My Years at the Gotham Book Mart with Frances Stelloff, Proprietor

My Years at the Gotham Book Mart with Frances Stelloff, Proprietor PDF

Author: Howard Koch

Publisher: Worthy Shorts Inc

Published: 2009-09-11

Total Pages: 26

ISBN-13: 1935340506

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

This short story was written in 1984 by one of Hollywood's finest screenwriters, until he was blacklisted by the House Un-American Activities Committee in 1950. During the 1940s, he was responsible or partially responsible for such great films as The Letter, The Sea Hawk (both 1940), Sergeant York (1941) and Casablanca (1942), for which he shared an Oscar with his co-writers.

My Years at the Gotham Book Mart with Frances Steloff, Proprietor

My Years at the Gotham Book Mart with Frances Steloff, Proprietor PDF

Author: Matthew Tannenbaum

Publisher: Worthy Shorts Inc

Published: 2009

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9781935340157

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The proprietor of the present "The Bookstore" in Lenox, MA, the author reflects on working early on at the legendary Gotham Book Mart on West 47th Street in New York City. He writes, "I am very fortunate to have found Frances Steloff, founder of The Gotham Book Mart, when I was a very young man, and she turned me into the bookman that I have since become. . . . to speak of Frances Steloff's Gotham Book Mart is to remember the entire twentieth century in belles-lettres." Tannenbaum provides anecdotes and vignettes of Steloff as well as some of the many literary figures he met after serving in the Navy during the Vietnam war, including Tennessee Williams, Galway Kinnell, Anne Sexton, Archibald MacLiesh, Allen Ginsberg, Gregory Corso, J.D. Salinger ("a guy I almost tripped over one morning"). Steloff opened the Gotham in 1920, starting "a literary salon in the middle of New York City in the most wonderful time of its own history." Among those there: Martha Graham, Christopher Morely, Mencken and Dreiser, and Anais Nin. Steloff had her "battles with the censors, the court dates, the time she was actually arrested and only an 11th hour phone call to Bennett Cerf of Random House kept her out of prison." This charming memoir is enriched by the author's wonderment, drinking it all in with such memories as the weekend he "walked all over Manhattan . . . wearing e.e. cummings' fedora."

The Bookshop

The Bookshop PDF

Author: Evan Friss

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2024-08-06

Total Pages: 417

ISBN-13: 0593299922

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

"It is a delight to wander through the bookstores of American history in this warm, generous book." —Emma Straub, New York Times bestselling author and owner of Books Are Magic An affectionate and engaging history of the American bookstore and its central place in American cultural life, from department stores to indies, from highbrow dealers trading in first editions to sidewalk vendors, and from chains to special-interest community destinations Bookstores have always been unlike any other kind of store, shaping readers and writers, and influencing our tastes, thoughts, and politics. They nurture local communities while creating new ones of their own. Bookshops are powerful spaces, but they are also endangered ones. In The Bookshop, we see the stakes: what has been, and what might be lost. Evan Friss’s history of the bookshop draws on oral histories, archival collections, municipal records, diaries, letters, and interviews with leading booksellers to offer a fascinating look at this institution beloved by so many. The story begins with Benjamin Franklin’s first bookstore in Philadelphia and takes us to a range of booksellers including the Strand, Chicago’s Marshall Field & Company, the Gotham Book Mart, specialty stores like Oscar Wilde and Drum and Spear, sidewalk sellers of used books, Barnes & Noble, Amazon Books, and Parnassus. The Bookshop is also a history of the leading figures in American bookselling, often impassioned eccentrics, and a history of how books have been marketed and sold over the course of more than two centuries—including, for example, a 3,000-pound elephant who signed books at Marshall Field’s in 1944. The Bookshop is a love letter to bookstores, a charming chronicle for anyone who cherishes these sanctuaries of literature, and essential reading to understand how these vital institutions have shaped American life—and why we still need them.

Footnotes from the World's Greatest Bookstores

Footnotes from the World's Greatest Bookstores PDF

Author: Bob Eckstein

Publisher: Clarkson Potter

Published: 2016-10-04

Total Pages: 178

ISBN-13: 0553459279

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A New York Times Bestseller From the beloved New Yorker cartoonist comes a collection of paintings and stories from some of the world’s most cherished bookstores. This collection of 75 evocative paintings and colorful anecdotes invites you into the heart and soul of every community: the local bookshop, each with its own quirks, charms, and legendary stories. The book features an incredible roster of great bookstores from across the globe and stories from writers, thinkers and artists of our time, including David Bowie, Tom Wolfe, Jonathan Lethem, Roz Chast, Deepak Chopra, Bob Odenkirk, Philip Glass, Jonathan Ames, Terry Gross, Mark Maron, Neil Gaiman, Ann Patchett, Chris Ware, Molly Crabapple, Amitav Ghosh, Alice Munro, Dave Eggers, and many more. Page by page, Eckstein perfectly captures our lifelong love affair with books, bookstores, and book-sellers that is at once heartfelt, bittersweet, and cheerfully confessional.

Figured Dark

Figured Dark PDF

Author: Greg Rappleye

Publisher: University of Arkansas Press

Published: 2007-11-01

Total Pages: 106

ISBN-13: 1557288526

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

Greg Rappleye’s Figured Dark is a collection of contemporary lyric and narrative poems, set in an American landscape, which takes as its implicit theme the journey of the soul from darkness into light. The voices in the collection call across a vast landscape of myth, memory, and horrific wreckage. In the title poem, speaking of the phenomenon of fireflies rising at night from a southern field, he writes, “I could read this down to a million tiny bodies, / blazing the midnight trees,” but the reader is left to wonder whether any extravagant numbering can account for the massed starlings, dreamy raptors, dome-lighted Firebirds, flaming bodies, junk cars, and deadly archangels that come to ground in Rappleye’s world, where the spiritual exhaustion of Odysseus is visited upon Brian Wilson, and the young John Berryman seeks recompense from a wily family in northern Michigan. These poems are by turns wise, elegiac, ironic, and wickedly funny. This is a poet who refuses easy categories. If these poems are anything, they are affidavits of a heart at work, building out of darkness a kind of wild redemption, hard-earned in the real world. Figured Dark is part of the University of Arkansas’s Poetry Series, edited by Enid Shomer.

Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara

Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara PDF

Author: Joe LeSueur

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2004-04-21

Total Pages: 398

ISBN-13: 1429929030

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

An unprecedented eyewitness account of the New York School, as seen between the lines of O'Hara's poetry Joe LeSueur lived with Frank O'Hara from 1955 until 1965, the years when O'Hara wrote his greatest poems, including "To the Film Industry in Crisis," "In Memory of My Feelings," "Having a Coke with You," and the famous Lunch Poems—so called because O'Hara wrote them during his lunch break at the Museum of Modern Art, where he worked as a curator. (The artists he championed include Jackson Pollock, Joseph Cornell, Grace Hartigan, Jane Freilicher, Joan Mitchell, and Robert Rauschenberg.) The flowering of O'Hara's talent, cut short by a fatal car accident in 1966, produced some of the most exuberant, truly celebratory lyrics of the twentieth century. And it produced America's greatest poet of city life since Whitman. Alternating between O'Hara's poems and LeSueur's memory of the circumstances that inspired them, Digressions on Some Poems by Frank O'Hara is a literary commentary like no other—an affectionate, no-holds-barred memoir of O'Hara and the New York that animated his work: friends, lovers, movies, paintings, streets, apartments, music, parties, and pickups. This volume, which includes many of O'Hara's best-loved poems, is the most intimate, true-to-life portrait we will ever have of this quintessential American figure and his now legendary times.

Errand into the Maze

Errand into the Maze PDF

Author: Deborah Jowitt

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2024-01-30

Total Pages: 312

ISBN-13: 0374709149

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

From the legendary dance critic Deborah Jowitt, Errand into the Maze is the definitive biography of the visionary dancer and choreographer Martha Graham. “Deborah Jowitt chronicles a life passionately, artfully lived. An essential read about a true legend.” —Mikhail Baryshnikov In the pantheon of American modernists, few figures loom larger than Martha Graham. One of the greatest choreographers ever to live, Graham pioneered a revolutionary dance technique—primal, dynamic, and rooted in the emotional life of the body—that upended traditional vocabulary and shaped generations of dancers and choreographers across the globe. Over her sweeping career, she founded what is now the oldest dance company in the country and produced nearly two hundred ballets, many of them masterpieces. And along the way, she engaged with the major debates, events, and ideas of the twentieth century, creating works that cut to the core of the human experience. Time magazine’s “Dancer of the Century,” and the first dancer and choreographer to be awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom, Graham was a visionary artistic force and an international cultural figure: hers was the iconic face of what came to be known as modern dance. From the renowned dance writer and former longtime critic for The Village Voice Deborah Jowitt, Errand into the Maze draws on more than a decade of firsthand research to deliver the definitive portrait of this titan. Beginning with Graham’s childhood in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and her early studies at the Denishawn School; weaving in her offstage adventures, including her relationship with her dancer and muse Erick Hawkins; and chronicling her retirement from dancing at age seventy-five and her remarkably productive final years, this elegant, empathetic biography portrays the artist in all her passionate complexity. Most important, Jowitt places Graham’s creations at the heart of her story. Her works, brimming with raw intensity, are intimately linked with their creator, who played the heroine in almost all that she choreographed: Joan of Arc, Jocasta, Clytemnestra, and Judith, among others. In this volume, Graham is centerstage once more, and Jowitt casts a brilliant spotlight on her life and work.

The Rise of the Modernist Bookshop

The Rise of the Modernist Bookshop PDF

Author: Huw Osborne

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2016-03-09

Total Pages: 234

ISBN-13: 1317017471

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

The trade in books has always been and remains an ambiguous commercial activity, associated as it is with literature and the exchange of ideas. This collection is concerned with the cultural and economic roles of independent bookstores, and it considers how eight shops founded during the modernist era provided distinctive spaces of literary production that exceeded and yet never escaped their commercial functions. As the contributors show, these booksellers were essential institutional players in literary networks. When the eight shops examined first opened their doors, their relevance to literary and commercial life was taken for granted. In our current context of box stores, online shopping, and ebooks, we no longer encounter the book as we did as recently as twenty years ago. By contributing to our understanding of bookshops as unique social spaces on the thresholds of commerce and culture, this volume helps to lay the groundwork for comprehending how our relationship to books and literature has been and will be affected by the physical changes to the reading experience taking place in the twenty-first century.

Tropic of Cancer

Tropic of Cancer PDF

Author: Henry Miller

Publisher: Createspace Independent Pub

Published: 2013-02-19

Total Pages: 198

ISBN-13: 9781482568967

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A stream-of-consciousness story of a poverty-stricken young American, living in Paris.

The Five Books of (Robert) Moses

The Five Books of (Robert) Moses PDF

Author: Arthur Nersesian

Publisher: Akashic Books

Published: 2020-07-28

Total Pages: 1422

ISBN-13: 1617758388

DOWNLOAD EBOOK →

A dramatic, playful, brutal, sweeping, and always entertaining reimagining of New York City history, presaging today's political tyranny. "A postmodern masterwork that outdoes Pynchon in eccentricity--and electricity, with all its dazzling prose." --Kirkus Reviews, Starred review "A masterwork of modern speculative adventure." --Rain Taxi Review of Books "Mr. Nersesian's work is a tale of extremes. The finished product weighs more than 4 pounds. If he stacked all his manuscript pages since he began the book back in 1993 it would stand 6 feet tall, a shade taller than himself, Mr. Nersesian says...Main characters include a fictionalized Robert Moses, the powerful public official who reshaped New York City and its environs, and his brother Paul, an electrical engineer. A difficult relationship between the two has dire consequences. There are also pop-culture favorites from the period, including psychedelic evangelist Timothy Leary; urbanologist Jane Jacobs, and poet Allen Ginsberg. All are intended to show readers how the value of culture erodes in an isolated world." --Wall Street Journal "Arthur Nersesian is the Bard of Lower East Side Manhattan...He knows every street corner, every bar, store, book stall, and even the famous 100-year-old Russian shvitz on 10th Street. Nobody does it better. Not Don DeLillo, not Richard Price, and not William Burroughs." --On the Seawall "A sprawling, engrossing Pentateuch of an alternate New York City...Nersesian's binge-worthy odyssey is a singularly wild ride." --Publishers Weekly "Nersesian is one of my favorite New York authors; this tome is one to lose yourself in." --Bob Odenkirk, actor, Breaking Bad After a domestic terrorist unleashes a dirty bomb in Manhattan in 1970, making the borough uninhabitable, FBI agent Uli Sarkisian finds himself in a world that is suddenly unrecognizable as the United States is faced with its greatest immigration crisis ever: finding housing for millions of its own citizens. The federal government hastily retrofits an abandoned military installation in the Nevada desert, vast in size. Despite the government's best intentions, as the military pulls out of "Rescue City," the residents are increasingly left to their own devices, and tribal warfare fuses with democracy, forming a frightening evolution of the two-party system: the gangocracy. Years after the Manhattan cleanup was supposed to have been finished, Uli travels through this bizarre new New York City, where he is forced to reckon with his past, while desperately trying to get out alive. The Five Books of (Robert) Moses alternates between the outrageous present of Rescue City and earlier in the twentieth century, detailing the events leading up to the destruction of Manhattan. We simultaneously follow legendary urban planner Robert Moses through his early years and are introduced to his equally ambitious older brother Paul, a brilliant electrical engineer whose jealousy toward Robert and anger at the devastation caused by the man's "urban renewal" projects lead to a dire outcome. Arthur Nersesian's most important work to date examines the political chaos of today's world through the lens of the past. Fictional versions of real historical figures populate the pages, from major politicians and downtown drag queens to notorious revolutionaries and obscure poets.