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In An American Princess, Laurie Dennett relates the remarkable story of a New England woman whose wealth, intelligence, and charm took her to the heart of aristocratic and intellectual Europe. Marguerite Chapin (1880–1963) was the product of two cultures: her father’s enterprising American one and her mother’s French heritage, which enabled her to move to Paris when she inherited a fortune at age twenty-one. There, she studied singing with the greatest tenor of the age, commissioned paintings from artists such as Pierre Bonnard, Edouard Vuillard, and André Derain, and drew upon her many friendships with writers to found and edit the pioneering literary review Commerce. Her marriage, i...
“Our lives are Swiss,” Emily Dickinson wrote in 1859, “So still—so cool.” But over the Alps, “Italy stands the other side.” For Dickinson, as for many other writers and artists, Italy has been the land of light, a seductive source of invention, enchantment, and freedom. So it was for Helen Barolini, who, as a student in Rome after World War II, wrote her first poetry and gave birth to her own creative life, reinvigorating her mother tongue. In this book, Barolini celebrates the lives of other women whose imaginations succumbed to the lure of Italy. Here Barolini profiles six gifted women transformed by Italy’s mythic appeal. Unlike Barolini herself, they were not daughters of...
In 1920s Paris, Adrienne Monnier provided a focal point for the writers and artists drawn to the Left Bank. Her bookstore in the Rue de l’Odeon was aptly called La Maison des Amis des Livres. Monnier took a simple though sophisticated delight in language, books, art, music, nature, friendship, and food. Her 1940 journal, written as Paris fell to the Germans and originally published in 1976, is a rich tapestry of essays, reviews, and personal recollections. She goes to lunch with Colette, visits T. S. Eliot, befriends Joyce, argues with Breton, takes walks with Gide, publishes her elegant reviews, and reflects on the ballet, opera, Steinberg drawings, Marlon Brando and Alec Guinness movies, and the country of her birth.
In 1925, the 22-year-old Kenneth Clark (1903–1983) and the legendary art critic and historian Bernard Berenson (1865–1959) met in Italy. From that moment, they began a correspondence that lasted until Berenson's death at age 94. This book makes available, for the first time, the complete correspondence between two of the most influential figures in the 20th-century art world, and gives a new and unique insight into their lives and motivations. The letters are arranged into ten chronological sections, each accompanied by biographical details and providing the context for the events and personalities referred to. They were both talented letter writers: informative, spontaneous, humorous, gossipy, and in their frequent letters they exchanged news and views about art and politics, friends and family life, collectors, connoisseurship, discoveries, books read and written, and travel. Berenson advised Clark on his blossoming career, warning against the museum and commercial art worlds while encouraging his promise as a writer and interpreter of the arts. Above all, these letters trace the development of a deep and intimate friendship.
A vibrant history of the renowned and often controversial Iowa Writers’ Workshop and its celebrated alumni and faculty As the world’s preeminent creative writing program, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop has produced an astonishing number of distinguished writers and poets since its establishment in 1936. Its alumni and faculty include twenty-eight Pulitzer Prize winners, six U.S. poet laureates, and numerous National Book Award winners. This volume follows the program from its rise to prominence in the early 1940s under director Paul Engle, who promoted the “workshop” method of classroom peer criticism. Meant to simulate the rigors of editorial and critical scrutiny in the publishing industry, this educational style created an environment of both competition and community, cooperation and rivalry. Focusing on some of the exceptional authors who have participated in the program—such as Flannery O’Connor, Dylan Thomas, Kurt Vonnegut, Jane Smiley, Sandra Cisneros, T. C. Boyle, and Marilynne Robinson—David Dowling examines how the Iowa Writers’ Workshop has shaped professional authorship, publishing industries, and the course of American literature.
Three novellas by the author of Legends of the Fall. “A brilliant tour de force . . . Jim Harrison at his peak: comic, erotic, and insightful” (San Francisco Chronicle). Across the odd contours of the American landscape, people are searching for the things that aren’t irretrievably lost, for the incandescent beneath the ordinary. An ex-Bible student with raucously asocial tendencies rescues the preserved body of an Indian chief from the frigid depths of Lake Superior in a caper that nets a wildly unexpected bounty. A band of sixties radicals, now approaching middle age, reunite to free an old comrade from a Mexican jail. A fifty-year-old suburban housewife flees quietly from her abusiv...
Elsa Morante’s Politics of Writing is a collected volume of twenty-one essays written by Morante specialists and international scholars. Essays gather attention on four broad critical topics, namely the relationship Morante entertained with the arts, cinema, theatre, and the visual arts; new critical approaches to her four novels; treatment of body and sexual politics; and Morante’s prophetic voice as it emerges in both her literary works and her essayistic writings. Essays focus on Elsa Morante’s strategies to address her wide disinterest (and contempt) for the Italian intellectual status quo of her time, regardless of its political side, while showing at once her own kind of ideologi...
A study of the role of 'little magazines' and their contribution to the making of artistic modernism and the avant-garde across Europe, this volume is a major scholarly achievement of immense value to those interested in material culture of the 20th century.