"Working On A Song is one of the best books about lyric writing for the theater I've read."—Lin-Manuel Miranda Anaïs Mitchell named to TIME's List of the 100 Most Influential People in the World of 2020 An illuminating book of lyrics and stories from Hadestown—the winner of eight Tony Awards, including Best Musical—from its author, songwriter Anaïs Mitchell with a foreword by Steve Earle On Broadway, this fresh take on the Greek myth of Orpheus and Eurydice has become a modern classic. Heralded as “The best new musical of the season,” by The Wall Street Journal, and “Sumptuous. Gorgeous. As good as it gets,” by The New York Times, the show was a breakout hit, with its poignant social commentary, and spellbinding music and lyrics. In this book, Anaïs Mitchell takes readers inside her more than decade’s-long process of building the musical from the ground up—detailing her inspiration, breaking down the lyrics, and opening up the process of creation that gave birth to Hadestown. Fans and newcomers alike will love this deeply thoughtful, revealing look at how the songs from “the underground” evolved, and became the songs we sing again and again.
Between 1982 and 1989, Pelafina H. Lièvre sent her son, Johnny Truant, a series of letters from The Three Attic Whalestoe Institute, a psychiatric facility in Ohio where she spent the final years of her life. Beautiful, heartfelt, and tragic, this correspondence reveals the powerful and deeply moving relationship between a brilliant though mentally ill mother and the precocious, gifted young son she never ceases to love. Originally contained within the monumental House of Leaves, this collection stands alone as a stunning portrait of mother and child. It is presented here along with a foreword by Walden D. Wyhrta and eleven previously unavailable letters.
New from a poet whose "intensity makes the world visible" (Linda Gregg) "Everywhere, a forceful, scrupulous intelligence is active- a luminous diction, a range of cadences." So has Mark Strand written of the work of Joanna Klink, who has won acclaim for elegant, sensual, and musical poems that "remain alert to the reparations of beauty and song" (Dean Young). The linked poems in Klink's third collection, Raptus, search through a failed relationship, struggling with the stakes of compassion, the violence of the outside world, and the wish to anchor both in something true.
A dazzling literary exploration by acclaimed poet and critic Michael Schmidt, The First Poets brings to life for the general reader the great Greek poets who gave our poetic tradition its first bearings and whose works have had an enduring influence on our literature and our imagination. Starting with the legendary and possibly mythical Orpheus and with Homer, Schmidt conjures a host of our literary forebears. From Hipponax, “the dirty old man of poetry,” to Theocritus, the father of pastoral; from Sappho, who threw herself from a cliff for love, to Hesiod, who claimed a visit from the Muses–the stories in The First Poets masterfully merge fact and conjecture into animated and compelling portraits of these ancestors of our culture.
A writer arrives in Bombay on a book-related visit, and finds himself in search of the city he grew up in and barely knows, a city shaken to its core not long ago by the 2008 terrorist strikes-even as he takes for granted his errant local friend, Ramu. A six-foot-tall Kannadiga and one-time junkie who cannot reconcile himself to modern-day adult life, Ramu is an unlikely hero, Bombay incarnate; the writer is his mirrored counterpart in an extraordinary narrative about this city by the sea. Friend of My Youth is at once an unexpected exploration and a concentrated reminiscence woven around a series of visits to a city that was never really home; a commentary on the power of memory and the stubborn interference of childhood with adult life; a paean to the transformative power of friendship by one of our greatest living writers.
An early and influential champion of cubism, Apollinaire was seminal in the revolutionary art style of Surrealism, a term he coined some seven years before Breton formally founded the movement. This text was originally published in 1910.