Safe Suicide: Marratives, Essays, and Meditations - Couverture souple

Henry, Dewitt

Couverture souple

ISBN 10 : 1597091006 ISBN 13 : 9781597091008

Editeur : Red Hen Press, 2008

Synopsis

Against a background of suburban Philadelphia in the 1950s, and the family secret of his father's alcoholism, Henry comes of age as the youngest of four children. He rejects his father's course in managing the family chocolate factory, and goes on to college, becoming a writer and teacher. When Henry marries, and becomes a father himself, he is impacted by the social revolutions of the 1970s, and struggles to avoid his father's flaws. He leads a literary life in Boston, founds the literary magazine Ploughshares, and befriends novelist Richard Yates. During the 1980s, Henry suffers the deaths of his parents, infertility, rejections of his work, and setbacks in his teaching career. In the 1990s, while his daughter and adopted son are swept up into trials of adolescence and young adulthood, and as his wife grieves the deaths of friends and family, Henry confronts a spiritual abyss similar to his father's, and learns to surrender to life, to love, to aging and mortality.

By turns lyrical, quirky, confessional, and experimental in form, Henry's essays build into an affirming and generous vision. While addiction, the uses of imagination, a passion for literature, and issues of heart and soul are key motifs, a bungee jump becomes Henry's central metaphor: "isn't this life? isn't this art? We live and trust in our safe suicides."

A propos du livre

À propos de l'auteur

Ploughshares, which DeWitt Henry directed for its first twenty years, and for which he received a Massachusetts Commonwealth Award in 1992, is regarded as one of the leading literary magazines in the country. Henry's novel, The Marriage of Anna Maye Potts, won the inaugural Peter Taylor Prize. Jack Smith wrote: "The novel evokes in the reader a sense for the power of the heart and will to transform one's self--and to make claims on what's rightfully one's own." The same can be said for Safe Suicide (Red Hen Press, 2008). Henry is a professor at Emerson College in Boston. He has also edited five anthologies, including Sorrows Company: Writers on Loss and Grief and (with James Alan McPherson) Fathering Daughters: Reflections by Men. He is working on a childhood memoir and novel.

Détails de l'édition

• Éditeur: Red Hen Press
• Date d'édition: 2008
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN 10: 1597091006
• ISBN 13: 9781597091008
• Reliure: Broché
• Nombre de pages: 200
• Coordonnées du fabricant: non disponible
• Personne responsable: GPSR Kontakt; gpsr@libri.de; ; Europaallee 1; Bad Hersfeld; 36244; Allemagne