Search results for ""author laurie stone""

In this provocative collection of memoirs, eight acclaimed writers go about the risky business of telling their own secrets. Collectively, they provide what amounts to a psychic map of American life, from the streets of New York’s East Village–where Peter Trachtenberg’s affair with a fragile ex-prostitute becomes entwined with scenes from an imaginary film noir, to the trailer parks of southern California–where, in a last-ditch bid for affection, Terminator dresses in drag and seduces his abusive mother’s boyfriend. in between, Jane Creighton has an affair with her gentle, sickly brother; Lois Gould recalls Businessman–the flamboyant gentleman who had a string of red-haired mistresses and who, incidentally, was her father; Philip Lopate views his pathologically schlumpy dad in a nursing home; Laurie Stone searches for the connections between her creativity and her addiction to sex; Jerry Stahl remembers his rock-bottom days doing crack in Los Angeles; and Catherine Texier, an accomplished adult, meets her father for the first time in the south of France. In her introduction, award-winning critic Laurie Stone gives the genre an incisive once-over and explores the question: Why is memoir so dominant on the literary scene? These stories–filled with harrowing self-knowledge, as antic as they are haunting–go a long way toward answering that question.

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Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That Is Happening is a collection of hybrid feminist narratives that perfectly captures the many paradoxes of the COVID-19 pandemic, contrasting the seemingly never-ended public catastrophes we experienced as a collective with the isolated lives we carried out in private.Longlisted for the 2023 PEN Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of the Essay Shifting effortless between social commentary and memoir, glimpses of history and threads of fiction, Stone, a lifelong feminist and longtime contributor to the Village Voice and NPR's Fresh Air, unapologetically observes against the backdrop of a Zoom call the evolution of feminism over the years, the gendered sexual politics underlying Jeffrey Toobin's public disgrace, rage and hope on the heels of Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsberg's death, and the way we continue to pot and maintain our plants amidst the broken narrative of our world's future. As Stone says, It’s good this narrative has been broken. In the narrative that has been broken, people ignored the way so many things they wanted required the suffering of others. In a time when most of us felt more alone than ever before, Laurie Stone's Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That Is Happening is a retroactive but no less timely reminder that we were less alone in our thoughts than we thought.

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