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Few would disagree with the assessment of the man whose peers voted the "Best Western writer of all time" and whose 50 novels form a testament and tribute to the American West.
But, who is that Texas gentleman with the white Stetson and rimless eyeglasses whose friendly face appears on so many book jackets?
Sandhills Boy is Kelton's memoir, a funny and poignant story of "a freckle-faced country boy, green as a gourd, a sheep ready to be sheared,"...
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"In The Last Love Song, Tracy Daugherty, the critically acclaimed author of Hiding Man (a New Yorker and New York Times Notable book) and Just One Catch, delves deep into the life of distinguished American author and journalist Joan Didion in this, the first printed biography published about her life. Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in...
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Wherever you look, there's trouble and wonder, pain and beauty, restoration and darkness--sometimes all at once. Yet amid the confusion, if you look carefully, in nature or in the kitchen, in ordinariness or in mystery, beyond the emotion muck we all slog through, you'll find it eventually: a path, some light to see by, moments of insight, courage, or buoyancy. In other words, grace. Lamott knows and lives by this belief, most of the time. In these...
65) Galatea 2.2
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Richard Powers, returns to the United States as Humanist-in-Residence at the enormous Center for the Study of Advanced Sciences. There he runs afoul of Philip Lentz, an outspoken cognitive neurologist intent upon modeling the human brain by means of computer-based neural networks. Lentz involves Powers in an outlandish and irresistible project: to train a neural net on a canonical list of Great Books. Through repeated tutorials, the device grows gradually...
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In a small boat like those her Native American ancestors have used for countless generations, the author travels to Ojibwe home ground, the islands of Lake of the Woods in southern Ontario. Her only companions are her new baby and the baby's father, an Ojibwe spiritual leader, on a pilgrimage to the sacred rock paintings their people have venerated for centuries as mystical "teaching and dream guides," and where Ojibwe still leave offerings of tobacco...
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"One Matchless time is an evocation of William Faulkner's life and work. From his birth in 1897 in Mississippi to his death sixty-five years later, Faulkner spent almost his entire life on this one small patch of land, the "significant soil" from which all his fiction grew. Jay Parini paints an intimate picture of Faulkner's Mississippi world and shows how the artist transformed this raw material into Yoknapatawpha County, a place of pure imagination."...
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A comprehensive and eye-opening portrait of one of the most significant and improbable figures of the twentieth century--from her childhood in Russia during the Bolshevik Revolution to her years as a screenwriter in Hollywood, the publication of her blockbuster novels, and the rise and fall of the cult that formed around her in the 1950s and 1960s.
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"A biography of the late Pulitzer Prize-winning American novelist and screenwriter Larry McMurtry from New York Times bestselling author Tracy Daugherty. In over forty books, in a career that spanned over sixty years, Larry McMurtry staked his claim as asuperior chronicler of the American West, and as the Great Plains' keenest witness since Willa Cather and Wallace Stegner. Larry McMurtry: A Life traces his origins as one of the last American writers...
74) Child: a memoir
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"In Rock Hill, South Carolina, in 1949, Judy Kurtz and Mattie Culp shared a bed, but when Judy needed stitches after a playground accident, the white child and Black woman were sent to separate, segregated, hospital waiting rooms. In 1956, Judy and Mattie discovered Elvis together--a white man dancing Black on the Ed Sullivan Show--but only Judy would attend his live concert. After Mattie's daughter, Minnie, rode in the local Christmas parade as her...
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In this warm collection of personal essays and recipes, best-selling author Ann Hood nourishes both our bodies and our souls. From her Italian American childhood through singlehood, raising and feeding a growing family, divorce, and a new marriage to food writer Michael Ruhlman, Ann Hood has long appreciated the power of a good meal. Growing up, she tasted love in her grandmother's tomato sauce and dreamed of her mother's special-occasion Fancy Lady...
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"The saga of John Kennedy Toole is one of the greatest stories of American literary history. After writing A Confederacy of Dunces, Toole corresponded with Robert Gottlieb of Simon & Schuster for two years. Exhausted from Gottlieb's suggested revisions, Toole declared the publication of the manuscript hopeless and stored it in a box. Years later he suffered a mental breakdown, took a two-month journey across the United States, and finally committed...
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When Andrew Offutt died, his son, Chris, inherited a desk, a rifle, and eighteen hundred pounds of pornographic fiction. Andrew had been considered the "king of twentieth-century smut," with a writing career that began as a strategy to pay for his sons orthodontic needs and soon took on a life of its own, peaking during the 1970s when the commercial popularity of the erotic novel reached its height.With his dutiful wife serving as typist, Andrew wrote...