Synopses & Reviews
Exploring the fascinating stories of more than a dozen authorial impostors across several centuries and cultures, Carmela Ciuraru plumbs the creative process and the darker, often crippling aspects of fame.
Only through the protective guise of Lewis Carroll could a shy, half-deaf Victorian mathematician at Oxford feel free to let his imagination run wild. The "three weird sisters" from Yorkshire—the Brontës—produced instant bestsellers that transformed them into literary icons, yet they wrote under the cloak of male authorship. Bored by her aristocratic milieu, a cigar-smoking, cross-dressing baroness rejected the rules of propriety by having sexual liaisons with men and women alike, publishing novels and plays under the name George Sand. Highly accessible and engaging, these provocative stories reveal the complex motives of writers who harbored secret identities—sometimes playfully, sometimes with terrible anguish and tragic consequences. Part detective story, part exposé, part literary history, Nom de Plume is an absorbing psychological meditation on identity and creativity.
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“Nom De Plume is wildly entertaining, almost gossipy, but travels on the high end of the literary landscape. This book is beyond great.” Bookazine
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“Ciuraru builds each history as its own personal story, then builds the literary charm and genius behind the pathos, … a tale of literary genius all its own.” Los Angeles Times
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“You are on the second-to-last page of Carmela Ciurarus NOM DE PLUME and wishing you werent because this book is such great fun...Intelligent, confident, and trustworthy.” San Francisco Chronicle
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“Our curator is always having fun in ‘Nom De Plume, and, as a result, so are we.” Jewish Daily Forward
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“Ms. Ciuraru…writes with clarity and confidence, and her research is impressive.” Wall Street Journal
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“A fascinating book on a fascinating subject. We all have other selves, but only some of us give them a name and let them loose in the world. Carmela Ciuraru steps behind a host of shadowy facades to interrogate the originals, and the result is both enlightening and wonderfully entertaining.” John Banville, author of The Sea, winner of the Man Booker Prize
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“Nom de Plume is filled with tremendous insight into the minds of these writers and their ability to create not only works of fiction within the covers of their books, but fictional lives for themselves as well....beautifully researched and deftly written-pure pleasure from cover to cover.” New York Journal of Books
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“...Ciuraru, a freelance literary journalist, writes well and has a fully functioning sense of humor, so “Nom de Plume” is a pleasure to read...” Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World
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“Ciurarus writing is bright, lively, and smart, making Nom de Plume both informative and extremely enjoyable to read. I strongly recommend this read for any fans of biography, especially writers, and perhaps even more especially, women writers.” The Best Damn Creative Writing Blog
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“Each page affords sparkling facts and valuable insights onto the manufacturing of books and reputations, the keeping and revealing of secrets, the vagaries of private life and public opinion, and the eternally mysterious, often tormented interface between life and literature.” Elif Batuman, author of The Possessed: Adventures with Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
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“An engrossing, well-paced literary history…biography on the quick, and done well.” BookForum
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“Nom de Plume is a fascinating collection of storiespopulated by individuals whose ‘doubleness is so distinct that they acquire secondary personalities, and, in some notable cases, multiple personalities. Its a richly documented literary excursion into the inner, secret lives of some of our favorite writers.” Joyce Carol Oates
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“Engaging without being breezy, informative without being pedantic, these essays offer insightful, fascinating literary portraits without the solemness and heft of so many literary biographies. Ciuraru gets to the essence of their lives efficiently and evocatively, which makes for pleasant and piquant summer literary non-fiction.” The Reading Ape Blog
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“Ciurarus treatments of her subjects sparkle with rich, well-arranged detail and the sly wit of literary hindsight. With a central focus that remains urgent and appealing for 21st century readers even as it dissects the personal lives of authors long past, Nom de Plume is surely an important book.” Chelsea Now Magazine
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“Nom de Plume is a delicious investigation of what leads the likes of the Brontës, Samuel Clemens, and Karen Blixen to ditch their names for safer, more romantic identities when they write. Whether their reasons are practical or mysterious, their lives and choices are here charmingly limned by Carmela Ciuraru.” Honor Moore, author of The Bishop's Daughter
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“What to make of the paradox that some of the boldest writers have hidden behind pen names? Carmela Ciuraru has performed a valuable service in examining the phenomenon through her charming, sprightly, and illuminating biographical essays.” Phillip Lopate
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“This survey of authors who sought anonymity and privacy is well researched. Amid informative, illuminating profiles, Ciuraru successfully ferrets out curious literary charades.” Publishers Weekly
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“Carmela Ciurarus Nom de Plume deftly tells the stories of some of literatures most famous pen names. For anyone who creates the book will enthrall. As much a meditation on the creative process as it is a tell-all about their names and the intrigue that created them.” Associated Press
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“Fascinating, lively, and fun - you cant do much better than to read about George Sand, born Amandine-Aurore-Lucile Dupin, who adopted a swaggering male persona to go along with the name.” Boston Globe
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“…‘Nom de Plume is part detective story, part exposé, part literary history, and an absorbing psychological meditation on identity and creativity. Its a delightful book.” Huntington News
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“Stories of self-invention are always interesting to read about, especially in Carmela Ciurarus Nom de Plume. Ciurarus book presents a persuasive argument that the generative powers of the pseudonym should persist.” The Daily
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“With description that captures the imagination, Nom de Plume is what nonfiction should be - accessible, thought-provoking, and highly entertaining.” Christian Science Monitor
Synopsis
MaryAnne Evans. Charles Dodgson. Eric Blair. William Sydney Porter. Or, as they aremore commonly remembered, George Eliot, Lewis Carroll, George Orwell, and O.Henry. For these writers and many others, from Mark Twain to Stan Lee to RobertJordan, the invocation of a nom de plume has been an essential part inthe creation of an authorial identity. Now, in a captivating series ofbiographical snapshots exploring the lives of famous authors and their pennames, author Carmela Ciuraru delivers a unique literaryhistory and a penetrating examination of identity, creativity, andself-creation, revisiting the enduring question—whats in a name?
About the Author
Carmela Ciuraru is not a pseudonym. Her anthologies include First Loves: Poets Introduce the Essential Poems That Captivated and Inspired Them and Solitude Poems. She is a graduate of Columbia University's School of Journalism and a member of the National Book Critics Circle. She has written for the Los Angeles Times, the San Francisco Chronicle, the Boston Globe, the Wall Street Journal, Newsday, Elle Decor, ARTNews, O, The Oprah Magazine, and other publications. She lives in Brooklyn.