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Actress Pauline Terry is so successful in a performance of
Chekhov's Uncle Vanya that one critic calls her "the perfect
Sonya." But her life is not what she expected when she left Texas
for Broadway. She swims in a fish tank in a New Jersey bar to make
a living, most auditions do not result in callbacks, and her
marriage is shaky. Called home by her father's imminent death, she
confronts both the past she thought she'd left behind and her
uncertain future. For solace she turns to her aunt's former
husband, Will Hand, a professor and nature writer. But their affair
is brief and leaves her more uncertain than ever. Back in New York,
Pauline realizes that her life onstage cannot make up for the
emptiness of her life offstage. Her return to Texas was a
transforming experience, leading her ultimately to come to terms
with her childhood memories, her marriage, her dramatic ambitions,
and finally, herself. The Perfect Sonya, first published in 1987 by
Viking Penguin, won the Jesse Jones Award for the Best Novel of
1987 from the Texas Institute of Letters.
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Why I Like This Story (Hardcover)
Jackson R. Bryer; Contributions by A.R. Gurney, Alan Cheuse, Alice McDermott, Andre Dubus, …
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R1,267
Discovery Miles 12 670
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Ships in 12 - 17 working days
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Presents essays by leading short-story writers on their favorite
American short stories and why they like them. It will send readers
to the library or bookstore to read - or re-read - the stories
selected. On the assumption that John Updike was correct when he
asserted, in a 1978 letter to Joyce Carol Oates, that "Nobody can
read like a writer," Why I Like This Story presents brief essays by
forty-eight leading American writers on their favorite American
short stories, explaining why they like them. The essays, which are
personal, not scholarly, not only tell us much about the story
selected, they also tell us a good deal about the author of the
essay, about what elements of fiction he or she values. Among the
writers whose stories are discussed are such American masters as
James, Melville, Hemingway, O'Connor, Fitzgerald, Porter, Carver,
Wright, Updike, Bellow, Salinger,Malamud, and Welty; but the book
also includes pieces on stories by canonical but lesser-known
practitioners such as Andre Dubus, Ellen Glasgow, Kay Boyle,
Delmore Schwartz, George Garrett, Elizabeth Tallent, William Goyen,
Jerome Weidman, Peter Matthiessen, Grace Paley, William H. Gass,
and Jamaica Kincaid, and relative newcomers such as Lorrie Moore,
Kirstin Valdez Quade, Phil Klay, Viet Thanh Nguyen, and Edward P.
Jones. Why I Like This Story will send readers to the library or
bookstore to read or re-read the stories selected. Among the
contributors to the book are Julia Alvarez, Andrea Barrett, Richard
Bausch, Ann Beattie, Andre Dubus, George Garrett, William H. Gass,
Julia Glass, Doris Grumbach, Jane Hamilton, Jill McCorkle, Alice
McDermott, Clarence Major, Howard Norman, Annie Proulx, Joan
Silber, Elizabeth Spencer, and Mako Yoshikawa. Editor Jackson R.
Bryer is Professor Emeritus of English at the University of
Maryland.
Madam C. J. Walker is an American rags-to-riches icon. Born to
former slaves in Louisiana in 1867, she went on to become a
prominent African American businesswoman and the first female
self-made millionaire in U.S. history. The story of her
transformation from a laundress to a tremendously successful
entrepreneur is both inspirational and mysterious, as many of the
details of her early life remain obscure. In this superior
biography, Beverly Lowry's abundant research fleshes out Walker's
thinly documented story and frames it in the roiling race relations
of her day.
Walker grew up illiterate and worked as a washerwoman well into her
thirties before staking her future on a "Wonderful Hair Grower."
Defying all odds, Walker learned to read and write, mastered
marketing and spin, and built a booming cosmetics empire that
provided lucrative work for thousands of black women and allowed
her to engage in philanthropy and civil rights activism until her
death in a Westchester mansion in 1919. Spanning from the
antebellum South to the Harlem Renaissance, Lowry brings this
intriguing and important woman vividly to life.
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