| |
(March 15, 2007) - A few traditional American notions that are no longer much in vogue – experimentation, transcendence, civil disobedience – make a fierce comeback in Robert Stone's Prime Green: Remembering the Sixties, one of many recent or soon-to-be released books by Yaddo artists. As in his fiction, Stone offers you in his memoir a vision of freedom and escape, and then he examines, with a burning moral clarity, the price that is inevitably paid for such liberations, the "damages" to be covered, which, in the sixties, meant the psyches destroyed, the people left behind, the work not done while the decades' many blessed children of light wandered the beaches of California, Mexico, and elsewhere, minds blown by visions of primitive gods. Stone grew up quasi-orphaned first in New York's Hell's Kitchen, then in Chicago. He had very little formal education and held a bouquet of odd jobs, served in the Navy, wandered the planet, and eventually found his way to the San Francisco scene in the early 60s, hooking up with Ken Kesey and the famous Merry Pranksters. His take on that extraordinary decade is testimony from the core of the experience; he is both skeptical of the absurdities of those years and tender toward the moment's lovely dreams.
Susan Cheever | |
For the origins of the American spirit of experimentation, transcendence, civil disobedience, not to mention the god immanent in nature and man, check out Susan Cheever's American Bloomsbury -- Louisa May Alcott, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Margaret Fuller, Nathaniel Hawthorne, and Henry David Thoreau: Their Lives, Their Loves, Their Work, chronicling the group of Transcendentalists and friends who formed the core of America's first secular intellectual movement.
Please see below for an abbreviated list of new and upcoming books from Yaddo authors, or click here to visit our Recent Works page for a more comprehensive list of publications from Yaddo writers.
New and Upcoming Books
Joan Acocella, Twenty-Eight Artists and Two Saints, an elegant collection of the critic’s assessments of various artists.
Hannah Arendt, The Promise of Politics, a compilation of the late author’s post-Marxist theories and insights on the beginnings of totalitarianism.
John Ashbery, A Worldly Country, the poet’s 26th book, a collection of 58 new, mostly short, works.
Paul Auster, Travels in the Scriptorium, a chilling portrait of an old man trying to piece together his past and identify his obscure tormentor.
Dennis Bock, The Communist’s Daughter, a novel that cleverly blends fact and fiction to create a what-if story based on real-life battlefield surgeon Norman Bethune.
Carl Dennis, Unknown Friends, the 10th collection from the Pulitzer Prize-winning poet, explores separation and connection between friends real and imagined.
Lesley Dorman, The Best Place to Be, a story collection with a narrator who’s run the bases in life, work, and love and finds, at age 50, she’s arrived at last.
Philip Gourevitch, The Paris Review Interviews, Volume I, the first book in a three-volume set of interviews with literary icons culled from the archive of The Paris Review.
Lee Gutkind, Almost Human: Robots Think, a summary of the author’s six-year journey following a group of scientists working to develop human movement and decision-making capabilities for robots created to find signs of life on Mars.
Masha Hamilton, The Camel Bookmobile, a novel following librarian Fiona Sweeney from New York to Kenya on a quest to make a difference in the world.
A.M. Homes, The Mistress’s Daughter, a much-anticipated memoir about the author’s reunion with her biological parents 31 years after they gave her up for adoption.
Ann Hood, The Knitting Circle, a novel about a woman who discovers friendship and redemption when she joins a knitting circle to get over the loss of her child.
Sheri Joseph, Stray, a novel centered on a love triangle and a murder.
Laura Kasischke, Be Mine, an erotic thriller that begins with an anonymous Valentine sent to a married woman.
Sheila Kohler, Bluebird, or the Invention of Happiness, a historical realism novel following the life of an aristocratic woman in Marie Antoinette’s court.
Jonathan Lethem, You Don’t Love Me Yet, a comic novel that explores the paradoxes of love and art.
Walter Mosley, This Year You Write Your Novel, advice from the best-selling author about how to write a novel in one year, which he says is within anyone’s grasp.
Jenny Offill, co-editor of Money Changes Everything: Twenty-Two Writers Tackle the Last Taboo with Tales of Sudden Windfalls, Staggering Debts, and Other Surprising Turns of Fortune, a collection of brutally honest essays about spending, saving, and stealing.
Peter Quinn, Looking for Jimmy: A Search for Irish America, a collection of 22 essays (some never before published) tracing the Irish in New York back to before the famine.
Jonathan Raban, Surveillance, an ironic comical novel, set slightly in the future, that explores the current political climate.
Nahid Rachlin, Persian Girls, a deeply moving memoir of the author’s life growing up in Iran that offers rare insight into how Iranians feel about the American way of life.
Phyllis Raphael, Off the King’s Road: Lost and Found in London, a memoir about the author’s personal journey from New York City wife and actress to divorcée and single mom in swinging 1968 London.
Joanna Scott, Everybody Loves Somebody, a collection of 10 stories spanning the 20th century to document love and its consequences.
Susan Richards Shreve, Warm Springs: Traces of a Childhood at FDR’s Polio Haven, a recollection of the author’s stay at the Warm Springs Polio Foundation in Georgia from ages 11 to 13.
Colm Toibin, Mothers and Sons, a collection of nine stories about what happens when mothers and sons confront one another as adults.
Patricia Volk, To My Dearest Friends, a delightful novel about two friends who turn into amateur sleuths when they are made co-executrixes of their dead friend’s safe deposit box and discover a letter from an unnamed lover.
Rebecca Walker, Baby Love: Choosing Motherhood After a Lifetime of Ambivalence, a powerful new memoir in journal format by the daughter of another Yaddo author, Alice Walker.
|
