Leaving Brooklyn

Leaving Brooklyn

Author: Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Publisher: Hawthorne Books

Published: 2011-10-05

Total Pages: 170

ISBN-13: 0983850445

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An injury at birth left Audrey with a wandering eye. Though flawed, the bad eye functions well enough to permit her an idiosyncratic view of the world, one she welcomes in the stifling postwar Brooklyn of the 1950s. During a journey to Manhattan to see a doctor about her sight, she begins to explore the sexual rites of adulthood. But can her romance last? In this beautifully observed novel, Lynne Sharon Schwartz raises themes of innocence and escape while illuminating the rich inner life of a singular girl.


Literary Brooklyn

Literary Brooklyn

Author: Evan Hughes

Publisher: Holt Paperbacks

Published: 2011-08-16

Total Pages: 352

ISBN-13: 1429973064

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For the first time, here is Brooklyn's story through the eyes of its greatest storytellers. Like Paris in the twenties or postwar Greenwich Village, Brooklyn today is experiencing an extraordinary cultural boom. In recent years, writers of all stripes—from Jhumpa Lahiri, Jennifer Egan, and Colson Whitehead to Nicole Krauss and Jonathan Safran Foer—have flocked to its patchwork of distinctive neighborhoods. But as literary critic and journalist Evan Hughes reveals, the rich literary life now flourishing in Brooklyn is part of a larger, fascinating history. With a dynamic mix of literary biography and urban history, Hughes takes us on a tour of Brooklyn past and present and reveals that hiding in Walt Whitman's Fort Greene Park, Hart Crane's Brooklyn Bridge, the raw Williamsburg of Henry Miller's youth, Truman Capote's famed house on Willow Street, and the contested streets of Jonathan Lethem's Boerum Hill is the story of more than a century of life in America's cities. Literary Brooklyn is a prismatic investigation into a rich literary inheritance, but most of all it's a deep look into the beloved borough, a place as diverse and captivating as the people who walk its streets and write its stories.


A Brooklyn Memoir

A Brooklyn Memoir

Author: Robert Rosen

Publisher: SCB Distributors

Published: 2020-01-01

Total Pages: 167

ISBN-13: 1909394998

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A darkly comic and deeply moving story of a New York City lost to time. From the final days of the Brooklyn Dodgers in the mid-1950s to the arrival of the Beatles in 1964, A Brooklyn Memoir is an unsentimental journey through one rough-and-tumble working-class neighborhood. Though only a 20-minute and 15-cent subway ride from the gleaming towers of Manhattan across the East River, Flatbush remained insular and provincial—a place where Auschwitz survivors and WWII vets lived side by side and the war lingered like a mass hallucination. Meet Bobby, a local kid who shares a shabby apartment with his status-conscious mother and bigoted father, a soda jerk haunted by memories of the Nazi death camp he helped liberate. Flatbush, to Bobby, is a world of brawls with neighborhood “punks,” Hebrew school tales of Adolf Eichmann’s daring capture, and grade school duck-and-cover drills. Drawn to images of mushroom clouds and books about executions, Bobby ultimately turns the seething hatred he senses everywhere against himself. From the bestselling author of Nowhere Man: The Final Days of John Lennon. Formerly published under the title Bobby in Naziland.


Vina: A Brooklyn Memoir

Vina: A Brooklyn Memoir

Author: Joseph C. Polacco

Publisher: Compass Flower Press

Published: 2016-10-21

Total Pages: 213

ISBN-13: 1942168640

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Joe Polacco has written a wonderful tribute to his mother, Vina, and in the process has learned about himself. This memoir is told with humor, and is a tale of extended family in Brooklyn headed by the author's mother, the kind and big-hearted Vina. It's all about the family, the neighborhood, and most of all about Vina. She is beautiful, selfless, a creative designer and knows how to laugh and make others laugh. She is a master of Italian cuisine, admired for her original recipes, which are willingly shared. What more could anyone want in a Mom? More to the point which of us would not want to claim Vina as Mom? And all the characters in the memoir willingly testify that they love Vina and claim her as their own. The author has a love of--and knack for—foreign language and dialects. In New York City, specifically Brooklyn, the whole world can be found in this one place. And you'll find Joe Polacco and Vina in this melting pot. But be careful not to melt down as you laugh through the pages while commemorating those who have passed before, and after, Vina.


Brooklyn

Brooklyn

Author: Truman Capote

Publisher:

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 105

ISBN-13:

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"In 2001, The Little Bookroom published Truman Capote's long-out-of-print homage to Brooklyn, A House in the Heights. In 2014, more than fifty years after they were taken, the original photographs commissioned to illustrate the piece have been discovered by the photographer's son. Also found among the negatives were portraits of Capote taken on that same day; none of the photos have ever been published. Now, in a new edition with a new title, Brooklyn : A Personal Memoir, with the lost photographs of David Attie, the words and images will be united for the first time. The images of Brooklyn provide a stunning and atmospheric visual portrait of the city in 1959--its building, shops, street life, lost moments-- a Brooklyn at once strangely familiar yet largely vanished: horse-drawn wagons delivering produce to housewives, kids swimming in the East River and getting into mischief on the docks, dimly-lit bars, vintage signs, little girls jumping rope, bricklayers, barbers, neighborhood characters, all set against a backdrop of period architecture, that spectacular bridge, and the skyline of Manhattan. The essay itself brings to life the landscape that was for the author a world of grand homes and dimly recalled gentility, of mysterious warehouses and menacing street thugs, a garden overhung with wisteria, and the famous Promenade and waterfront--all rendered in his deft and stylish prose. Originally commissioned for Holiday magazine by John Knowles (later the author of A Separate Peace), the piece remained one of his favorites--especially its surprise ending. At the time, George Plimpton wrote that in the essay, Capote's 'love of history, gossip, character, and a skill at putting all this to words...brings Brooklyn Heights to life as vividly as any landscape Truman ever undertook to survey.' David Attie's photos enhance that landscape in a breathtaking way"--


I Don't Drop Names Like Marilyn Monroe Just to Sell Books

I Don't Drop Names Like Marilyn Monroe Just to Sell Books

Author: Richard Baer

Publisher: iUniverse

Published: 2005-09

Total Pages: 196

ISBN-13: 0595361447

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In the early 1950's, in Los Angeles, at 6 AM, John West, vice-president of the National Broadcasting Company in charge of west coast, gets a phone call from New York City on the NBC tie line. The caller is General David Sarnoff, chairman of the Board of RCA, the Radio Corporation of America, NBC's parent company. Awakened from sleep, Mr. West groggily says "Hello" "John, this is General Sarnoff." Mr. West swiftly clears the cobwebs. "Good morning, General, it's always good to hear from you." "John, you're acquainted with my nephew Richard Baer, aren't you?" "Yes, General, I am. He's a fine young man. I think very highly of him." "Last night I spoke with his mother, my sister. She's upset. The reason she's upset is that Richard has been out of work for four months and he has no prospects, so it looks like his life is going nowhere." "General, I'm surprised and sorry to hear that." "John, I want you to find Richard a job. And I want you to find him a job by nine o'clock this morning, your time. I'll be waiting for your call saying you took care of it. Goodbye."


The Oxford History of the Novel in English

The Oxford History of the Novel in English

Author: Cyrus R. K. Patell

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2024-04-04

Total Pages: 705

ISBN-13: 0192844725

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An overview of US fiction since 1940 that explores the history of literary forms, the history of narrative forms, the history of the book, the history of media, and the history of higher education in the United States.


Odysseys Home

Odysseys Home

Author: George Elliott Clarke

Publisher: University of Toronto Press

Published: 2017-06-22

Total Pages: 923

ISBN-13: 1487516789

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Odysseys Home: Mapping African-Canadian Literature is a pioneering study of African-Canadian literary creativity, laying the groundwork for future scholarly work in the field. Based on extensive excavations of archives and texts, this challenging passage through twelve essays presents a history of the literature and examines its debt to, and synthesis with, oral cultures. George Elliott Clarke identifies African-Canadian literature's distinguishing characteristics, argues for its relevance to both African Diasporic Black and Canadian Studies, and critiques several of its key creators and texts. Scholarly and sophisticated, the survey cites and interprets the works of several major African-Canadian writers, including André Alexis, Dionne Brand, Austin Clarke, Claire Harris, and M. Nourbese Philip. In so doing, Clarke demonstrates that African-Canadian writers and critics explore the tensions that exist between notions of universalism and black nationalism, liberalism and conservatism. These tensions are revealed in the literature in what Clarke argues to be – paradoxically – uniquely Canadian and proudly apart from a mainstream national identity. Clarke has unearthed vital but previously unconsidered authors, and charted the relationship between African-Canadian literature and that of Africa, African America, and the Caribbean. In addition to the essays, Clarke has assembled a seminal and expansive bibliography of texts – literature and criticism – from both English and French Canada. This important resource will inevitably challenge and change future academic consideration of African-Canadian literature and its place in the international literary map of the African Diaspora.


Pee Wee Reese

Pee Wee Reese

Author: Glen Sparks

Publisher: McFarland

Published: 2022-06-06

Total Pages: 308

ISBN-13: 1476644381

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Harold "Pee Wee" Reese may have been the most beloved Brooklyn Dodgers player of all time. During a 16-year career in the 1940s and 1950s, he delivered timely hits, made countless acrobatic defensive plays at shortstop, and stole hundreds of bases for clubs that won seven pennants and, in 1955, finally overcame the Yankees to win the World Series. Reese may be best remembered, however, for a gesture of solidarity. The year and the location vary with the telling, but witnesses agree on this crucial detail: During one of Jackie Robinson's early tours of the National League, as catcalls and racial taunts rained down on him, the Southern-born Reese draped an arm across the infielder's shoulder and stood alongside him, facing the crowd. In this first full-length biography of Reese, author Glen Sparks digs into Hall of Famer's life and career, his leadership both on and off the field, and the reasons that Brooklyn fans fell in love with the Boys of Summer.