Off the road

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Catherine Texier

Breakup is the erotically charged chronicle of the tempestuous final months of an eighteen-year romantic and literary partnership, self-destructing in the aftermath of the ultimate betrayal. Fearlessly and courageously, Texier chronicles the end of the love as it is wrecked by infidelity and deceit in a literary tour de force reminiscent by turns of Marguerite Duras and Henry Miller. Texier writes in harrowing detail about the powerful sexual relationship she shared with her husband even during their breakup, how sex between them became a substitute for real intimacy, and how the fabric of a marriage (a shared cup of cafe au lait on a yellow table every morning, the memories of giving birth to two glorious daughters, of coediting their own literary magazine) is brutally dissolved.

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Carolyn G. Heilbrun

When she was a young woman, distinguished author and critic Carolyn Heilbrun made a solemn resolution not to live past "three score years and ten." Taking her own life at the age of seventy, she reasoned, would give closure to a life well lived. But on the advent of her seventieth birthday she realized that the past ten years, the years of her sixties, had been filled with unexpected pleasures. As a consequence, Heilbrun writes: "I find it powerfully reassuring now to think of life as borrowed time. Each day one can say to oneself: I can always die; do I choose death or life? I daily choose life the more earnestly because it is a choice." With the wry humor and clarity of vision that have long marked her work, Carolyn Heilbrun writes with honesty about the emotional and intellectual insights that brought her "to choose, each day for now, to live."

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Roy Blount, Jr

Roy Blount Jr. - Georgia boy turned New York wit, lover of baseball and interesting women, bumbling adventurer, literary lion, salty-limerick virtuoso and impassioned father - journeys into the past and his psyche (also all the way to China, sixty feet underwater and to various Manhattan hot spots) in search of the answers to three riddles that have haunted him intimately:. One: the riddle of "the family curse." Two: the riddle of what drives him (or anyone) to be funny. Three: the riddle of what so cruelly tangled his unseverable bond with the beguiling, beaten orphan girl who became the impossible mother who raised him to Be Sweet.

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Jeffrey B. Ferguson

This is a focus on the life and early career of George Schuyler one of the important intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. The text presents an understanding of Schuyler as public intellectual while offering insights into the relations between race and satire during a formative period in African-American cultural history.