Search results for ""Author W. D. Wetherell""

Where We Live is master story-teller W. D. Wetherell's fifth story collection, and his first in ten years, bringing together the best of his recent fictions. The stories exemplify the qualities readers and critics have praised in the past, while continuing to explore new directions in style, theme, and characterization. He illumines contemporary American life and culture by focusing on the forgotten places and people living on the edges, from a young Somali immigrant who finds an unlikely mentor in his attempt to come to terms with his new home, to a widower faced with the everyday challenges of his first day alone.

Read more less

As the world commemorates the hundredth anniversary of World War I, the literary canon of the war has consolidated around the memoirs written in the years after the Armistice by soldier-writers who served in the trenches. Another kind of Great War literature has been almost entirely ignored: the books written and published during the war by the greatest English, American, French, and German writers at work—books that show us how the best, most influential writers responded to an overpowering human and cultural catastrophe.Where Wars Go to Die: The Forgotten Literature of World War I explores this little-known cache of contemporary writings by the greatest novelists, poets, playwrights, and essayists of the war years, examining their interpretations and responses, weaving excerpts and quotations from their books into a narrative that focuses on the various ways civilian writers responded to an overwhelming historical reality.The authors whose war writings are presented include George Bernard Shaw, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, H. G. Wells, Edith Wharton, Maurice Maeterlinck, Henri Bergson, W. E. B. Du Bois, Romain Rolland, Thomas Mann, Thomas Hardy, May Sinclair, W. B. Yeats, Ring Lardner, Reinhold Niebuhr, and dozens more of equal stature.Intended for the general reader as much as the specialist, Where Wars Go to Die breaks important new ground in the history and literature of World War I.Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

Read more less

In a refreshing departure from today’s celebrity worship cultivated by reality television, tabloid photos, and celebrity twittering, award-winning novelist W. D. Wetherell's On Admiration celebrates the heroes and heroines who have peopled his life from his earliest years. Writers, singers, presidents, athletes, cartoonists, artists, activists, and many more are examined here—from Henry David Thoreau to Willa Cather to Albert Camus to Dwight D. Eisenhower to Winston Churchill to Beverly Sills—in this humorous, insightful memoir that speaks powerfully about the state of fame, celebrity culture, and honest admiration. Wetherell skillfully reminds us of the magic and mystery that comes with slow discovery—of that first awareness of those figures who awoke something within us, that inspired us as children, teenagers, and adults—forever altering the landscape of ourselves. From visiting Herman Melville’s study where Melville wrote Moby Dick to being a Rangers fan living in NYC—Wetherell examines the meaning of the American cultural landscape—and its remnants—in a candid and personal memoir like no other before him. With this lively and exacting series of pop culture essays, Wetherell joins the ranks of David Foster Wallace, Jonathan Franzen, and Chuck Klosterman.

Read more less

When Vera decides to travel to an old house in the New England countryside for a month-long escape from some devastating news about her daughter, Cassie, she has no idea her life is about to change forever. It begins innocently enough—peeling the old wallpaper from the walls as a favor to the house’s owner. What she discovers underneath—written in India ink on the very walls of the house by a woman named Beth, in 1919—is the beginning of the reader’s unsettling crossing into the unknown world underneath the paper.The Writing on the Wall is a brilliantly realized journey into the connected lives of three women whose stories span a century, linked by the house they all briefly inhabit, and by the tragedies they've had to endure. And it's not just their own stories that reveal themselves. A brilliant schoolteacher, back from the war in the trenches, finds the pupils of his dreams. A young Vietnam draftee makes a stubbornly quirky separate peace. The moody, dangerously charismatic leader of a commune becomes the unlikeliest of heroes. An “ordinary” housewife's lonely battle propels her onto the national stage. A girl sent to Iraq tries making sense of the chaos and the pain. The Writing on the Wall is about stories that can't be told, but must be told—about secrets that can't be shared, but must be shared—and the surprising ways people find to confront the truth.

Read more less