A fascinating look at the stories behind the dedications of 50 literary classics. Mary Shelley dedicated Frankenstein to her father, her greatest champion. Charlotte Brönte dedicatedJane Eyre to William Makepeace Thackeray for his enthusiastic review of the book’s first edition. Dostoyevsky dedicated The Brothers Karamazov to his typist-turned-lover Anna Grigoyevna. And, as this collection’s title indicates, F. Scott Fitzgerald dedicated his masterpiece The Great Gatsby to his wife Zelda. Often overlooked, a novel’s dedication can say much about an author and his or her relationship to the person for whom the book was consecrated. Once Again to Zelda explores the dedications in fifty iconic books that are an intrinsic part of both literary and pop culture, shedding light on the author’s psyche, as well as the social and historic context in which the book was first published.
Charlotte Bronte dedicated Jane Eyre to William Makepeace Thackeray, setting literary London ablaze with gossip. Ayn Rand dedicated Atlas Shrugged to both her husband and her lover. Sylvia Plath dedicated The Bell Jar to her friends. And F. Scott Fitzgerald dedicated The Great Gatsby to his wife, Zelda, the tumultuous love of his life. The dedication of a novel is the most personal and public of gestures, and yet we don't often stop to consider how it came to be inspired. This charming 'behind the scenes' book traces the relationships immortalized in the dedications to fifty novels that are an intrinsic part of literary and pop culture. Sometimes tragic, often romantic, and always engaging, these are intimate glimpses into the lives of the writers we admire and the people they loved.
Felix and Zelda have escaped the train to the death camp, but where do they go now? They're two runaway kids in Nazi-occupied Poland. Danger lies at every turn of the road. With the help of a woman named Genia and their active imaginations, Felix and Zelda find a new home and begin to heal, forming a new family together. But can it last? Morris Gleitzman's winning characters will tug at readers' hearts as they struggle to survive in the harsh political climate of Poland in 1942. Their lives are difficult, but they always remember what matters: family, love, and hope.
THE INSPIRATION FOR THE TELEVISION DRAMA Z: THE BEGINNING OF EVERYTHING With brilliant insight and imagination, Therese Anne Fowler's New York Times bestseller Z brings us Zelda's irresistible story as she herself might have told it. I wish I could tell everyone who thinks we're ruined, Look closer...and you'll see something extraordinary, mystifying, something real and true. We have never been what we seemed. When beautiful, reckless Southern belle Zelda Sayre meets F. Scott Fitzgerald at a country club dance in 1918, she is seventeen years old and he is a young army lieutenant stationed in Alabama. Before long, the "ungettable" Zelda has fallen for him despite his unsuitability: Scott isn't wealthy or prominent or even a Southerner, and keeps insisting, absurdly, that his writing will bring him both fortune and fame. Her father is deeply unimpressed. But after Scott sells his first novel, This Side of Paradise, to Scribner's, Zelda optimistically boards a train north, to marry him in the vestry of St. Patrick's Cathedral and take the rest as it comes. What comes, here at the dawn of the Jazz Age, is unimagined attention and success and celebrity that will make Scott and Zelda legends in their own time. Everyone wants to meet the dashing young author of the scandalous novel—and his witty, perhaps even more scandalous wife. Zelda bobs her hair, adopts daring new fashions, and revels in this wild new world. Each place they go becomes a playground: New York City, Long Island, Hollywood, Paris, and the French Riviera—where they join the endless party of the glamorous, sometimes doomed Lost Generation that includes Ernest Hemingway, Sara and Gerald Murphy, and Gertrude Stein. Everything seems new and possible. Troubles, at first, seem to fade like morning mist. But not even Jay Gatsby's parties go on forever. Who is Zelda, other than the wife of a famous—sometimes infamous—husband? How can she forge her own identity while fighting her demons and Scott's, too?
“Pure and lovely…to read Zelda’s letters is to fall in love with her.” —The Washington Post Edited by renowned Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks, with an introduction by Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan, this compilation of over three hundred letters tells the couple's epic love story in their own words. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's devotion to each other endured for more than twenty-two years, through the highs and lows of his literary success and alcoholism, and her mental illness. In Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda, over 300 of their collected love letters show why theirs has long been heralded as one of the greatest love stories of the 20th century. Edited by renowned Fitzgerald scholars Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks, with an introduction by Scott and Zelda's granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan, this is a welcome addition to the Fitzgerald literary canon.
"Parker hasn't spoken since he watched his father die five years ago. He communicates through writing on slips of paper and keeps track of his thoughts by journaling. A loner, Parker has little interest in school, his classmates, or his future. But everything changes when he meets Zelda, a mysterious young woman with an unusual request: 'treat me like a teenager'"--
The "Fresh Air" book critic investigates the enduring power of The Great Gatsby -- "The Great American Novel we all think we've read, but really haven't." Conceived nearly a century ago by a man who died believing himself a failure, it's now a revered classic and a rite of passage in the reading lives of millions. But how well do we really know The Great Gatsby? As Maureen Corrigan, Gatsby lover extraordinaire, points out, while Fitzgerald's masterpiece may be one of the most popular novels in America, many of us first read it when we were too young to fully comprehend its power. Offering a fresh perspective on what makes Gatsby great -- and utterly unusual -- So We Read On takes us into archives, high school classrooms, and even out onto the Long Island Sound to explore the novel's hidden depths, a journey whose revelations include Gatsby 's surprising debt to hard-boiled crime fiction, its rocky path to recognition as a "classic," and its profound commentaries on the national themes of race, class, and gender. With rigor, wit, and infectious enthusiasm, Corrigan inspires us to re-experience the greatness of Gatsby and cuts to the heart of why we are, as a culture, "borne back ceaselessly" into its thrall. Along the way, she spins a new and fascinating story of her own.
Felix, a Jewish boy in Poland in 1942, is hiding from the Nazis in a Catholic orphanage. The only problem is that he doesn't know anything about the war, and thinks he's only in the orphanage while his parents travel and try to salvage their bookselling business. And when he thinks his parents are in danger, Felix sets off to warn them--straight into the heart of Nazi-occupied Poland. To Felix, everything is a story: Why did he get a whole carrot in his soup? It must be sign that his parents are coming to get him. Why are the Nazis burning books? They must be foreign librarians sent to clean out the orphanage's outdated library. But as Felix's journey gets increasingly dangerous, he begins to see horrors that not even stories can explain. Despite his grim suroundings, Felix never loses hope. Morris Gleitzman takes a painful subject and expertly turns it into a story filled with love, friendship, and even humor.
