Showing results for "Becomings" in World Literature

It's unprecedented, even in the 21st century, for a young Sicilian woman to incur infamy and defy the centuries old mandate, “Family is everything!” Twenty-two-year old Mariella Russo is desperate to flee Sicily, that, while her lifelong home, has become a claustrophobic island. She’s being relentlessly coerced into an engagement with her wealthy college sweetheart from a prominent, powerful, family, and her envious and erratic mother hopes the match will increase her own ignominious social status. To fight for independence and escape entrapment, Mariella flees to San Francisco.

Jack Kerouac was one of America's great writers of the latter half of the twentieth century, yet he endured a life characterized by persistent hardship and disillusion. Leading Kerouac scholar Paul Maher Jr. targets the writer's embattled insight of self as central to his life and work. He reveals how Kerouac's troubled interactions with alcohol, drugs, and spirituality stamped its importance on his autobiographical prose and poetry and created a singular language that united thoughts on the human condition and spiritual liberation.

William Faulkner was the greatest American novelist of the 20th century, yet he lived a life marked by a pervasive sense of failure. Throughout his career, he remained haunted by his inability to master a series of personal and professional challenges: his less-than-heroic military career; the loss of his brother in an airplane crash; a disappointing stint as a Hollywood screenwriter; and a destructive bout with alcoholism.

Bestselling author and beloved chronicler of Los Angeles D.J. Waldie reconsiders the city in a collection of contemporary essays. Becoming Los Angeles, a new collection by the author of the acclaimed memoir Holy Land, blends history, memory, and critical analysis to illuminate how Angelenos...

Although most famous for her bestselling fiction, including Fear of Flying and Any Woman's Blues, Erica Jong started her publishing career as a poet. The celebrated author enjoys an international reputation for her verse. An essential collection of poetry, Becoming Light includes early poems previously uncollected in book form, selections from her previous books, and many new poems. Erica Jong's poetry exhibits her rare gifts for inventiveness, wit, vigor, honesty, and accessibility. Critics have generously praised Jong's unique poetic voice.

A rousing, beautifully observed, and tender-hearted debut poetry collection about identity, culture, home, and belonging—for fans of Jasmine Mans and Fatimah Asghar “We, children of plátanos, always gotta learn to play in everyone else’s backyard and somehow feel at home.” Poet and...

Brought to you by Penguin. HOW FAR WILL WE GO TO BELONG? On the precipice of Y2K, unpaid intern Lily Chen is attempting to live the American dream in New York City. But her scientist parents imagined so much more for her when they fled Mao's cultural revolution, hoping for a better life. Despite...