Occasional Prose

DIVDIVReading and romance, gardening tips, a farewell to a friend, even an opera retold make up this stellar collection from the bestselling author of The Group and Memories of a Catholic Girlhood/divDIV This intriguing nonfiction collection by Mary McCarthy is a cornucopia of literary delights that challenges the mind and captivates the senses./divDIV “On Rereading a Favorite Book” is McCarthy’s reaction to returning to Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina after more than thirty years. In “Politics and the Novel,” she shatters a myth about the American versus European style of storytelling. Acts of reading, when consummated, are akin to “Acts of Love.” And “Saying Good-bye to Hannah” is a poignant farewell to the author of The Human Condition and, in particular, The Life of the Mind, the book Hannah Arendt saw as her crowning achievement./divDIV Whether giving us the story of La Traviata in her own words or reviewing a charming and practical book on gardening, McCarthy imbues Occasional Prose with her powerful sense of time and place. Uninhibited and uncensored, it filters the world through her unique gifts of observation and novelist’s masterful eye for detail. This is a book for anyone interested in the life of the mind—and heart. /divDIV This ebook features an illustrated biography of Mary McCarthy including rare images from the author’s estate./div/div

This collection shows Flannery O'Connor's extraordinary versatility and expertise as a practitioner of the essayistic form. The book opens with "The King of the Birds", her famous account of raising peacocks. There are three essays on regional writing, two on teaching literature, and four on the writer and religion. Essays such as "The Nature and Aim of Fiction" and "Writing Short Stories" are gems, and their value to the contemporary reader -- and writer -- is inestimable. Copyright © Libri GmbH. All rights reserved.

The essays and articles in this volume are concerned mainly with the art of fiction--its quality, in regional writing; its nature and its aims; and its relatino to the writer's religion.

Spanning a period of thirty years, a wide-ranging collection of writing about poetry and literature by the Poet Laureate of England includes reflections on the creative process and such figures as Shakespeare, Emily Dickinson, and Sylvia Plath.

On a sunny beach on the Italian Riviera, two thirtysomething women, Yvonne and Huda, relax by the sparkling sea. But despite the setting, as their vacation unfolds, their complicated pasts seep through to the idyllic present. Both women spent their childhoods in Lebanon—Yvonne raised in a Christian family, Huda in a Muslim one—and they now find themselves torn between the traditional worlds they were born into and the successful professional identities they’ve created. Three months later, when Huda (a theater director from Toronto) visits Yvonne (an advertising executive) in London, a chance encounter with a man at Speaker’s Corner leads to profound repercussions for them both, as each woman undertakes her own quest for romance, revenge, and fulfillment. Witty and wry, The Occasional Virgin is a poignant and perceptive story of the tumultuous lives and sometimes shocking choices of two women successful in their careers but unlucky in love.

In his new collection of essays, Occasional Desire, David Lazar meditates on random violence and vanished phone booths, on the excessive relationship to jewelry that links Kobe Bryant and Elizabeth Taylor, on Hitchcock, Francis Bacon, and M. F. K. Fisher. He explores, in his concentrically self-aware, amused, and ironic voice, what it means to be occasionally aware that we are surviving by our wits, and that our desires, ulterior or obvious, are what keep us alive. Lazar also turns his attention on the essay itself, affording us a three-dimensional look at the craft and the art of reading and writing a literary form that maps the world as it charts the peregrinations of the mind. Lazar is especially interested in the trappings of memory, the trapdoors of memory, the way we gild or codify, select, soften, and self-delude ourselves based on our understanding of the past. His own process of selection and reflection reminds us of how far this literary form can take us, bound only by the limits of desire and imagination.

This book offers a guided introduction to Chinese nonfictional prose and its literary and cultural significance. It features more than one hundred major texts from antiquity through the Qing dynasty that exemplify major genres, styles, and forms of traditional Chinese prose. For each work, the book presents an English translation, the Chinese original, and accessible critical commentary by leading scholars. How to Read Chinese Prose teaches readers to appreciate the literary merits, stylistic devices, rhetorical choices, and argumentative techniques of a wide range of nonfictional writing. It emphasizes the interconnections among individual texts and across eras, helping readers understand the development of the literary tradition and what makes particular texts formative or distinctive within it. Organized by dynastic period and genre, the book identifies and examines four broad categories of prose—narrative, expository, descriptive, and communicative. How to Read Chinese Prose is suitable for a range of courses in Chinese literature, history, religion, and philosophy, as well as for scholars and interested readers seeking to deepen their knowledge of the Chinese prose tradition. A companion book, How to Read Chinese Prose in Chinese, is designed for Chinese-language learners and features many of the same texts.