Thomas Mann’s Los Angeles is an illustrated book that explores Nobel-prizewinning author Thomas Mann life during his exile in Los Angeles.After fleeing Nazi Germany, writer and Nobel Prizewinner Thomas Mann found refuge for himself and his family in the Pacific Palisades, a quiet residential neighborhood in Los Angeles between Santa Monica and the Pacific Ocean. Mann was one of many European intellectuals who fled to Los Angeles, forming a community known as the “Weimar on the Pacific.” Thomas Mann’s Los Angeles: Stories from Exile 1940-1952 explores Mann’s connections to the city and the network of intellectuals he found there, including writers such as Christopher Isherwood and Aldous Huxley and musicians such as Igor Stravinsky and Arnold Schoenberg. Short texts accompanied by maps, a rich selection of historic images, contemporary photographs and vivid anecdotes guide the reader through this fascinating community. Stories from both scholars well-known writers such as the New Yorker
An innovative memoir connecting ideas of grief, memory, and animals to illustrate the importance of storytelling.When his mother died, Timothy C. Baker discovered that there was almost no record of her existence, and no stories that were his to tell: the only way to bring her back was through reading. Reading My Mother Back is a genre-bending memoir that explores a life marked by trauma, illness, religion, and abuse through a focus on the books Baker and his mother shared. The book combines accounts of rereading childhood classics with true and apocryphal stories of a quiet life, marked by great sorrow and great joy. The book is about grief and memory and how our childhood reading shapes the way we see the world; it’s about loneliness and the search for belonging; it’s about how ordinary lives are transfigured by storytelling. Moving from accounts of American evangelical communities to kidney failure, from literary criticism to psychoanalysis, and from guilt to love, Baker shows how li
From author of GMA Book Club pick and national bestseller OONA OUT OF ORDER, a novel about what really happened when a famous magician vanishes mid-act, as her sister and a podcast host investigateNearly a decade ago, iconic magician Violet Volk performed her greatest trick yet: vanishing mid-act. Though she hasn’t been seen since, her hold on the public imagination is stronger than ever. While Violet sought out the spotlight, her sister Sasha always had to be the responsible one, taking over their mother’s hair salon and building a quiet life for her beloved daughter, Quinn. But Sasha can never seem to escape her sister’s orbit or her memories of their unresolved, tumultuous relationship. Then there’s Cameron Frank, tapped to host a podcast devoted to all things Violet, who is determined to finally get his big break―even if he promised to land an exclusive interview with Sasha, the one person who definitely doesn’t want to talk to him.As the ten-year anniversary approaches, the podcas
