Tuesday, January 12, 2016

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Observations: Poems, by Marianne Moore

Marianne Moore's Observations stands with T. S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Ezra Pound's early Cantos, and Wallace Stevens's Harmonium as a landmark of modern poetry. But to the chagrin of many admirers, Moore eliminated a third of its contents from her subsequent poetry collections while radically revising some of the poems she retained. This groundbreaking book has been unavailable to the general reader since its original publication in the 1920s.

Presented with a new introduction by Linda Leavell, the author of the award-winning biography Holding On Upside Down: The Life and Work of Marianne Moore, this reissue of Observations at last allows readers to experience the untamed force of Moore's most dazzling innovations. Her fellow modernists were thrilled by her originality, her "clear, flawless" language--to them she was "a rafter holding up . . . our uncompleted building." Equally forceful for subsequent generations, Observations was an "eye-opener" to the young Elizabeth Bishop, its poems "miracles of language and construction." John Ashbery has called "An Octopus" the finest poem of "our greatest modern poet." Moore's heroic open-mindedness and prescient views on multiculturalism, biodiversity, and individual liberty make her work uniquely suited to our times.

Impeccably precise yet playfully elusive, emotionally complex but stripped of all sentiment, the poems in Observations show us one of America's greatest poets at the height of her powers.

  • Sales Rank: #80154 in Books
  • Published on: 2016-04-05
  • Released on: 2016-04-05
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Dimensions: 8.27" h x .43" w x 5.43" l, .0 pounds
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 144 pages

Review

“If Observations appeared today readers would think it the most original and game-changing poetry of this new century. One would say that Moore had transcended all the experiments of Modernism to find a completely unique synthesis of the objective and the subjective―unimaginably supple verse imprinted by the science of our moment, in which what it is to be virtual, material, experienced, repurposed could all be integrated into a poetry where a singular voice both has and does not have a place. The hypertrophic use of quotation moves the speaker’s position from lyric to dramatic to epigrammatic to didactic and back in the space of a single sentence. The astonishing math of her syllabics slice and build new realities like a 3-D printer or the marvelous precisions of astrophysics. She penetrates deep space even within resistant fractal surfaces. This brilliant slender book makes Marianne Moore feel like our future. She is.” ―Jorie Graham


“Marianne Moore’s Observations are personal and historical, and always intensely modern. Clearly a figurehead, she’s armed with a quiver of wit and perfect aim. This poet bends the natural and man-made until each turn conveys a physical intellect and a music distinctly hers. Throughout this collection, Moore’s unique signature becomes a capsule of tonal time and playful contemplation through compelling imagery. This reissue of Observations realigns and claims Moore’s place within the modernist tradition as she continues to speak to us.” ―Yusef Komunyakaa

“I have always been awed by the glittering intelligence, immense ambition, precision, formal confidence, wit, and authentic idiosyncratic imagination of Moore’s earlier poems. Reading them, I feel I am in the presence of that rare thing, a truly extraordinary poetic mind. If, instead of reading this book yet again with the greatest pleasure and admiration, I were picking it up for the first time, I would have felt immediately sure I was in the presence of an important new voice in American poetry. These poems have always seemed totally contemporary to me, and they are some of the finest ever written in the American language.” ―Matthew Zapruder


“Far from being an obscure or difficult poet, Marianne Mooreis one of the most lucid poets America has ever produced. The poems in Observations compose a collected―and collective―inquiry into what is valuable and why, combining two kinds of 'observation:' that of the natural scientist, whose whole occupation is engaged in unruffled looking; and that of the essayist, who arranges social experience into sentences that surprise us with the force of objects. In Moore’s case, beautiful objects. But these poems aren’t just ornaments: they are radical, like her witty poem about socialist carrots: 'wedge-shaped engine with the/secret of expansion.' I am grateful for this reissue, which restores poems all but lost to us. It is really the best of Moore in one portable volume―a poetry not of the past, it seems to me, but of the future.” ―Ange Mlinko

“How wonderful to have Observations as it was when it first appeared. Or almost. This is Moore's slightly revised 1925 version of the 1924 first edition, as strange and new and enchanting as we remember it. One's long-ago favorites are here, 'Poetry' (I too, dislike it), 'Sea Unicorns and Land Unicorns,' 'Marriage,' and above all, 'An Octopus,' one of the truly great poems of the twentieth century. In it she quotes the lines, 'complexities which still will be complexities/ as long as the world lasts,' which could be a motto for Moore's magnificent bricolage.” ―John Ashbery

“The sensation of reading Marianne Moore is like none other. She is the most natural, the most exotic, the most concentrated, the most circumspect, the most weirdly precise, the most beguiling poet of the twentieth century. Like explosive sunbursts, her poems sparkle with irrepressible feeling―joy, grief, desperation, triumph―and ask, What is virtue? What is vice? What is ugliness? What is a hero? What is love? She is my favorite American anti-poet.” ―Henri Cole

About the Author
Marianne Moore (1887-1972) was an American poet, critic, editor, and translator, greatly admired for her formal innovations and her startling vision. Her poetry received many honors, including the Dial Award, the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize, and the Bollingen Prize.

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0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Modernism's Neglected Masterpiece
By Amazon Customer
One of the seminal works of modernism, along with The Waste Land and Ulysses but not as well known or appreciated. About time Marianne Moore got her due. Thanks to Farrar Straus for reprinting this in its original form in a handy paperback.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Five Stars
By rebecca newth
The poetry of one of twentieth century's most important voices.

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? Get Free Ebook Collected Poems, by Thom Gunn

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Collected Poems, by Thom Gunn

In his [Collected Poems] Thom Gunn has assembled all the work he considers worthy from throughout his remarkable career. Gunn's first book, Fighting Terms (1954), was quickly identified in The Cambridge Review as "one of the few volumes of post-war verse that all serious readers of poetry need to possess and study", and in the four decades since, he has come to be recognized as one of the finest poets writing in English. Collected Poems establishes the breadth and formal catholicity of his work, from the classically inspired early poems to the stylistically exuberant poems of the 1960s to the elegiac rhymed verse of The Man with Night Sweats (1992), in which, as John Updike wrote in The New Yorker, "the tension of Gunn's famous earlier poems...has become muted and commemorative". Born in 1929 and raised in Britain, Gunn has lived in northern California since 1954, and he describes himself as an Anglo-American poet. His poetry is likewise a mixture of apparently discordant elements, and he has made a specialty of playing style against subject, dealing with the out-of-control through tightly controlled meters and with the systematized through open forms. Some of the contents of Collected Poems has been out of print for many years. This gathering together of the full range of Thom Gunn's work reveals the enormous extent of his creative achievement.

  • Sales Rank: #2355196 in Books
  • Published on: 1994-04
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Dimensions: 9.00" h x 6.00" w x 1.75" l,
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 495 pages

Review
"[Gunn] has always been elusive, hard to place both as to nationality and as to poetic affiliation. His "Collected Poems" are sane, accessible, impressive in their versification and command of language--testaments to intelligence, warmth, and integrity."--Richard Tillinghast, "The New York Times Book Review" "[Gunn is] an exceptional and fascinating poet with a formal range to rival Auden's, a sensuality to rival Ginsberg's, and a profound yet daily humanity that surely surpassess that of any other poet of our times . . . [There is] a unity of purpose that extends throughout [this] work, from the watchful early metrics through the syllabics, the reach and skill of the free verse and, in much of the latest work, a return to strong form that might be termed triumphant had it not been called into the service of matter so saddening. Always Gunn has written from that lost and loving center between brain and body, which thinks while it feels, and feels while it learns: that species of po

About the Author
Thom Gunn was born in Gravesend, Kent in 1929. After National Service and a short time living in Paris, he enrolled at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read English. He published his first book of poems, Fighting Terms, while he was still an undergraduate. In 1954 he moved to San Francisco and held a one-year Fellowship at Stanford University. He published over thirty books of poetry, including The Man with Night Sweats, which won the Forward Prize for Poetry in 1992, and Boss Cupid (2000). Thom Gunn died in 2004.

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18 of 19 people found the following review helpful.
The Evolution of a Great Poet
By JEREMY REED c/o eaw@centrenet.co.uk
One of the most exciting and challenging bodies of poetry created over the past forty years, Thom Gunn's Collected Poems offers a heady Anglo-American cocktail of liberal sensuality, often contained within surprisingly conventional forms.
Gunn's poetry is characterised by a cool sense of intellectual detachment, and a penetratingly lucid ability to follow experience to its resolvable core. This sensibility is offered in disarmingly casual, laid-back tones inherited from post-60's American poetry. Gunn successfully pulled off that rare and necessary trick of re-inventing himself through American poetry, thus bypassing the pedestrianism which blighted so many of his British contemporaries. This ongoing re-invention and self-resurrection is one of the most interesting and inspiring subtexts of his Collected Poems.
Taking up residence in the United States in 1954, Gunn soon got turned on to a variety of recreational drugs, including LSD. Clearly, these experiences proved a catalyst, shifting the terrain of Gunn's work. Yet right from the start, Gunn had presented an angular, leather-cased shoulder to social convention. In The Sense Of Movement (1957), he sided with the Beat and Teddy-Boy culture of the late 50's, employing motorbikes and Elvis as distinctly valid, modern subjects for poetry. Gunn's telling lines in the poem "Elvis Presley" could also be read as a credo for his own evolving poetics:
"He turns revolt into a style, prolongs/The impulse to a habit of the time."
Turning revolt into a style was to prove Gunn's directive. While the allegorical poems from his first two books still draw on unsurprising themes and employ myth and religion rather conventionally to explore their subjects, a liberating undertow of defiance is everywhere present. In "High Fidelity", a poem about listening to records, Gunn's metaphysical playfulness works to impose reason on an emerging pop culture:
"I play your furies back to me at night,/ The needle dances in the grooves they made,/ For fury is passion like love, and fury's bite/ These grooves, no sooner than a love mark fades..."
By the time Gunn published Moly in 1971, he was deeply involved in the west coast rock scene of outdoor festivals and psychedelic happenings, and his work took on a spacey, almost visionary quality. Poems like "Tom-Dobin," "The Colour Machine," "Street Song," "The Fair In The Woods," "The Messenger," and "At the Centre" are all examples of a poetry siding with altered states. Gunn writes about his LSD experiences with remarkable clarity:
"...Later, downstairs and at the kitchen table,/I look round at my friends. Through light we move/Like foam. We started choosing long ago/--clearly and capably as we were able--/Hostages from the pouring we are of. /The faces are as bright now as fresh snow." ----(From "At the Centre")
Gunn's first five collections, represented in the first half of Collected Poems, gave little indication of his coming out as a gay man. The acid landscape of Moly, however, seems to have provided a space of psychological transition necessary for the poet to write more explicitly about his sexuality. Since Jack Straw's Castle (1976), his work has been explicitly informed by the details of his engagement with the gay subculture and its interactions with the culture at large. It is also more explicit about his interior emotional landscape.
Ten years lapsed between Gunn's publication of The Passages of Joy (1982) and The Man With Night Sweats (1992). This interval is in part attributable to the adjustment, personal and poetic, to watching a generation liquidated by AIDS. The plague and its increasing casualties have proved a central subject for Gunn's later poetry, and by the final phase of the Collected Poems he has taken on the role of principal elegist to a virally stricken gay community. The poem "Elegy" first provided Gunn the stripped-down manner and elegiac tone which he needed for his task, and which he has subsequently made inimitably his own. Here, a sense of the unwavering terror at the heart of suicide is powerfully evoked:
"Though I hardly knew him /I rehearse it again and again/ Did he smell eucalyptus last?/No it was his own blood/as he choked on it"
In Thom Gunn's incarnation as a compassionate, deeply humane elegist to dying friends, his touch is neither too grave nor too light. Steeped in 17th century poetry-a period rich in the elegist's art-he proved himself as adept at writing formal couplets in the celebration of the dying or the dead as he had at writing free verse. "The Missing" is a particularly successful late poem in Gunn's canon. In it, he perceives himself as belonging to a universal gay family, a resilient but continuously reduced nucleus in which survival is all.
"Now as I watch the progress of the plague,/ The friends surrounding me fall sick, grow thin, /And drop away. Bared, is my shape less vague/Sharply exposed and with a sculpted skin?// I do not like the statue's chill contour,/ Not nowadays. The warmth investing me /led outward through mind, limb feeling and more/ In an involved increasing family. // Contact of a friend led to another friend, /Supple entwinement through the living mass /Which for all that I knew might have no end, /Image of an unlimited embrace."
Nobody has or will put this better. Gunn's achievements over four decades of writing are those of an innovator pushing the boundaries of the accepted subject matter of poetry. He is a master of the compressed lyric executed in formal stanzas, yet he is always modern. And he is compellingly truthful.
An outsider to British poetry by reason of place and sensibility, Gunn is, to me, the most exciting poet of his generation. The Collected Poems is the place to get at the whole body of work of a poet who continues to surprise, who celebrates those who live on the cutting edge of social and sexual issues in our crazily up-ended, but always meaningful world.

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Five Stars
By milwaukee_bryan
TG is underrated

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Monday, January 11, 2016

@ Ebook The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America, by Edward White

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The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America, by Edward White

A revealing biography of the influential and controversial cultural titan who embodied an era

The Tastemaker explores the many lives of Carl Van Vechten, the most influential cultural impresario of the early twentieth century: a patron and dealmaker of the Harlem Renaissance, a photographer who captured the era's icons, and a novelist who created some of the Jazz Age's most salacious stories. A close confidant of Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, George Gershwin, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and the Knopfs, Van Vechten frolicked in the 1920s Manhattan demimonde, finding himself in Harlem's jazz clubs, Hell's Kitchen's speakeasies, and Greenwich Village's underground gay scene. New York City was a hotbed of vice as well as creativity, and Van Vechten was at the center of it all.
Edward White's biography―the first comprehensive biography of Carl Van Vechten in nearly half a century, and the first to fully explore Van Vechten's tangled relationship to race and sexuality―depicts a controversial figure who defined an age. Embodying many of the contradictions of modern America, Van Vechten was a devoted husband with a coterie of boys by his side, a supporter of difficult art who also loved lowbrow entertainment, and a promoter of the Harlem Renaissance whose bestselling novel―and especially its title―infuriated many of the same African-American artists he championed. Van Vechten's defense of what many Americans considered bad taste―modernist literature, African-American culture, and sexual self-expression―created a popular appetite for these quintessential elements of American art. The Tastemaker encompasses its subject's private fears and longings, as well as Manhattan's raucous, taboo-busting social scene of which he was such a central part. It is a remarkable portrait of a man whose brave journeys across boundaries of race, sexuality, and taste helped make America fully modern.

  • Sales Rank: #1154148 in Books
  • Brand: White, Edward
  • Published on: 2014-02-18
  • Released on: 2014-02-18
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Dimensions: 9.22" h x 1.25" w x 6.42" l, 1.34 pounds
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 400 pages

From Booklist
*Starred Review* In the prologue, first-time author White notes that you may not have heard of Carl Van Vechten (1880–1964), but that’s in large part because he was a difficult man to pin down, earning renown via a variety of endeavors (see Emily Bernard’s Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance, 2012). Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, he came of age—preciously and self-importantly—in first Chicago and then New York City, and with the world in a postwar cultural flux, Van Vechten took action. In often controversial newspaper articles and criticism, essays, and later fiction (for which he finally achieved a wider though divided notoriety), he spoke his opinionated mind on race, sexuality, jazz and other new music, the arts, and more, embodying “the carefree spirit of excess and experimentation that defined Manhattan’s Jazz Age adventure.” His friends and acquaintances, many of whose photographs pepper these pages, were a who’s who of the best America’s melting pot served up, such as Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Paul Robeson. Van Vechten was intellectually ahead of his time. Though a tireless champion of his beliefs and his belief in others, he was also untruthful and selfish, often ignoring his wife while lavishing attention on his male lovers. White’s engaging biography adeptly depicts America as a burgeoning cultural powerhouse, one that Van Vechten helped build. A marvelously written, masterful portrait of an exceptionally complex person. --Eloise Kinney

Review

“As Edward White writes in The Tastemaker, his ambitious and engaging portrait of a ‘polymath' and the world he helped shape, Van Vechten ‘collapsed the 19th-century distinctions between edifying art and facile entertainment, constantly probing the boundaries of what was considered good and bad taste.' . . . White shows a commanding grasp of the larger cultural ethos and Van Vechten's place in it.” ―Blake Bailey, The New York Times Book Review

“In The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America, White celebrates all the things that might once have seemed shocking about Van Vechten: his conviction that Negro culture was the essence of America; his simultaneous fascination with the avant-garde and the broadly popular; and his string of sexual relationships with men, which were an open secret during his life . . . White calls him, plausibly enough, ‘prophet of a new cultural sensibility that promoted the primacy of the individual, sexual freedom, and racial tolerance and dared put the blues on a par with Beethoven.' . . . The most startling thing about White's book is its breadth . . . [Van Vechten] was in the end, the opposite of a dilettante.” ―Kelefa Sanneh, The New Yorker

“In the first half of the 20th century, Van Vechten connected more cultural dots than any of his contemporaries, as Edward White points out in his fascinating and thoroughly researched new biography, The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America . . . White delves deeper, producing a more nuanced portrait of Van Vechten's life and times. ” ―J.C. Gabel, Los Angeles Times

“Much recent writing on Van Vechten has focused on his role as a white man within the Harlem Renaissance, a blend of enthusiasm, paternalism, and provocation. In this new biography, Edward White shifts the frame to examine Van Vechten through his criticism, his sexuality, and especially his identity as an urbanite . . . White writes deftly about his complex subject, his stance at once critical enough to rebuke Van Vechten's naïve cruelties (about race and other things), yet generous enough to praise his powerful, and prescient, position as ‘a one-man publicity machine for American modernism.' ” ―Kate Tuttle, The Boston Globe

“[An] excellent biography of Carl Van Vechten . . . White portrays the young critic as deeply self-centered and ambitious, but also immensely charming and sexually complicated. ” ―Michael Dirda, The Washington Post

“Carl Van Vechten is the most important figure in American culture you've never heard of. Edward White's superb biography, The Tastemaker completes the work of reclamation begun in Emily Bernard's thoughtful but partial 2012 portrait, Carl Van Vechten and the Harlem Renaissance. Yes, Van Vechten was a pioneering advocate of African-American artists who fostered the careers of Paul Robeson, Langston Hughes, and James Weldon Johnson, among many others. But his fascination with black culture, born in Chicago in the 1910s, became the core of a larger mission that White explores with acute intelligence and a zest that is never dampened by Van Vechten's narcissism and mythomania--indeed, he appreciates those qualities as essential armor for someone engaged in a lifelong quest to shatter taboos and foster a radically new vision of American life and art.” ―Wendy Smith, The Daily Beast

“Edward White's The Tastemaker: Carl Van Vechten and the Birth of Modern America (FSG), [is] a fascinating look at the music and dance critic for the Times, a white Iowan, who became an unlikely champion of the Harlem Renaissance, photographing friends and luminaries such as Zora Neale Hurston, Ella Fitzgerald, and Louis Armstrong. ” ―Megan O'Grady, Vogue

“‘Far more lasting than his output of essays, books, and photographs,' says White, ‘was the example of the life he lived; no other man or woman before him embodied the vision of modern American culture as emphatically as Carl Van Vechten.' The value of White's biography is in its portrayal of an entire American culture about to morph into a monster unrecognizable from any incarnation that had come before, and of a vital but largely unknown personality who labored to forge that culture . . . Carl Van Vechten was and is alluring for how he lived, not for what he wrote, for the violent vicissitudes of the epochs he witnessed, the epochs to which he helped give purpose and form.” ―William Giraldi, Los Angeles Review of Books

“*Starred Review* "White's engaging biography adeptly depicts America as a burgeoning cultural powerhouse, one that Van Vechten helped build. A marvelously written, masterful portrait of an exceptionally complex person. ” ―Booklist

“*Starred Review* "A significant reappraisal of a cultural icon and crucial booster of modern artists, especially African-American artists . . . White tackles this complicated, multifaceted, tremendously fascinating and contradictory subject: a married gay man, an alcoholic and always a ‘catalyst for outrage and argument.' A vigorous, fully fleshed biography of an important contributor to American culture. ” ―Kirkus

“*Starred Review* "n his immensely entertaining and vivid first book, White tackles the life and times of Carl Van Vechten, one of the most influential figures in American culture in the early 20th century . . . White's biography offers absorbing anecdotes and insights into New York society and culture as seen through the life of an ‘archetypal American modernist.' ” ―Publishers Weekly

“One of Library Journal's Four Essential Nonfiction Picks for February* "Appreciating modernism in the early 20th century American requires appreciating Carl Van Vechten, a photographer, a novelist, and, above all, a cultural champion who introduced Gertrude Stein to Americans, supported the Harlem Renaissance, and befriended luminaries like Langston Hughes and F. Scott Fitzgerald. White . . . should offer a fresh take on this key figure . . . capturing both his accomplishments and his dark-edged experiences in Jazz Age New York.” ―Barbara Hoffert, Library Journal

“Journalist, novelist, critic, photographer, iconoclast, visionary. Dandy and groupie, hedonist and dissembler, provocateur and self-promoter. Champion of Paul Robeson and Langston Hughes, drinking buddy of Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, "honorary Negro" to some, racist exploiter to others. Denizen of the black and gay demimondes, flouter of racial and sexual divides and taboos. Carl Van Vechten was all of these things, and much more besides, in his brilliant and gaudy life. It would burst an ordinary biography at the seams, but Edward White manages to do to Van Vechten in death what no one ever accomplished in life: tame him. With wit, style, and skepticism, The Tastemaker both cuts Van Vechten down to size and restores to him the lofty stature he deserves.” ―David Margolick, author of Dreadful: The Short Life and Gay Times of John Horne Burns and Strange Fruit: The Biography of a Song

“Carl Van Vechten was a celebrated writer, photographer and publicist during the first half of the twentieth century. His extraordinary career reads like a violent roller-coaster ride. He invested time and energy in contemporary geniuses ranging from Gertrude Stein to Paul Robeson. What he sought was not money so much as recognition for influencing and recording modern American culture--especially African-American culture. He lived in the future, responding to everything that was exciting and new--unaware apparently that the future becomes the past and fame fades away. He presents a considerable challenge to a biographer, being both entertaining yet unsympathetic, dangerous but disarming, cold-blooded as well as generous. Edward White brings him vividly to life on the page, balancing his contradictory qualities with skill and honesty. His research has been enthusiastic and his writing is engaging. This is an outstanding first book. ” ―Michael Holroyd, author of A Book of Secrets and Lytton Strachey

About the Author
Edward White studied European and American history at Mansfield College, Oxford, and Goldsmiths College, London. Since 2005 he has worked in the British television industry, including two years at the BBC, devising programs in its arts and history departments. He is a contributor to The Times Literary Supplement. The Tastemaker is his first book. White lives in London.

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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
This Explains a Lot!
By Rhio9
Really well-written and informative, but not dry or filled with uninteresting names and dates. The writer brings to life the personalities who helped make "modern" America what it is. The background on what was going on in the lead-up and during the First World War put history in perspective, especially if you're interested in art, the development of social networks before they were called "networks". The book is a fascinating look behind the scenes, like having a back-stage pass to the back alleys and concert monuments of the rich, the famous, the infamous, the wealthy, the self-destructive and self-possessed. This book has it all. I could read it again. Apparently, this is the author's first book and if this is any indication of his talent, I look forward to more!

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
CVV deserves better
By James R. Anderson
CVV was an American Original: critic, essayist, novelist, photographer. And a keen tastemaker to boot. His vast accomplishments are denied in this snoring bio by a prissy, judgmental scribe. He's a scold who cannot write a stylish or amusing sentence. He cannot convey the spirit and enthusio that ignited CVV. I suggest you read CVVs novels and "The Letters of Carl Van Vechten" (Yale Uni Press) or Bruce Kellner's, "Carl Van Vechten and the Irreverent Decades." Question: Who wants to read a bio about a writer the author disses? Bad move on part of FSG.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Great Read
By Deborah E. Moore
Excellent and balanced view of the life of Carl Van Vechten and his important role in the changing world of his day. His contributions to Modern art/culture and Black art/culture were unquestionably game-changing during this period of immense transition. His egocentric party boy personality and sexual escapades only make it clear that one can be wonderfully individualistic and human while simultaneously impacting the world. Anyone interested in the 1910's/1920's should read this book. Even if you are not familiar with Van Vechten, you'll know almost every other name mentioned.

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Saturday, January 9, 2016

>> Free PDF Me vs. Me, by Sarah Mlynowski

Free PDF Me vs. Me, by Sarah Mlynowski

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Me vs. Me, by Sarah Mlynowski

Gabby Wolf has pretty much, almost definitely (this close!) come to a decision: She's trading in Phoenix (nice but uneventful life with boyfriend) for Manhattan (dream job as producer for highly successful news show). Then Cam swoops in and gives her a sparkling engagement ring, making her decision even more impossible. Husband vs. career. Vera Wang wedding dress vs. sexy first-date outfits. Planting roots in Phoenix vs. playing the field in Manhattan… She wishes she didn't have to decide, that she could have it all.

She never expects her wish to come true.

Suddenly Gabby's living two lives. Whenever she falls asleep in one, she wakes up in the other. She's got the best of both worlds — what more could a girl ask for? Right?

This fantastic (and fantastical) new novel from bestselling author Sarah Mlynowski will have you flipping pages as quickly as Gabby flips lives to find out which Gabby reigns supreme in the battle of Me vs. Me.

  • Sales Rank: #2188330 in Books
  • Published on: 2006-07-18
  • Released on: 2006-07-18
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Dimensions: 8.00" h x .86" w x 5.13" l,
  • Binding: Paperback
  • 311 pages

From Publishers Weekly
Gabby Wolf, 24, is all set to move to from Arizona to New York for the job of her dreams when her boyfriend, Cam, proposes to her 36 hours before her flight. Forced to choose between a $125K cable news production job and being a Southwestern wife with a less flashy career, Gabby makes an ambivalent gesture that Cam interprets as a yes. Distracted during their celebratory snog, Gabby makes a wish on a shooting star she espies out the window. The result: she gets to have both lives, transporting herself from one to the other whenever she falls asleep, and allowing her to live the same day twice in different places. Gabby is smart, funny and likeable, and Mlynowski does a nice job with some of the contradictions that arise (Can Gabby use advance knowledge gained in Arizona to get a jump on the news? Should she take a lover in New York?). But Gabby's life is exhausting, and the wearier one gets, the harder it is to suspend disbelief.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist
Mlynowski's latest novel is a clever look at what happens to one woman when her wish comes true and she's able to choose both paths that open in front of her. Gabby Wolf isn't sure what she wants most: to marry her devoted boyfriend, Cam, and stay in Arizona or move to New York for her dream job, producing a popular news show. She wishes she could have it both ways and the next thing she knows, she's living two lives, going back and forth between planning her wedding to Cam in Arizona and working at the fast-paced, exciting job in New York. Neither life is perfect. Though she adores Cam, his overbearing mother is hijacking her wedding plans, while in New York her roommate is somewhat unbalanced, and the dating scene is dismal. As time goes on, the choice doesn't become any easier. Gabby still loves Cam, though she's starting to love her newly assertive self that emerges in New York, too. A thoroughly original and completely delightful read. Kristine Huntley
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

About the Author
Sarah is the author of Milkrun, Fishbowl, As Seen on TV, Monkey Business, and Me Vs Me as well as the teen novels Gimme a Call, Bras & Broomsticks, Frogs & French Kisses, Spells & Sleeping Bags, Parties & Potions, Ten Things We Did (and Probably Shouldn't Have) and How to Be Bad, which she co-wrote with Lauren Myracle and E. Lockhart. Sarah also co-edited the bestselling collections Girls' Night In and Girls' Night Out and co-wrote the first ever guide to writing chick lit, See Jane Write. Sarah's books have been translated into twenty-one languages and optioned to Hollywood. She was born in Montreal but now lives and writes in New York City. Visit her at sarahm.com.

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11 of 11 people found the following review helpful.
Chic lit with thought provocation
By JBinMD
At first, I was having trouble keeping track of what was happening in this story, but I caught on quickly. In our lives, we all have choices. In this book, the heroine gets to see the consequences of taking two paths. Very interesting writing. Very interesting concept. Very enjoyable.

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Another great novel!
By Lisa Bedigian
I always enjoy Sarah's books and look forward to them, this one does not disappoint. Gabby's life is all coming together perfectly. Then her boyfriend proposes, and she says yes, then wants to say no, then wishes she could have it both ways. And then poof, she does. As Gabby lives two separate lives, she finds herself yearning for various aspects of both of them while dealing with psycho roommates and the mother-in-law-to-be from hell. This book is super-entertaining, I couldn't put it down.

7 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
Me vs Me is a GREAT read
By Jennifer Lieder
I bought me vs me on an impulse, I was going to do an all night flight and I wanted something that would ease me to sleep while flying. Wrong book for that! I couldn't and wouldn't put it down! Even when I got to my destination I was reading it! I laughed, I shook my head is dismay, I gasped in surprise. It is a great book and I am just looking forward to reading more of her books! I have lent it to my friends and now I have a few friends looking into Sarahs books! Good job, Sarah!

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Friday, January 8, 2016

@ PDF Ebook Counting My Chickens . . .: And Other Home Thoughts, by The Duchess of Devonshire

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Counting My Chickens . . .: And Other Home Thoughts, by The Duchess of Devonshire

A unique window on an extraordinary life lived with tremendous zest, discrimination, and intelligence

The Duchess of Devonshire is the youngest of the Mitford siblings, the famous brood that includes the writers Nancy and Jessica. Like them, she has lived an unusually full and remarkable life, and like them she has an inimitable expressive gift. In Counting My Chickens, she has gathered extracts from her diaries and other writings to create a multifaceted portrait of her life at Chatsworth, the home of the Dukes of Devonshire, that is pithy, hilarious, wise, and always richly rewarding.

Under the Duchess's inspired supervision, Chatsworth has become one of England's most frequently visited great houses, welcoming over 400,000 visitors a year. The Duchess reveals what it takes to keep such an establishment alive and prospering, tells of transporting a goat by train from the Scottish island of Mull to London, discusses having her portrait painted by Lucian Freud, and provides rich reminisces of growing up a Mitford--along with telling anecdotes about friends from Evelyn Waugh to John F. Kennedy. From Tom Stoppard's adoring Introduction to the author's meditation on the beauty of Elvis Presley's voice, COUNTING MY CHICKENS offers continuous surprise and delight.

  • Sales Rank: #444089 in Books
  • Published on: 2002-10-15
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Dimensions: 9.40" h x .79" w x 4.46" l, .65 pounds
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 208 pages

From Publishers Weekly
The duchess of Devonshire, youngest of the famous Mitford siblings, is best known for Chatsworth, her historic Derbyshire home, which she keeps open for more than 400,000 visitors each year. Unlike sisters Nancy or Jessica, the duchess is probably a better estate manager than a writer as Stoppard puts it, as "a literary moll, the Duchess is a hoot." This slim volume collects many previously published pieces, however, some of the works are not readily available to American readers (e.g., the British Goat Society Yearbook). Some dwell on the idiocies of modern life: impenetrable packaging, incomprehensible remote control devices for televisions and the ubiquity of consultants. A few revisit Mitford family history, the best being Deborah's account of bringing her goat from the Hebrides to sister Nancy's house in London in 1939, while others discuss obscure British writers. It's when she comes to livestock and gardens that the duchess hits her stride. Her description of the "five stages of gardening" is hilarious: people "begin by liking flowers, progress to flowering shrubs, then autumn foliage and berries; next they go for leaves, and finally the underneaths of leaves." While many of the duchess's pronouncements incite reactionary sentiments e.g., she'd "do away with" women "who want to join men's clubs" and "female weather forecasters," and she'd like to bring back "housewives" and "nurses in uniform" American readers, at least, may find it camp rather than offensive. Reading the duchess is a bit like visiting an old aunt: you swallow the dreary bits politely, knowing there will be a few delightful morsels when you least expect them.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

From Booklist
There is charm here, but it depends on how you respond tosentences such as, "In the 1930s, my parents bought a small island offthe coast of Mull." The duchess is the youngest of the Mitfords, Nancyand Jessica's baby sister. Chatsworth, her family estate, is athriving tourist destination as well as the place where shelives. Borrowing from writings, diaries, and letters, and carefullyfootnoting each person mentioned (Uncle Harold is Harold Macmillan),she decries environmentalists, feminists, and consultants. However,she writes lightly but amusingly about what it takes to make a statelyhome attractive (toilets and a good shop); the glories of a Camelliajaponica Alba Plena that has bloomed at Chatsworth since the 1840s;and how she got a goat from the Hebrides to her sister Nancy's housein London. Her opening page, about how hard it is to start a bookproperly, is worth the price of admission. GraceAnne DeCandido
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Review
"[Counting My Chickens] is more entertaining than anything I could say about it." --P.J. Kavanaugh, The Spectator

"Many distinguished people have known the pleasures of a ducal weekend at Chatsworth--not least Sir Tom Stoppard, who has provided an affectionate introduction. For those of us less fortunate, this charming collection of family stories, portraits of friends, thoughts on this and that, and snapshots of life at the great house is the next best thing. The tales of the Duchess's Mitford childhood come wonderfully fresh-minted . . . 'just the entertainment for a winter's night.'" --Christopher Matthew, The Daily Mail (London)

Most helpful customer reviews

24 of 24 people found the following review helpful.
A Small Jewel From the Last Mitford Girl
By John D. Cofield
Counting My Chickens is a collection of newspaper and magazine columns by Deborah Freeman-Mitford Cavendish, the Dowager Duchess of Devonshire. "Debo" is the youngest and only surviving Mitford Girl, the fabulous daughters of Lord and Lady Redesdale who scandalized and delighted the British and the world from the 1930s onward.

Although this is a very short book cut into many small, fairly unconnected segments, there is nevertheless much that charms. The celebrated Mitford wit,most clearly displayed by Debo's sisters Nancy and Jessica, is in evidence, particularly in the sections that deal with Debo's childhood and early adult years (she once traveled by train from Scotland with a goat, milking it in first class waiting rooms on the way.)

Also in evidence is the extraordinariness of Debo's life as wife of a Duke and as chatelaine of one of England's great mansions, Chatsworth House. She casually drops names like Harold Macmillan and John Kennedy (both of whom were indirectly related to her husband) and at the same time records some of the merriments and aggravations that come with having your home on display to tourists several months each year. Occasionally Debo will drop a barbed comment or two on the silliness of some politicians and visitors, but for the most part she is soft spoken and accomodating.

Few Duchesses have written or revealed much about their lives, so its nice that one has done so now, at a time when the House of Lords is being democratized and the aristocracy must seem more anachronistic than ever.

21 of 21 people found the following review helpful.
Last chaper was the best
By A reader
I've given this book only four stars because it wasn't long enough! I would have liked to read more about her childhood from her point of view. Nancy's stories about it were from another vantage since she was 16 when Deborah was born.
I wasn't bored by this book at all. Have been reading about the Mitfords this summer and fall and am interested in their way of life which is so different than mine.
I don't mind the footnotes telling who people are. Some I knew, others I had never heard of. I didn't think the use of footnotes was excessive, but then I read a lot of books that have footnotes so am not concerned about them.
The Duchess has been very successful with managing Chatsworth House and I admire her for that. Her wit and wisdom come through as she writes matter-of-factly about her life. She doesn't sound stuffy at all. I wish I could visit Chatsworth and meet her.

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Wonderful! What a delightful and beautiful book
By Xerlan J. Deery
Counting My Chickens... and Other Home Thoughts Wonderful! What a delightful and beautiful book. Such wisdom and sass!

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Thursday, January 7, 2016

~~ PDF Ebook Each Man in His Time: The Life Story of a Director, by Raoul Walsh

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Each Man in His Time: The Life Story of a Director, by Raoul Walsh

The Life Story of a Director

  • Sales Rank: #818014 in Books
  • Brand: Farrar, Straus & Giroux
  • Published on: 1974
  • Ingredients: Example Ingredients
  • Number of items: 1
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 385 pages

Most helpful customer reviews

0 of 0 people found the following review helpful.
Great BOOK, great SELLER!
By who-dun-it
Chris, the book's in wonderful condition, as described. Very nice dealing with you. I will purchase more in the future.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful.
An American Classic!!
By Mr Muckle
I found this book in a used bookstore in Cincinnatti about 20 years ago.
It was one great read. I would tell anyone to search out Walsh's book-you won't be disapointed!!

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
Not To Be Missed!!
By Joseph L. Burke
A fascinating read. The adventures of Raoul Walsh are almost beyond belief. I recommend this book without reservation. The seller was prompt and I a more than satisfied with my purchase.

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? Free PDF The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontës, and the Importance of Handbags, by Daphne Merkin

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The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontës, and the Importance of Handbags, by Daphne Merkin

The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontës, and the Importance of Handbags, by Daphne Merkin



The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontës, and the Importance of Handbags, by Daphne Merkin

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The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontës, and the Importance of Handbags, by Daphne Merkin

A wide-ranging collection of essays by one of America's most perceptive critics of popular and literary culture

From one of America's most insightful and independent-minded critics comes a remarkable new collection of essays, her first in more than fifteen years. Daphne Merkin brings her signature combination of wit, candor, and penetrating intelligence to a wide array of subjects that touch on every aspect of contemporary culture, from the high calling of the literary life to the poignant underside of celebrity to our collective fixation on fame. "Sometimes it seems to me that the private life no longer suffices for many of us," she writes, "that if we are not observed by others doing glamorous things, we might as well not exist."
Merkin's elegant, widely admired profiles go beneath the glossy façades of neon-lit personalities to consider their vulnerabilities and demons, as well as their enduring hold on us. As her title essay explains, she writes in order "to save myself through saving wounded icons . . . Famous people . . . who required my intervention on their behalf because only I understood the desolation that drove them." Here one will encounter a gallery of complex, unforgettable women―Marilyn Monroe, Courtney Love, Diane Keaton, and Cate Blanchett, among others―as well as such intriguing male figures as Michael Jackson, Mike Tyson, Truman Capote, and Richard Burton. Merkin reflects with empathy and discernment on what makes them run―and what makes them stumble.
Drawing upon her many years as a book critic, Merkin also offers reflections on writers as varied as Jean Rhys, W. G. Sebald, John Updike, and Alice Munro. She considers the vexed legacy of feminism after Betty Friedan, Bruno Bettelheim's tarnished reputation as a healer, and the reenvisioning of Freud by the elusive Adam Phillips.
Most of all, though, Merkin is a writer who is not afraid to implicate herself as a participant in our consumerist and overstimulated culture. Whether ruminating upon the subtext of lip gloss, detailing the vicissitudes of a pre–Yom Kippur pedicure, or arguing against our obsession with household pets, Merkin helps makes sense of our collective impulses. From a brazenly honest and deeply empathic observer, The Fame Lunches shines a light on truths we often prefer to keep veiled―and in doing so opens up the conversation for all of us.

  • Sales Rank: #807802 in Books
  • Brand: Merkin, Daphne
  • Published on: 2014-09-02
  • Released on: 2014-09-02
  • Original language: English
  • Number of items: 1
  • Dimensions: 9.24" h x 1.36" w x 6.22" l, 1.00 pounds
  • Binding: Hardcover
  • 416 pages

Review

“Precise, pointed. . . . Together, these essays . . . showcase a fearless intelligence. . . . Merkin addresses more complicated issues, or at least ones calling for either honest self-examination or subtlety. . . . These are stunning works, enough to hold us for at least another decade.” ―Clea Simon, The Boston Globe

“[Merkin] writes like an angel, whatever the subject.” ―Editor's Choice, Buffalo News

“Unfailingly intelligent.” ―Heller McAlprin, NPR

“Outstanding . . . one of our best narrative nonfiction writers. Merkin's voice is secular and modern and yet filled with some sort of ancient wisdom, and coupled with intellectual and emotional honesty, while maintaining a pureness of heart. That is no easy feat.” ―Elaine Margolin, Jewish Journal

“A diverse array of work . . . The keenly perceptive Merkin adroitly tackles high and low culture . . . refreshingly candid . . . . No matter what topic, readers will be treated to mesmerizing prose, lively wit, and penetrating analysis; the collection is a joy to read.” ―Publishers Weekly (starred, boxed review)

“An eclectic collection of pieces, all of which feature her unique style and voice . . . . Merkin's style is inevitably exploratory--these are ‘essays' in the word's literal sense. Like Montaigne, she writes to figure something out, not because she's already figured it out . . . Essays that go down like candy but nourish like health food.” ―Kirkus Reviews

“Fearless, impolitic, honest, darkly observant, these superb essays tell all of our secrets.” ―Katie Roiphe

“Daphne Merkin is one of the smartest and best readers I know--not only of books (about which she writes peerlessly) but of people and their preoccupations. She is fiercely honest, even when she turns her unflinching eye on herself, and has such range and such an uncanny ability to draw connections that her essays leave you enlightened about things you never knew you cared about.” ―Chip McGrath

“Daphne Merkin's voice is unmistakable in its wit and audacity and undertone of melancholy. The essay form is a perfect medium for her delicious arias.” ―Janet Malcolm

“Daphne Merkin puts the mark of her distinctive style--intellectual and literary--on everything she writes about, from Kabbalah to camp. This is the juiciest collection of cultural criticism to come along in quite a while and establishes her as a unique and major essayist.” ―Phyllis Rose

“The Fame Lunches is nothing short of a great read. It's filled with unexpected insights into the Complexity, Sorrow, and Beauty of my favorite subject: Women. Everything Daphne Merkin touches glows in the light of her shining talent.” ―Diane Keaton

“Daphne Merkin's sparkling and unreasonably informed essays are about fame, yes, and lunches, somewhat. Above all, they are strikingly original takes on the human condition.” ―Woody Allen

“The Fame Lunches is a delicious and delightful feast. What a pleasure to read a writer who can use language with joy and inventiveness. Daphne Merkin has taken the essay form back to its roots in Michel Montaigne, Joseph Addison, Richard Steele, and Samuel Johnson. Her range is vast, her intellect inspiring. Whether you agree with her conclusions or not, watching her mind work is a thing of beauty.” ―Erica Jong, author of Seducing the Demon: Writing for My Life

“Everything Daphne Merkin writes is so smart, it shines.” ―The Washington Post Book World on Daphne Merkin

“One of the few contemporary essayists who have (and deserve) a following.” ―New York Magazine on Daphne Merkin

About the Author

Daphne Merkin, a former staff writer for The New Yorker, is a regular contributor to ELLE. Her writing frequently appears in The New York Times, Bookforum, Departures, Travel + Leisure, W, Vogue, and other publications. Merkin has taught writing at the 92nd Street Y, Marymount, and Hunter College. Her previous books include Enchantment, a novel, and Dreaming of Hitler, a collection of essays. She lives in New York City.

Most helpful customer reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful.
it is nice to have them
By Lucubrator
It's been a long time since her last collection. While I've read a number of the essays gathered in this book in several magazines, it is nice to have them, and the ones that got away, in a beautiful hardbound collection. Personally, I love Ms. Merkin's voice--incisive, intelligent, empathetic, self-scrutinizing, and gently mocking. Her range of literary, historical, and psychological knowledge is wide and subtlety conveyed. I find reading her pieces like being in the company of smart, funny, and generous friend. Really enjoyed her profiles of Alice Munro and Diane Keaton, as well as her unflinching and honest takes on money and fame.

16 of 20 people found the following review helpful.
She's the queen of oversharing --- and that's good news for her readers.
By Jesse Kornbluth
Daphne Merkin is frighteningly intelligent. You only have to read a few paragraphs of her writing to know that she’s read, heard and seen everything written, recorded and filmed, and that, for good measure, she has a point of view about her subject that is dramatically different from every other writer. But Daphne Merkin is not only deeply smart, she is deeply troubled. She’s the queen of Too Much Information, though in her case the oversharing is the point.

She was, she tells us, born into a family of casually Orthodox Jews. They Merkins were rich — they lived in a Park Avenue duplex, they had a house staff — but money somehow didn’t seem plentiful. Her father was successful and distant. She could never get close to her mother; young Daphne had a “sense of not having been loved — or, to put it more precisely, responded to in a way that felt like love.” At 5, she began “to be apprehensive about what lay in wait for me.” At 8, she was “wholly unwilling to attend school, out of some combination of fear and separation anxiety.”

But she could write. Lord, could she write. When she was 21, she reviewed a book by Jane Bowles. Woody Allen wrote her a fan letter: “You’re wasting your gifts on reviewing.” They became friends. Many years later, over lunch, she told him she felt more depressed than usual. With that, as she writes in this collection of pieces, the interrogation began:

"How depressed? he immediately wanted to know. Quite depressed, I said. Did I have trouble getting up in the morning? Lots, I answered. Did I ever stay in bed all day? No, I said, but it was often noon before I got out of my nightgown. But of course I continued to write, he said. I answered that I hadn’t written a word in weeks. He looked quite serious and then gently asked me if I had ever thought about trying shock therapy. Shock therapy? Yes, he said, he knew a friend — a famous friend — for whom it had been quite helpful. Maybe I should try it.

Sure, I said. Thanks. I don’t know what I had been hoping for — some version of come with me and I will cuddle you until your sadness goes away, not go get yourself hooked up to electrodes, baby — but I was slightly stunned. More than slightly. I understood that he was trying to be helpful in his way, but it fell so far short. We shook hands on Madison Avenue and then gave each other a polite peck, as we always did. It was sunny and cool as I made my way home, looking in at the windows full of bright summer dresses. Shock therapy? It wasn’t as though I hadn’t heard of it or didn’t know people who had benefited from it. Still, how on earth did he conceive of me? As a chronic mental patient, someone who was meant to sit on a thin hospital mattress and stare grayly into space? Didn’t he know I was a writer with a future, a person given to creative descriptions of her own moods? Shock therapy, indeed; I’d sooner try a spa.

It suddenly occurred to me, as I walked up Madison Avenue, that it might pay to be resilient, if this was all being vulnerable and skinless got you. People didn’t stop and cluck over the damage done unless you made it worth their while. Indeed, maybe it was time to rethink this whole salvation business. Or maybe I was less desperate, less teetering on the edge, than I cared to admit. Now, that was a refreshing possibility."

Now that I’ve suggested the psychological terrain — and these are just the top notes, expressed as vulgar journalism — what about “The Fame Lunches: On Wounded Icons, Money, Sex, the Brontës, and the Importance of Handbags,” Daphne Merkin’s new collection of essays? There are 45 of them, and the topics are, as they say, wide-ranging.

Merkin is extremely conscious of surface appearance, especially her weight, so there’s an essay called “In My Head I’m Always Thin.” “Our Money, Ourselves” tracks her family’s public philanthropy and private tightness: “At some point I took to muttering darkly to my mother that charity began at home, but she would always fix me with a contemptuous look and ask, ‘And what exactly is it that you lack?’ She managed to make me feel ungrateful and grabby at once.”

There are meditations on stars, most of them damaged icons ripe for her healing analysis — Marilyn, Michael, Truman, Courtney. Her take on Princess Diana’s marriage will suggest the tone: “I find myself wondering how Diana’s life might have turned out if she and Charles had bonded over their shared lack of childhood, their virtual abandonment as children. …What would have happened if they had the patience (on his side) and endurance (on hers) to address their mutual longings for love and nurturance in each other?”

There are book reviews, many of them learned, some of them esoteric. Zingers appear — on John Updike: “He began to seem like a man who always wore a hat to work.” — but the general reader may feel lost. No problem. This isn’t a book you read cover-to-cover in an evening. It’s a book you dip into, reading what you like, skipping what doesn’t appeal.

Tina Brown told Daphne Merkin, “The art of self-exposure is not simply catharsis.” True, especially for Daphne Merkin. I know her just well enough to believe she found only modest catharsis in writing these pieces. She’s after something bigger, smarter, grander. And in her endless distress, she often finds it.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
A great collection
By 20thCenturyLtd
Merkin has perfect pitch as an observer. A great collection, in the spirit of Mary MCarthy, Dorothy Parker, and Janet Flanner.

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