Search results for ""Author Joan Acocella""

A collection of the New Yorker critic''s finest essays, which examine the books that reveal and record our world.Joan Acocella was one of our finest cultural critics (Edward Hirsch), and she had the rare ability to examine literature and unearth the lives contained within itits authors, its subjects, and the communities from which it springs. In her hands, arts criticism was a celebration and an investigation, and her essays pulse with unadulterated enthusiasm. As Kathryn Harrison wrote in The New York Times Book Review, Hers is a vision that allows art its mystery but not its pretensions, to which she is acutely sensitive. What better instincts could a critic have?The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays gathers twenty-four essays from the final decade and a half of Acocella's career, as well as an introduction that frames her simple preoccupations: life and art. In agile, inspired prose, she moves from J. R. R. Tolkie

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From 1985 to 1995 an estimated 40,000 Americans, most of themwomen, were told they suffered from multiple personality disorder.Feminists, fundamentalists, and a substantial portion of the mentalhealth community Andorsed this "Sybil-ing" of America.Sensation-seeking television talk shows took up the MPD rallyingcry. In Creating Hysteria, Joan Acocella tells a riveting tale oftherapists betraying their patients, of a psychotherapy professionat war within its own ranks, and finally of expatients rising upand putting an And to the MPD scandal. "Creating Hysteria exposes one of the most frightening mentalrollercoaster rides taken by thousands of people in modern times.Joan Acocella brilliantly illuminates how the mental healthprofession spearheaded, perhaps inadvertently, a fin-de-sieclehysteria, the fallout from which will take us into the nextmillennium. Anyone who has ever been interested in mental healthshould read this book."--Elizabeth Loftus, president, AmericanPsychological Society

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The visionary choreographer and dancer Isadora Duncan (1877–1927) not only revolutionized dance in the twentieth century but blazed a path for other visionaries who would follow in her wake. While many biographies have explored Duncan’s crucial role as one of the founders of modern dance, no other book has proved as critical—as both historical record and vivid evocation of a riveting life—as her autobiography. From her early enchantment with classical music and poetry to her great successes abroad, to her sensational love affairs and headline-grabbing personal tragedies, Duncan’s story is a dramatic one. My Life still stands alone as “a great document, revealing the truth of her life as she understood it, without reticence or apology or compromise” (New York Herald Tribune). Now, in this fully restored edition, with its risqué recollections and fervent idealism, My Life can be appreciated by a new generation.

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In The Bloody Chamber, Carter's famous collection of deeply unsettling stories inspired by fairy tales, a Beauty is turned into a Beast and Little Red Riding's grandmother is stoned to death as a witch; a young music student is swept off her feet in Paris by a middle-aged aristocrat and transported to his ancestral abode to re-enact the story of Bluebeard against a sumptuous fin de siècle background; a British soldier on a cycling holiday in Transylvania in the summer of 1914 finds himself the guest of an alluring female vampire. By contrast, in Wise Children, Carter's last novel), the comic, the bawdy and the life-enhancing prevail. An irrepressible elderly lady recalls the many colourful decades she and her sister spent as vaudeville performers - a tale as full of twins and mistaken identities as any plot of Shake- speare's. The early collection, Fireworks, reveals Carter taking her first forays into the fantastic writing that was to become her unforgettable legacy. The Everyman's Library omnibus gathers the best of Angela Carter in one astonishing volume.

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