Synopses & Reviews
J.D. Salinger published his first story in
The New Yorker at age twenty-nine. Three years later came
The Catcher in The Rye, a novel that has sold more than sixty-five million copies and achieved mythic status since its publication in 1951. Subsequent books introduced a new type in contemporary literature: the introspective, hyperarticulate Glass family, whose stage is the Upper East Side. Yet we still know little about Salingers personal life and less about his character.
This was by design. In 1953, determined to escape media attention, Salinger fled to New Hampshire, where he would live until his death in 2010. Even there, privacy proved elusive: a Time cover story; a memoir by Joyce Maynard (who dropped out of Yale as a freshman to move in with him); and a legal battle over an unauthorized biography, which darkened his last decades. Yet he continued to write, and is rumored to have left behind a mass of work that his estate intends to publish.
Thomas Beller, a novelist who grew up in Manhattan, is the ideal guide to Salingers world. He gives us a sense of life at The New Yorker (where he was once a staff writer) and a portrait of editor Gus Lobrano, whose relationship with Salinger has rarely been written about. He visits Salingers summer camp and the apartment buildings where the author lived. He reads the famous works with obsessive attention, finding in them an image of his own life experience. The result is a quest biography about learning to know yourself in order to know your subject. J.D. Salinger is the triumph of a rare literary form: biography as work of art.
Synopsis
A revealing look at the life and work of David Lynch, one of the most enigmatic and influential filmmakers of our time Every frame of David Lynch's work, from the '70s midnight movie Eraserhead to the groundbreaking TV series Twin Peaks, to the digital-video DIY feat Inland Empire, bears his unmistakable imprint. But the paradox of the Lynchian is that it's easy to recognize and hard to define. Lynch is a master of the inscrutable gesture, the opaque symbol. His career evades the usual categories: pop culture icon and subject of academic study, cult figure and industry outsider. He's a Renaissance man—musician, painter, photographer, carpenter, entrepreneur—and a vocal proponent or transcendental meditation.
Dennis Lim, the newly minted director of Cinematheque programming at Lincoln Center, is a skilled cinephile wary of over-interpretation. David Lynch preserves the strangeness of the Lynch's universe and offers a personal meditation on the most distinctive filmmaker in modern American culture. It leaves what Lynch likes to call "room to dream," honoring the allure of the unknown and the unknowable.
Synopsis
A spirited, deeply personal inquiry into the near-mythic life and canonical work of J. D. Salinger by a writer known for his sensitivity to the Manhattan culture that was Salinger's great theme.
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Part of James Atlas’s Icons series, a revealing look at the life and work of David Lynch, one of the most enigmatic and influential filmmakers of our time
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A view into the tumultuous and creative life of Edgar Allan Poe.
Synopsis
Looming large in the popular imagination as a serious poet and lively drunk who died in penury, Edgar Allan Poe was also the most celebrated and notorious writer of his day. He died broke and alone at the age of forty, but not before he had written some of the greatest works in the English language, from the chilling “The Tell-Tale Heart” to “The Murders in the Rue Morgue”—the first modern detective story—to the iconic poem “The Raven.”
Poes life was one of unremitting hardship. His father abandoned the family, and his mother died when he was three. Poe was thrown out of West Point, and married his beloved thirteen-year-old cousin, who died of tuberculosis at twenty-four. He was so poor that he burned furniture to stay warm. He was a scourge to other poets, but more so to himself.
In the hands of Paul Collins, one of our liveliest historians, this mysteriously conflicted figure emerges as a genius both driven and undone by his artistic ambitions. Collins illuminates Poes huge successes and greatest flop (a 143-page prose poem titled Eureka), and even tracks down what may be Poes first published fiction, long hidden under an enigmatic byline. Clear-eyed and sympathetic, Edgar Allan Poe is a spellbinding story about the man once hailed as “the Shakespeare of America.”
Synopsis
At once a pop culture icon, cult figure, and film industry outsider, master filmmaker David Lynch and his work defy easy definition. Dredged from his subconscious mind, Lynch’s work is primed to act on our own subconscious, combining heightened, contradictory emotions into something familiar but inscrutable. No less than his art, Lynch’s life also evades simple categorization, encompassing pursuits as a musician, painter, photographer, carpenter, entrepreneur, and vocal proponent of Transcendental Meditation.
David Lynch: The Man from Another Place, Dennis Lim’s remarkably smart and concise book, proposes several lenses through which to view Lynch and his work: through the age-old mysteries of the uncanny and the sublime, through the creative energies of surrealism and postmodernism, through ideas of America and theories of good and evil. Lynch himself often warns against overinterpretation. And accordingly, this is not a book that seeks to decode his art or annotate his life—to dispel the strangeness of the Lynchian—so much as one that offers complementary ways of seeing and understanding one of the most distinctive bodies of work in modern cinema. Its spirit is true to its subject, in remaining suggestive rather than definitive, in allowing what Lynch likes to call “room to dream,” and in honoring the allure of the unknown and the unknowable.
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A riveting life of the brilliant British artist, one of the greatest figurative painters of the 20th century.
Synopsis
Phoebe Hoban, author of definitive biographies of Jean-Michel Basquiat and Alice Neel, now turns her attention to Lucian Freud, the grandson of Sigmund and one of the greatest painters England has produced.
Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open is the first biography to assess Freud's work and life, showing how the two converge.
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In Hoban's dramatic and fast-paced narrative, we follow Freud from his birthplace in Berlin to London, where he fled with his family in the 1930s, and then to Paris, where he mixed with Picasso and Giacometti. He led a dissolute life in Soho after the war, gambling and womanizing with fierce energy. He painted his wives nude, his children nude, himself nude. He married twice, had an uncountable number of children, and kept working through it all, painting everyone from close friend and rival Francis Bacon to Kate Moss and Queen Elizabeth. He sometimes spent years on a single painting, which could require hundreds of hours of sittings. However various his subjects, his intent was always the same: to find and reveal the character hidden within by means of his intense visual imagination.
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Along with its startling biographical revelations, the great thrill of Lucian Freud: Eyes Wide Open is the way Hoban deconstructs the art itselfand#8212;its influences, models, and techniqueand#8212;to show how Freud reproduced reality on the canvas while breaking down the illusion that what we see is real.
About the Author
Thomas Beller is the author of Seduction Theory, a collection of stories; The Sleep-Over Artist, a novel; and How to Be a Man: Scenes from a Protracted Boyhood, an essay collection. He is a frequent contributor to The New Yorkers Culture Desk, has edited numerous anthologies including two drawn from his website, Mr. Beller's Neighborhood, and was a cofounder of the literary journal Open City.
Table of Contents
1. 1923: On Running Away 1
2. The Gift 3
3. Lost 11
4. 1930s: Ham and Cheese 14
5. The Myron Arms 18
6. Comanches 21
7. 1932: McBurney and Central Park 26
8. The Salinger Triptych 29
9. 1934-1936: Salinger the Sublime 33
10. The Perversities of Princeton 39
11. Samizdat Salinger 43
12. 1937: Vienna 47
13. “A Girl I Knew” 52
14. The Bacon King 55
15. The Eighth Grade Canon 57
16. The Muse of Manasquan 60
17. 1938: “The Young Man Went Back to College.” 63
18. The New Yorker 69
19. Roger Angell 76
20. The Professional 82
21. Room 505 86
22. “The Daring Young Man on the Flying Trapeze” 94
23. 1133 Park Avenue 97
24. 1941: “A Young Girl in 1941 with No Waist at All” 104
25. Women in Letters 110
26. The Fan 117
27. The Lady Upstairs 120
28. Joyce Maynard 126
29. 1945: The End of the War 131
30. 1945: The Nazi Bride 136
31. 1961: The Year of the Woodchuck 142
32. 1972: “Begin the Beguine” 154
33. The Miscalculation 157
34. Gustave Lobrano and William Shawn 160
35. 1960s-1980s: Letters to the Swami 172
36. The Catcher in the Rye: Rereading and Birthing 177
Acknowledgments 181