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Strangers Tend to Tell Me Things: A Memoir Of Love, Loss, And Coming Home
by Amy DickinsonIn STRANGERS TEND TO TELL ME THINGS--her follow-up memoir to the NYT bestselling The Mighty Queens of Freeville--America's most popular advice columnist, "Ask Amy," shares her journey of family, second chances, and finding love.By peeling back the curtain of her syndicated advice column, Amy Dickinson reveals much of the inspiration and motivation that has fueled her calling. Through a series of linked essays, this moving narrative picks up where her earlier memoir left off. Exploring central themes of romance, death, parenting, self-care, and spiritual awakening, this touching and heartfelt homage speaks to all who have faced challenges in the wake of life's twists and turns. From finding love in middle-age to her storied experience with stepparenting to overcoming disordered eating to her final moments spent with her late mother, Dickinson's trademark humorous tone delivers punch and wit that will empower, entertain, and heal.
Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us
by Rachel AvivThe highly anticipated debut from the acclaimed award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv compels us to examine how the stories we tell about mental illness shape our sense of who we are.Strangers to Ourselves poses fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Rachel Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. She follows an Indian woman celebrated as a saint who lives in healing temples in Kerala; an incarcerated mother vying for her children's forgiveness after recovering from psychosis; a man who devotes his life to seeking revenge upon his psychoanalysts; and an affluent young woman who, after a decade of defining herself through her diagnosis, decides to go off her meds because she doesn't know who she is without them. Animated by a profound sense of empathy, Aviv's gripping exploration is refracted through her own account of living in a hospital ward at the age of six and meeting a fellow patient with whom her life runs parallel—until it no longer does.Aviv asks how the stories we tell about mental disorders shape their course in our lives—and our identities, too. Challenging the way we understand and talk about illness, her account is a testament to the porousness and resilience of the mind.
Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories That Make Us
by Rachel AvivOne of the top ten books of the year at The New York Times Book Review, The Wall Street Journal, Vulture/New York magazineA best book of the year at Los Angeles Times, Time, NPR, The Washington Post, Bookforum, The New Yorker, Vogue, KirkusThe acclaimed, award-winning New Yorker writer Rachel Aviv offers a groundbreaking exploration of mental illness and the mind, and illuminates the startling connections between diagnosis and identity.Strangers to Ourselves poses fundamental questions about how we understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on deep, original reporting as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, Rachel Aviv writes about people who have come up against the limits of psychiatric explanations for who they are. She follows an Indian woman celebrated as a saint who lives in healing temples in Kerala; an incarcerated mother vying for her children’s forgiveness after recovering from psychosis; a man who devotes his life to seeking revenge upon his psychoanalysts; and an affluent young woman who, after a decade of defining herself through her diagnosis, decides to go off her meds because she doesn’t know who she is without them. Animated by a profound sense of empathy, Aviv’s gripping exploration is refracted through her own account of living in a hospital ward at the age of six and meeting a fellow patient with whom her life runs parallel—until it no longer does.Aviv asks how the stories we tell about mental disorders shape their course in our lives—and our identities, too. Challenging the way we understand and talk about illness, her account is a testament to the porousness and resilience of the mind.
Strangers with Memories: The United States and Canada from Free Trade to Baghdad
by John StewartIn the early 1990s North America was the vibrant centre of an increasingly democratic and revitalized western hemisphere. The United States and Canada were close allies working together to implement a bilateral free trade agreement and build an integrated manufacturing and export economy. By the late 2000s, the economic and diplomatic ties between the two countries were strained as policies stagnated or slipped backward and passports were needed to cross the border for the first time in history. By 2017 the US planned to wall off its border with Mexico and NAFTA was slated for renegotiation. In Strangers with Memories John Stewart combines an insider’s knowledge, a mole’s perspective, and a historian’s consciousness to explain how two countries that spent the twentieth century building a world order together drifted so quickly apart in the early years of the twenty-first - and how that world order began its current shift. Assessing the major forces and events in North America’s development between 1990 and 2010, this book also details changes at the US embassy in Ottawa during those years and its relationship with US consulates in Canada and with the State Department’s Canada desk. Explaining how Canada's influence in the world depends on the US and has radically diminished with the decline in US diplomacy under presidents George W. Bush and Donald Trump, Stewart gives valuable advice on how Canada should handle its foreign policy in a much less stable world. From the viewpoint of a Canadian with a front-row seat to two decades of US-Canada relations, Strangers with Memories chronicles Canada at the apogee of American power.
The Strangest Man: The Hidden Life of Paul Dirac, Mystic of the Atom
by Graham FarmeloPaul Dirac was among the great scientific geniuses of the modern age. One of the discoverers of quantum mechanics, the most revolutionary theory of the past century, his contributions had a unique insight, eloquence, clarity, and mathematical power. His prediction of antimatter was one of the greatest triumphs in the history of physics. One of Einstein's most admired colleagues, Dirac was in 1933 the youngest theoretician ever to win the Nobel Prize in physics. Dirac's personality is legendary. He was an extraordinarily reserved loner, relentlessly literal-minded and appeared to have no empathy with most people. Yet he was a family man and was intensely loyal to his friends. His tastes in the arts ranged from Beethoven to Cher, from Rembrandt to Mickey Mouse. Based on previously undiscovered archives, The Strangest Man reveals the many facets of Dirac's brilliantly original mind. A compelling human story, The Strangest Man also depicts a spectacularly exciting era in scientific history.
Strategies of Representation in Auto/biography
by Muchativugwa Hove Kgomotso MasemolaStrategies of Representation in Auto/biography investigates how selves are represented and reconstructed in selected auto/biographical readings from African literary discourse. It examines how such representations confirm, validate, interrogate and pervade conversations with issues of identity, nation and history. In addition to providing an overview of the multidimensionality of auto/biography, the book also introduces readers to various ways of reading and analysing auto/biographical writings and develops specific perspectives on the genre and views inherently expressed through the re-imagined, re-membered and re-constructed self that speaks through the pages of autobiographical scripting. The focus on auto/biographical writings from southern Africa, specifically South Africa and Zimbabwe, offers a fresh reading of the work of significant figures in the political, economic and sociological spheres of these nation states. This collection shows that auto/biography may be more than simply the representation of an individual life, and that the socio-cultural memory of a people is a core aspect influencing individual self-representation.
The Strategist: Brent Scowcroft and the Call of National Security
by Bartholomew SparrowBased on the full cooperation of the subject--with no restraining conditions--The Strategist provides an in-depth portrait of a man whose career has been intimately linked to the great transformations in U. S. foreign policy, from the last third of the Cold War, to September 11, 2001, and up to the present. Bartholomew Sparrow brings color and focus to the complex and often secretive nature of U. S. foreign policy and strategic adjustments--an intellectual battlefield on which ideas and worldviews clash, in which economics, politics, and strategic concerns intertwine, and in which private citizens and non-office holders may exert as much influence as highly visible Cabinet officials. Among the most important foreign policy minds of the 20th and early 21st centuries, Brent Scowcroft is also among the least well-known or understood. In a now-famous August 2002 Wall Street Journal op-ed titled "Don’t Attack Saddam Hussein,” Brent Scowcroft, who had been national security advisor under President George H. W. Bush, went to war himself, in a sense, with his closest and longest-standing friends. He noted the scant evidence that tied the Iraqi government to terrorist organizations. He warned that an invasion and occupation of Iraq would be costly and potentially disastrous for a variety of carefully considered reasons. He recommended that the Bush administration work with the U. N. Security Council and wait for definitive proof of Saddam’s wrongdoing before taking action. The essay at once made Scowcroft the most outspoken and most credible critic of the Bush administration’s plans for war and immediately generated national controversy. It provoked a sudden, deep split in the Republican Party over the plans for war. Vice President Cheney, National Security Advisor Rice, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and President George W. Bush all vigorously reaffirmed their cause and their course of action, and the media and American public opinion soon fell in line. Clearly, Scowcroft, 84, continues to participate in the most central and important debates over U. S. foreign policy and national security. He has been a leading architect of U. S. foreign policy and grand strategy for almost a half-century, and though long out of office, still gives speeches, makes media appearances, and leads tasks forces and commissions. He is a rare creature, one of the few "wise men” of the nation’s capital: someone who is regularly consulted by top government officials in Democratic and Republican administrations, ranking members of the House and Senate from both sides of the aisle, and the country’s leading foreign-policy journalists. As recently as April 2009, Scowcroft co-chaired an extensive Council of Foreign Relations study of the U. S. nuclear weapons policy. More than anyone else, he stands at the center of the United States’ foreign policy establishment. Most significantly, Scowcroft is trusted--a scarce and typically fleeting quality in Washington--and has been for four decades. The unprecedented insights into the man and his career Sparrow offers in The Strategist are vital to anyone who wishes to understand America's changing role in the world.
The Strategists: Churchill, Stalin, Roosevelt, Mussolini, and Hitler--How War Made Them and How They Made War
by Phillips Payson O'BrienChurchill. Hitler. Stalin. Mussolini. Roosevelt. Five of the most impactful leaders of WW2, each with their own individualistic and idiosyncratic approach to warfare. But if we want to understand their military strategy, we must first understand the strategist.In The Strategists, Professor Phillips Payson O'Brien shows how the views these five leaders forged in WW1 are crucial to understanding how they fought WW2. For example, Churchill's experiences of facing the German Army in France in 1916 made him unwilling to send masses of British soldiers back there in the 1940s, while Hitler's mistakes on the Eastern Front were influenced by his reluctance to accept that conditions had changed since his own time fighting. The implications of the power of leaders remain with us to this day: to truly understand what is happening in Ukraine, for example, requires us to know what has influenced the leaders involved.This is a history in which leaders—and their choices—matter. For better or worse.
The Strategy of Campaigning: Lessons from Ronald Reagan and Boris Yeltsin
by Kiron K. Skinner Serhiy Kudelia Bruce Bueno de Mesquita Condoleezza RiceThe Strategy of Campaigningexplores the political careers of Ronald Reagan and Boris Yeltsin, two of the most galvanizing and often controversial political figures of our time. Both men overcame defeat early in their political careers and rose to the highest elected offices in their respective countries. The authors demonstrate how and why Reagan and Yeltsin succeeded in their political aspirations, despite-or perhaps because of-their apparent "policy extremism": that is, their advocacy of policy positions far from the mainstream. The book analyzes the viability of policy extremism as a political strategy that enables candidates to forge new coalitions and outflank conventional political allegiances. Kiron K. Skinner is Associate Professor of International Relations and Political Science at Carnegie Mellon University, a Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, and a member of the Chief of Naval Operations Executive Panel and the National Security Education Board. Serhiy Kudelia is Lecturer of Politics at Kyiv-Mohyla Academy, Ukraine and advisor to Deputy Prime Minister of Ukraine. Bruce Bueno de Mesquita is Julius Silver Professor and Director of the Alexander Hamilton Center for Political Economy at New York University and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. Condoleezza Rice is on a leave of absence from Stanford University, where she was a Professor of Political Science and a Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution. She is currently serving as U. S. Secretary of State.
The Strategy of Victory: How General George Washington Won the American Revolution
by Thomas FlemingA sweeping and insightful grand strategic overview of the American Revolution, highlighting Washington's role in orchestrating victory and creating the US ArmyLed by the Continental Congress, the Americans almost lost the war for independence because their military thinking was badly muddled. Following the victory in 1775 at Bunker Hill, patriot leaders were convinced that the key to victory was the home-grown militia--local men defending their families and homes. But the flush of early victory soon turned into a bitter reality as the British routed Americans fleeing New York.General George Washington knew that having and maintaining an army of professional soldiers was the only way to win independence. As he fought bitterly with the leaders in Congress over the creation of a regular army, he patiently waited until his new army was ready for pitched battle. His first opportunity came late in 1776, following his surprise crossing of the Delaware River. In New Jersey, the strategy of victory was about to unfold.In The Strategy of Victory, preeminent historian Thomas Fleming examines the battles that created American independence, revealing how the creation of a professional army worked on the battlefield to secure victory, independence, and a lasting peace for the young nation.
Stravinsky: France and America, 1934-1971
by Stephen WalshPicking up where the first volume left off, Walsh, a critic and musicologist at Cardiff U. , continues his biography of Russian composer Igor Stravinsky (1882-1971) from 1934 in France to his death in 1971. The biography follows his life and career from Paris to America, during a time when his wife died, he remarried, composed neoclassical works such as The Rake's Progress and Symphony in C, and dabbled in serialism. The first volume of the biography is Stravinsky: A Creative Spring: Russia and France, 1882-1934, which was published in 1999. Annotation ©2006 Book News, Inc. , Portland, OR (booknews. com)
Stravinsky: A Creative Spring: Russia and France, 1882-1934 (New Grove Composer Biographies Ser.)
by Stephen WalshWidely regarded the greatest composer of the twentieth century, Igor Stravinsky was central to the development of modernism in art. Deeply influential and wonderfully productive, he is remembered for dozens of masterworks, from The Firebird and The Rite of Spring to The Rake's Progress, but no dependable biography of him exists. Previous studies have relied too heavily on his own unreliable memoirs and conversations, and until now no biographer has possessed both the musical knowledge to evaluate his art and the linguistic proficiency needed to explore the documentary background of his life--a life whose span extended from tsarist Russia to Switzerland, France, and ultimately the United States.In this revealing volume, the first of two, Stephen Walsh follows Stravinsky from his birth in 1882 to 1934. He traces the composer's early Russian years in new and fascinating detail, laying bare the complicated relationships within his family and showing how he first displayed his extraordinary talents within the provincial musical circle around his teacher, Nikolay Rimsky-Korsakov. Stravinsky's brilliantly creative involvement with the Ballets Russes is illuminated by a sharp sense of the internal artistic politics that animated the group. Portraying Stravinsky's circumstances as an émigré in France trying to make his living as a conductor and pianist as well as a composer while beset by emotional and financial demands, Walsh reveals the true roots of his notorious obsession with money during the 1920s and describes with sympathy the nature of his long affair with Vera Sudeykina.While always respecting Stravinsky's own insistence that life and art be kept distinct, Stravinsky makes clear precisely how the development of his music was connected to his life and to the intellectual environment in which he found himself. But at the same time it demonstrates the composer's remarkably pragmatic psychology, which led him to consider the welfare of his art to be of paramount importance, before which everything else had to give way. Hence, for example, his questionable attitude toward Hitler and Mussolini, and his reputation as a touchy, unpredictable man as famous for his enmities as for his friendships.Stephen Walsh, long established as an expert on Stravinsky's music, has drawn upon a vast array of material, much of it unpublished or unavailable in English, to bring the man himself, in all his color and genius, to glowing life. Written with elegance and energy, comprehensive, balanced, and original, Stravinsky is essential reading for anyone interested in the adventure of art in our time.Praise from the British press for Stephen Walsh's The Music of Stravinsky "One of the finest general studies of the composer."--Wilfrid Mellers, composer, Times Literary Supplement"The beautiful prose of The Music of Stravinsky is itself a fund of arresting images. For those who already love Stravinsky's music, Walsh's essays on each work will bring a smile of recognition and joy at new kernels of insight. For those unfamiliar with many of the works he discusses, Walsh's commentaries are likely to whet appetites for performances of the works."--John Shepherd, Notes"This book sent me scurrying back to the scores and made me want to recommend it to other people. Above all, it is a good read."--Anthony Pople, Music and Letters
Stravinsky and Balanchine: A Journey of Invention
by Charles M. JosephThis book is about the collaboration of some of the greatest artists in the twentieth century, Igor Stravinsky and George Balanchine.
Stravinsky and His World (The Bard Music Festival #33)
by Tamara LevitzA new look at one of the most important composers of the twentith centuryStravinsky and His World brings together an international roster of scholars to explore fresh perspectives on the life and music of Igor Stravinsky. Situating Stravinsky in new intellectual and musical contexts, the essays in this volume shed valuable light on one of the most important composers of the twentieth century.Contributors examine Stravinsky's interaction with Spanish and Latin American modernism, rethink the stylistic label "neoclassicism" with a section on the ideological conflict over his lesser-known opera buffa Mavra, and reassess his connections to his homeland, paying special attention to Stravinsky's visit to the Soviet Union in 1962. The essays also explore Stravinsky's musical and religious differences with Arthur Lourié, delve into Stravinsky's collaboration with Pyotr Suvchinsky and Roland-Manuel in the genesis of his groundbreaking Poetics of Music, and look at how the movement within stasis evident in the scores of Stravinsky's Orpheus and Oedipus Rex reflected the composer's fierce belief in fate. Rare documents—including Spanish and Mexican interviews, Russian letters, articles by Arthur Lourié, and rarely seen French and Russian texts—supplement the volume, bringing to life Stravinsky's rich intellectual milieu and intense personal relationships.The contributors are Tatiana Baranova, Leon Botstein, Jonathan Cross, Valérie Dufour, Gretchen Horlacher, Tamara Levitz, Klára Móricz, Leonora Saavedra, and Svetlana Savenko.
Stravinsky and the Russian Period:
by Pieter C. van den Toorn John McginnessVan den Toorn and McGinness take a fresh look at the dynamics of Stravinsky's musical style from a variety of analytical, critical and aesthetic angles. Starting with processes of juxtaposition and stratification, the book offers an in-depth analysis of works such as The Rite of Spring, Les Noces and Renard. Characteristic features of style, melody and harmony are traced to rhythmic forces, including those of metrical displacement. Along with Stravinsky's formalist aesthetics, the strict performing style he favoured is also traced to rhythmic factors, thus reversing the direction of the traditional causal relationship. Here, aesthetic belief and performance practice are seen as flowing directly from the musical invention. The book provides a counter-argument to the criticism and aesthetics of T. W. Adorno and Richard Taruskin, and will appeal to composers, critics and performers as well as scholars of Stravinsky's music.
Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, Volume One: A Biography of the Works through Mavra
by Richard TaruskinThis book undoes 50 years of mythmaking about Stravinsky's life in music. During his spectacular career, Igor Stravinsky underplayed his Russian past in favor of a European cosmopolitanism. Richard Taruskin has refused to take the composer at his word. In this long-awaited study, he defines Stravinsky's relationship to the musical and artistic traditions of his native land and gives us a dramatically new picture of one of the major figures in the history of music. Taruskin draws directly on newly accessible archives and on a wealth of Russian documents. In Volume One, he sets the historical scene: the St. Petersburg musical press, the arts journals, and the writings of anthropologists, folklorists, philosophers, and poets. Volume Two addresses the masterpieces of Stravinsky's early maturity—Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, and Les Noces. Taruskin investigates the composer's collaborations with Diaghilev to illuminate the relationship between folklore and modernity. He elucidates the Silver Age ideal of "neonationalism"—the professional appropriation of motifs and style characteristics from folk art—and how Stravinsky realized this ideal in his music. Taruskin demonstrates how Stravinsky achieved his modernist technique by combining what was most characteristically Russian in his musical training with stylistic elements abstracted from Russian folklore. The stylistic synthesis thus achieved formed Stravinsky as a composer for life, whatever the aesthetic allegiances he later professed. Written with Taruskin's characteristic mixture of in-depth research and stylistic verve, this book will be mandatory reading for all those seriously interested in the life and work of Stravinsky.
Stravinsky and the Russian Traditions, Volume Two: A Biography of the Works through Mavra
by Richard TaruskinThis book undoes 50 years of mythmaking about Stravinsky's life in music. During his spectacular career, Igor Stravinsky underplayed his Russian past in favor of a European cosmopolitanism. Richard Taruskin has refused to take the composer at his word. In this long-awaited study, he defines Stravinsky's relationship to the musical and artistic traditions of his native land and gives us a dramatically new picture of one of the major figures in the history of music. Taruskin draws directly on newly accessible archives and on a wealth of Russian documents. In Volume One, he sets the historical scene: the St. Petersburg musical press, the arts journals, and the writings of anthropologists, folklorists, philosophers, and poets. Volume Two addresses the masterpieces of Stravinsky's early maturity—Petrushka, The Rite of Spring, and Les Noces. Taruskin investigates the composer's collaborations with Diaghilev to illuminate the relationship between folklore and modernity. He elucidates the Silver Age ideal of "neonationalism"—the professional appropriation of motifs and style characteristics from folk art—and how Stravinsky realized this ideal in his music. Taruskin demonstrates how Stravinsky achieved his modernist technique by combining what was most characteristically Russian in his musical training with stylistic elements abstracted from Russian folklore. The stylistic synthesis thus achieved formed Stravinsky as a composer for life, whatever the aesthetic allegiances he later professed. Written with Taruskin's characteristic mixture of in-depth research and stylistic verve, this book will be mandatory reading for all those seriously interested in the life and work of Stravinsky.
Stravinsky Inside Out
by Charles M. JosephRevealing Igor Stravinsky's two sides--the public persona and the private composer--this complex portrait draws upon an array of unpublished materials and rereleased film clips from the composer's huge archive at the Paul Sacher Institute in Switzerland.
Stravinsky's Piano
by Graham GriffithsStravinsky's reinvention in the early 1920s, as both neoclassical composer and concert-pianist, is here placed at the centre of a fundamental reconsideration of his whole output – viewed from the unprecedented perspective of his relationship with the piano. Graham Griffiths assesses Stravinsky's musical upbringing in St Petersburg with emphasis on his education at the hands of two extraordinary teachers whom he later either ignored or denounced: Leokadiya Kashperova, for piano and Rimsky-Korsakov, for instrumentation. Their message, Griffiths argues, enabled Stravinsky to formulate from that intensely Russian experience an internationalist brand of neoclassicism founded upon the premises of objectivity and craft. Drawing directly on the composer's manuscripts, Griffiths addresses Stravinsky's lifelong fascination with counterpoint and with pianism's constructive processes. Stravinsky's Piano presents both of these as recurring features of the compositional attitudes that Stravinsky consistently applied to his works, whether Russian, neoclassical or serial and regardless of idiom and genre.
Straw: Finding My Way
by Darryl Strawberry John Strausbaugh“Darryl has written a profound book on the meaning of celebrity, sports and manhood . . . a riveting and memorable account.” —David ConeFormer New York Met and Yankee slugger Darryl Strawberry has subtitled his autobiography Straw, “Finding My Way”—and his path was never easy. A National League Rookie of the Year, eight-time MLB All Star, and four-time World Series Champion, Strawberry’s baseball achievements were often overshadowed by his struggles off the field. In Straw, he tells it all: his boyhood in Crenshaw, Los Angeles; his rise to baseball superstardom; the high life and low life; his brushes with the law; his triumphant battle over cancer; his religious awakening, and his marriage to the love of his life.“Straw is the story of a guy who had two strikes against him in the middle innings of life and hit one out of the park.” —Reggie Jackson“Straw [has] the virtue of sincerity and of seeming profoundly felt. Its narrator emerges as a real and complex man: humble in the face of his failures, palpably hungry for redemption, and yet still capable of myopia and self-righteousness. You feel for him in a way you never did—at least I never did—when you were merely cheering and/or booing him at Shea.” —The New York Times“If you’re looking for an interesting book about a chaotically interesting life, Straw makes for good reading.” —St. Louis Post-Dispatch
Strawberry Days: How Internment Destroyed a Japanese American Community
by David A. NeiwertImmigrants from Japan began coming to the west coast of the United States toward the end of the 19th century. Along the eastern shore of Lake Washington a community of farmers became highly successful, raising strawberries and an assortment of other fruits and vegetables. Although they were largely accepted by their Caucasian neighbors, underlying prejudice rushed to the surface after the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Based on local histories, newspaper accounts, and extensive interviews, this is a history of the community around Bellevue, Washington, and what became of its Japanese American members during and after the internment.
The Strawberry Statement
by James S. KunenWriting from the vantage point of a priveleged middleclass student attending columbia University during the Vietnam War in the 1960's, the author is transformed from a "conformist" "Jock" into a politically and Socially Radical "Puke". He also experiences his first Romance, finds that changes is harder to accomplish than idealism might indicate, and rarely pure... He also reflects upon his writing and experiences with 40 years of life behind the point where he authored the book...
Stray: A Memoir
by Stephanie DanlerFrom the bestselling author of Sweetbitter, a memoir of growing up in a family shattered by lies and addiction, and of one woman's attempts to find a life beyond the limits of her past. Stray is a moving, sometimes devastating, brilliantly written and ultimately inspiring exploration of the landscapes of damage and survival.After selling her first novel--a dream she'd worked long and hard for--Stephanie Danler knew she should be happy. Instead, she found herself driven to face the difficult past she'd left behind a decade ago: a mother disabled by years of alcoholism, further handicapped by a tragic brain aneurysm; a father who abandoned the family when she was three, now a meth addict in and out of recovery. After years in New York City she's pulled home to Southern California by forces she doesn't totally understand, haunted by questions of legacy and trauma. Here, she works toward answers, uncovering hard truths about her parents and herself as she explores whether it's possible to change the course of her history. Lucid and honest, heart-breaking and full of hope, Stray is an examination of what we inherit and what we don't have to, of what we have to face in ourselves to move forward, and what it's like to let go of one's parents in order to find peace--and a family--of one's own.
Stray: A Memoir
by Stephanie DanlerFrom the author of the international bestseller Sweetbitter, a memoir of survival, starting over, and love in all its complicated guises. Even after achieving her dream of selling her debut novel, Stephanie Danler feels adrift in New York. Struggling in the throes of a doomed relationship and haunted by her tumultuous childhood, something nameless compels her to return home to Southern California. In a cottage in Laurel Canyon, as a new life begins to shape itself, she finally succumbs to memories of the past that have proved impossible to escape. A father who swung in and out of her life erratically, charming and mercurial and prone to addiction. A mother now disabled by years of alcoholism and an aneurysm, who cannot remember the abuse she inflicted. The looming, desolate mountains of Colorado, and a teenage freedom that nearly killed her. And above all, the painful love and forgiveness for those who failed her over and over again. &‘It's such a thrill to watch a writer open up her greediest thoughts, to slice open little pockets of her skin and root around underneath her flesh.&’ New York Times Book Review &‘A compulsive, neck-breaking masterpiece.&’ Lisa Taddeo &‘This is a story of triumph: the triumph of grit, talent, grace, and beauty over the dark pull of inner demons.&’ Dani Shapiro
The Stray Bullet: William S. Burroughs in Mexico
by Jorge García-RoblesWilliam S. Burroughs arrived in Mexico City in 1949, having slipped out of New Orleans while awaiting trial on drug and weapons charges that would almost certainly have resulted in a lengthy prison sentence. Still uncertain about being a writer, he had left behind a series of failed business ventures—including a scheme to grow marijuana in Texas and sell it in New York—and an already long history of drug use and arrests. He would remain in Mexico for three years, a period that culminated in the defining incident of his life: Burroughs shot his common-law wife, Joan Vollmer, while playing William Tell with a loaded pistol. (He would be tried and convicted of murder in absentia after fleeing Mexico.)First published in 1995 in Mexico, where it received the Malcolm Lowry literary essay award, The Stray Bullet is an imaginative and riveting account of Burroughs&’s formative experiences in Mexico, his fascination with Mexico City&’s demimonde, his acquaintances and friendships there, and his contradictory attitudes toward the country and its culture. Mexico, Jorge García-Robles makes clear, was the place in which Burroughs embarked on his &“fatal vocation as a writer.&”Through meticulous research and interviews with those who knew Burroughs and his circle in Mexico City, García-Robles brilliantly portrays a time in Burroughs&’s life that has been overshadowed by the tragedy of Joan Vollmer&’s death. He re-creates the bohemian Roma neighborhood where Burroughs resided with Joan and their children, the streets of postwar Mexico City that Burroughs explored, and such infamous figures as Lola la Chata, queen of the city&’s drug trade. This compelling book also offers a contribution by Burroughs himself—an evocative sketch of his shady Mexican attorney, Bernabé Jurado.