Search results for [Didion, Joan] at Tsuga Consortium

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Cold warriors : writers who waged the literary Cold War / by White, Duncan,1979-author.;

Includes bibliographical references and index.A brilliant, invigorating account of the great writers on both sides of the Iron Curtain who played the dangerous games of espionage, dissidence and subversion that changed the course of the Cold War. During the Cold War, literature was both sword and noose. Novels, essays and poems could win the hearts and minds of those caught between the competing creeds of capitalism and communism. They could also lead to exile, imprisonment or execution if they offended those in power. The clandestine intelligence services of the United States, Britain and the Soviet Union had secret agents and vast propaganda networks devoted to literary warfare. But the battles were personal, too: friends turning on each other, lovers cleaved by political fissures, artists undermined by inadvertent complicities. In Cold Warriors, Harvard University's Duncan White vividly chronicles how this ferocious intellectual struggle was waged on both sides of the Iron Curtain. The book has at its heart five major writers--George Orwell, Stephen Spender, Mary McCarthy, Graham Greene and Andrei Sinyavsky--but the full cast includes a dazzling array of giants, among them Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, John le Carr, Richard Wright, Ernest Hemingway, Boris Pasternak, Gioconda Belli, Arthur Koestler, Vaclav Havel, Joan Didion, Isaac Babel, Howard Fast, Lillian Hellman, Mikhail Sholokhov--and scores more. Spanning decades and continents and spectacularly meshing gripping narrative with perceptive literary detective work, Cold Warriors is a welcome reminder that, at a moment when ignorance is celebrated and reading seen as increasingly irrelevant, writers and books can change the world.

Subjects: Biographies.; Cold War in literature.; Politics and literature.; Authors; Literature, Modern;

Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1

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Smile : the story of a face / by Ruhl, Sarah,1974-author.;

Includes bibliographical references."In this poignant and deeply intimate memoir, Sarah Ruhl chronicles her experience with Bell's palsy after giving birth to twins. At night, I dreamed that I could smile. The smile felt effortless in my dreams, the way it did in my childhood. Happily married and in the flush of hard-earned professional success, with her first play opening on Broadway, Sarah Ruhl has just survived a high risk pregnancy and given birth to twins when she discovers the left side of her face entirely paralyzed. Bell's palsy. Ninety percent of Bell's palsy sufferers see spontaneous improvement and full recovery. Like Ruhl's mother. Like Angelina Jolie. But not like Sarah Ruhl. Sarah Ruhl is in the unlucky ten percent. Like Allen Ginsberg. But for a woman, a mother, a wife, and an artist working in the realm of theater, the paralysis and the disconnect between the interior and exterior, brings significant and specific challenges. So Ruhl begins an intense decade-long search for a cure, while simultaneously grappling with the reality of her new face-one that, while recognizably her own-is incapable of accurately communicating feelings or intentions. In a series of searing, witty, and lucid meditations, Ruhl chronicles her journey as a patient, mother, wife, and artist. She details the struggle of a body yearning to match its inner landscape, the pain post-partum depression, the joys and trials of marriage and being a playwright and a mother to three tiny children, and the desire for a resilient spiritual life in the face of difficulty. Brimming with insight, humility, and levity, SMILE is a triumph by one of the leading playwrights in America. It is about loss and reconciliation, perseverance and hope. The Hollywood pitch would be Joan Didion meets Ann Lamott with a little Nora Ephron for good measure"--

Subjects: Biographies.; Autobiographies.; Ruhl, Sarah, 1974-; Facial paralysis; Dramatists, American;

Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1

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Big Girls Don't Cry A Memoir About Taking Up Space [electronic resource] : by Swan, Susan.aut; Atwood, Margaret.; CloudLibrary;

“[Swan’s writing offers] not only an enjoyable read, but also the chance to think and reflect on the vast complex living entity that is the world." —Nobel Prize-winner Olga Tokarczuk Where do we belong if we don’t fit in? A memoir about what it means to defy expectations as a woman, a mother and an artist, for readers of Joan Didion and Gloria Steinem and listeners of the podcast Wiser than Me Susan Swan has never fit inside the boxes that other people have made for her—the daughter box, the wife box, the mother box, the femininity box. Instead, throughout her richly lived, independent decades, she has carved her own path and lived with the consequences. In this revealing and revelatory memoir, Swan shares the key moments of her life. As a child in a small Ontario town, she was defined by her size—attracting ridicule because she was six-foot-two by the age of twelve. She left her marriage to be a single mother and a fiction writer in the edgy, underground art scene of 1970s Toronto. In her forties, she embraced the new freedom of the Aphrodite years. Despite the costs to her relationships, Swan kept searching for the place she fit, living in the literary circles of New York while seeking pleasure and spiritual wisdom in Greece, and culminating in the hard-won experience of true self-acceptance in her seventies. Swan examines the expectations of women of her generation and beyond using the lens of her then-unusual height as a metaphor for the way women are expected not to take up space in the world. Inspiring and thought-provoking, Big Girls Don’t Cry invites us to re-examine what we’ve been taught to believe about ourselves and ask how it could be different.

Subjects: Electronic books.; Personal Memoirs; Editors, Journalists, Publishers; Women;

© 2025., HarperCollins Canada,

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The last fire season : a personal and pyronatural history / by Martin, Manjula,author.;

Includes bibliographical references."H Is for Hawk meets Joan Didion in the Pyrocene in this arresting combination of memoir, natural history, and literary inquiry that chronicles one woman's experience of life in Northern California during the worst fire season on record. Told in luminous, perceptive prose, The Last Fire Season is a deeply incisive inquiry into what it really means--now--to live in relationship to the elements of the natural world. When Manjula Martin moved from the city to the woods of Northern California, she wanted to be closer to the wilderness that she had loved as a child. She was also seeking refuge from a health crisis that left her with chronic pain, and found a sense of healing through tending her garden beneath the redwoods of Sonoma County. But the landscape that Martin treasured was an ecosystem already in crisis. Wildfires fueled by climate change were growing bigger and more frequent: each autumn, her garden filled with smoke and ash, and the local firehouse siren wailed deep into the night. In 2020, when a dry lightning storm ignited hundreds of simultaneous wildfires across the West and kicked off the worst fire season on record, Martin, along with thousands of other Californians, evacuated her home in the midst of a pandemic. Both a love letter to the forests of the West and an interrogation of the colonialist practices that led to their current dilemma, The Last Fire Season, follows her from the oaky hills of Sonoma County to the redwood forests of coastal Santa Cruz, to the pines and peaks of the Sierra Nevada, as she seeks shelter, bears witness to the devastation, and tries to better understand fire's role in the ecology of the West. As Martin seeks a way to navigate the daily experience of living in a damaged body on a damaged planet, she comes to question her own assumptions about nature and the complicated connections between people and the land on which we live"--

Subjects: Biographies.; Autobiographies.; Personal narratives.; Martin, Manjula.; Human beings; Wildfires; Women authors, American;

Available copies: 1 / Total copies: 1

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Dead and alive : essays / by Smith, Zadie,author.;

"A profound and unparalleled literary voice, Zadie Smith returns with a resounding collection of essays. In the past two decades, few writers have been able to master the craft and art of the essay in the way that Zadie Smith has. Her discerning eye and singularly intimate perspective emblazon Smith as a preeminent critic of our generation, society, and culture. In her inimitable honesty and poignant voice, Smith studies the fault lines that divide us and consistently finds within them grounds for solidarity and compassion. This eagerly awaited new collection brings Zadie Smith's unique skills as an essayist to bear on a range of subjects that have captured her attention in recent years. Organized in five sections -- eyeballing, considering, reconsidering, mourning, and confessing -- she unspools personal dialogues with various sources of inspiration. She takes an exhilaratingly close look at artists Toyin Ojih Odutola and Kara Walker. She invites us along to the movies in her review of Tár, a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and to her desk when researching the Tichborne trial and writing her New York Times bestselling novel The Fraud. She asks us to look at the young Michael Jackson and to mourn with her the passing of writers Joan Didion, Martin Amis, Hilary Mantel, Philip Roth, and Toni Morrison. And she shows us once again in Dead and Alive her unrivalled ability to think through critically and humanely some of the most urgent preoccupations and tendencies of our troubled times. A master of perception always in search of a lesser-known reality, Smith continually assesses, and reassesses, what it means to identify with the contemporary world, and how we choose to remember the history that brought us here"--

Subjects: Essays.;

Available copies: 0 / Total copies: 1

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