Casts And Characters

“Exuberant . . . elegantly conjures an evocative group dynamic.” —Sam Roberts, New York Times From its birth in 1925 to the early days of the Cold War, The New Yorker slowly but surely took hold as the country’s most prestigious, entertaining, and informative general-interest periodical. In Cast of Characters, Thomas Vinciguerra paints a portrait of the magazine’s cadre of charming, wisecracking, driven, troubled, brilliant writers and editors. He introduces us to Wolcott Gibbs, theater critic, all-around wit, and author of an infamous 1936 parody of Time magazine. We meet the demanding and eccentric founding editor Harold Ross, who would routinely tell his underlings, "I'm firing you because you are not a genius," and who once mailed a pair of his underwear to Walter Winchell, who had accused him of preferring to go bare-bottomed under his slacks. Joining the cast are the mercurial, blind James Thurber, a brilliant cartoonist and wildly inventive fabulist, and the enigmatic E. B. White—an incomparable prose stylist and Ross's favorite son—who married The New Yorker's formidable fiction editor, Katharine Angell. Then there is the dashing St. Clair McKelway, who was married five times and claimed to have no fewer than twelve personalities, but was nonetheless a superb reporter and managing editor alike. Many of these characters became legends in their own right, but Vinciguerra also shows how, as a group, The New Yorker’s inner circle brought forth a profound transformation in how life was perceived, interpreted, written about, and published in America. Cast of Characters may be the most revealing—and entertaining—book yet about the unique personalities who built what Ross called not a magazine but a "movement."

Inspiring selections offer a compelling look at the most high-impact moments in the biblical narrative, featuring stories about Mary, Peter, Matthew, Job, and other biblical characters.

Contemporaries in imagination as in fact, James Joyce and Sigmund Freud pondered the complexities and depths of human consciousness and found distinct ways to represent it-the one as a great novelist, the other as the first psychoanalyst. In this book, Paul Schwaber, both a professor of literature and a psychoanalyst, brings a clinician’s attentiveness and a scholar-critic’s literary commitment to the study of characterization in Ulysses.

From the Editor: An old friend of mine once said to me, “You oughta go ahead and get the graveyard people to cut your stone now. Have ’em write on there, ‘If this is anything like his life, he won’t be here long.’ ”I’ve thought a dozen times to get a paperweight-size version of that very epitaph. I’ll get around to it someday. Or the graveyard people will. Anyway, with this short attention span I’m blessed with, I sat at my breakfast table on an Alabama springtime morning, ideas sprouting like the green outside my window, and a thought ran by: What could we do differently with the Blue Moon Café anthology? Nothing wrong with it the way it is. But that’s not the point. I thought about that little hardback I bought in the Pensacola airport, which fit so nicely into my sport coat pocket, and which I finished before I completed the loop down and back from the Miami International Book Fair: Gabriel García Márquez’s Memories of My Melancholy Whores. I fell so in love with that small volume that I used a couple precious minutes of my allotted seven on the book fair panel to read from the brief work that extends infinitely in my mind. Aha! Let’s make the next Blue Moon Café book fit into a coat pocket, a purse. Let’s peg the meter with exceptional literary talent. Let’s give readers less on their plates, but more to digest. More provocation. More beauty, horror, and sadness. More loving insight into the comedy and tragedy of the human situation.And readers’ palates, of course, will judge the effort. Here’s betting their decision leads to a long life for this new edition of our book of stories served up from the Blue Moon Café.

Not loaded with theory, Skip's invaluable book contains concise, easily understood and applied advice for both writing and marketing any kind of book, article, story, play, screen-play, report, proposal or anything else you can think of.How to Write What You Want and Sell What You Write is for every writer or wannabe who needs to sort out his or her desires, capabilities and strengths and, even more importantly, learn the particular formats for the kind of writing in which he or she is interested.

Common people. Maybe you heard their names in a childhood Sunday school class. They're not often the champions or the go-to sermon illustrations. They probably didn't stand at the foot of the cross or even hang next to Jesus on one of their own. But they pepper the pages of the Bible, reminding us that we're not alone. Just like you and me, these ordinary people stumbled and struggled. They faced their own sin and came face to face with a God who not only wipes it away, but also makes the common extraordinary. They discovered that an encounter with the living God changes everything. Dive into the lives of more than twenty of the Bible's most compelling characters through inspirational selections from the writings of bestselling author Max Lucado. An ideal companion volume to Cast of Characters, this book features a whole new cast and the encouragement from their stories.

Common people ... Story after story marked by scandal, stumble, and intrigue. Who are these people? They're the people of the Bible. And they're us. We find our stories in theirs. We find our hope where they found theirs. In the hands of an uncommon God. In the midst of them all ... hovering over them all ... is the hero of it all: God. Maker. Shaper. Rescuer of sinking hearts. God. Passing out high callings, second chances, and moral compasses to all comers and takers. In this gathering of inspiring stories from his numbers best-selling books, master storyteller Max Lucado revisits some of his favorite biblical characters -- all of whom were very human and imperfect, just like us. If God can find a place for them ... He might just have a place for us too.