Essays/Creative Non Fiction

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Bookends

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A brilliant, idiosyncratic collection of introductions and afterwords (plus some liner notes) by New York Times bestselling and Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Chabon--"one of contemporary literature's most gifted prose stylists" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times).

In Bookends, Pulitzer Prize winning author Michael Chabon offers a compilation of pieces about literature--age-old classics as well as his own--that presents a unique look into his literary origins and influences, the books that shaped his taste and formed his ideas about writing and reading.

Chabon asks why anyone would write an introduction, or for that matter, read one. His own daughter Rose prefers to skip them. Chabon's answer is simple and simultaneously profound: "a hope of bringing pleasure for the reader." Likewise, afterwords--they are all about shared pleasure, about the "pure love" of a work of art that has inspired, awakened, transformed the reader. Ultimately, this thought-provoking compendium is a series of love letters and thank-you notes, unified by the simple theme of the shared pleasure of discovery, whether it's the boyhood revelation of the most important story in Chabon's life (Ray Bradbury's "The Rocket Man"); a celebration of "the greatest literary cartographer of the planet Mars" (Edgar Rice Burroughs, with his character John Carter); a reintroduction to a forgotten master of ghost stories (M. R. James, ironically "the happiest of men"); the recognition that the worlds of Wes Anderson's films are reassembled scale models of our own broken reality (as is all art); Chabon's own rude awakening from the muse as he writes his debut novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh; or a playful parody of lyrical interpretation in the liner notes for Mark Ronson's Uptown Special, the true purpose of which, Chabon insists, is to "spread the gospel of sensible automotive safety and maintenance practices."

Galaxies away from academic or didactic, Bookends celebrates wonder--and like the copy of The Phantom Tollbooth handed to young Michael by a friend of his father he never saw again--it is a treasured gift.
Essay Writing

Essay Writing

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Book by Kenneth P. Cash

Grammar/Spelling

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Local Color (USED)
Local Color (USED)
Local Color (USED)

Local Color

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Local Color was the third published book by the American author Truman Capote, released in the Fall of 1950. It includes notes and sketches about persons and places, including travel journal-style essays on cities and countries Capote had lived in or visited. 

1st printing. Dust jacket in protective cover; unclipped; edges worn; corners chipped; spine tanned; black cloth over black & white paper boards; corners bumped; endpapers tanned; binding tight; text clean. G+/G
On Rereading (Used)

On Rereading (Used)

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After retiring from teaching literature, Patricia Meyer Spacks embarked on a year-long project of rereading dozens of novels: childhood favorites, young adult fiction, canonical works she didn't like, guilty pleasures. On Rereading records the surprising, fascinating results of her personal experiment and raises a number of intriguing questions.
Plan B : Further Thoughts on Faith

Plan B : Further Thoughts on Faith

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From the New York Times bestselling author of Hallelujah Anyway, Bird by Bird, and Almost Everything, a spiritual antidote to anxiety and despair in increasingly fraught times.

As Anne Lamott knows, the world is a dangerous place. Terrorism and war have become the new normal. Environmental devastation looms even closer. And there are personal demands on her faith as well: getting older; her mother's Alzheimer's; her son's adolescence; and the passing of friends and time.

Fortunately for those of us who are anxious about the state of the world, whose parents are also aging and dying, whose children are growing harder to recognize as they become teenagers, Plan B offers hope that we're not alone in the midst of despair. It shares with us Lamott's ability to comfort and to make us laugh despite the grim realities.

Anne Lamott is one of our most beloved writers, and Plan B is a book more necessary now than ever. It is further evidence that, as The New Yorker has written, "Anne Lamott is a cause for celebration."
Playing in the Dark : Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (USED)

Playing in the Dark : Whiteness and the Literary Imagination (USED)

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Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison brings the genius of a master writer to this personal inquiry into the significance of African-Americans in the American literary imagination. Her goal, she states at the outset, is to "put forth an argument for extending the study of American literature...draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World--without the mandate for conquest." Author of Beloved, The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, and other vivid portrayals of black American experience, Morrison ponders the effect that living in a historically racialized society has had on American writing in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. She argues that race has become a metaphor, a way of referring to forces, events, and forms of social decay, economic division, and human panic. Her compelling point is that the central characteristics of American literature--individualism, masculinity, the insistence upon innocence coupled to an obsession with figurations of death and hell--are responses to a dark and abiding Africanist presence. Through her investigation of black characters, narrative strategies, and idiom in the fiction of white American writers, Morrison provides a daring perspective that is sure to alter conventional notions about American literature. She considers Willa Cather and the impact of race on concept and plot; turns to Poe, Hawthorne, and Melville to examine the black force that figures so significantly in the literature of early America; and discusses the implications of the Africanist presence at the heart of Huckleberry Finn.A final chapter on Ernest Hemingway is a brilliant exposition of the racial subtext that glimmers beneath the surface plots of his fiction. Written with the artistic vision that has earned her a preeminent place in modern letters, Playing in the Dark will be avidly read by Morri
Rust Belt Chic

Rust Belt Chic

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Rust Belt Chic: The Cleveland Anthology, edited by Richey Piiparinen and Anne Trubek, provides an inside-out snapshot of the city, containing contributions by established authors such as Connie Schultz and Michael Ruhlman as well as 47 others. Rust Belt Chic tells stories about failure (mills closing), conflict (Pekar's constant grousing), growth (a thriving Iraqi immigrant community) and renewal (moving away only to, finally, return home). Put together, these stories create a new narrative about Cleveland that incorporates but deepens and widens the familiar tropes of manufacturing, stadiums and comebacks.

Words of Wisdom

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