harvard students for students everywhere, SparkNotes is a new breed of study guide: smarter, better, faster. Geared to what today's students need to know, SparkNotes provides: *Chapter-by-chapter analysis *Explanations of key themes, motifs, and symbols *A review quiz and essay topicsLively and accessible, these guides are perfect for late-night studying and writing papers
The Last of the Whampoa Breed: Stories of the Chinese Diaspora (Modern Chinese Literature from Taiwan)
by David Der-wei Wang Pang-Yuan ChiWhampoa Military Academy was China's first modern military institution. For decades the "Spirit of Whampoa" was invoked as the highest praise to all Chinese soldiers who guarded their nation heroically. But of all the battles these soldiers have fought, the most challenging one was the civil war that resulted in the "great divide" of China in the mid-twentieth century. In 1949 the Communists exiled a million soldiers and their families to compounds in Taiwan and cut off communication with mainland China for forty years. The Last of the Whampoa Breed tells the stories of the exiles written by their descendants, many of whom have become Taiwan's most important authors. The book is an important addition to the vastly underrepresented literature of Taiwan in translation and sheds light on the complex relationship between Taiwan and the People's Republic of China. Western readers will not at first recognize the experiences of these soldiers who were severed from a traditional past only to face unfulfilled promises and uncertain futures. Many of the exiles were doomed to live and die homeless and loveless. Yet these life stories reveal a magnanimous, natural dignity that has transcended prolonged mental suffering. "I Wanted to Go to War" describes the sadly ineffectual, even comic attempts to "recapture the mainland." The old soldier in "Tale of Two Strangers" asks to have his ashes scattered over both the land of his dreams and the island that has sheltered him for forty years. Some of the stories recount efforts to make peace with life in Taiwan, as in "Valley of Hesitation," and the second generation's struggles to find a place in the native island society as in "The Vanishing Ball" and "In Remembrance of My Buddies from the Military Compound." Narrating the homeland remembered and the homeland in reality, the stories in this book affirm that "we shall not let history be burned to mere ashes."
Last Paper Standing: A Century of Competition between the Denver Post and the Rocky Mountain News (G - Reference,information And Interdisciplinary Subjects Ser.)
by Ken J. WardLast Paper Standing chronicles the history of competition between the Denver Post and Rocky Mountain News—from both newspapers’ origins to their joint operating agreement in 2001 to the death of the News in 2009—to tell a broader story about the decline of newspaper readership in the United States. The papers fought for dominance in the lucrative Denver newspaper market for more than a century, enduring vigorous competition in pursuit of monopoly control. This frequently sensational, sometimes outlandish, and occasionally bloody battle spanned numerous eras of journalism, embodying the rise and fall of the newspaper industry during the twentieth century in the lead up to the fall of American newspapering. Drawing on manuscript collections scattered across the United States as well as oral histories with executives, managers, and journalists from the papers, Ken J. Ward investigates the strategies employed in their competition with one another and against other challenges, such as widespread economic uncertainty and the deterioration of the newspaper industry. He follows this competition through the death of the Rocky Mountain News in 2009, which ended the country’s last great newspaper war and marked the close of the golden age of Denver journalism. Fake news runs rampant in the absence of high-quality news sources like the News and the Post of the past. Neither canonizing nor vilifying key characters, Last Paper Standing offers insight into the historical context that led these papers’ managers to their changing strategies over time. It is of interest to media and business historians, as well as anyone interested in the general history of journalism, Denver, and Colorado.
The Last Physician: Walker Percy and the Moral Life of Medicine
by John Lantos Carl ElliottWalker Percy brought to his novels the perspective of both a doctor and a patient. Trained as a doctor at Columbia University, he contracted tuberculosis during his internship as a pathologist at Bellevue Hospital and spent the next three years recovering, primarily in TB sanitoriums. This collection of essays explores not only Percy's connections to medicine but also the underappreciated impact his art has had--and can have--on medicine itself. The contributors--physicians, philosophers, and literary critics--examine the relevance of Percy's work to current dilemmas in medical education and health policy. They reflect upon the role doctors and patients play in his novels, his family legacy of depression, how his medical background influenced his writing style, and his philosophy of psychiatry. They contemplate the private ways in which Percy's work affected their own lives and analyze the author's tendency to contrast the medical-scientific worldview with a more spiritual one. Assessing Percy's stature as an author and elucidating the many ways that reading and writing can combine with diagnosing and treating to offer an antidote to despair, they ask what it means to be a doctor, a writer, and a seeker of cures and truths--not just for the body but for the malaise and diseased spirituality of modern times. This collection will appeal to lovers of literature as well as medical professionals--indeed, anyone concerned with medical ethics and the human side of doctoring.Contributors. Robert Coles, Brock Eide, Carl Elliott, John D. Lantos, Ross McElwee, Richard Martinez, Martha Montello, David Schiedermayer, Jay Tolson, Bertram Wyatt-Brown, Laurie Zoloth-Dorfman
The Last Plantagenet Consorts
by Kavita Mudan FinnAn examination of fifteenth-century British queens through literature and history.
The Last Poems of D.H. Lawrence: Shaping a Late Style
by Bethan JonesIn the first book to take D. H. Lawrence's Last Poems as its starting point, Bethan Jones adopts a broadly intertextual approach to explore key aspects of Lawrence's late style. The evolution and meaning of the poems are considered in relation to Lawrence's prose works of this period, including Sketches of Etruscan Places, Lady Chatterley's Lover, and Apocalypse. More broadly, Jones shows that Lawrence's late works are products of a complex process of textual assimilation, as she uncovers the importance of Lawrence's reading in mythology, cosmology, primitivism, mysticism, astronomy, and astrology. The result is a book that highlights the richness and diversity of his poetic output, also prioritizing the masterpieces of Lawrence's mature style which are as accomplished as anything produced by his Modernist contemporaries.
The Last Romantics (Routledge Revivals)
by Graham HoughFirst published in 1947, The Last Romantics elucidates on the major preoccupations of the leaders of thought in late Victorian times such as the arts and their relation to religion and the social order. The aim is to trace their thoughts and feelings and study the relevance of the thoughts to the author's time. This leads author to examine some aesthetic theories of Ruskin, Rosetti, Morris, Pater and finally Yeats, and includes discussions on art and French literature. This book will be of interest to students of Romantic literature.
The Last Samurai Reread (Rereadings)
by Lee KonstantinouConsidered by some to be the greatest novel of the twenty-first century, Helen DeWitt’s brilliant The Last Samurai tells the story of Sibylla, an Oxford-educated single mother raising a possible child prodigy, Ludo. Disappointed when he meets his biological father, the boy decides that he can do better. Inspired by Akira Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, he embarks on a quixotic, moving quest to find a suitable father. The novel’s cult-classic status did not come easy: it underwent a notoriously tortuous publication process and briefly went out of print.Lee Konstantinou combines a riveting reading of The Last Samurai with a behind-the-scenes look at DeWitt’s fraught experiences with corporate publishing. He shows how interpreting the ambition and richness of DeWitt’s work in light of her struggles with literary institutions provides a potent social critique. The novel helps us think about our capacity for learning and creativity, revealing the constraints that capitalism and material deprivation impose on intellectual flourishing. Drawing on interviews with DeWitt and other key figures, Konstantinou explores the book’s composition and its history with Talk Miramax Books, the publishing arm of Bob and Harvey Weinstein’s media empire. He argues that The Last Samurai allegorizes its troubled relationship with the institutions and middlemen that ferried it into the world. What’s ultimately at stake in Ludo’s quest is not only who might make a good father but also how we might fulfill our potential in a world that often seems cruelly designed to thwart that very possibility.
The Last Testament of Oscar Wilde
by Peter AckroydProvides insightful commentary on Wilde and his work.
Last Things: Disastrous Form from Kant to Hujar (Lit Z)
by Jacques KhalipThe arrival of the Anthropocene brings the suggestion that we are only now beginning to speculate on an inhuman world that is not for us, only now confronting fears and anxieties of ecological, political, social, and philosophical extinction. While pointing out that reflections on disaster were not foreign to what we historically call romanticism, Last Things pushes romantic thought toward an altogether new way of conceiving the “end of things,” one that treats lastness as neither privation nor conclusion. Through quieter, non-emphatic modes of thinking the end of human thought, Khalip explores lastness as what marks the limits of our life and world. Reading the fate of romanticism—and romantic studies—within the key of the last, Khalip refuses to elegize or celebrate our ends, instead positing romanticism as a negative force that exceeds theories, narratives, and figures of survival and sustainability. Each chapter explores a range of romantic and contemporary materials: poetry by John Clare, Emily Dickinson, John Keats, Percy Shelley, and William Wordsworth; philosophical texts by William Godwin, David Hume, Immanuel Kant, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau; paintings by Hubert Robert, Caspar David Friedrich, and Paterson Ewen; installations by Tatsuo Miyajima and James Turrell; and photography by John Dugdale, Peter Hujar, and Joanna Kane. Shuttling between temporalities, Last Things undertakes an original reorganization of romantic thought for contemporary culture. It examines an archive on the side of disappearance, perishing, the inhuman, and lastness.
The Last Titan: A Life of Theodore Dreiser
by Jerome LovingA standard biography of one of America's best novelists, Theodore Dreiser, this book paints a full portrait of a writer who boldly swept away Victorian timidity to open the twentieth century in American literature.
The Last Utopians: Four Late Nineteenth-Century Visionaries and Their Legacy
by Michael RobertsonThe entertaining story of four utopian writers—Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—and their continuing influence todayFor readers reared on the dystopian visions of Nineteen Eighty-Four and The Handmaid's Tale, the idea of a perfect society may sound more sinister than enticing. In this lively literary history of a time before "Orwellian" entered the cultural lexicon, Michael Robertson reintroduces us to a vital strain of utopianism that seized the imaginations of late nineteenth-century American and British writers.The Last Utopians delves into the biographies of four key figures--Edward Bellamy, William Morris, Edward Carpenter, and Charlotte Perkins Gilman—who lived during an extraordinary period of literary and social experimentation. The publication of Bellamy's Looking Backward in 1888 opened the floodgates of an unprecedented wave of utopian writing. Morris, the Arts and Crafts pioneer, was a committed socialist whose News from Nowhere envisions a workers' Arcadia. Carpenter boldly argued that homosexuals constitute a utopian vanguard. Gilman, a women's rights activist and the author of "The Yellow Wallpaper," wrote numerous utopian fictions, including Herland, a visionary tale of an all-female society.These writers, Robertson shows, shared a belief in radical equality, imagining an end to class and gender hierarchies and envisioning new forms of familial and romantic relationships. They held liberal religious beliefs about a universal spirit uniting humanity. They believed in social transformation through nonviolent means and were committed to living a simple life rooted in a restored natural world. And their legacy remains with us today, as Robertson describes in entertaining firsthand accounts of contemporary utopianism, ranging from Occupy Wall Street to a Radical Faerie retreat.