The Year of Magical Thinking

Author: Joan Didion
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780739469675
Category : Grief
Languages : en
Pages : 227

Book Description
[In this book, the author] explores an intensely personal yet universal experience: a portrait of a marriage - and a life, in good times and bad - that will speak to anyone who has ever loved a husband or wife or child. Several days before Christmas 2003, John Gregory Dunne and Joan Didion saw their only daughter, Quintana, fall ill with what seemed at first flu, then pneumonia, then complete septic shock. She was put into an induced coma and placed on life support. Days later - the night before New Year's Eve - the Dunnes were just sitting down to dinner after visiting the hospital when John Gregory Dunne suffered a massive and fatal coronary. In a second, this close, symbiotic partnership of forty years was over. Four weeks later, their daughter pulled through. Two months after that, arriving at LAX, she collapsed and underwent six hours of brain surgery at UCLA Medical Center to relieve a massive hematoma. This ... book is Didion's attempt to make sense of the "weeks and then months that cut loose any fixed idea I ever had about death, about illness ... about marriage and children and memory ... about the shallowness of sanity, about life itself."--Jacket.

Nothing Was the Same

Author: Kay Redfield Jamison
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 030727313X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 256

Book Description
Kay Redfield Jamison, award-winning professor and writer, changed the way we think about moods and madness. Now Jamison uses her characteristic honesty, wit and eloquence to look back at her relationship with her husband, Richard Wyatt, a renowned scientist who died of cancer. Nothing was the Same is a penetrating psychological study of grief viewed from deep inside the experience itself.

Blue Nights

Author: Joan Didion
Publisher: Vintage
ISBN: 0307700518
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 209

Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A work of stunning frankness about losing a daughter, from the bestselling, award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Let Me Tell You What I Mean Richly textured with memories from her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion is an intensely personal and moving account of her thoughts, fears, and doubts regarding having children, illness and growing old. As she reflects on her daughter’s life and on her role as a parent, Didion grapples with the candid questions that all parents face, and contemplates her age, something she finds hard to acknowledge, much less accept. Blue Nights—the long, light evening hours that signal the summer solstice, “the opposite of the dying of the brightness, but also its warning”—like The Year of Magical Thinking before it, is an iconic book of incisive and electric honesty, haunting and profound.

A Cool Customer

Author: Jacob Bacharach
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780989961585
Category : Authors, American
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Reflecting on his brother's death from opioid addiction, Jacob Bacharach turns Didion's masterpiece into a blueprint for grief and self-discovery Literary Nonfiction. Essay. Reading Joan Didion's iconic memoir The Year of Magical Thinking, Jacob Bacharach's thoughts are never far from his brother, Nate, who died of an opioid addiction. Although he tries to be a "a cool customer" like Didion, he finds Nate's story breaking through the text, stirring memories of their tight-knit childhood and defying his attempts to find "the truth" about a tragic death. In A COOL CUSTOMER, Bacharach turns The Year of Magical Thinking into a blueprint for grief and self-discovery that anyone can follow. This book is part of a new series from Fiction Advocate called Afterwords. "Bacharach smartly weaves his family story with a literate discussion of Didion's narratives and cultural position to make a snappy and inviting book you could easily read in one sitting."--Rebecca Foster

The 100 Best Nonfiction Books of All Time

Author: Robert McCrum
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781903385838
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 0

Book Description
Beginning in 1611 with the King James Bible and ending in 2014 with Elizabeth Kolbert's 'The Sixth Extinction', this extraordinary voyage through the written treasures of our culture examines universally-acclaimed classics such as Pepys' 'Diaries', Charles Darwin's 'The Origin of Species', Stephen Hawking's 'A Brief History of Time' and a whole host of additional works --

The Last Thing He Wanted

Author: Joan Didion
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0007291620
Category : Central America
Languages : en
Pages : 242

Book Description
The first novel in over a decade from perhaps the most admired writer in America.

Magical Thinking

Author: Augusten Burroughs
Publisher: Picador
ISBN: 125040665X
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 270

Book Description
From the #1 bestselling author of Running with Scissors and Dry—a contagiously funny, heartwarming, shocking, twisted, and absolutely magical collection. True stories that give voice to the thoughts we all have but dare not mention. It begins with a Tang Instant Breakfast Drink television commercial when Augusten was seven. Then there is the contest of wills with the deranged cleaning lady. The execution of a rodent carried out with military precision and utter horror. Telemarketing revenge. Dating an undertaker. And much more. A collection of true stories that are universal in their appeal, yet unabashedly intimate and very funny.

The Deficit Myth

Author: Stephanie Kelton
Publisher: PublicAffairs
ISBN: 1541736206
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 311

Book Description
A New York Times Bestseller The leading thinker and most visible public advocate of modern monetary theory -- the freshest and most important idea about economics in decades -- delivers a radically different, bold, new understanding for how to build a just and prosperous society. Stephanie Kelton's brilliant exploration of modern monetary theory (MMT) dramatically changes our understanding of how we can best deal with crucial issues ranging from poverty and inequality to creating jobs, expanding health care coverage, climate change, and building resilient infrastructure. Any ambitious proposal, however, inevitably runs into the buzz saw of how to find the money to pay for it, rooted in myths about deficits that are hobbling us as a country. Kelton busts through the myths that prevent us from taking action: that the federal government should budget like a household, that deficits will harm the next generation, crowd out private investment, and undermine long-term growth, and that entitlements are propelling us toward a grave fiscal crisis. MMT, as Kelton shows, shifts the terrain from narrow budgetary questions to one of broader economic and social benefits. With its important new ways of understanding money, taxes, and the critical role of deficit spending, MMT redefines how to responsibly use our resources so that we can maximize our potential as a society. MMT gives us the power to imagine a new politics and a new economy and move from a narrative of scarcity to one of opportunity.

One Hundred Years of Solitude

Author: Gabriel García Márquez
Publisher: Blackstone Publishing
ISBN:
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 342

Book Description
Netflix’s series adaptation of One Hundred Years of Solitude premieres December 11, 2024! One of the twentieth century’s enduring works, One Hundred Years of Solitude is a widely beloved and acclaimed novel known throughout the world and the ultimate achievement in a Nobel Prize–winning career. The novel tells the story of the rise and fall of the mythical town of Macondo through the history of the Buendía family. Rich and brilliant, it is a chronicle of life, death, and the tragicomedy of humankind. In the beautiful, ridiculous, and tawdry story of the Buendía family, one sees all of humanity, just as in the history, myths, growth, and decay of Macondo, one sees all of Latin America. Love and lust, war and revolution, riches and poverty, youth and senility, the variety of life, the endlessness of death, the search for peace and truth—these universal themes dominate the novel. Alternately reverential and comical, One Hundred Years of Solitude weaves the political, personal, and spiritual to bring a new consciousness to storytelling. Translated into dozens of languages, this stunning work is no less than an account of the history of the human race.

Dutch Shea, Jr.

Author: John Gregory Dunne
Publisher: Zola Books
ISBN: 1939126207
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 355

Book Description
“Dunne’s bravura plotting asserts an exhilarating mastery.” —The New York Times Book Review. In John Gregory Dunne’s celebrated third novel, Los Angeles-based criminal defense attorney Dutch Shea, Jr. struggles to keep from falling apart after an act of terrorist violence strikes his family, the loss pushing him towards a confrontation with his past and into a mystery involving the death of his father, a felon who died in prison. Set in L.A. and Dunne’s hometown of Hartford, Connecticut, the novel follows Shea into a labyrinth of deception, corruption, and criminal malice. Fighting to keep a host of disturbing memories tamped down, Shea plunges into his legal work, one embedding him in a world of scammers and burglars, pimps and prostitutes, corrupt cops and shady private eyes. With unrivaled detail and pitch-black humor, Dunne takes us into police precincts and criminal courtrooms, judge’s chambers and city morgues. The novel’s deft noir touches will remind readers of Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, while Dunne’s command of legal dynamics and police procedures anticipates fiction by Scott Turow, John Grisham and Michael Connelly. Introducing a sweeping cast of two dozen vivid characters, including Shea’s sometime girlfriend, a judge who packs a pistol under her robe, Dutch Shea, Jr. - a Zola e-book exclusive - is a gripping, bleakly funny exploration of a fallen world through which its past-haunted hero weaves, beset from within and without, for a series of fraught days.