Still Life with Bread Crumbs

Author: Anna Quindlen
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0099591693
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILEYS WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2014 THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Still Life with Bread Crumbs begins with an imagined gunshot and ends with a new tin roof. Between the two is a wry and knowing portrait of Rebecca Winter, a photographer whose work made her an unlikely heroine for many women. Her career is now descendent, her bank balance shaky, and she has fled the city for the middle of nowhere. There she discovers, in a tree stand with a roofer named Jim Bates, that what she sees through a camera lens is not all there is to life. Brilliantly written, powerfully observed, Still Life with Bread Crumbs is a deeply moving and often very funny story of unexpected love, and a stunningly crafted journey into the life of a woman, her heart, her mind, her days, as she discovers that life is a story with many levels, a story that is longer and more exciting than she ever imagined.

Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake

Author: Anna Quindlen
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0679604006
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 226

Book Description
“[Quindlen] serves up generous portions of her wise, commonsensical, irresistibly quotable take on life.”—NPR This edition includes an exclusive conversation between Meryl Streep and Anna Quindlen. In this irresistible memoir, Anna Quindlen writes about a woman’s life, from childhood memories to manic motherhood to middle age. Considering—and celebrating—everything from marriage, girlfriends, our mothers, parenting, faith, loss, to all the stuff in our closets, and more, Quindlen says for us here what we may wish we could have said ourselves. As she did in her beloved New York Times columns, and in A Short Guide to a Happy Life, Quindlen uses her past, present, and future to explore what matters most to women at different ages. Quindlen talks about: Marriage: “A safety net of small white lies can be the bedrock of a successful marriage. You wouldn’t believe how cheaply I can do a kitchen renovation.” Girlfriends: “Ask any woman how she makes it through the day, and she may mention her calendar, her to-do lists, her babysitter. But if you push her on how she really makes it through her day, she will mention her girlfriends. ” Our bodies: “I’ve finally recognized my body for what it is: a personality-delivery system, designed expressly to carry my character from place to place, now and in the years to come.” Parenting: “Being a parent is not transactional. We do not get what we give. It is the ultimate pay-it-forward endeavor: We are good parents not so they will be loving enough to stay with us but so they will be strong enough to leave us.” Candid, funny, and moving, Lots of Candles, Plenty of Cake is filled with the sharp insights and revealing observations that have long confirmed Quindlen’s status as America’s laureate of real life.

Bread Toast Crumbs

Author: Alexandra Stafford
Publisher: Clarkson Potter
ISBN: 0553459848
Category : Cooking
Languages : en
Pages : 258

Book Description
With praise from Dorie Greenspan, Jim Lahey, and David Lebovitz, the definitive bread-baking book for a new generation. But this book isn’t just about baking bread-- it’s about what to do with the slices and heels and nubs from those many loaves you’ll bake. Alexandra Stafford grew up eating her mother’s peasant bread at nearly every meal—the recipe for which was a closely-guarded family secret. When her blog, Alexandra’s Kitchen, began to grow in popularity, readers started asking how to make the bread they’d heard so much about; the bread they had seen peeking into photos. Finally, Alexandra’s mother relented, and the recipe went up on the internet. It has since inspired many who had deemed bread-baking an impossibility to give it a try, and their results have exceeded expectations. The secret is in its simplicity: the no-knead dough comes together in fewer than five minutes, rises in an hour, and after a second short rise, bakes in buttered bowls. After you master the famous peasant bread, you’ll work your way through its many variations, both in flavor (Cornmeal, Jalapeno, and Jack; Three Seed) and form (Cranberry Walnut Dinner Rolls; Cinnamon Sugar Monkey Bread). You’ll enjoy bread’s usual utilities with Food Cart Grilled Cheese and the Summer Tartine with Burrata and Avocado, but then you’ll discover its true versatility when you use it to sop up Mussels with Shallot and White Wine or juicy Roast Chicken Legs. Finally, you’ll find ways to savor every last bite, from Panzanella Salad Three Ways to Roasted Tomato Soup to No-Bake Chocolate-Coconut Cookies. Bread, Toast, Crumbs is a 2018 nominee for The IACP Julia Child First Book Award, and Alexandra's Kitchen was a finalist for the Saveur Blog Awards Most Inspired Weeknight Dinners 2016

A Short Guide to a Happy Life

Author: Anna Quindlen
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0375506470
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 65

Book Description
#1 New York Times bestselling author Anna Quindlen’s classic reflection on a meaningful life makes a perfect gift for any occasion. “Life is made of moments, small pieces of silver amidst long stretches of tedium. It would be wonderful if they came to us unsummoned, but particularly in lives as busy as the ones most of us lead now, that won’t happen. We have to teach ourselves now to live, really live . . . to love the journey, not the destination.” In this treasure of a book, Anna Quindlen, the bestselling novelist and columnist, reflects on what it takes to “get a life”—to live deeply every day and from your own unique self, rather than merely to exist through your days. “Knowledge of our own mortality is the greatest gift God ever gives us,” Quindlen writes, “because unless you know the clock is ticking, it is so easy to waste our days, our lives.” Her mother died when Quindlen was nineteen: “It was the dividing line between seeing the world in black and white, and in Technicolor. The lights came on for the darkest possible reason. . . . I learned something enduring, in a very short period of time, about life. And that was that it was glorious, and that you had no business taking it for granted.” But how to live from that perspective, to fully engage in our days? In A Short Guide to a Happy Life, Quindlen guides us with an understanding that comes from knowing how to see the view, the richness in living.

Black And Blue

Author: Anna Quindlen
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1409007413
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 274

Book Description
'The first time my husband hit me I was nineteen years old.' For eighteen years Fran Benedetto kept her secret, hid her bruises. She stayed with Bobby because she wanted her son to have a father, and because, in spite of everything, she loved him. Then one night, when she saw the look on her ten-year-old son's face, Fran finally made a choice - she ran for both their lives. Now she is starting over in a city far from home, far from Bobby. She uses a name that isn't hers, watches over her son, and tries to forget. For the woman who now calls herself Beth, every day is a chance to heal, to put together the pieces of her shattered self. And every day she waits for Bobby to catch up with her. Bobby always said he would never let her go, and Fran Benedetto is certain of one thing: it is only a matter of time.

Alternate Side

Author: Anna Quindlen
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0812996070
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 306

Book Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “Captures the angst and anxiety of modern life with . . . astute observations about interactions between the haves and have-nots, and the realities of life among the long-married.”—USA Today A provocative novel that explores what it means to be a mother, a wife, and a woman at a moment of reckoning, from the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Miller’s Valley and Still Life with Bread Crumbs. Some days Nora Nolan thinks that she and her husband, Charlie, lead a charmed life—except when there’s a crisis at work, a leak in the roof at home, or a problem with their twins at college. And why not? New York City was once Nora’s dream destination, and her clannish dead-end block has become a safe harbor, a tranquil village amid the urban craziness. The owners watch one another’s children grow up. They use the same handyman. They trade gossip and gripes, and they maneuver for the ultimate status symbol: a spot in the block’s small parking lot. Then one morning, Nora returns from her run to discover that a terrible incident has shaken the neighborhood, and the enviable dead-end block turns into a potent symbol of a divided city. The fault lines begin to open: on the block, at Nora’s job, and especially in her marriage. Praise for Alternate Side “[Anna] Quindlen’s quietly precise evaluation of intertwined lives evinces a keen understanding of and appreciation for universal human frailties.”—Booklist (starred review) “Exquisitely rendered . . . [Quindlen] is one of our most astute chroniclers of modern life. . . . [Alternate Side] has an almost documentary feel, a verisimilitude that’s awfully hard to achieve.”—The New York Times Book Review “An exceptional depiction of complex characters—particularly their weaknesses and uncertainties—and the intricacies of close relationships . . . Quindlen’s provocative novel is a New York City drama of fractured marriages and uncomfortable class distinctions.”—Publishers Weekly

How Reading Changed My Life

Author: Anna Quindlen
Publisher: Ballantine Books
ISBN: 0307763528
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 98

Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Anna Quindlen presents a “swift and compelling paean to the joys of books” (Booklist). “Like the columns she used to write for the New York Times, [How Reading Changed My Life] is tart, smart, full of quirky insights, lapidary, and a pleasure to read.”—Publishers Weekly “Reading has always been my home, my sustenance, my great invincible companion. . . . Yet of all the many things in which we recognize universal comfort—God, sex, food, family, friends—reading seems to be the one in which the comfort is most undersung, at least publicly, although it was really all I thought of, or felt, when I was eating up book after book, running away from home while sitting in a chair, traveling around the world and yet never leaving the room. . . . I read because I loved it more than any activity on earth.”—from How Reading Changed My Life

Write for Your Life

Author: Anna Quindlen
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0593229835
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 241

Book Description
NATIONAL BESTSELLER • In this clarion call to pick up a pen and find yourself from “one of our most astute chroniclers of modern life” (The New York Times Book Review), #1 New York Times bestselling author Anna Quindlen shows us how anyone can write, and why everyone should. What really matters in life? What truly lasts in our hearts and minds? Where can we find community, history, humanity? In this lyrical new book, the answer is clear: through writing. This is a book for what Quindlen calls “civilians,” those who want to use the written word to become more human, more themselves. Write for Your Life argues that there has never been a more important time to stop and record what we are thinking and feeling. Using examples from past, present, and future—from Anne Frank to Toni Morrison, from love letters written after World War II to journal reflections from nurses and doctors today—Write for Your Life vividly illuminates the ways in which writing connects us to ourselves and to those we cherish. Drawing on her personal experiences not just as a writer but as a mother and daughter, Quindlen makes the case that recording our daily lives in writing is essential. When we write we not only look, we see; we not only react but reflect. Writing gives you something to hold onto in a changing world. “To write the present,” Quindlen says, “is to believe in the future.”

Object Lessons: The Life of the Woman and the Poet in Our Time

Author: Eavan Boland
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 0393346463
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 273

Book Description
In this important prose work, one of our major poets explores, through autobiography and argument, a woman's life in Ireland together with a poet's work. Eavan Boland beautifully uncovers the powerful drama of how these lives affect one another; how the tradition of womanhood and the historic vocation of the poet act as revealing illuminations of the other.

Following Breadcrumbs

Author: Jamie Johnston
Publisher: iUniverse
ISBN: 1532029276
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 186

Book Description
As an LA tween in the mid-1960s, Jamie Johnston—free-spirited, fiercely independent Hollywood brat and daughter of ’40s/’50s actor-singer Johnny Johnston (“Rock Around the Clock”)—had two significant events forever frozen in her mind. The first of these memories she would share with millions—the era-defining appearance of the Beatles on Ed Sullivan in 1964. The second memory, however, was much more intimate. It was a bright summer’s day in 1966 when she stood rapt, watching one of the undisputed kings of the Sunset Strip, the Byrds’ Gene Clark, coolly entering the legendary Whisky a Go Go. Little did Jamie know that a mere nine years after having her life changed by the Fab Four, her female duo, the Skiffles, would be signed to a record deal with Beatles producer, George Martin, or that twenty years hence, she would embark upon a passionate affair with the ill-fated ex-Byrd Clark, who died at the age of forty-six in 1991. What begins as an up-close-and-personal commentary of an era that changed the world, with many of its famous players traversing through the pages, evolves into a tragic love story. Praise for Following Breadcrumbs “Following Breadcrumbs is a tell-all rock-and-roll memoir with a conscience” (Tom Sandford, the Clarkophile Blog, Toronto, Canada).