Böcker av Carmela Ciuraru

?Delicious and infuriating . . . unputdownable.??Sadie Stein, The New York Times?A tour de force. . . . The stories are gripping, horrific and sometimes funny, but most important of all they are important.??The Washington Post?A compulsively readable book.??The Wall Street Journal?Enthralling . . . incendiary reading.??Daphne Merkin, Air MailIn Lives of the Wives, author Carmela Ciuraru offers a witty, provocative look inside the tumultuous marriages of five famous writers, illuminating the creative process as well as the role of money, fame, and power in these complex and fascinating relationships.The legendary British theater critic Kenneth Tynan encouraged his American wife, Elaine Dundy, to write, then watched in a jealous rage as she became a bestselling author. In their early years of marriage, Roald Dahl enjoyed basking in the glow of his glamorous movie star wife, Patricia Neal, until he detested her for being wealthier and more famous. Elizabeth Jane Howard had to divorce Kingsley Amis to escape his suffocating needs and pursue her own writing. In the marriage of the Italian novelists Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia, it was Morante who often behaved abusively toward her cool, detached husband, even as he unwaveringly championed his wife's talent and work. The most conventional partnership is a lesbian couple, Una Troubridge and Radclyffe Hall, both of whom were socially and politically conservative and unapologetic snobs.Lives of the Wives is an erudite, entertaining project of reclamation and reparation, paying tribute to the wives who were often demonized and misrepresented, and revealing the price they paid for recognition and freedom.

Exploring the fascinating stories of more than a dozen authorial impostors across several centuries and cultures, Carmela Ciuraru plumbs the creative process and the darker, often crippling aspects of fame.Only through the protective guise of Lewis Carroll could a shy, half-deaf Victorian mathematician at Oxford feel free to let his imagination run wild. The "three weird sisters" from Yorkshire?the Brontës?produced instant bestsellers that transformed them into literary icons, yet they wrote under the cloak of male authorship. Bored by her aristocratic milieu, a cigar-smoking, cross-dressing baroness rejected the rules of propriety by having sexual liaisons with men and women alike, publishing novels and plays under the name George Sand. Highly accessible and engaging, these provocative stories reveal the complex motives of writers who harbored secret identities?sometimes playfully, sometimes with terrible anguish and tragic consequences. Part detective story, part exposé, part literary history, Nom de Plume is an absorbing psychological meditation on identity and creativity.

Many kinds of equine characters grace these pages, from magnificent war horses to cowboys' trusty steeds, from broken-down nags to playful colts, from wild horses to dream horses.

A celebration of fathers and fatherhood, this anthology features the richly varied voices of sons and daughters, and of fathers and grandfathers themselves.

From tenth-century Japan's Izumi Shikibu, colonial America's Anne Bradstreet, and Victorian England's Elizabeth Barrett Browning to Israel's Yehuda Amichai, Ireland's Paul Muldoon, and Russia's Anna Akhmatova, poets across the centuries and around the world have immortalized this elemental relationship.

The defining work of Allen Ginsberg and Jack Kerouac provides the foundation for this collection, which also features the improvisational verse of such Beat legends as Gregory Corso, Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Gary Snyder and Michael McClure and the work of such women writers as Diane di Prima and Denise Levertov.

If you believe that a dog is man's - and woman's - best friend, this is the anthology for you: six hundred years of reflections on the virtues (and some of the vices) of canine kind.