Dramatiker

GEKL

Paperback

"A shapely experiment, mixing memoir with biography . . . [Elizabeth Bishop] fuses sympathy with intelligence, sending us back to Bishop's marvelous poems." -- Wall Street Journal Since her death in 1979, Elizabeth Bishop, who published only one hundred poems in her lifetime, has become one of America's most revered poets. And yet she has never been fully understood as a woman and artist. Megan Marshall makes incisive and moving use of a newly discovered cache of Bishop's letters to reveal a much darker childhood than has been known, a secret affair, and the last chapter of her passionate romance with Brazilian modernist designer Lota de Macedo Soares. By alternating the narrative line of biography with brief passages of memoir, Megan Marshall, who studied with Bishop in her storied 1970s poetry workshop at Harvard, offers the reader an original and compelling glimpse of the ways poetry and biography, subject and biographer, are entwined. "Marshall is a skilled reader who points out the telling echoes between Bishop's published and private writing. Her account is enriched by a cache of revelatory, recently discovered documents . . . Marshall's narrative is smooth and brisk: an impressive feat." -- New York Times Book Review

In Harold: The Boy Who Became Mark Twain, the beloved stage, film, and television actor Hal Holbrook presents an affecting memoir about his struggle to discover his true self, even as he learned to transform himself onstage. <BR><BR>Abandoned by his mother and father when he was two, Holbrook and his two sisters commenced separate journeys of survival. Raised by his powerful grandfather, who died when Holbrook was twelve, he spent his childhood at boarding schools, visiting his father in an insane asylum and hoping his mother would suddenly surface in Hollywood.<BR><BR>As World War II engulfed Europe, Holbrook began acting almost by accident. Through war, marriage, and the work of honing his craft, his fear of insanity and his fearlessness in the face of risk were channeled into discovering that the riskiest path of all-success as an actor-would be his birthright. The climb up that forbidding mountain was a lonely one. And how he achieved it-the cost to his wife and children and to his own conscience-is the dark side of the fame he would eventually earn by portraying the man his career would forever be most closely associated with: Mark Twain.<BR><BR>"If I were to conjure an image of an individual who best fits the phrase 'a real American,' it would be Hal Holbrook. This book shows him as a complete person. You will be compelled by the wit and wisdom of this beautifully composed story of self-determination and survival."-Robert Redford

Among Jane Austen's many attractions for the modern reader are the comfortable domestic details that furnish her novels, and what could be more comforting than tea? Tea was not just a beverage in Austen's time, but a key ingredient in social ritual, and her letters and novels are full of references to its buying, preparing, serving, and drinking. In this book, readers will find not only plenty of tea-related Austen quotes, but a well-researched history of Austen-era tea drinking at different times of day and in different settings. Recipes taken from contemporary cookbooks for old-fashioned delicacies are included.

Un petit Marseillais d'il y a un siècle: l'école primaire; le cocon familial; les premières vacances dans les collines, à La Treille; la première chasse avec son père...Lorsqu il commence à rédiger ses Souvenirs d'enfance, au milieu des années cinquante, Marcel Pagnol est en train de s'éloigner du cinéma., et le théâtre ne lui sourit plus.La Gloire de mon père, dès sa parution, en 1957, est salué comme marquant l'avènement d'un grand prosateur. Joseph, le père instituteur., Augustine, la timide maman., l'oncle Jules, la tante Rosé, le petit frère Paul, deviennent immédiatement aussi populaires que Marius, César ou Panisse. Et la scène de la chasse à la bartavelle se transforme immédiatement en dictée d'école primaire...Les souvenirs de Pagnol sont un peu ceux de tous les enfants du monde. Plus tard, paraît-il, Pagnol aurait voulu qu'ils deviennent un film. C 'est Yves Robert qui, longtemps après la mort de l'écrivain, le réalisera.' Je suis né dans la ville d'Aubagne. sons le Garlaban couronné de chèvres au temps des derniers chevriers. '

An vielen Stellen des großen, im 20. Jahrhundert einzigartigen Werks von Bertolt Brecht finden sich kluge, durch sprachliche Schlichtheit und Präzision geprägte Ideen und Beobachtungen. Zahlreiche solcher Gedanken Brechts sind für sein Werk zentral und kehren an verschiedenen Stellen in ähnlicher, manchmal auch in gegensätzlicher Form wieder. Im vorliegenden Band geht es um Politisches, um Geld und Geschäfte, Endlichkeit und Tod, aber auch um Genuß und Sinnlichkeit, Kunst und Literatur - und immer wieder um die Liebe. Diese Lektüre für Minuten will erfreuen, belehren, trösten und ermutigen, erheitern und vor allem: vergnügen.