Kirjahaku

In “Cotton County,” the first of the dual memoirs in The Land and the Days, acclaimed author Tracy Daugherty describes the forces that shape us: the “rituals of our regions” and the family and friends who animate our lives and memories. Combining reminiscence, history, and meditation, Daugherty retraces his childhood in Texas and Oklahoma, where he first encountered the realities of politics, race, and class. As a child in the early 1960s, Daugherty lived with his parents and sister in West Texas. And yet from a young age, in the author’s recounting, he was just as much at home in the small town of Walters, Oklahoma, where his grandparents lived and where he and his family often visited. A cattle and oil town just a few miles north of the Red River, Walters seemingly belonged to another realm. In sensory detail, Daugherty evokes the old-fashioned atmosphere of his grandparents’ home, the “tastes, smells, and textures: fried okra, mothballs, cotton batting—radiators and ancient typewriters.” These were things, he explains, that he experienced only in Oklahoma. The “Unearthly Archives,” the second of Daugherty’s memoirs, expands the realistic accounts of the first narrative, providing a meditation on the meaning of grief. Daugherty demonstrates his curiosity and indefatigable quest for understanding and closure by examining his life-long store of literary readings, as well as the music he loves, to discover the true value of a life dedicated to art. Whereas the first narrative explores daily family life, setting up what will be the huge loss of his parents, the second examines questions of death, grief, creativity, and the meaning of memory. As he mourns the loss of his parents, Daugherty reckons with his own mortality and finds himself confronting such fundamental questions as, How does individual consciousness develop? What can music, art, and literature teach us about life’s experiences? And finally, Is there a soul? The Land and the Days addresses these eternal questions with uncommon honesty and grace.

George Harrison met Muhammad Ali in 1964, when both men were on the cusp of worldwide fame. Ten years later, the two men simultaneously staged comebacks, demonstrating just how much they embodied the promises and perils of their era. In doing so, Tracy Daugherty suggests, they revealed the scope and the limits of political courage and commitment to faith in the modern world. We Shook Up the World is the story of these two larger-than-life figures at a momentous time. A unique blend of biography and cultural history, this book goes to the very heart of the zeitgeist that each man inhabited and reinvented in profound and enduring ways. In 1974, deep in the Pennsylvania woods, thirty-two-year-old Muhammad Ali was seeking renewal, training to regain his heavyweight boxing title in a fight with George Foreman, and exploring questions about his politics, his career, and his life. Meanwhile, George Harrison was thirty-one years old. With the Beatles disbanded, his marriage ending, and the loss of his mother still fresh, he traveled to India to revitalize his faith, energy, and musical spirit, seeking renewal at the Hindu holy city of Varanasi. In contemplating how these two complex figures managed to carry the cultural rebelliousness and spiritual yearning of the 1960s into a new era of cataclysmic political, economic, and social change, We Shook Up the World offers an intimate perspective on two outsize figures in the nation’s and the world’s cultural history, and a new understanding of their unique contributions to the consciousness of their time and ours.

With Let Us Build Us a City Tracy Daugherty considers the principles of literary art in a series of essays that focus on the nature of artistic vision and the creative individual’s relationship to the world. The book reads like a master class on writing as practice, while performing a deep reading of art and life and looking to discern why liberal education matters so much to our society.At its core, Let Us Build Us a City is a work of cultural and literary history, combining memoir (of the author’s experiences as a student and teacher of literature and writing) with analysis and speculation. Daugherty exploits a variety of forms to explore literary apprenticeship and mentoring, philosophy, politics, metaphysics, and American history.In particular, Daugherty focuses on the creative impulse and the diverse ways in which individual writers apply their imaginations to their craft. Along the way, he offers multiple lace of creative practice within it. Let Us Build Us a City is a stirring defense and timely renewal of our national literary vision.

In over forty books, in a career that spanned over sixty years, Larry McMurtry staked his claim as a superior chronicler of the American West, and as the Great Plains’ keenest witness since Willa Cather and Wallace Stegner. Larry McMurtry: A Life traces his origins as one of the last American writers who had direct contact with this country’s pioneer traditions. It follows his astonishing career as bestselling novelist, Pulitzer-Prize winner, author of the beloved Lonesome Dove, Academy-Award winning screenwriter, public intellectual, and passionate bookseller. A sweeping and insightful look at a versatile, one-of-a-kind American writer, this book is a must-read for every Larry McMurtry fan.

In over forty books, in a career that spanned over sixty years, Larry McMurtry staked his claim as a superior chronicler of the American West, and as the Great Plains’ keenest witness since Willa Cather and Wallace Stegner. Larry McMurtry: A Life traces his origins as one of the last American writers who had direct contact with this country’s pioneer traditions. It follows his astonishing career as bestselling novelist, Pulitzer-Prize winner, author of the beloved Lonesome Dove, Academy-Award winning screenwriter, public intellectual, and passionate bookseller. A sweeping and insightful look at a versatile, one-of-a-kind American writer, this book is a must-read for every Larry McMurtry fan.

In the spare and deliberate stories in The Empire of the Dead, through situations both comic and bluntly melancholy, the future remains open for people - but at an indeterminate cost. Daily, characters weigh their indecision against the consequences of choice. Through a series of five linked stories, we meet Bern, a New York City architect yearning for a return to "first principles" - the "initial euphoria, the falling-in-love" that led him to consider a life devoted to sheltering others. In his ministrations to colleagues and friends, his memories of magical building feats now in the past, he learns the limits and the expansiveness of joy and need. In another tale, we meet a young painter in a Gulf Coast refinery town struggling to differentiate beauty from affliction. His sister's encounter with the singer Janis Joplin causes him to reconsider the nature of saintliness. And in the novella "The Magnitudes," a planetarium director, grieving over the unexpected loss of his parents, must learn how much of the universe - both the real sky beyond his reach and the firmament cast upon the planetarium dome - he can control. Like the other characters in Tracy Daugherty's masterful collection, he moves through spaces at once sacred and spoiled, within cities, deserts, and other strange environments, reckoning, taking soundings, trying to find firm footing in the world.

Acclaimed by critics as a second F. Scott Fitzgerald, Billy Lee Brammer was once one of the most engaging young novelists in America. “Brammer’s is a new and major talent, big in scope, big in its promise of even better things to come,” wrote A. C. Spectorsky, a former staffer at the New Yorker. When he published his first and only novel, The Gay Place, in 1961, literary luminaries such as David Halberstam, Willie Morris, and Gore Vidal hailed his debut. Morris deemed it “the best novel about American politics in our time.” Halberstam called it “a classic . . . [a] stunning, original, intensely human novel inspired by Lyndon Johnson. . . . It will be read a hundred years from now.” More recently, James Fallows, Gary Fisketjon, and Christopher Lehmann have affirmed The Gay Place’s continuing relevance, with Lehmann asserting that it is “the one truly great modern American political novel.”Leaving the Gay Place tells a sweeping story of American popular culture and politics through the life and work of a writer who tragically exemplifies the highs and lows of the country at mid-century. Tracy Daugherty follows Brammer from the halls of power in Washington, DC, where he worked for Senate majority leader Johnson, to rock-and-roll venues where he tripped out with Janis Joplin, and ultimately to back alleys of self-indulgence and self-destruction. Constantly driven to experiment with new ways of being and creating-often fueled by psychedelics-Brammer became a cult figure for an America on the cusp of monumental change, as the counterculture percolated through the Eisenhower years and burst out in the sixties. In Daugherty’s masterful recounting, Brammer’s story is a quintessential American story, and Billy Lee is our wayward American son.

Acclaimed by critics as a second F. Scott Fitzgerald, Billy Lee Brammer was once one of the most engaging young novelists in America. “Brammer’s is a new and major talent, big in scope, big in its promise of even better things to come,” wrote A. C. Spectorsky, a former staffer at the New Yorker. When he published his first and only novel, The Gay Place, in 1961, literary luminaries such as David Halberstam, Willie Morris, and Gore Vidal hailed his debut. Morris deemed it “the best novel about American politics in our time.” Halberstam called it “a classic . . . [a] stunning, original, intensely human novel inspired by Lyndon Johnson. . . . It will be read a hundred years from now.” More recently, James Fallows, Gary Fisketjon, and Christopher Lehmann have affirmed The Gay Place’s continuing relevance, with Lehmann asserting that it is “the one truly great modern American political novel.”Leaving the Gay Place tells a sweeping story of American popular culture and politics through the life and work of a writer who tragically exemplifies the highs and lows of the country at mid-century. Tracy Daugherty follows Brammer from the halls of power in Washington, DC, where he worked for Senate majority leader Johnson, to rock-and-roll venues where he tripped out with Janis Joplin, and ultimately to back alleys of self-indulgence and self-destruction. Constantly driven to experiment with new ways of being and creating-often fueled by psychedelics-Brammer became a cult figure for an America on the cusp of monumental change, as the counterculture percolated through the Eisenhower years and burst out in the sixties. In Daugherty’s masterful recounting, Brammer’s story is a quintessential American story, and Billy Lee is our wayward American son.

Tracy Daugherty’s historical novel 148 Charles Street explores the fascinating story of Willa Cather’s friendship with Elizabeth Shepley Sergeant. The women shared a passion for writing, for New York, and for the desert Southwest, but their sensibilities could not have been more different: Cather, the novelist of lyrical landscapes and aesthetic refinement, and Sergeant, the muckraking journalist and literary activist. Their friendship is sorely tested when Cather fictionalizes a war that Sergeant covered as a reporter, calling into question, for both women, the uses of art and journalism, the power of imagination and witness. 148 Charles Street is a testament to the bonds that endure despite disagreements and misunderstandings, and in the relentlessness of a vanishing past.148 Charles Street explores, as only fiction can, the two writers’ interior lives, and contrasts Sergeant’s literary activism with Cather’s more purely aesthetic approach to writing.

In The Last Love Song, Tracy Daugherty, the critically acclaimed author of Hiding Man (a New York Times Notable book) and Just One Catch, delves deep into the life of distinguished American author and journalist Joan Didion in this, the first printed biography published about her life.Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in New York City, when Didion was at Vogue and Dunne was writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and cowrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and nonfiction. Some of her most notable work includes Slouching towards Bethlehem, Run River, and The Year of Magical Thinking, a National Book Award winner short-listed for the Pulitzer Prize. Daugherty takes listeners on a journey back through time, following a young Didion in Sacramento through to her adult life as a writer. Daugherty interviews those who know and knew her personally while maintaining a respectful distance from the reclusive literary great.The Last Love Song reads like fiction; lifelong fans and listeners learning about Didion for the first time will be enthralled with this impressive tribute.

High Skies recounts the collision of devastating weather, Cold War suspicion, tense race relations, and the unintended consequences of good intentions in a small West Texas town in the 1950s, changing the futures of the families there and altering their perceptions of America. At the center of this perfect storm is Raymond “Flyboy” Seaker, a respected military veteran, now the vice principal of a school in which Troy, who tells the story, and his disabled friend Stevie will have their lives upended forever. Through a combination of his own well-meaning ambitions and the political maneuverings of others, Flyboy and the families he serves come to grasp the meaning of community and of individual fortitude. Written with a vivid economy recalling Denis Johnson’s Train Dreams and painting as indelible a portrait of small town life as Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, High Skies is a perfectly distilled American epic.

The novellas and stories in American Originals convey the power of the West Texas desert to swallow people—literally, or through the rituals of labor, or through the raptures of ecstatic vision, induced by blessings or madness—and people’s ability to forgeconnections in spite of extreme conditions. Each piece in thisthematically-linked collection assumes a unique shape, whetherpoetically compressed, echoing (only to break) the contours ofmystery stories, or redolent of the forms of classical prayer. TheTexas of American Originals becomes the landscape of strife andhope, struggle and love, lost and found.The characters in the stories and novellas here learn, sometimesthe hard way, the truth of T. S. Eliot’s insight that the “end of allour exploring” in life is to “arrive where we started” and to know,for the first time, who we really are. Saints and sinners, and theblurred lines between them, drive these spare narratives set in theplains and deserts of Texas.

Fictionalized accounts of John Howard Griffin, Jack Elliott Myers, and Anna Akhmatova, portraying the struggles and sacrifices of the writing life.Tracy Daugherty is an acclaimed biographer of authors, as well as a distinguished fiction author in his own right. In SNOW AND STRAW he braids together these two skills, presenting three novellas that offer fictionalized accounts of the lives of very disparate writers: John Howard Griffin, Jack Elliott Myers, and Anna Akhmatova. What connects their stories--aside from Daugherty's mastery of language and narrative--is the insight they offer into the writing life. All three of his subjects, along with a wide cast of other characters real and imagined who populate their stories (including, in the Griffin account, a vivid portrait of Thomas Merton), are human, all too human, and Daugherty grants them their flaws along with their achievements--suggesting, in the process, that it may not be possible to separate the two. He also demonstrates, compelling, that sometimes it is fiction that conveys the greatest truths.Fiction.