Recommendations based on "Lust for Life"

The first biography of Shirley Hazzard, the author of The Transit of Venus and a writer of “shocking wisdom” and “intellectual thrill” (The New Yorker).Shirley Hazzard: A Writing Life tells the extraordinary story of a great modern novelist. Brigitta Olubas, Hazzard’s authorized biographer, has drawn, with great subtlety and understanding, on her fiction (itself largely based on Hazzard’s own experience); on an extensive archive of letters, diaries, and notebooks; and on the memories of surviving friends and colleagues to create this resonant portrait of an exceptional woman.This biography explores the distinctive times of Hazzard’s life, from her youth and middle age to her widowhood and years of decline, and traces the complex and intricate processes of self-fashioning that lay beneath Hazzard’s formidable, beguiling presence. Olubas shows us the places of Hazzard’s life, of which she wrote with characteristic lyricism: her childhood in Depression-era Sydney; her youth in postwar Hong Kong, New Zealand, and London; her years in New York in the 1950s, working at the United Nations and The New Yorker. Olubas also describes Hazzard’s long marriage to the writer Francis Steegmuller and their deep involvement in postwar Naples and Capri. Rare photographs from Hazzard’s collection and elsewhere accompany the text.Hazzard was the last of a generation of self-taught writers, devotees of a great literary tradition, and her depth of perception and expressive gifts have earned her iconic status. Brigitta Olubas has brought her brilliantly alive, enhancing and deepening our understanding of the singular woman who created some of the most enduring fiction of the past sixty years.As Dwight Garner wrote in The New York Times, “Hazzard’s stories feel timeless because she understands, as she writes in one of them: ‘We are human beings, not rational ones.’” Here, in Shirley Hazzard, is the story of a remarkable human being.

The first authorised biography of eternal legend Elizabeth Taylor.Known for her glamorous beauty, soap-opera personal life and magnetic screen presence, Elizabeth Taylor was the twentieth century’s most famous film star. Including unseen photographs and unread private reflections, this authorised biography is a fascinating and complete portrait worthy of the legend and her legacy.Elizabeth Taylor captures this intelligent, empathetic, tenacious, volatile and complex woman as never before, from her rise to massive fame at the age of twelve in National Velvet to becoming the first actor to negotiate a million-dollar salary for a film, from her eight marriages and enduring love affair with Richard Burton to her lifelong battle with addiction and her courageous efforts as an AIDS activist.Using Elizabeth’s unpublished letters, diary entries and off-the-record interview transcripts as well as interviews with 250 of her closest friends and family, Kate Andersen Brower tells the full, unvarnished story of the classic Hollywood star who continues to captivate audiences the world over.

Spoiled Southern belle Scarlett O'Hara never stops loving the married Ashley Wilkes even as she faces the hardships of life during the Civil War and the changes brought about by Reconstruction. Reprint.

The poet and visual artist Mina Loy (1882-1966) has long had an underground reputation as an exemplary avant-gardist. Born in London of mixed Jewish and English parentage, and a much photographed beauty, she moved in the pivotal circles of international modernism - in Florence as Gertrude Stein's friend and Marinetti's lover; in New York as Marcel Duchamp's co-conspirator and Djuna Barnes's confidante; in Mexico with her greatest love, the notorious boxer-poet Arthur Cravan; in Paris with the Surrealists and Man Ray. Carolyn Burke's riveting, authoritative biography brings this highly original and representative figure wonderfully alive, in the process giving us a new picture of modernism - and one woman's important contribution to it.

Dorothy Parker, more than any of her contemporaries, captured the spirit of her age in her writing. The decadent twenties and thirties in New York were a time of great experiment and daring for women. For the rich, life seemed a continual party, but the excesses took their emotional toll. With a biting wit and perceptive insight, Dorothy Parker examines the social mores of her day and exposes the darkness beneath the dazzle. Her own life exemplified this duality, for while she was one of the most talked-about women of her day, rich and gifted, she was also known as 'a masochist whose passion for unhapiness knew no bound.' Her brilliant dissection of the jazz Age in poetry and prose is collected in this volume along with articles and reviews.

Fragments is an event--an unforgettable book that will redefine one of the greatest icons of the twentieth century and that, nearly fifty years after her death, will definitively reveal Marilyn Monroe's humanity.Marilyn's image is so universal that we can't help but believe we know all there is to know of her. Every word and gesture made headlines and garnered controversy. Her serious gifts as an actor were sometimes eclipsed by her notoriety--and by the way the camera fell helplessly in love with her.Beyond the headlines--and the too-familiar stories of heartbreak and desolation--was a woman far more curious, searching, witty, and hopeful than the one the world got to know. Now, for the first time, readers can meet the private Marilyn and understand her in a way we never have before. Fragments is an unprecedented collection of written artifacts--notes to herself, letters, even poems--in Marilyn's own handwriting, never before published, along with rarely seen intimate photos.Jotted in notebooks, typed on paper, or written on hotel letterhead, these texts reveal a woman who loved deeply and strove to perfect her craft. They show a Marilyn Monroe unsparing in her analysis of her own life, but also playful, funny, and impossibly charming. The easy grace and deceptive lightness that made her performances indelible emerge on the page, as does the simmering tragedy that made her last appearances so affecting.

Their search for privacy took the Lindberghs from the United States to England and then France. Anne Lindbergh sets the record straight here on her husband's prewar visits to Germany. Introduction by the Author; Index; photographs. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

What we now call "the good life" first appeared in California during the 1930s. Motels, home trailers, drive-ins, barbecues, beach life and surfing, sports from polo and tennis and golf to mountain climbing and skiing, "sportswear" (a word coined at the time), and sun suits were all a part of the good life--perhaps California's most distinctive influence of the 1930s. In The Dream Endures, Kevin Starr shows how the good life prospered in California--in pursuits such as film, fiction, leisure, and architecture--and helped to define American culture and society then and for years to come.Starr previously chronicled how Californians absorbed the thousand natural shocks of the Great Depression--unemployment, strikes, Communist agitation, reactionary conspiracies--in Endangered Dreams, the fourth volume of his classic history of California. In The Dream Endures, Starr reveals the other side of the picture, examining the newly important places where the good life flourished, like Los Angeles (where Hollywood lived), Palm Springs (where Hollywood vacationed), San Diego (where the Navy went), the California Institute of Technology in Pasadena (where Einstein went and changed his view of the universe), and college towns like Berkeley. We read about the rich urban life of San Francisco and Los Angeles, and in newly important communities like Carmel and San Simeon, the home of William Randolph Hearst, where, each Thursday afternoon, automobiles packed with Hollywood celebrities would arrive from Southern California for the long weekend at Hearst Castle.The 1930s were the heyday of the Hollywood studios, and Starr brilliantly captures Hollywood films and the society that surrounded the studios. Starr offers an astute discussion of the European refugees who arrived in Hollywood during the period: prominent European film actors and artists and the creative refugees who were drawn to Hollywood and Southern California in these years--Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Man Ray, Bertolt Brecht, Christopher Isherwood, Aldous Huxley, Thomas Mann, and Franz Werfel. Starr gives a fascinating account of how many of them attempted to recreate their European world in California and how others, like Samuel Goldwyn, provided stories and dreams for their adopted nation. Starr reserves his greatest attention and most memorable writing for San Francisco. For Starr, despite the city's beauty and commercial importance, San Francisco's most important achievement was the sense of well-being it conferred on its citizens. It was a city that "magically belonged to everyone."Whether discussing photographers like Edward Weston and Ansel Adams, "hard-boiled fiction" writers, or the new breed of female star--Marlene Dietrich, Jean Harlow, Bette Davis, Carole Lombard, and the improbable Mae West--The Dream Endures is a brilliant social and cultural history--in many ways the most far-reaching and important of Starr's California books.

An Anthology of Women Poets that includes: Gertrude Stein, Edna St. Vincent Millay, H.D., Louise Bogen, and Muriel Rukeyser.Each audio production is accompanied by a book containing the text of the poems and a commentary by J.D. McClatchy.Gertrude Stein (1874-1946)After attending Radcliffe College, Gertrude Stein lived abroad, mostly in Paris, for the rest of her life. Her home became a cultural salon for writers and artists. Even among Cubist painters who were her friends, her work stands out for its boldness and invention. She turned English on its head with results both witty and enigmatic. In addition to her poetry she wrote novels, memoirs, history, and libretti.Edna St. Vincent Millay (1892-1950) was born in Rockland, Maine to her self-sufficient single mother and three sisters. At her mother’s urging, she entered her poem “Renascence” into a contest: she won fourth place bringing her immediate acclaim and scholarship to Vassar.While there she continued to write poetry and became involved in the theater. In 1917, Millay published her first book, Renascence and Other Poems. At the request of Vassar’s drama department, she wrote her first verse play, The Lamp and the Bell in 1921.Millay moved to New York’s Greenwich Village, where she led a notoriously bohemian life. In 1920 she published A Few Figs from Thistles, a volume of poetry which drew much attention for its controversial descriptions of female sexuality and feminism. Her fourth volume of poetry The Harp Weaver (1921) was awarded the Pulitzer Prize.Millay married Eugen Boissevain in 1923. Their marriage ended in 1949 with Boissevain’s death. Edna St. Vincent Millay died in 1950 of heart failure.H.D. (1886-1961) was born Hilda Doolittle in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. She attended Bryn Mawr as a classmate of Marianne Moore, and later the University of Pennsylvania where she befriended Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams. In 1911, she traveled to Europe intending only to stay for a summer, but remained abroad for the rest of her life. Through Pound, she grew interested in and quickly became the leader of the Imagist movement. Some of her earliest poems gained recognition when they were published by Harriet Monroe in Poetry.Her work is characterized by the intense strength and intensity of her images, economy of language, and use of classical mythology. Her poems did not receive widespread recognition due in part to the limits of being associated with the Imagist movement, as well as her feminist principles, which were not readily acceptable at the time. She died in 1961.Louise BogenMuriel Rukeyser

The epic romance of one of the most celebrated poets in the English language Coming to theatres in September 2009 is the tragic love story of nineteenth- century poet John Keats and the love of his life, Fanny Brawne. Keats died at the young age of twenty-five, leaving behind some of the most exquisite and moving verse and letters ever written, inspired by his deep love for Fanny. Bright Star is a collection of Keats' romantic poems and correspondence in the heat of his passion, and is a dazzling display of a talent cut cruelly short.