Joe Gould's Secret
10 best books like Joe Gould's Secret (Joseph Mitchell): Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany, The Horn, Red Hot and Holy: A Heretic's Love Story, Monsieur Proust's Library, The Treehorn Trilogy: The Shrinking of Treehorn, Treehorn's Treasure, and Treehorn's Wish, Motherpeace: A Way to the Goddess Through Myth, Art, and Tarot, Living Color: Painting, Writing, and the Bones of Seeing, A Woman Speaks: The Lectures, Seminars and Interviews of Anaïs Nin, The Imaginary World of..., The Kingdom and the Power: Behind the Scenes at The New York Times: The Institution That Influences the World
Escape Velocity: A Charles Portis Miscellany
| Author | Charles Portis |
| ISBN | 1935106503 |
Anyone who would consider picking this "miscellany" up is almost by definition a Portis die-hard already, but although it wouldn't make a very good introduction to his work for a newbie, it's still worth a read if you've already plowed through all five of his novels. According to the Introduction, this...
| Author | John Clellon Holmes |
| ISBN | 1560252065 |
Art in Evolution
In my childhood, it was customary for my parents to bring my brother and me to the French Market on Sundays to buy our weekly produce. It was on one of these occasions I heard the most amazing music. The song emitted through a radio owned by the man selling Creole tomatoes. I lingered...
| Author | Sera Beak |
| ISBN | 1622030532 |
When one person dares to speak her truth, it challenges us all to live our own. With Red Hot and Holy, Sera Beak offers a provocative and intimate view of what it means to get up close and personal with the divine in modern times.
With a rare combination of audacious wit, scholarly acumen, and tender...
| Author | Anka Muhlstein |
| ISBN | 1590515668 |
Reading was so important to Marcel Proust that it sometimes seems he was unable to create a fictional personage without a book in hand. Two hundred of his creatures inhabit his fictional world, and sixty writers hover over them. These writers--among them various classical authors of the seventeenth...
| Author | Florence Parry Heide |
| ISBN | 0810959941 |
Long ago I was a young reader growing up in the middle of nowhere (eleven miles from each of the three nearest towns, in fact). I didn't often get to the library, but I had a number of magazines and books thoughtfully delivered by the USPS. One of those magazines, a little digest-sized thing, included The...
| Author | Vicki Noble |
| ISBN | 0062510851 |
For over a decade, Motherpeace has been an inspiration and oracle for women all over the world. Motherpeace recovers the positive, nurturing peace-oriented values of prepatriarchal times, and brilliantly combines art, history, mythology, folklore, philosophy, and comparative religion with...
| Author | Natalie Goldberg |
| ISBN | 1617690848 |
From fill-in art journals to self-help books on creativity, more than ever the public is striving to bring artistic enlightenment into their everyday lives. In Living Color, one of the country’s most celebrated writers expounds on her own path to artistic inspiration. Tailored to a new generation...
| Author | Anaïs Nin |
| ISBN | 0804006946 |
A very thoughtful book indeed! What I liked most about the book is the voice that is so much hers. The thoughts expressed on a broad range of issues are heartfelt and lived. It is not like one theory is talking to another; it is more a zen-like person speaking to us a friend, and sharing what seems worth sharing....
| Author | Keri Smith |
| ISBN | 0399165258 |
What kind of world would you like to inhabit?
To imagine something different, better, or more interesting is to push the existing world into a state of change. Some of the greatest revolutionary acts of our time came to be because someone had the courage to imagine something new.
In...
| Author | Gay Talese |
| ISBN | 0812977688 |
Once upon a time, in the land of New York, there was a powerful and prestigious newspaper called the Times. It printed "all the news that's fit to print." Everyone thought it was the greatest and most perfect newspaper in the history of the world.
It wasn't.
Gay Talese's book, The Kingdom...
| Author | Bill Morgan |
| ISBN | 1416592423 |
2014 ACKER AWARD WINNER
Anyone who cares to understand the literary and cultural ferment of America in the later twentieth century must be familiar with the writings and lives of those scruffy bohemians known as the Beat Generation.
In this highly entertaining work, Bill Morgan,...
| Author | Karin Muller |
| ISBN | 0762702435 |
Imagine being a twenty-eight-year-old single woman, working your way up the management consulting ladder, with your own expense account a fancy gym membership and salary to spare. Now imagine throwing it all away to Hitchhike a country under the iron fist of communism with a dubious grip on the language,...
Moondog, The Viking of 6th Avenue: The Authorized Biography
| Author | Robert Scotto |
| ISBN | 0976082284 |
"Moondog is one of America’s great originals."—Alan Rich, New York Magazine
Here is one of the most improbable lives of the twentieth century: a blind and homeless man who became the most famous eccentric in New York and who, with enormous diligence, rose to prominence as an internationally...
| Author | Grace Paley |
| ISBN | 0140086412 |
A few hot human truthful words are powerful enough…
Reading Paley's collection is like having a conversation with someone who gets to the point in a few words, and I can appreciate a woman of necessary words. It's not too often that you come across a short story collection and you're immediately...
| Author | Philip Shaw |
| ISBN | 0826427928 |
Described as the perfect fusion of poetry and garage band rock and roll (the original concept was "rock and Rimbaud"), Horses belongs as much to the world of literary and cultural criticism as it does to the realm of musicology. While Horses pays homage to the record's origins in the nascent New York punk...
The Long-Winded Lady: Notes from The New Yorker
| Author | Maeve Brennan |
| ISBN | 0395893631 |
From 1954 to 1981, Maeve Brennan contributed to "The New Yorker's" "Talk of the Town" department under the pen name "the long-winded lady." Her unforgettable sketches--prose snapshots of life in the streets, diners, and cheap hotels just off Times Square--are a timeless, bittersweet tribute to...
Innocent When You Dream: The Tom Waits Reader
| Author | Tom Waits |
| ISBN | 1560256672 |
Over the past three decades, Tom Waits has achieved the kind of top-shelf cult status most artists only dream about. In his varied career, he has acted alongside Jack Nicholson, Meryl Streep, and Lily Tomlin; his songs have been covered by artists as diverse as Bruce Springsteen, Sarah McLachlan, the...
Why Write? Collected Nonfiction 1960-2013
| Author | Philip Roth |
| ISBN | 1598535404 |
Tracing the full span of Philip Roth’s career—from the early controversies surrounding the stories in Goodbye, Columbus to his recent assessments of his work and corrections of the record—Why Write? shows at every turn the vigor, acuity, and persuasive power of Roth’s brilliant nonfiction....
| Author | Kiki de Montparnasse |
| ISBN | 0880014962 |
Now appearing in English translation for the first time, these are the bold and sassy memoirs of the model who became the reigning queen of 1920s Paris - featuring many unpublished Man Ray photographs. A love child, she was born in Burgundy in 1901 and christened Alice Prin. Raised by her grandmother...
Man in Profile: Joseph Mitchell of The New Yorker
| Author | Thomas Kunkel |
| ISBN | 0375508902 |
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY • This fascinating biography reveals the untold story of the legendary New Yorker profile writer—author of Joe Gould’s Secret and Up in the Old Hotel—and unravels the mystery behind one of literary...
Detour: A Hollywood Story
| Author | Cheryl Crane |
| ISBN | 0877959382 |
This is a book I revisit several times a year. I guess being a fan of Lana Turner is part of it, but I have admiration for Cheryl Crane, as she is a true survivor. Her life is a fascinating, sometimes difficult read. And, despite all the problems between herself and her mother, you can always feel the love and...
Prick Up Your Ears: The Biography of Joe Orton
| Author | John Lahr |
| ISBN | 0520226666 |
John Lahr—New Yorker critic, novelist, and biographer of his father Bert Lahr (Notes on a Cowardly Lion)—reconstructs both the life and death of Joe Orton in another extraordinary biography that was chosen Book of the Year by Truman Capote and Nobel Prize-winning novelist Patrick White when...
Iphigenia in Forest Hills: Anatomy of a Murder Trial
| Author | Janet Malcolm |
| ISBN | 0300167466 |
"Astringent and absorbing. . . . Iphigenia in Forest Hills casts, from its first pages, a genuine spell — the kind of spell to which Ms. Malcolm’s admirers (and I am one) have become addicted."—Dwight Garner, New York Times
"She couldn't have done it and she must have done it." This is the...
Red Brick, Black Mountain, White Clay: Reflections on Art, Family, and Survival
| Author | Christopher E.G. Benfey |
| ISBN | 1594203261 |
When TLC Book Tours offered me the opportunity to review this book, I felt both excited and a little unsure. After all, even though I do study art history, American art, pottery and related topics are far from my expertise. I did worry I would have a hard time to get into it, but I shouldn’t have; Benfey’s...
