Author: Sarah Ruhl Publisher: Milkweed Editions ISBN: 157131976X Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 240
Book Description
A real professor and her student forge a friendship through correspondence as they discuss love, art, life, cancer, and death. In 2012, Sarah Ruhl was a distinguished author and playwright, twice a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize. Max Ritvo, a student in her playwriting class at Yale University, was an exuberant, opinionated, and highly gifted poet. He was also in remission from pediatric cancer. Over the next four years—in which Ritvo’s illness returned and his health declined, even as his productivity bloomed—the two exchanged letters that spark with urgency, humor, and the desire for connection. Reincarnation, books, the afterlife as an Amtrak quiet car, good soup: in Ruhl and Ritvo’s exchanges, all ideas are fair, nourishing game, shared and debated in a spirit of generosity and love. “We’ll always know one another forever, however long ever is,” Ritvo writes. “And that’s all I want—is to know you forever.” Studded with poems and songs, Letters from Max is a deeply moving portrait of a friendship, and a shimmering exploration of love, art, mortality, and the afterlife. Praise for Letters from Max “An unusual, beautiful book about nothing less than the necessity of art in our lives. Two big-hearted, big-brained writers have allowed us to eavesdrop on their friendship: jokes and heartbreaks, admiration, hard work, tender work.” —Elizabeth McCracken, author of Bowlaway “Immediate comparisons will be made to Rainer Maria Rilke’s Letters to a Young Artist . . . this book is a nuanced look at the evolution of an incredible talent facing mortality and the mentor, never condescending, who recognizes his gift. Their infectious letters shine with a love of words and beauty.” —The Observer “Deeply moving, often heartbreaking. . . . A captivating celebration of life and love.” —Kirkus Reviews “Moving and erudite . . . devastating and lyrical . . . Ruhl draws a comparison between their correspondence and that between poets Robert Lowell and Elizabeth Bishop, and indeed, with the depth and intelligence displayed, one feels in the presence of literary titans.” —Publishers Weekly
Author: Sarah Ruhl Publisher: Samuel French, Incorporated ISBN: 9780573710582 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 0
Book Description
An adaptation of Sarah Ruhl and Max Ritvo's 2018 epistolary book, Letters from Max: A Poet, a Teacher, a Friendship, this intimate, poetic play explores the relationship between Sarah and her former student, Max. With humor, lyricism and candor, the two friends share letters and poems as Max faces terminal illness and tests poetry's capacity to put to words what otherwise feels ineffable.
Author: Rosanna Warren Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company ISBN: 0393247376 Category : Biography & Autobiography Languages : en Pages : 970
Book Description
A comprehensive and moving biography of Max Jacob, a brilliant cubist poet who lived at the margins of fame. Though less of a household name than his contemporaries in early twentieth century Paris, Jewish homosexual poet Max Jacob was Pablo Picasso’s initiator into French culture, Guillaume Apollinaire’s guide out of the haze of symbolism, and Jean Cocteau’s loyal friend. As Picasso reinvented painting, Jacob helped to reinvent poetry with compressed, hard-edged prose poems and synapse-skipping verse lyrics, the product of a complex amalgamation of Jewish, Breton, Parisian, and Roman Catholic influences. In Max Jacob, the poet’s life plays out against the vivid backdrop of bohemian Paris from the turn of the twentieth century through the divisions of World War II. Acclaimed poet Rosanna Warren transports us to Picasso’s ramshackle studio in Montmartre, where Cubism was born; introduces the artists gathered at a seedy bar on the left bank, where Max would often hold court; and offers a front-row seat to the artistic squabbles that shaped the Modernist movement. Jacob’s complex understanding of faith, art, and sexuality animates this sweeping work. In 1909, he saw a vision of Christ in his shabby room in Montmartre, and in 1915 he converted formally from Judaism to Catholicism—with Picasso as his godfather. In his later years, Jacob split his time between Paris and the monastery of Benoît-sur-Loire. In February 1944, he was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Drancy, where he would die a few days later. More than thirty years in the making, this landmark biography offers a compelling, tragic portrait of Jacob as a man and as an artist alongside a rich study of his groundbreaking poetry—in Warren’s own stunning translations. Max Jacob is a nuanced, deeply researched, and essential contribution to Modernist scholarship.
Author: Max Ritvo Publisher: Milkweed Editions ISBN: 1571319573 Category : Poetry Languages : en Pages : 999
Book Description
Reverent and profane, entertaining and bruising, Four Reincarnations is a debut collection of poems that introduces an exciting new voice in American letters. When Max Ritvo was diagnosed with cancer at age sixteen, he became the chief war correspondent for his body. The poems of Four Reincarnations are dispatches from chemotherapy beds and hospitals and the loneliest spaces in the home. They are relentlessly embodied, communicating pain, violence, and loss. And yet they are also erotically, electrically attuned to possibility and desire, to everything living / that won t come with me / into this sunny afternoon. Ritvo explores the prospect of death with singular sensitivity, but he is also a poet of life and of lovea cool-eyed assessor of mortality and a fervent champion for his body and its pleasures. Ritvo writes to his wife, ex-lovers, therapists, fathers, and one mother. He finds something to love and something to lose in everything: Listerine PocketPak breath strips, Indian mythology, wool hats. But in these poemsfrom the humans that animate him to the inanimate hospital machines that remind him of deathit s Ritvo s vulnerable, aching pitch of intimacy that establishes him as one of our finest young poets. "
Author: Maxwell Evarts Perkins Publisher: Penn State Press ISBN: 9780271022543 Category : History Languages : en Pages : 314
Book Description
First time publications of letters from 25-year correspondence between famed Charles Scribner's Sons editor Max Perkins and Virginia socialite Elizabeth Lemmon.
Author: Max Stafford-Clark Publisher: MIT Press ISBN: 9781854593177 Category : Drama Languages : en Pages : 228
Book Description
When Max Stafford-Clark took the unusual step of choosing to stage 'The Recruiting Officer', he also decided to keep a rehearsal diary. What emerges is an instructive account of the rehearsal methods of a respected British theatre director.
Author: Calvin Miller Publisher: Worthy Books ISBN: 1617950475 Category : Religion Languages : en Pages : 224
Book Description
In these masterfully written letters to heaven, Calvin Miller thanks, lovingly reflects on-and sometimes confesses his regrets to -the departed influences in his life. Some are names familiar to us all (C. S. Lewis, Todd Beamer, Oscar Wilde); others he knew well; and some he only admired from a distance. But all brought a brightness to his life or challenged him to live more fully in some way. Aware that eternity for any of us is only a step away, Miller has sought to complete the unfinished business of life by writing letters to the great beyond. This moving work will not only elicit a desire in readers to reconcile all things unfinished, but teach the living about the importance of people and the treasure of faith while holding out for us all the hope that awaits..
Author: Franz Kafka Publisher: Schocken ISBN: 0804150788 Category : Literary Collections Languages : en Pages : 528
Book Description
"These magnificent letters, meticulously set up and annotated, show us aspects of Kafka that were only hinted at in earlier collections and help us trace his development from unhappy young law student and insurance administrator to novelist and short-story writer of originality and genius." --Publishers Weekly "When we turn from Kafka's books to his letters we have a series of self-portraits desperate and courageous, always eager and warm in feeling; the self is lit by fantasy and, of course, by drollery. His candor is of the kind that flies alongside him in the air. He was a marvelous letter writer." --V.S. Pritchett, The New York Review of Books "These letters are like messages from the underground, from the dark side of the moon, presenting aspects of Kafka that would have died with his friends. We meet alternately Kafka the artist, friend, son, father figure, marriage counselor, literary critic, insurance official. . . . A full portrait, and a significant contribution to Kafka scholarship." --Smithsonian Magazine "An inside view of a writer who, perhaps more than any other novelist or poet in our century, stands at the center of our culture." --Robert Alter, The New York Times Book Review
Author: Sarah Ruhl
Author: Sarah Ruhl
Author: Rosanna Warren
Author: Max Ritvo
Author: Maxwell Evarts Perkins
Author: Ken Wilson-Max
Author: Max Stafford-Clark
Author: Calvin Miller
Author: Friedrich Max Müller
Author: Franz Kafka