THE VIOLET HOUR: GREAT WRITERS AT THE END - Rare Fine Copy of The First Hardcover Edition/First Printing: Signed, Dated (Two Days After Publication), And Inscribed by Katie Roiphe - ONLY SIGNED COPY ONLINE

Roiphe, Katie (Author); Freud, Sigmund; Sendak, Maurice; Sontag, Susan; Thomas, Dylan; Updike, John

ISBN 10: 0385343590 / ISBN 13: 9780385343596

Edité par New York City, NY: The Dial Press, 2016, 2016

A propos de cet article

1st Printing. Signed. 310 pages. Published in 2016. The author's book-length account on subject. Now considered a contemporary classic. The First Hardcover Edition. Precedes and should not be confused with all other subsequent editions. Published in a small and limited first print run as a hardcover original only. The First Edition is now scarce. Presents Katie Roiphe's "The Violet Hour: Great Writers At The End". How six iconic writers in the Western tradition, very different from one another, faced The End to their productive and meaningful lives: Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak, and James Salter. Regardless of the actual time of death, Western culture views death as night, the "violet hour, the evening hour that strives homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea" (T. S. Eliot). "In the final acts of each of these creative geniuses are examples of courage, passion, self-delusion, pointless suffering, and superb devotion. There are also moments of sublime insight and understanding" (Publisher's blurb). "A beautiful book. The intensity of these 'passages' is deeply beguiling" (The New York Times). For these great writers (and for their fellow-writer Roiphe), death is a meaningful part of life that undermines meaning itself. Why? Because when the moment comes, we see what we have achieved (in terms of career, wealth, social status, and recognition) in its proper perspective: As nothing in the face of death. But: We also realize that what finally matters is our "track record" as human beings, that is, not as achievers, but what we have done for others: Those we have known - family, friends, colleagues, loved ones - and in a profound sense, through the way we have lived our lives, those we don't and will never know: Our fellow human beings. Western culture makes us think of mortality merely as two kinds of speed: (mercifully) sudden or (agonizingly) slow. Roiphe describes a third, more meaningful kind: Heroic. After all, unlike most of us, these writers have already ensured that they will live on through their work (which Roiphe celebrates), have therefore somehow outwitted death, and even achieved immortality. And yet, as one of them very famously wrote, the fully human way is to "rage, rage against the dying of the light" (Dylan Thomas). An absolute "must-have" title for Katie Roiphe collectors. This copy is very prominently, neatly, and beautifully signed, dated (two days after publication), and inscribed in black ink-pen on the title page by the author: "For - Warmly, Katie Roiphe 3/10/16". It is signed directly on the page itself, not on a tipped-in page. The recipient, who is named, is a friend of the author, and cannot be named here. This title is a contemporary classic. As far as we know, this is the only such signed, post-publication dated, and inscribed copy of the First Hardcover Edition/First Printing available online and is in especially fine condition: Clean, crisp, and bright. Please note: This is a copy of the true First Edition. By the time Roiphe launched her book, it was already a bestseller. Copies available online are in subsequent printing. A rare signed copy thus. One of the most brilliant American writers of our time. A fine copy. (SEE ALSO OTHER KATIE ROIPHE TITLE IN OUR CATALOG) ISBN 0385343590.

N° de réf. du vendeur 23263

Détails bibliographiques

• Titre: THE VIOLET HOUR: GREAT WRITERS AT THE END - Rare Fine Copy of The First Hardcover Edition/First Printing: Signed, Dated (Two Days After Publication), And Inscribed by Katie Roiphe - ONLY SIGNED COPY ONLINE
• Éditeur: New York City, NY: The Dial Press, 2016
• Date de parution: 2016
• Langue: anglais
• ISBN à 10 chiffres: 0385343590
• ISBN à 13 chiffres: 9780385343596
• Reliure: Hardcover
• Édition: 1st Edition.
• État de l'article: Fine
• État de la jaquette: Fine
• Signé: Signed by Author

A propos de ce titre

Synopsis

From one of our most perceptive and provocative voices comes a deeply researched account of the last days of Susan Sontag, Sigmund Freud, John Updike, Dylan Thomas, Maurice Sendak, and James Salter—an arresting and wholly original meditation on mortality.

In The Violet Hour, Katie Roiphe takes an unexpected and liberating approach to the most unavoidable of subjects. She investigates the last days of six great thinkers, writers, and artists as they come to terms with the reality of approaching death, or what T. S. Eliot called “the evening hour that strives Homeward, and brings the sailor home from sea.”

Roiphe draws on her own extraordinary research and access to the family, friends, and caretakers of her subjects. Here is Susan Sontag, the consummate public intellectual, who finds her commitment to rational thinking tested during her third bout with cancer. Roiphe takes us to the hospital room where, after receiving the worst possible diagnosis, seventy-six-year-old John Updike begins writing a poem. She vividly re-creates the fortnight of almost suicidal excess that culminated in Dylan Thomas’s fatal collapse at the Chelsea Hotel. She gives us a bracing portrait of Sigmund Freud fleeing Nazi-occupied Vienna only to continue in his London exile the compulsive cigar smoking that he knows will hasten his decline. And she shows us how Maurice Sendak’s beloved books for children are infused with his lifelong obsession with death, if you know where to look.

The Violet Hour is a book filled with intimate and surprising revelations. In the final acts of each of these creative geniuses are examples of courage, passion, self-delusion, pointless suffering, and superb devotion. There are also moments of sublime insight and understanding where the mind creates its own comfort. As the author writes, “If it’s nearly impossible to capture the approach of death in words, who would have the most hope of doing it?” By bringing these great writers’ final days to urgent, unsentimental life, Katie Roiphe helps us to look boldly in the face of death and be less afraid.

Praise for The Violet Hour

“A beautiful book . . . The intensity of these passages—the depth of research, the acute sensitivity for declarative moments—is deeply beguiling.”—The New York Times Book Review

“Profound, poetic and—yes—comforting.”—People

“Unconventional, engaging . . . [The Violet Hour] is at once scholarly, literary, juicy—and unabashedly personal.”—Los Angeles Times

“Enveloping . . . I read it in bed, at the kitchen table, while walking down the street. . . . ‘What normal person wants to blunder into this hushed and sacred space?’ she asks. But the answer is all of us, and Ms. Roiphe does it with grace.”—Jennifer Senior, The New York Times

“A beautiful and provocative meditation on mortality.”—Minneapolis Star Tribune

“A tender yet penetrating look at the final days . . . Roiphe has always seemed to me a writer to envy. No matter what the occasion, she can be counted on to marry ferocity and erudition in ways that nearly always make her interesting.”—The Wall Street Journal

“Here is a critic in supreme control of her gifts, whose gift to us is the observant vigor that refuses to flinch before the Reaper. . . . She knows that true criticism does not bother with the mollification of delicate sensibilities, only with the intellect as it roils and rollicks through language.”—William Giraldi, The New Republic

À propos de l'auteur

Katie Roiphe is the author of several books, including The Morning After: Sex, Fear, and Feminism; Uncommon Arrangements: Seven Marriages; In Praise of Messy Lives: Essays; and a novel, Still She Haunts Me. Her essays and articles have appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, The New Yorker, The Paris Review, The Wall Street Journal, Financial Times, Harper’s, Vogue, Esquire, Slate, and Tin House. She has a Ph.D. in literature from Princeton University and is the director of the Cultural Reporting and Criticism program at New York University. She lives in Brooklyn.