Casual affairs
Maryellen V. Keefe
"Follows the life and career of Sally Benson, acclaimed writer of New Yorker fiction and Hollywood screenplays."--Publishers website

by Gena Dagel Caponi (1998)
Paul Bowles serves as an introduction to this enigmatic figure. Caponi discusses all of Bowles's novels: The Sheltering Sky, the first American novel to articulate an existential philosophy; Let It Come Down, a further exploration of existentialism; The Spider's House, which explores the fall of the French colonial regime and the aftermath from the point of view of a Moroccan; and the thriller Up Above the World. In addition to the novels, Caponi examines Bowles's other writings - the poetry, travel essays, and stories - and also touches on his musical compositions. Accompanying her critical examination is extensive material from Caponi's illuminating interviews with Bowles. The quintessential introduction to an unusual figure in American literature, Paul Bowles will be welcomed by scholars and students of literature, and music.
Maryellen V. Keefe
"Follows the life and career of Sally Benson, acclaimed writer of New Yorker fiction and Hollywood screenplays."--Publishers website
Michael Shnayerson
He was one of America's greatest storytellers. The Young Lions; Rich Man, Poor Man; The Girls in their Summer Dresses, novels, essays, dramas, screenplays, and some of the finest short stories of our century: in seventy-one years crowded with accomplishment and contradiction, Irwin Shaw wrote them all. Success came early, but then he had to struggle with the temptations of success. He achieved a greater level of celebrity than most writers of his generation, then had to grapple with the demons that celebrity brings. He was known everywhere for his generosity and charm, but became almost as legendary for his battles -- with the Group Theatre, with The New Yorker, with his book publishers, with competitors such as Hemingway, with his wife in their stormy marriage. - Jacket flap.
Janet Malcolm
"How had the pair of elderly Jewish lesbians survived the Nazis?” Janet Malcolm asks at the beginning of this extraordinary work of literary biography and investigative journalism. The pair, of course, is Gertrude Stein, the modernist master whose charm was as conspicuous as her fatness” and thin, plain, tense, sour” Alice B. Toklas, the worker bee” who ministered to Stein’s needs throughout their forty-year expatriate marriage.” As Malcolm pursues the truth of the couple’s charmed life in a village in Vichy France, her subject becomes the larger question of biographical truth. The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties,” she writes. The portrait of the legendary couple that emerges from this work is unexpectedly charged. The two world wars Stein and Toklas lived through together are paralleled by the private war that went on between them. This war, as Malcolm learned, sometimes flared into bitter combat. Two Lives is also a work of literary criticism. Even the most hermetic of [Stein’s] writings are works of submerged autobiography,” Malcolm writes. The key of 'I' will not unlock the door to their meaning you need a crowbar for that but will sometimes admit you to a kind of anteroom of suggestion.” Whether unpacking the accessible Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, in which Stein solves the koan of autobiography,” or wrestling with The Making of Americans, a masterwork of magisterial disorder,” Malcolm is stunningly perceptive.
Lisa Alther
The author looks for her father's family in Virginia. They may have belonged to a mysterious group known as the Melungeons.