"National Book Award-winning biographer Deirdre Bair explores her fifteen remarkable years in Paris with Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir, painting intimate new portraits of two literary giants and revealing secrets of the biographical art. In 1971 Deirdre Bair was a journalist and recently minted Ph.D. who managed to secure access to Nobel Prize-winning author Samuel Beckett. He agreed that she could write his biography despite never having...

Recounts how the author fell in love with a veterinarian and pursued a family life replete with several pets, including a portly rooster who initially treated him as a male rival and eventually prompted inspirational realizations about love, acceptance, and change.

In a tribute to his late wife, Alice, and their relationship, the author celebrates the life of a remarkable woman who played a vital role in his life.

Introduction: Some kind of calling ; Buying hay -- Part one. Getting out. The tinnitus of truth telling ; Stacking wood ; Retethering ; Donkey chasing -- Part two. Digging in. The season of hunkering down ; Leonids ; Mother's Day storm ; Puppy ; A kind of quiet most people have forgotten ; Log chain ; The sound of horse teeth on hay ; Born in a barn ; Ranch archive ; First warm day ; Eating Phoebe ; Lambing -- Part three. Diary of a fire. Diary of...

The celebrated author shares the intimate story of her relationship with her mother, relating the events that prompted her mother to send young Angela to Arkansas to live with her grandmother and the complicated fallout that shaped their family life.

"J.D. Salinger, the mysterious author of The Catcher in the Rye, is remembered today as a litigious misanthrope who disowned his daughter. Jerome Charyn's Sergeant Salinger is a young WWII draftee assigned to the Counter Intelligence Corps, a band of secret soldiers who trained with the British. A rifleman and an interrogator, he witnessed all the horrors of the war-from the landing on D-Day to the relentless hand-to-hand combat in the hedgerows of...