“Jules WHO?” asks The Buffalo News in its review of Jules Feiffer’s forthcoming memoir, on sale tomorrow. Responding to its own rhetoric the article continues, “Jules Feiffer is one of the most important cultural figures of the last 50 years despite his current late-life obscurity among the young in his ninth decade on earth. . . At 81, [Feiffer’s] time has come. Again. And this wonderfully weird and revealing book proves it. [Backing Into Forward] has all the neurotic splendor and self-protective disingenuousness of truth. It’s by turns entertaining and gripping about the life of a wildly talented man who was bad at sports, bad at school (he never went to college and wasted years fearing discovery) and by his own cheerful admission, not all that great at drawing either. But look at the deeply neurotic and emaciated lines in any characteristic Feiffer cartoon. No one ever drew late-20th century urban American civilization any better. In memoir form, he’s grand company.”
More >This March Nan A. Talese/Doubleday will release Paul and Me, a memoir on Paul Newman, which Kirkus Reviews has dubbed, “an intimate, uplifting account of a profound friendship and a boyish lark that grew into a spectacularly successful enterprise.” Bestselling author A. E. Hotchner first met Newman during the production of a 1955 TV play that proved to be a turning point in both their careers. Together they founded Newman’s Own line of gourmet foods. Their friendship endured until Newman’s death in 2008.
More >About this guide
The questions, discussion topics, and author biography that follow are intended to enhance your group’s reading of Jill Ker Conway’s The Road from Coorain. We hope they will aid your understanding of the many rich themes that make up Conway’s story of her youth in mid-century Australia.
Conway recounts the successive phases of her [...]
Pulitzer Prize-winning humorist Jules Feiffer’s recognizable and subversive comic strips, which ran in the Village Voice as well as one hundred other papers, won him legions of fans. In his forthcoming memoir, Backing Into Forward, Feiffer delivers the same unique wit, self-deprecating humor and tight narration to tell the story of his own life, beginning with his childhood in the Bronx, “a daily exercise in confusion, endurance, fakery and cheating.” A recent Q&A in Martha’s Vineyard Magazine and an excerpt from the book (on sale March 16th) sheds light on the man, his career, and the projects he plans to tackle next. Read it here.
More >When she was fifteen, Sally Greenberg experienced a psychotic break and “was struck mad.”
In Hurry Down Sunshine, her father, Michael Greenberg, recounts the events in vivid detail—beginning with Sally’s visionary crack-up on the streets of Manhattan’s Greenwhich Village and continuing through her days in the otherworldly atmosphere of a psychiatric ward.
In her letter to readers of O, The Oprah Magazine, Oprah Winfrey said, “Hurry Down Sunshine is about tenacity and tenderness, feeling helpless but being present, about cracking up, then finding the wherewithal to glue the jagged piece of your mind back together again. But mostly, it’s about love.”
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Knopf
Doubleday
Pantheon
Vintage/Anchor