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More copies of this ISBNThis title in other editionseBook editionsYours Ever: People and Their Lettersby Thomas Mallon
Review-A-Day"[T]here is no denying the love that undergirds the author's labor or the seemingly laborless way in which he calls these dead pages back to life....What kind of life, though? That's the question that began niggling at me the moment I closed this delightful book. Yours Ever is conceived as a museum for a lost art, and it is not hard to see Mallon as the docent in the cardigan sweater, ushering us into each room and then sending us off into the gloaming of modernity." Louis Bayard, The Wilson Quarterly (read the entire Wilson Quarterly review) Synopses & ReviewsPublisher Comments:From the author of A Book of One's Own and Stolen Words comes a delightful and wide-ranging investigation of the art of letter writing. Yours Ever explores the offhand masterpieces dispatched through the ages by messenger, postal service, and BlackBerry. Thomas Mallon weaves a remarkable assortment of epistolary riches into his own insightful and eloquent commentary on the circumstances and characters of the world's most intriguing letter writers. Here are Madame de Sevigne's devastatingly sharp reports from the court of Louis XIV, F. Scott Fitzgerald's tormented advice to his young daughter, the besotted midlife billets-doux of a suddenly rejuvenated Woodrow Wilson, the casually brilliant spiritual musings of Flannery O'Connor, the lustful boastings of Lord Byron, the cries from prison of Sacco and Vanzetti. Along with the confessions and complaints and revelations sent from battlefields, frontier cabins, and luxury liners, a reader will find Mallon considering travel bulletins, suicide notes, fan letters, and hate mail-forms as varied as the human experiences behind them. Yours Ever is an exuberant reintroduction to a vast and entertaining literature — a book that will help to revive, in the digital age, this glorious lost art. Review:"This companion volume to prolific Mallon's 1984 study of diaries, A Book of One's Own, surveys several epistolary subgenres, including friendship, advice, complaint, love, confession, war-zone dispatch and pleas from prison. A 25-year correspondence between Mary McCarthy and Hannah Arendt pleasurably mixes world politics and personal foibles, musings about the Eichmann trial with an unwanted pregnancy and literary gossip. Henry Miller bullied his patient publisher James Laughlin for 30 years ('Why should I compromise?... to please you?'); Florence Nightingale's angry, agitated letters from the Crimean War show a respect for the suffering soldier and a contempt for complaining nurses; E.M. Forster confides to a friend his homosexual initiation at age 37 by an Egyptian tram conductor; and Winston and Clementine Churchill's long correspondence blends patriotism, ambition and shared tenacity. They stand in marked contrast to the duke and duchess of Windsor's baby talk and self-pity. This smart, witty and lively account with excerpts of a not-yet-extinct literary genre will whet our appetites for published collections of letters — a selected bibliography is included — while motivating us to put pen to paper to rediscover a satisfying means of communication." Publishers Weekly (Starred Review) (Copyright Reed Business Information, Inc.) Synopsis:Mallon offers a delightful and wide-ranging chronicle of the art of letter-writing that explores the offhand masterpieces dispatched through the ages by the likes of Scott Fitzgerald, Flannery O'Connor, Lord Byron, and others. About the AuthorTHOMAS MALLON is the author of seven novels, including Henry and Clara, Dewey Defeats Truman and Fellow Travelers. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, and The Atlantic Monthly. He lives in Washington, D.C. Table of ContentsIntroduction ONE Absence TWO Friendship THREE Advice FOUR Complaint FIVE Love SIX Spirit SEVEN Confession EIGHT War NINE Prison Selected Bibliography Index What Our Readers Are SayingBe the first to add a comment for a chance to win!Product Details
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