About this product: Amazon Best of the Month, July 2009: Steve Hely's satiric novel masquerades as the tell-all memoir of Pete Tarslaw, author of the runaway bestseller The Tornado Ashes Club who's become a lit-world pariah. Two years out of college, Pete still moons after the brilliant Polly Pawson, who dropped him post-graduation for law school. His hygiene and motivation have degraded such that he's accumulating beer bottles next to his bed as convenient substitutes for the toilet. His dubious job transforming the convoluted prose of wealthy foreign students into earnest college entrance essays depresses him, more for its lack of prestige than any ethical implications. When Polly announces her engagement in a gleeful mass email, Pete's desire to upstage her at the wedding inflames his obsession with the fame, fortune, and female attention enjoyed by bestselling authors--clever charlatans, in his estimation. What follows is Pete's exposé of the Machiavellian tactics he employed in creating and selling a maudlin mess of a book. It lands him a spot on the New York Times bestsellers list (hilariously parodied by Hely) and an unwisely candid prime-time TV interview, in which his theories on authors as con artists spark a book-world feud, spike his Amazon sales rank, and force him into a literary showdown at a Texan book festival. Along the way, no one connected to books--writers, writing teachers, lit agents, publishers, critics, book buyers--gets off unskewered by Hely's rapier pen (and readers may wonder, on occasion, if Steve Hely has employed Tarslawian strategies in his own bid for a slot on the bestsellers lists). But out of the irony emerges something that feels like genuine reverence for great books, and for those who write out of honesty. For fellow book lovers weary of tracking book sales trends, Hely's wrap-up might feel like a catharsis. --Mari Malcolm
About this product: Just what kind of book is Let Us Now Praise Famous Men? It contains many things: poems; confessional reveries; disquisitions on the proper way to listen to Beethoven; snippets of dialogue, both real and imagined; a lengthy response to a survey from the Partisan Review; exhaustive catalogs of furniture, clothing, objects, and smells. And then there are Walker Evans's famously stark portraits of depression-era sharecroppers--photographs that both stand apart from and reinforce James Agee's words.
Assigned to do a story for Fortune magazine about sharecroppers in the Deep South, Agee and Evans spent four weeks living with a poor white tenant family, winning the Burroughs's trust and immersing themselves in a sharecropper's daily existence. Given a first draft of the resulting article, the editors at Fortune quite understandably threw up their hands--as did several other editors who subsequently worked with a later book-length manuscript. The writing was contrary. It refused to accommodate itself to the reader, and at times it positively bristled with hostility. (What other book could take Marx as the epigraph and then announce: "These words are quoted here to mislead those who will be misled by them"?) Response to the book was puzzled or unfriendly, and Let Us Now Praise Famous Men sputtered out of print only a few short years after its publication. It took the 1960s, and a vogue for social justice, to bring Agee's masterwork the audience it deserved.
Yet the book is far more interesting--aesthetically and morally--than the sort of guilty-liberal tract for which it is often mistaken. On an existential level, Agee's text is a deeply felt examination of what it means to suffer, to struggle to live in spite of suffering. On a personal level, it is the painful, beautifully written portrait of one man's obsession. In its collaboration with Evans's photographs, the book is also a groundbreaking experiment in form. In the end, however, it is more than merely the sum of its parts. Let Us Now Praise Famous Men is, quite simply, a book unlike any other, simmering with anger and beauty and mystery. --Mary Park
About this product: The best clients and customers are those that seek you out because they've already heard of you. Get Slightly FamousT shows how to build visibility and credibility by making yourself a thought leader and indispensable resource to your potential clients and customers. This expanded new edition provides a toolbox of strategies for: Getting consistent media attention; Using speaking engagements to cultivate your target market; Becoming a center of influence within your industry; Leveraging the Internet and Web 2.0 to its full potential;Creating ancillary info-products that supplement your income and build public awareness.
Deceptively simple and surprisingly addictive, Not Quite What I Was Planning is a thousand glimpses of humanity—six words at a time.
When Ernest Hemingway famously wrote, "For Sale: baby shoes, never worn," he proved that an entire story can be told using a half-dozen words. When the online storytelling magazine SMITH asked readers to submit six-word memoirs, they proved a whole, real life can be told this way, too. The results are fascinating, hilarious, shocking, and moving.
From small sagas of bittersweet romance ("Found true love, married someone else") to proud achievements and stinging regrets ("After Harvard, had baby with crackhead"), these terse true tales relate the diversity of human experience in tasty bite-size pieces.
The original edition of Not Quite What I Was Planning spent six weeks on the New York Times bestseller list, and thanks to massive media attention—from NPR to the The New Yorker—the six-word memoir concept spread to classrooms, dinner tables, churches, synagogues, and tens of thousands of blogs. This deluxe edition has been revised and expanded to include more than sixty never-before-seen memoirs.
From authors Elizabeth Gilbert, Richard Ford, and Joyce Carol Oates to celebrities Stephen Colbert, Mario Batali, and Joan Rivers to ordinary folks around the world, everyone has a six-word story to tell.
About this product: Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: A murmur of the restless deep Was blent with every strain, A voice of winds that would not sleep — He never smiled again. Hearts, in that time, closed o'er the trace Of vows once fondly poured, And strangers took the kins-man's place At many a joyous board; Graves which true love had bathed with tears Were left to heaven's bright rain ; Fresh hopes were born for other years — He never smiled again ! Mrs. Hemans. KING JOHN AND THE ABBOT. I. THE THREE QUESTIONS. There was once a king of England whose name was John. He was a bad king; for he was harsh and cruel to his people, and so long as he could have his own way, he did not care what became of other folks. He was the worst king that England ever had. Now, there was in the town of Can'ter-bur-y a rich old abbot who lived in grand style in a great house called the Abbey. Every day a hundred noble men sat down with him to dine; and fifty brave knights,in fine velvet coats and gold chains, waited upon him at his table. When King John heard of the way in which the abbot lived, he made up his mind to put a stop to it. So he sent for the old man to come and see him. " How now, my good abbot ? " he said. " I hear that you keep a far better house than I. How dare you do such a thing? Don't you know that no man in the land ought to live better than the king ? And I tell you that no man shall." " O king! " said the abbot, " I beg to say that I am spending nothing but what is my own. I hope that you will not think ill of me for making things pleasant for my friends and the brave knights who are with me." " Think ill of you ? " said the king. " How can I help but think ill of you ? All that there is in this broad land is mine by right; and how do you dare to put me to shame by living in gran...
About this product: From braving the wilds of Los Angeles to the Costa Rican jungle, Heidi Montag and Spencer Pratt have learned a thing or two about reality...television, that is. But while dominating the airwaves and tabloid covers every week may look like all fun and mind games, Speidi is here to tell you: becoming wildly famous requires hard work and a no-fail blueprint for success. Now, for the first time ever, Heidi and Spencer invite you behind the scenes as they reveal the ten-step plan that took them from nobodies to notorious! You will:
Learn how to say I hate you without opening your mouth--Heidi's exclusive tutorial
Increase your capacity for evil with Spencer's "Villain-o-meter"
Discover why getting and talking about plastic surgery is a must
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With Heidi and Spencer as your personal coaches, you, too, can transform yourself into a red-carpet-ready superstar!
About this product: The very first Famous Five adventure, featuring Julian, Dick, Anne, not forgetting tomboy George and her beloved dog, Timmy! There's a shipwreck off Kirrin Island! But where is the treasure? The Famous Five are on the trail - looking for clues - but they're not alone! Someone else has got the same idea. Time is running out for the Famous Five, who will follow the clues and get to the treasure first?
True tales of love, loss, good friends, and bad hair days filled Not Quite What I Was Planning, the New York Times bestselling first book in the Six-Word Memoir series—and an international phenomenon. Some of the most compelling were by teens, so now SMITH Magazine has compiled a book written entirely by these bold, brash truth-tellers. From cancer to creativity, prom dates to promiscuity, and breaking hearts to breaking laws, the memoirs in this collection reveal that often the youngest writers have the most fascinating stories to tell.
About this product: George was a leader even in his younger days. The boys looked up to him for his strength, skills, intelligence, and honesty. Events in his boyhood are recounted, even the cherry tree incident.
About this product: In the childhood story of an American original, readers learn how a farm boy in Missouri grew up to be the father of Mickey Mouse, Donald Duck, Pluto, Goofy, and scores of other beloved characters.
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