House Of Wits

Author : Paul Fisher
Publisher : Macmillan + ORM
ISBN 13 : 146685507X
Total Pages : 902 pages
Book Rating : 4.76/5 ( download)

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Download or read book House of Wits written by Paul Fisher and published by Macmillan + ORM. This book was released on 2013-10-22 with total page 902 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An American odyssey that reveals the fascinating complexities of one of history's most brilliant, eccentric, and daring families The James family, one of America's most memorable dynasties, gave the world three famous children: a novelist of genius (Henry), an influential philosopher (William), and an invalid (Alice) who became a feminist icon, despite her sheltered life and struggles with mental illness. Although much has been written on them, many truths about the Jameses have long been camouflaged. The conflicts that defined one of American's greatest families— homosexuality, depression, alcoholism, female oppression—can only now be thoroughly investigated and discussed with candor and understanding. Paul Fisher's grand family saga, House of Wits, rediscovers a family traumatized by the restrictive standards of their times but reaching out for new ideas and ways to live. He follows the five James offspring ("hotel children," Henry called them) and their parents through their privileged travels across the Atlantic; interludes in Newport and Cambridge; the younger boys' engagement in the Civil War; and William and Henry's later adventures in London, Paris, and Italy. He captures the splendor of their era and all the members of the clan—beginning with their mercurial father, who nurtured, inspired, and damaged them, setting the stage for lives of colorful passions, intense rivalries, and extraordinary achievements. House of Wits is a revealing cultural history that revises and completes our understanding of its remarkable protagonists and the changing world where they came of age.

Author : Harold B. Segel
Publisher : Purdue University Press
ISBN 13 : 9781557530332
Total Pages : 424 pages
Book Rating : 4.35/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Vienna Coffeehouse Wits, 1890-1938 written by Harold B. Segel and published by Purdue University Press. This book was released on 1993 with total page 424 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Segel's extensive introduction provides a wealth of information concerning the social, political, and cultural background of turn-of-the-century Vienna. The eight artists assembled here are concerned with their world, Austria and particularly Vienna. They exchange ideas, argue, gossip, tell stories, read each other's works and even write in the coffeehouse.

Author : Benjamin Errett
Publisher : Penguin
ISBN 13 : 0698153863
Total Pages : 258 pages
Book Rating : 4.68/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Elements of Wit written by Benjamin Errett and published by Penguin. This book was released on 2014-10-07 with total page 258 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Got wit? We’ve all been in that situation where we need to say something clever, but innocuous; smart enough to show some intelligence, without showing off; something funny, but not a joke. What we need in that moment is wit—that sparkling combination of charm, humor, confidence, and most of all, the right words at the right time. Elements of Wit is an engaging book that brings together the greatest wits of our time, and previous ones from Oscar Wilde to Nora Ephron, Winston Churchill to Christopher Hitchens, Mae West to Louis CK, and many in between. With chapters covering the essential ingredients of wit, this primer sheds light on how anyone—introverts, extroverts, wallflowers, and bon vivants—can find the right zinger, quip, parry, or retort…or at least be a little bit more interesting.

Author : Gene Wolfe
Publisher : Tor Books
ISBN 13 : 9781429991773
Total Pages : 304 pages
Book Rating : 4.71/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The Sorcerer's House written by Gene Wolfe and published by Tor Books. This book was released on 2010-04-01 with total page 304 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In a contemporary town in the American midwest where he has no connections, Bax, an educated man recently released from prison, is staying in a motel. He writes letters to his brother and to others, including a friend still in jail, to whom he progressively reveals the intriguing pieces of a strange and fantastic narrative. When he meets a real estate agent who tells him he is, to his utter surprise, the heir to a huge old house in town, long empty, he moves in. He is immediately confronted by an array of supernatural creatures and events, by love and danger. His life is utterly transformed and we read on, because we must know more. We revise our opinions of him, and of others, with each letter, piecing together more of the story as we go. We learn things about magic, and another world, and about the sorcerer Mr. Black, who originally inhabited the house. And then knowing what we now know only in the end, perhaps we read it again. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.

Author : Michelle O'Callaghan
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
ISBN 13 : 1139462563
Total Pages : 15 pages
Book Rating : 4.63/5 ( download)

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Download or read book The English Wits written by Michelle O'Callaghan and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2007-02-08 with total page 15 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries the Inns of Court and fashionable London taverns developed a culture of clubbing, urban sociability and wit. The convivial societies that emerged created rituals to define social identities and to engage in literary play and political discussion. Michelle O'Callaghan argues that the lawyer-wits, including John Hoskyns, in company with authors such as John Donne, Ben Jonson and Thomas Coryate, consciously reinvigorated humanist traditions of learned play. Their experiments with burlesque, banquet literature, parody and satire resulted in a volatile yet creative dialogue between civility and licence, and between pleasure and the violence of scurrilous words. The wits inaugurated a mode of literary fellowship that shaped the history and literature of sociability in the seventeenth century. This study will provide many insights for historians and literary scholars of the period.

Author : Lauren Sandler
Publisher : Random House Trade Paperbacks
ISBN 13 : 039958997X
Total Pages : 353 pages
Book Rating : 4.73/5 ( download)

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Download or read book This Is All I Got written by Lauren Sandler and published by Random House Trade Paperbacks. This book was released on 2021-05-25 with total page 353 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • From an award-winning journalist, a poignant and gripping immersion in the life of a young, homeless single mother amid her quest to find stability and shelter in the richest city in America LONGLISTED FOR THE PEN/JEAN STEIN BOOK AWARD • “Riveting . . . a remarkable feat of reporting.”—The New York Times Camila is twenty-two years old and a new mother. She has no family to rely on, no partner, and no home. Despite her intelligence and determination, the odds are firmly stacked against her. In this extraordinary work of literary reportage, Lauren Sandler chronicles a year in Camila’s life—from the birth of her son to his first birthday—as she navigates the labyrinth of poverty and homelessness in New York City. In her attempts to secure a safe place to raise her son and find a measure of freedom in her life, Camila copes with dashed dreams, failed relationships, the desolation of abandonment, and miles of red tape with grit, humor, and uncanny resilience. Every day, more than forty-five million Americans attempt to survive below the poverty line. Every night, nearly sixty thousand people sleep in New York City-run shelters, 40 percent of them children. In This Is All I Got, Sandler brings this deeply personal issue to life, vividly depicting one woman's hope and despair and her steadfast determination to change her life despite the myriad setbacks she encounters. This Is All I Got is a rare feat of reporting and a dramatic story of survival. Sandler’s candid and revealing account also exposes the murky boundaries between a journalist and her subject when it becomes impossible to remain a dispassionate observer. She has written a powerful and unforgettable indictment of a system that is often indifferent to the needs of those it serves, and that sometimes seems designed to fail. Praise for This Is All I Got “A rich, sociologically valuable work that’s more gripping, and more devastating, than fiction.”—Booklist “Vivid, heartbreaking. . . . Readers will be moved by this harrowing and impassioned call for change.”—Publishers Weekly “A closely observed chronicle . . . Sandler displays her journalistic talent by unerringly presenting this dire situation. . . . An impressive blend of dispassionate reporting, pungent condemnation of public welfare, and gritty humanity.” —Kirkus Reviews

Author : Richard Osman
Publisher : Random House
ISBN 13 : 1473531977
Total Pages : 311 pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Richard Osman's House of Games written by Richard Osman and published by Random House. This book was released on 2019-10-17 with total page 311 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Do you know how many post boxes there are in the UK? Could you guess how many times the word 'goat' appear in the King James Version of the bible? Fancy playing a game of charades where all of the books, films and plays are entirely made up? Now, look around the room. Is anyone there the kind of person who’ll say ‘I just don’t understand this’, when faced with something that’s not just perfectly easy to understand, but is ... well, fun? Ask them to leave. Have they gone? Good. Now welcome inside the House of Games ... Featuring questions based on some of the most loved rounds from the hit BBC2 show, including Roonerspisims, Venn Will I Be Famous?, Dim Sums and Answer Smash, Richard Osman’s House of Games Quiz Book is the ultimate test of wit, wisdom and imagination. Curated by Richard Osman and Alan Connor and featuring over 50 new and exclusive games to try out, this is your chance to step inside the House of Games and pitch your trivia skills against your family and friends. Quirky, unique and exactly the right amount of silly, House of Games contains hours of guaranteed fun!

Author : Paul Fisher
Publisher :
ISBN 13 : 9780349116976
Total Pages : pages
Book Rating : 4.70/5 ( download)

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Download or read book House of Wits B written by Paul Fisher and published by . This book was released on 2008-05 with total page pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Five siblings: two celebrated (novelist Henry and the philosopher William James); two brothers overshadowed by them; and one dazzling sister, Alice. Beginning with the peculiar courtship of Henry James Sr and Mary Walsh in the late 1830s and ending with the death of Henry James Jr in 1916, HOUSE OF WITS tells the story of the James family's driven and anguished quest through some of the most glittering and varied scenes of the nineteenth century. Restless and striving, the Jameses were always searching for a better house or palazzo, a better school for the children, a more exciting metropolis to live in, a snobbier club to join, a bigger and brainier magnum opus to write. Never satisfied with their conquests, they shifted from New York to grand imperial Victorian London, jaunting to German spas and Italian ruins, before they at last settled in fiercely academic Boston, a city that matched their ambitious intellectual aims and afterward launched the younger Jameses towards careers, marriages and never-satisfied international house-hunts of their own. With a narrative that calls to mind the spirit of a Henry James novel, but with an even stranger cast of characters, HOUSE OF WITS dazzlingly recreates the interactions in the lives of an astounding family.

Author : Sharon Dennis Wyeth
Publisher : Doubleday
ISBN 13 : 0385322399
Total Pages : 38 pages
Book Rating : 4.93/5 ( download)

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Download or read book Something Beautiful written by Sharon Dennis Wyeth and published by Doubleday. This book was released on 1998 with total page 38 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: When she goes looking for "something beautiful" in her city neighborhood, a young girl finds beauty in many different forms.

Author : Erma Bombeck
Publisher : Fawcett
ISBN 13 : 030777824X
Total Pages : 225 pages
Book Rating : 4.46/5 ( download)

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Download or read book At Wit's End written by Erma Bombeck and published by Fawcett. This book was released on 2011-02-02 with total page 225 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "America's irrepressible doyenne of domestic satire." THE BOSTON GLOBE Madcap, bittersweet humor in classic Erma Bombeck-style. You'll laugh until it hurts and love it! "Any mother with half a skull knows that when Daddy's little boy becomes Mommy's little boy, the kid is so wet, he's treading water. What do you mean you're a participle in the school play and you need a costume? Those rotten kids. If only they'd let me wake up in my own way. Why do they have to line up along my bed and stare at me like Moby Dick just washed up onto a beach somewhere?"