Kategoria BISAC: Biography & Autobiography >> Literary Figures

Borges On Writing

In 1971, Jorge Luis Borges was invited to preside over a series of seminars on his writing at Columbia University. This book is a record of those seminars, which took the form of informal discussions between Borges, Norman Thomas di Giovanni--his editor and translator, Frank MacShane--then head of the writing program at Columbia, and the students. Borges's prose, poetry, and translations are handled separately and the book is divided accordingly.

The prose seminar is based on a line-by-line discussion of one of Borges's most distinctive...

Rewriting Medieval Japanese Women explores the world of thirteenth-century Japan through the life of a prolific noblewoman known as Nun Abutsu (1225-1283). Abutsu crossed gender and genre barriers by writing the first career guide for Japanese noblewomen, the first female-authored poetry treatise, and the first poetic travelogue by a woman--all despite the increasingly limited social mobility for women during the Kamakura era (1185-1336). Capitalizing on her literary talent and political prowess, Abutsu rose from middling origins and single-motherhood to a prestigious marriage and...

Orally or on the page, John Edgar Wideman never seems to stray far from firsthand experience. -Writing for me is a way of opening up, - he states in one of the interviews in this collection, -a way of sharing, a way of making sense of the world, and writing's very appeal is that it gives me a kind of hands-on way of coping with the very difficult business of living a life.-

Wideman shares the joy and pain of his life experience. The easy laughter accompanying many of these interviews shows that conversations with him can be intense and fun.

This book spans thirty-five years. Wideman...

Tell about Night Flowers presents previously unpublished letters by Eudora Welty, selected and annotated by scholar Julia Eichelberger. Welty published many of her best-known works in the 1940s: A Curtain of Green, The Wide Net, The Robber Bridegroom, Delta Wedding, and The Golden Apples. During this period, she also wrote hundreds of letters to two friends who shared her love of gardening. One friend, Diarmuid Russell, was her literary agent in New York; the other, John Robinson, was a high school classmate and an aspiring writer who served in the Army in WWII, and long the...

A moving and thoughtful tribute, this book, originally published in 1979, offers fourteen essays dedicated to the memory of J. R. R. Tolkien (1892 1973). The contributors, a distinguished group of his friends, colleagues, and former students, address a wide and diverse range of subjects.

The first part of the book contains material on Tolkien the man and the scholar. It includes his obituary notices from The Times of London and his valedictory address at Oxford in which he points out, eloquently and purposefully, the artificiality of the split between language and literary study. The...

"Even if I lived a hundred lives, I still wouldn't be exhausted." These words capture the intensity of the experiences of Claude Lanzmann, a man whose acts have always been a negation of resignation: a member of the French Resistance at sixteen, a friend to Jean-Paul Sartre and a lover to Simone de Beauvoir, and the director of movies including one of the most important films in the history of cinema, Shoah.

In these pages, Lanzmann composes a hymn to life that flows from memory yet has the rhythm of a novel, as tumultuous as it is energetic. The Patagonian Hare is the...