Showing results by publisher "Tantor Audio" in Art & Literature

There is only one person who can tell Stieg Larsson's story better than he can, and that is his lifelong companion, Eva Gabrielsson. This is her book. Here, she tells the story of their 30-year romance; of Stieg's lifelong struggle to expose Sweden's neo-Nazis; of his struggle to keep the magazine he founded, Expo, alive; of his difficult relationships with his immediate family; and of the joy and the relief he discovered writing the Millennium trilogy.

The summer before she was set to head out of state to pursue her MFA, 26-year-old Cole Cohen submitted herself to a battery of tests. For as long as she could remember, she'd struggled with a series of learning disabilities that made it nearly impossible to judge time and space - standing at a crosswalk, she couldn't tell you if an oncoming car would arrive in 10 seconds or 30; if you asked her to let you know when 10 minutes had passed, she might notify you in a minute or an hour.

At age 25, Michael Hastings arrived in Baghdad to cover the war in Iraq for Newsweek. He had at his disposal a little Hemingway romanticism and all the apparatus of a 21st-century reporter: cell phones, high-speed Internet access, digital video cameras, fixers, drivers, guards, and translators.

An Oxford-educated scholar of the Middle East and a former foreign correspondent for the Wall Street Journal, Hugh Pope lived and worked in two dozen countries throughout the region. Following in the footsteps of Sir Richard Burton and Lawrence of Arabia, Hugh Pope's explorations of the people, politics, religion, and culture of Islamic nations shows there is no such thing as a monolithic "Muslim World".

Jonathan Franzen's work raises major questions about the possibilities of contemporary fiction: How does one appeal to a broad mass of mainstream readers on the one hand while persuading connoisseurs, on the other, that one's fiction has is high art? Even more acutely, how did Franzen move from the rage that animates his first two novels to the more generous comic stance of the two later novels, on which his reputation rests?

When 28-year-old San Francisco Daily Morning Call reporter Mark Twain met Tom Sawyer at a local bathhouse in 1863, he was seeking a subject for his first novel. As Twain steamed, played cards, and drank beer with Sawyer (a volunteer firefighter, customs inspector, and local hero responsible for having saved 90 lives at sea), he had second thoughts about Shirley Tempest, his proposed book about a local girl firefighter, and began to envision a novel of wider scope.

From top CNN anchor and special correspondent Soledad O'Brien comes a highly personal look at her biggest reporting moments, from Hurricane Katrina, the tsunami in Southeast Asia, and the devastating Haiti earthquake to historic elections and high-profile interviews with everyday Americans. Drawing on her own unique background and consciousness as well as her experiences as a journalist at the front lines of the most provocative issues in today's society.

A major, best-selling novelist and former magazine editor, long married to a handsome and successful stockbroker with whom she has a beautiful daughter and son, Benilde Little once had every reason to feel on top of the world. But as illness, the aging of her parents, and other hurdles interrupted her seemingly perfect life, she took a tailspin into a pit of clinical depression. Told in her own fearless and wise voice, Welcome to My Breakdown chronicles a cavern of depression so dark that Benilde didn't know if she'd ever recover.

When Andrew Offutt died, his son, Chris, inherited a desk, a rifle, and 1,800 pounds of pornographic fiction. Andrew had been considered the "king of 20th-century smut", with a writing career that began as a strategy to pay for his son's orthodontic needs and soon took on a life of its own, peaking during the 1970s, when the commercial popularity of the erotic novel reached its height. With his dutiful wife serving as typist, Andrew wrote from their home in the Kentucky hills, locked away in an office no one dared intrude upon.

Almost 200 years after her death, Austen remains a hot topic, and the current flare in the cultural zeitgeist echoes the continuous revival of her works, from the time of original publication through the 20th century. In Jane's Fame, Claire Harman gives us the complete biography of the author and analyzes her lasting cultural influence, making this essential listening for anyone interested in Austen's life, works, and remarkably potent fame.

Julia Ward (1819-1910) was an heiress and aspiring poet when she married Dr. Samuel Gridley Howe, an internationally acclaimed pioneer in the education of the blind. Together the Howes knew many of the key figures of their era, from Charles Dickens to John Brown. But Samuel also wasted Julia's inheritance, isolated and discouraged her, and opposed her literary ambitions. Julia persisted and continued to publish poems and plays while raising six children.

In 1940 Edmund Wilson was the undisputed big dog of American letters. Vladimir Nabokov was a near-penniless Russian exile seeking asylum in the States. Wilson became a mentor to Nabokov, introducing him to every editor of note, assigning to him book reviews for the New Republic, engineering a Guggenheim. Their intimate friendship blossomed over a shared interest in all things Russian, ruffled a bit by political disagreements. But then came Lolita, and suddenly Nabokov was the big (and very rich) dog.

When even his friends refer to him in print as "a balding, bug-eyed opportunist with the looks of a beach ball, the charisma of a glove-puppet, and an ego the size of a Hercules supply plane", the odds of Toby Young scoring, in any sense, appear to be slim. But then How to Lose Friends and Alienate People, his account of the five years he spent trying (and failing) to take Manhattan, improbably catapults Toby to best sellerdom, and his book is translated into 12 languages, including American.

Delve into the home of the world's most beloved bear! The Natural World of Winnie-the-Pooh explores the magical landscapes where Pooh, Christopher Robin, and their friends live and play. The Hundred Acre Wood - the setting for Winnie-the-Pooh's adventures - was inspired by Ashdown Forest, a wildlife haven that spans more than 6,000 acres in southeast England.

To his New York intellectual peers, Lionel Trilling could seem reserved and circumspect. But in his selected letters, Trilling is revealed in all his variousness and complexity. In Life in Culture, edited by Adam Kirsch, Trilling's letters add up to an intimate portrait of a great critic and of America's intellectual journey from the political passions of the 1930s to the cultural conflicts of the 1960s and beyond.

There's No Crying in Newsrooms tells the stories of remarkable women who broke through barrier after barrier at media organizations around the country over the past four decades. They started out as editorial assistants, fact checkers, and news secretaries and ended up running multi-million-dollar news operations that determine a large part of what Americans read, view, and think about the world.

"We are infinitely rich, yet we mess about with penny-in-the-slot machines," writes Brian W. Aldiss in this autobiographical work written over the course of one month. From his Oxfordshire home, he ruminates on dreams, education, the role of technology in our lives, the rise and function of science fiction, and a variety of other topics. The Shape of Further Things is a window into the life and mind of a Science Fiction Grand Master.

John Clellon Holmes met Jack Kerouac on a hot New York City weekend in 1948, and until the end of Kerouac's life they were—in Holmes's words—"Brother Souls." Late one night as they sat talking, Kerouac spontaneously created the term "Beat Generation" to describe this new attitude they felt stirring around them. Brother-Souls: John Clellon Holmes, Jack Kerouac, and the Beat Generation is the remarkable chronicle of this cornerstone friendship and the life of John Clellon Holmes.

Timothy O'Sullivan is America's most famous war photographer. You know his work even if you don't know his name: A Harvest of Death, taken at Gettysburg, is an icon of the Civil War. He was also among the first photographers to elevate what was then a trade to the status of fine art. The images of the American West he made after the war, while traveling with the surveys led by Clarence King and George Wheeler, display a prescient awareness of what photography would become; years later, Ansel Adams would declare his work "surrealistic and disturbing."

A Times former White House and investigative correspondent, Robert M. Smith, discloses how some stories make it to print, some do not, how the filters work, and how the paper may have suppressed the most important US political story of the day - Watergate. Smith shows how the paper stepped into the ring and begun slugging it out with President Trump, instead of staying outside the ring and neutrally reporting what it saw. The book argues that the paper would have been far more effective in countering and exposing the president if it had remained neutral.