Read Free Book: Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart from Claire Harman

On the two hundredth anniversary of her birth, a landmark biography transforms Charlotte Brontë from a tragic figure into a modern heroine.
 
Charlotte Brontë famously lived her entire life in an isolated parsonage on a remote English moor with a demanding father and siblings whose astonishing childhood creativity was a closely held secret. The genius of Claire Harman’s biography is that it transcends these melancholy facts to reveal a woman for whom duty and piety gave way to quiet rebellion and fierce ambition.

Drawing on letters unavailable to previous biographers, Harman depicts Charlotte’s inner life with absorbing, almost novelistic intensity. She seizes upon a moment in Charlotte’s adolescence that ignited her determination to reject poverty and obscurity: While working at a girls’ school in Brussels, Charlotte fell in love with her married professor, Constantin Heger, a man who treated her as “nothing special to him at all.” She channeled her torment into her first attempts at a novel and resolved to bring it to the world's attention.

Charlotte helped power her sisters’ work to publication, too. But Emily’s Wuthering Heights was eclipsed by Jane Eyre, which set London abuzz with speculation: Who was this fiery author demanding love and justice for her plain and insignificant heroine? Charlotte Brontë’s blazingly intelligent women brimming with hidden passions would transform English literature. And she savored her literary success even as a heartrending series of personal losses followed.

Charlotte Brontë is a groundbreaking view of the beloved writer as a young woman ahead of her time. Shaped by Charlotte’s lifelong struggle to claim love and art for herself, Harman’s richly insightful biography offers readers many of the pleasures of Brontë’s own work. Read Online Book Charlotte Brontë: A Fiery Heart from Claire Harman Full Free

Review :

“Just as Jane Eyre happily survives multiple readings, so does the story of Charlotte Brontë—particularly when in the hands of a gifted teller. Just in time for the bicentennial anniversary of Brontë’s birth, A Fiery Heart is an engrossing, almost novelistic tale of a woman who since childhood embraced an uncanny ability ‘to enter trance-like into her own imaginary world’ and find everlasting stories there ... Throughout we hear Brontë’s voice, with Harman’s chiming in alongside. Quite rightly for a work on Charlotte Brontë, one gets the sense of a sisterly collaboration.”
—Seattle Times
 
"Harman’s well-paced narrative and keen attention to the tentative and troubled way Charlotte adjusted to sudden fame make this latest version of a literary life all the more modern and captivating."
—San Francisco Chronicle

“A well-researched, wonderfully lucid, pleasingly written treatment of a most extraordinary woman ... What makes this biography such a rewarding work is the poise and easy confidence with which Harman summons character and creative imagination, not only Charlotte’s, but her sisters’ too, showing, most crucially, how Charlotte’s reading of their work unleashed a bold, hitherto absent ‘emotional force’ in her own writing ... Harman’s tart, understated wit and gift for quotation shine throughout ... Who can say at this point which is the best biography of Charlotte Brontë, but Harman’s is among them and perhaps the most engaging of all.” 
—Chicago Tribune
 
“Harman mines [Charlotte’s letters], which she credits as ‘the fullest and most suggestive source to date of Charlotte Brontë’s behavior and private opinions,’ with considerable subtlety ... Harman skillfully interweaves the correspondence with other sources, including autobiographical passages from the novels, to produce as intimate and nuanced an account of the writer’s life as we are likely to get ... Charlotte Brontë’s end seems to have been harrowing. But at least Harman’s meticulous, affectionate biography reassures us that her afterlife is in good hands.” 
—Los Angeles Times

"[A] masterly biography ... Harman leads readers on a precipitous journey through the writer’s interior landscape ... Harman’s psychologically astute portrait deftly bridges Charlotte’s world and her work."
—The New Yorker
 
“Lively ... [Charlotte Brontë] has found an affectionate champion in British biographer Claire Harman.” 
—Washington Post

"An irresistible read."
—Christian Science Monitor

"Two hundred years after her birth, Charlotte Bronte’s rage over social expectations for women and thwarted ambitions are as relevant as ever, and [this] new biography by Claire Harman makes the Jane Eyre author fresh and relatable to readers who might only think of the Brontes as figures long buried in tragic myth ... Harman’s Bronte is a fighter, with so much still to say."
—Associated Press

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Download Now Dimestore: A Writer's Life from Lee Smith

For the inimitable Lee Smith, place is paramount. For forty-five years, her fiction has lived and breathed with the rhythms and people of the Appalachian South. But never before has she written her own story.

Set deep in the mountains of Virginia, the Grundy of Lee Smith’s youth was a place of coal miners, tent revivals, mountain music, drive-in theaters, and her daddy’s dimestore. It was in that dimestore--listening to customers and inventing adventures for the store’s dolls--that she became a storyteller. Even when she was sent off to college to earn some “culture,” she understood that perhaps the richest culture she might ever know was the one she was driving away from--and it’s a place that she never left behind.

Dimestore’s fifteen essays are crushingly honest, wise and perceptive, and superbly entertaining. Smith has created both a moving personal portrait and a testament to embracing one’s heritage. It’s also an inspiring story of the birth of a writer and a poignant look at a way of life that has all but vanished. Read Online Book Dimestore: A Writer's Life from Lee Smith Full Free

Review :

“With restrained prose and charming humor, [Smith] illuminated a way of life that has all but disappeared and explores the impulse to bear witness that underpins the storyteller in all of us.” —People, Book of the Week
 
“…heartwarming… Dimestore shares the habits that may have saved Smith from her own tendency to get too “wrought up,” one of which was to approach storytelling “the way other people write in their journals,” in order to make it through the night. Fiction became her lifelong outlet, a means of sustaining and reaffirming the connection to her work, as well as a way to preserve the rich mountain culture she so loved as a child.” —AtlantaJournal-Constitution
 
“Dimestore may prove to be a work that connects wildly with readers. Because truth is often more powerful than fiction, and because the tale she has actually lived so far to tell is rendered keenly, irrepressibly and without self-pity. Lee Smith, the person, emerges as one of nonfiction’s great protagonists.” —Raleigh News & Observer

“Now, at last, we have Dimestore: A Writer’s Life, a seasoned, open-hearted memoir….  Yes, Lee Smith is a writer, and without that, we probably would not have this engrossing memoir. But at heart, Lee Smith is a woman – openhearted, spirited, humble – and it is those qualities especially that inspire and make us glad as we read.” —Charlotte Observer
 
“…profoundly readable… Like her novels, Smith’s memoir is intimate, as though writer and reader are sitting together on a front-porch swing. She writes in the rich vernacular of her youth. Smith’s details are so piercingly remembered, so vividly set on the page, that I felt wrapped in a great blanket of familiarity. Her memoir is a warm, poignant read about a lost time and place, a love of books and a celebration of the quirks and oddities of home.” —Minneapolis Star Tribune

“Lee Smith’s memoir, Dimestore, is both a gorgeous remembrance of an Appalachian girlhood and an engrossing look at the makings of a writer. Her recollections Saturday-evening bluegrass, molded pink salad, small-town community before the age of Wi-Fi and the electrifying childhood thrill of finding a good book invite us to revisit our vanishing past.” —MORE Magazine

“This memoir is Smith at her finest. There is not one false note in the book. This wonderful memoir—filled with tenderness, compassion, love, and humor—is highly recommended for fans of Smith’s fiction, lovers of Southern writing, and readers who are interested in the changes in small-town America.” —Library Journal, starred review

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Download At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others by Sarah Bakewell

From the best-selling author of How to Live, a spirited account of one of the twentieth century’s major intellectual movements and the revolutionary thinkers who came to shape it
 
Paris, 1933: three contemporaries meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are the young Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and longtime friend Raymond Aron, a fellow philosopher who raves to them about a new conceptual framework from Berlin called Phenomenology. “You see,” he says, “if you are a phenomenologist you can talk about this cocktail and make philosophy out of it!”
            
It was this simple phrase that would ignite a movement, inspiring Sartre to integrate Phenomenology into his own French, humanistic sensibility, thereby creating an entirely new philosophical approach inspired by themes of radical freedom, authentic being, and political activism. This movement would sweep through the jazz clubs and cafés of the Left Bank before making its way across the world as Existentialism.
            
Featuring not only philosophers, but also playwrights, anthropologists, convicts, and revolutionaries, At the Existentialist Café follows the existentialists’ story, from the first rebellious spark through the Second World War, to its role in postwar liberation movements such as anticolonialism, feminism, and gay rights. Interweaving biography and philosophy, it is the epic account of passionate encounters—fights, love affairs, mentorships, rebellions, and long partnerships—and a vital investigation into what the existentialists have to offer us today, at a moment when we are once again confronting the major questions of freedom, global responsibility, and human authenticity in a fractious and technology-driven world. Read Online Book At the Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails with Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Others by Sarah Bakewell Full Free

Review :

“At the Existentialist Café is a bracingly fresh look at once-antiquated ideas and the milieu in which they flourished. Ms. Bakewell’s approach is enticing and unusual: She is not an omniscient author acting as critic, biographer or tour guide. This book is full of winning small details. Some may find the description of Camus as ‘a simple, cheerful soul,’ as surprising as Sartre’s apparently charming Donald Duck imitation… ‘When reading Sartre on freedom, Beauvoir on the subtle mechanisms of oppression, Kierkegaard on anxiety, Camus on rebellion, Heidegger on technology or Merleau-Ponty on cognitive science,’ Ms. Bakewell writes, ‘one sometimes feels one is reading the latest news.’”—Janet Maslin, The New York Times

“Ms. Bakewell’s jaunty, colloquial style very successfully brought the ideas of Michel de Montaigne to a wide and general audience in her best-selling How to Live. The existentialists and their subtle differences from the phenomenologists in the context of World War II and its aftermath are a much greater challenge, which she meets with equal elan." —The Wall Street Journal“This lively history of the existentialist movement makes a strong, if sometimes disorienting, case for the inextricability of philosophy and biography, embedding dense concepts—such as ‘being,’ ‘nothingness,’ and ‘bad faith’—in the colorful lives and milieus of those who debated them. Though the book is in many ways a group study, dotted with cameo appearances by Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and others, it focusses on Heidegger and Sartre. Heidegger appears as oracular, hermetic, and Nazi-tainted; Sartre as intellectually promiscuous and Soviet-sympathizing. Their divergent characters and checkered reputations lend credence to Bakewell’s view that ‘ideas are interesting, but people are vastly more so.’” —The New Yorker


“Brisk and perceptive…A fresh, invigorating look into complex minds and a unique time and place.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

"Bakewell brilliantly explains 20th-century existentialism through the extraordinary careers of the philosophers who devoted their lives and work to 'the task of responsible alertness' and 'questions of human identity, purpose, and freedom.' Through vivid characterizations and a clear distillation of dense philosophical concepts, Bakewell embeds the story of existentialism in the 'story of a whole European century,' dramatizing its central debates of authenticity, rebellion, freedom, and responsibility." —Publishers Weekly (starred review)

“Bakewell follows her celebrated study of Montaigne…with a lively appraisal of existentialism and its leading thinkers…With coverage of friendship, travel, argument, tragedy, drugs, Paris, and, of course, lots of sex, Bakewell’s biographical approach pays off… The result is an engaging story about a group of passionate thinkers, and a reminder of their continued relevance.” —Booklist (starred review)

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Download Ebook: So Sad Today: Personal Essays from Melissa Broder

"These essays are sad and uncomfortable and their own kind of gorgeous. They reveal so much about what it is to live in this world, right now." --Roxane Gay, New York Timesbestselling author of Bad Feminist

From acclaimed poet and creator of the popular Twitter account @sosadtoday comes a darkly funny and brutally honest collection of essays.

Melissa Broder always struggled with anxiety. In the fall of 2012, she went through a harrowing cycle of panic attacks and dread that wouldn't abate for months. So she began @sosadtoday, an anonymous Twitter feed that allowed her to express her darkest feelings, and which quickly gained a dedicated following. In SO SAD TODAY, Broder delves deeper into the existential themes she explores on Twitter, grappling with sex, death, love low self-esteem, addiction, and the drama of waiting for the universe to text you back. With insights as sharp as her humor, Broder explores--in prose that is both ballsy and beautiful, aggressively colloquial and achingly poetic--questions most of us are afraid to even acknowledge, let alone answer, in order to discover what it really means to be a person in this modern world. Read Online Book So Sad Today: Personal Essays from Melissa Broder Full Free

Review :

"At once devastating and delightful, this deeply personal collection of essays (named for Broder's popular Twitter handle) is as raw as it is funny."―Cosmopolitan

"If her Twitter account is a darkly comic 'creative way to distract myself and cope,' as [Melissa Broder] describes it, then her essays are deeper excavations of that same mind."―Elle

"Broder may be talking about things like sexts, Botox, and crushes, but these things are considered alongside contemplations about mortality, identity, and the difficulty of finding substance in a world where sometimes it's so much easier to exist behind a screen."―The Fader

"Her writing is deeply personal, sophisticated in its wit, and at the same time, devastating. SO SAD TODAY is a portrait of modern day existence told with provocative, irreverent honesty."
―Nylon

"If Melissa Broder weren't so fucking funny I would have wept through this entire book. Love, sex, addiction, mental illness and childhood trauma all join hands and dance in a circle, to the tune of Melissa's unmatched wit and dementedly perfect take on this terrifying orb we call home."―LennyLetter.com

"Instead of supersizing her angsty tweets, Broder presents a dizzying array of intimate dispatches and confessions...She has a near-supernatural ability to not only lay bare her darkest secrets, but to festoon those secrets with jokes, subterfuge, deep shame, bravado, and poetic turns of phrase."―New York Magazine

"It would have been easy for Broder to stay anonymous and simply publish a book of @SoSadToday's most popular tweets, but instead, she chose to challenge herself in what turned out to be a triumph of unsettlingly relatable prose."―VanityFair.com

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Read Online Book The Bridge Ladies: A Memoir by Betsy Lerner

A fifty-year-old Bridge game provides an unexpected way to cross the generational divide between a daughter and her mother. Betsy Lerner takes us on a powerfully personal literary journey, where we learn a little about Bridge and a lot about life.

After a lifetime defining herself in contrast to her mother’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” generation, Lerner finds herself back in her childhood home, not five miles from the mother she spent decades avoiding. When Roz needs help after surgery, it falls to Betsy to take care of her. She expected a week of tense civility; what she got instead were the Bridge Ladies. Impressed by their loyalty, she saw something her generation lacked. Facebook was great, but it wouldn’t deliver a pot roast.

Tentatively at first, Betsy becomes a regular at her mother’s Monday Bridge club. Through her friendships with the ladies, she is finally able to face years of misunderstandings and family tragedy, the Bridge table becoming the common ground she and Roz never had.

By turns darkly funny and deeply moving, The Bridge Ladies is the unforgettable story of a hard-won—but never-too-late—bond between mother and daughter. Read Online Book The Bridge Ladies: A Memoir by Betsy Lerner Full Free

Review :

“A searching, funny, warm memoir.” (O, the Oprah Magazine)

“A heartfelt and affecting memoir.” (Washington Post)

“A smart and colorful memoir.” (Maureen Corrigan, NPR's Fresh Air)

“In her absorbing memoir, Lerner probes marriage, career, motherhood, depression, aging, death, religion and sex, discovering that, although the Bridge Ladies’ generation differs from hers, they share common values of love and kinship. This beautifully written, bittersweet story of ladies of a certain age and era will have wide appeal.” (Publishers Weekly (starred review))

“Through the alchemy of a grand game, Betsy Lerner has woven a universal coming-of-age story for both mother and daughter. A poignant, humorous and often painful struggle through the pageantry of playing cards; a woman’s face on every one.” (Patti Smith, author of Just Kids and M Train)

“Betsy Lerner’s ladies are our ladies, our mothers, grandmothers, and aunts. Lerner takes us back to their tables, capturing a group of wonderful American women—growing older now and braving new battles—with sweetness, humor and sharp perceptiveness. This is a book with heart and feeling.” (George Hodgman, author of Bettyville)

“Lerner takes us on a journey of understanding: the card game, the women who play it, their lives and relationships. In Lerner’s beautifully observed account, Bridge becomes both a literal and figurative pathway to repairing an even more precious bond: her own relationship to her mother.” (Deborah Tannen, author of You Just Don’t Understand and You're Wearing THAT?)
“The Bridge Ladies reminded me of Tuesdays with Morrie, except it takes place on Mondays and has five Morries. Exquisitely written, in this book are portraits of five women whose like we won’t see again. I devoured it in one greedy sitting, and started re-reading as soon as I finished.” (Will Schwalbe, author of the New York Times bestseller The End of Your Life Book Club)

“This is the best book about mothers and daughters I’ve read in decades, maybe ever. It’s about mother-daughter conflict, the desire to love and be loved, aging and loss, discovery and renewal. Betsy Lerner is a beautiful, achingly honest writer, and The Bridge Ladies is at once heartbreaking and hilarious.” (Amy Chua, Yale Law Professor and author of Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother and The Triple Package: How Three Unlikely Traits Explain the Rise and Fall of Cultural Groups in America)

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Read Online Book Lust & Wonder: A Memoir by Augusten Burroughs

The instant New York Times bestseller

Lust: 1. intense sexual desire or appetite
2.a passionate or overmastering desire or craving
3.ardent enthusiasm; zest; relish.

Wonder: 1. something strange and surprising; a cause of surprise, astonishment,or admiration
2. the emotion excited by what is strange and surprising; a feeling of surprised or puzzled interest, sometimes tinged with admiration
3. a miraculous deed or event; remarkable phenomenon

From the beloved #1 New York Times bestselling author comes an intimate look at the driving forces in one man’s life.

With Augusten's unique and singular observations and his own unabashed way of detailing both the horrific and the humorous, Lust and Wonder is a hilariously frank memoir that his legions of fans have been waiting for. His story began in Running with Scissors, endured through Dry, and continues with this memoir, the capstone to the life of Augusten Burroughs.

Funny, sweet, alarming, and ultimately, moving and tender, Lust & Wonder is an experience of a book that will resonate with anyone who has loved and lost and loved again. Read Online Book Lust & Wonder: A Memoir by Augusten Burroughs Full Free

Review :

“All of the wisdom he dispenses in his new book-delivered with the dark, acidic humor we've come to expect-is certainly well-earned.” ―The Boston Globe on This is How

“Dry is more than a heartbreaking tale; it's a heroic one. As with its predecessor, we finish the book amazed not only that Burroughs can write so brilliantly, but that he's even alive.” ―People on Dry

“It makes a good run at blowing every other [memoir] out of the water.” ―Carolyn See, The Washington Post on Running with Scissors

“Funny and rich with child's eye details of adults who have gone off the rails.” ―The New York Times Book Review on Running with Scissors

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