Publisher: Dundurn
An enchanting chronicle of The Doors frontman, Jim Morrison, from one of his close friends during the mid-1960s The Doors remain one of the bestselling rock bands of all time, selling more than 100 million records Author was friends with Jim Morrison and his fiancee, Mary Werbelow, and recalls long days spent together in an altered state, and was there when The Doors first formed as a band
The Parrot’s Perch opens in 2013, when Karen Keilt, age sixty, receives an invitation to testify at the Brazilian National Truth Commission at the UN in New York. The email sparks memories of her “previous life”—the one she has kept safely bottled up for more than thirty-seven years. Hopeful of helping to raise awareness about ongoing human rights violations in Brazil, she wants to testify, but she anguishes over reliving the horrific events of her youth. In the pages that follow, Keilt tells the story of her life in Brazil—from her exclusive, upper-class lifestyle and dreams of Olympic medals to her turmoil-filled youth. Full of hints of a dark oligarchy in Brazil, corruption, crime, and military interference, The Parrot’s Perch is a searing, sometimes shocking true tale of suffering, struggle—and survival. Karen Keilt lived through the darkest days of Brazil’s military dictatorship. In her courageous and compelling memoir, Keilt narrates an emotionally honest reckoning of her desire to find true happiness. Forbidden by her wealthy family to even mention her imprisonment, torture, and rape, Keilt is forced to make a change that will affect the rest of her life. Seen through her testimony to the Brazilian National Truth Commission at the UN, readers become witnesses to both her vulnerability and her quiet strength.Show book
A genre-defying debut memoir of insomnia by Betty Trask Prize-winner and one of our most singular stylists, Samantha Harvey. In 2016, Samantha Harvey began to lose sleep. She tried everything to appease her wakefulness: from medication to therapy, changes in her diet to changes in her living arrangements. Nothing seemed to help. The Shapeless Unease is Harvey’s darkly funny and deeply intelligent anatomy of her insomnia, an immersive interior monologue of a year without one of the most basic human needs. Original and profound, and narrated with a lucid breathlessness, this is a startlingly insightful exploration of memory, writing and influence, death and the will to survive, from “this generation’s Virginia Woolf” (Telegraph).Show book
With his characteristic raw and minimalist style, Charles Bukowski takes us on a walk through his side of town in Hot Water Music. He gives us little vignettes of depravity and lasciviousness, bite sized pieces of what is both beautiful and grotesque. The stories in Hot Water Music dash around the worst parts of town – a motel room stinking of sick, a decrepit apartment housing a perpetually arguing couple, a bar tended by a skeleton – and depict the darkest parts of human existence. Bukowski talks simply and profoundly about the underbelly of the working class without raising judgement. In the way he writes about sex, relationships, writing, and inebriation, Bukowski sets the bar for irreverent art – his work inhabits the basest part of the mind and the most extreme absurdity of the everyday.Show book
The collected memoirs of a 1913 San Francisco sex worker, their effect on society at the time, and where they fit in today’s world.In 1913 the San Francisco Bulletin published a serialized, ghostwritten memoir of a prostitute who went by Alice Smith. “A Voice from the Underworld” detailed Alice's humble Midwestern upbringing and her struggle to find aboveboard work, and candidly related the harrowing events she endured after entering “the life.”While prostitute narratives had been published before, never had they been as frank in their discussion of the underworld, including topics such as abortion, police corruption, and the unwritten laws of the brothel. Throughout the series, Alice strongly criticized the society that failed her and so many other women, but, just as acutely, she longed to be welcomed back from the margins. The response to Alice's story was unprecedented: four thousand letters poured into the Bulletin, many of which were written by other prostitutes ready to share their own stories; and it inspired what may have been the first sex worker rights protest in modern history.An introduction contextualizes “A Voice from the Underworld” amid Progressive Era sensationalistic journalism and shifting ideas of gender roles, and reveals themes in Alice's story that extend to issues facing sex workers today.Winner of the California Historical Society Book Award “Essential reading for anyone interested in the rich history of sexual commerce in the United States.”—Gretchen Soderlund, author of Sex Trafficking, Scandal, and the Transformation of Journalism, 1885-1917 “Not only for Bay Area history buffs, Alice will enlighten all readers to early shifts in gender roles and societal correlations today.”—Cassie Duggan, Literary HubShow book
'Victor Gregg is the most remarkable spokesman for the war generation' Dan Snow 'A classic' Mail on Sunday 'Astonishing' James Holland Born in 1919, Victor Gregg enlisted in the Rifle Brigade aged just eighteen and began a life of adventure. A soldier throughout the Second World War, he saw action across North Africa, was a driver for the Long Range Desert group and fought at the battle of Alamein. Taken into captivity at the Battle of Arnhem in 1944, he was sentenced to death for sabotaging a Dresden factory; he escaped only when the Allies' infamous air raid blew apart his prison and very soon encountered the advancing Red Army. Revised and expanded with exclusive new material in time for Gregg's 100th birthday, Rifleman is the extraordinary story of an independent-minded and quick-witted survivor.Show book
The diary as a genre is found in all literate societies, and these autobiographical accounts are written by persons of all ranks and positions. The Diary offers an exploration of the form in its social, historical, and cultural-literary contexts with its own distinctive features, poetics, and rhetoric. The contributors to this volume examine theories and interpretations relating to writing and studying diaries; the formation of diary canons in the United Kingdom, France, United States, and Brazil; and the ways in which handwritten diaries are transformed through processes of publication and digitization. The authors also explore different diary formats, including the travel diary, the private diary, conflict diaries written during periods of crisis, and the diaries of the digital era, such as blogs. The Diary offers a comprehensive overview of the genre, synthesizing decades of interdisciplinary study to enrich our understanding of, research about, and engagement with the diary as literary form and historical documentation.Show book
