In the early 1970s Harold Pinter joined forces with director Joseph Losey and Proust scholar Barbara Bray to develop a screenplay of Proust's masterpiece, Remembrance of Things Past. Pinter took more than a year to conceive and write the screenplay and called the experience "the best working year of my life." Although never produced, Harold Pinter's The Proust Screenplay is considered one of the greatest adaptations for the cinema ever written. With fidelity to Proust's text, the screenplay is an extraordinary re-creation by one of the leading playwrights of our time. It is, in its way, a unique collaboration between two extraordinary writers united across more than half a century and two different cultures by a special concern for time and memory.
Early in 1972 the film director Joesph Losey asked Harold Pinter if he would work on a screen adaptation of Marcel Proust's famous sequence of novels A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu. He agreed and after a year's work the result is this book.
Céleste Albaret was Marcel Proust's housekeeper in his last years, when he retreated from the world to devote himself to In Search of Lost Time. She could imitate his voice to perfection, and Proust himself said to her, "You know everything about me." Her reminiscences of her employer present an intimate picture of the daily life of a great writer who was also a deeply peculiar man, while Madame Albaret herself proves to be a shrewd and engaging companion.
“A fascinating work . . . possessing extraordinary power. Masterful.” —San Francisco Chronicle “Brilliant, cranky, and eccentric, and the narrative passages are some of the most thrilling ever written.” —Library Journal “Some of the author’s most enduring themes—notably, sexual jealousy and betrayal—are present. . . . The narration shows traces of writers as various as Joyce and Beckett, e.e. cummings and J.P. Donleavy.” —The Washington Post “The Abbott and Costello meet Samuel Beckett dialogue . . . makes you laugh out loud.” —The Village Voice
First published a decade ago, A Writer's Book of Days has become the ideal writing coach for thousands of writers. Newly revised, with new prompts, up-to-date Web resources, and more useful information than ever, this invaluable guide offers something for everyone looking to put pen to paper — a treasure trove of practical suggestions, expert advice, and powerful inspiration. Judy Reeves meets you wherever you may be on a given day with: • get-going prompts and exercises • insight into writing blocks • tips and techniques for finding time and creating space • ways to find images and inspiration • advice on working in writing groups • suggestions, quips, and trivia from accomplished practitioners Reeves's holistic approach addresses every aspect of what makes creativity possible (and joyful) — the physical, emotional, and spiritual. And like a smart, empathetic inner mentor, she will help you make every day a writing day.
Nominated for a 34th annual Lambda Literary Award • An essential and revelatory coming-of-age narrative from a thrilling new voice, Rainbow Milk follows nineteen-year-old Jesse McCarthy as he grapples with his racial and sexual identities against the backdrop of his Jehovah's Witness upbringing. "The kind of novel you never knew you were waiting for." —Marlon James In the 1950s, ex-boxer Norman Alonso is a determined and humble Jamaican who has immigrated to Britain with his wife and children to secure a brighter future. Blighted with unexpected illness and racism, Norman and his family are resilient, but are all too aware that their family will need more than just hope to survive in their new country. At the turn of the millennium, Jesse seeks a fresh start in London, escaping a broken immediate family, a repressive religious community and his depressed hometown in the industrial Black Country. But once he arrives he finds himself at a loss for a new center of gravity, and turns to sex work, music and art to create his own notions of love, masculinity and spirituality. A wholly original novel as tender as it is visceral, Rainbow Milk is a bold reckoning with race, class, sexuality, freedom and religion across generations, time and cultures.
While best known as one of the most important playwrights of the twentieth century, Harold Pinter (1930–2008) had an equally successful career writing screenplays. His collaborations with director Joseph Losey garnered great attention and esteem, and two of his screenplays earned Academy Award nominations: The French Lieutenant's Woman (1981) and Betrayal (1983). He is also credited for writing an unproduced script to remake Stanley Kubrick's 1962 adaptation of Lolita. Much scholarship has been dedicated to the subject of Pinter as playwright, but the rich landscape of his work in film has been left largely undisturbed. In Sharp Cut: Harold Pinter's Screenplays and the Artistic Process, Steven H. Gale, the world's foremost Pinter scholar, analyzes Pinter's creative process from initial conception to finished film. Gale makes careful, point-by-point comparisons of each stage in the screenplay's creation—the source material, the adaptations themselves, and the films made from the scripts—in order to reveal the meaning behind each film script and to explain the cinematic techniques used to express that meaning. Unlike most Pinter scholars, who focus almost solely on the written word, Gale devotes discussion to the cinematic interpretation of the scripts through camera angles and movement, cutting, and other techniques. Pinter does not merely convert his stage scripts to screenplays; he adapts the works to succeed in the other medium, avoiding elements of the live play that do not work onscreen and using the camera's focusing operations in ways that are not possible on the stage. As Pinter's career progressed and his writing evolved, screenplays became for him an increasingly vital means of creative expression. Sharp Cut is the first study to fully explore this important component of the Pinter canon.
"A hilarious and helpful insider's guide to launching a successful writing career in Hollywood. . . . The only compass readers will ever need to navigate the treacherous waters of filmmaking"--("Kirkus Reviews," starred review).
