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BOYS
AND GIRLS FOREVER
(2003)
| In
this engaging series of essays, Pulitzer Prize-winning author
Alison Lurie explores the theory that the best children's books
authors have often preferred the world of young people to the
world of adults. Lurie looks at children's classics from every
era and relates them to the authors who wrote them, including
Little Women author Louisa May Alcott and Wizard
of Oz author Frank Baum, as well as Dr. Seuss and Salman
Rushdie. In the Process she reveals how these gifted writers
have used children's literature to transfigure sorrow, nostalgia,
and the struggles of their own experiences. |
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| THE
LANGUAGE OF CLOTHES
(1991)
| "[T]here's
a certain relentlessness about a book that tries to explain
everything from the meaning of the color blue . . .to the
semiotics of dotted bow ties . . .So, though Miss Lurie writes
clearly and wittily, 'The Language of Clothes' is a book to
be consumed with intermittent bites." |
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| DON'T
TELL THE GROWN-UPS:
SUBVERSIVE CHILDREN'S
LITERATURE
(1990)
| "[S]he
has taken her research seriously and made both the authors
and their surprising subversions of convention accessible
to us. It should never be too late to see through a child's
unjaded, penetrating eye." |
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| V.
R. LANG'S POEMS AND PLAYS
With
a memoir by Alison Lurie (1975)
| ".
. . a fascinating memoir . . . raises questions about the
importance of its heroine: Bunny Lang, a gifted eccentric
who lived in Cambridge in the fifties and was one of the founders
of the Poets' Theater." |
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| FAMILIAR
SPIRITS
A Memoir of James Merrill
and David Jackson
(2001)
| "Extraterrestrial''
isn't exactly the first word that comes to mind when you hear
the name of James Merrill (1926-95), the American poet who
during the course of a staggeringly successful 50-year career
won two National Book Awards, a National Book Critics Circle
Award, a Pulitzer Prize, a Bollingen Prize and the Library
of Congress's Bobbitt National Prize for Poetry -- to say
nothing of a shelfload of other honors and distinctions. But
that's what Alison Lurie, in her new memoir of her 40-year
friendship with Merrill and his longtime companion, David
Jackson, calls him -- twice. ...but as with the unexpected
but brilliant characterization of Merrill with which it opens,
it offers a lot of interesting suggestions." |
Read
the first chapter
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