A Romance On Three Legs

Glenn Gould was famous for his obsessions: the scarves, sweaters and fingerless gloves that he wore even on the hottest summer days; his deep fear of germs and illness; the odd wooden "pygmy" chair that he carried with him wherever he performed; and his sudden withdrawal from the public stage at the peak of his career. But perhaps Gould's greatest obsession of all was for a particular piano, a Steinway concert grand known as CD318 (C, meaning for the use of Steinway Concert Artists only, and D, denoting it as the largest that Steinway built). A Romance on Three Legs is the story of Gould's love for this piano, from the first moment of discovery, in a Toronto dept. store, to the tragic moment when the piano was dropped and seriously damaged while being transported from a concert overseas. Hafner also introduces us to the world and art of piano tuning, including a central character in Gould's life, the blind tuner Verne Edquist, who lovingly attended to CD318 for more than two decades. We learn how a concert grand is built, and the fascinating story of how Steinway & Sons weathered the war years by supplying materials for the military effort. Indeed, CD318 came very close to ending up as a series of glider parts or, worse, a casket. The book has already been lauded by Kevin Bazzana, author of the definitive Gould biography, who notes that Hafner "has clarified some old mysteries and turned up many fresh details."

The first major biography of Glenn Gould to stress the critical influence of the Canadian context on his life and art Glenn Gould was not, as has previously been suggested, an isolated and self-taught eccentric who burst out of nowhere onto the international musical scene in the mid-1950s. He was, says Kevin Bazzana in this fascinating new full-scale biography, very much a product of his time and place – and his entire life and diverse work reflect his Canadian heritage. Bazzana, editor of the international Glenn Gould magazine, throws fresh light on this and many other aspects of Gould’s celebrated life as a pianist, writer, broadcaster, and composer. He portrays Gould’s upbringing in Toronto’s neighbourhood of The Beach in the 1930s, revealing the area’s influence as a distinct social, religious, and cultural milieu. He looks at the impact of Canadian radio on the young musician, his relations with the “new music” crowd in Toronto, and the ways in which his career was furthered by the extraordinary growth of Canada’s cultural institutions in the 1950s. He examines Gould’s place within the CBC “culture” of the 1960s and ‘70s, and his distinctly Canadian sense of humour. Bazanna also reveals new information on Gould’s famous eccentricities, his sometimes bizarre stage manner, his highly selective repertoire, his control mania, his private and sexual life, his hypochondria, his romanticism, and his abrupt retirement from concert performance to communicate solely through electronic and print media. And finally, he takes a detailed look at the extraordinary phenomenon of the posthumous “life” that Gould and his work have enjoyed.

The complex, deeply binding relationship between mothers and daughters is brought vividly to life in Katie Hafner’s remarkable memoir, an exploration of the year she and her mother, Helen, spent working through, and triumphing over, a lifetime of unresolved emotions. Dreaming of a “year in Provence” with her mother, Katie urges Helen to move to San Francisco to live with her and Zoë, Katie’s teenage daughter. Katie and Zoë had become a mother-daughter team, strong enough, Katie thought, to absorb the arrival of a seventy-seven-year-old woman set in her ways. Filled with fairy-tale hope that she and her mother would become friends, and that Helen would grow close to her exceptional granddaughter, Katie embarked on an experiment in intergenerational living that she would soon discover was filled with land mines: memories of her parents’ painful divorce, of her mother’s drinking, of dislocating moves back and forth across the country, and of Katie’s own widowhood and bumpy recovery. Helen, for her part, was also holding difficult issues at bay. How these three women from such different generations learn to navigate their challenging, turbulent, and ultimately healing journey together makes for riveting reading. By turns heartbreaking and funny—and always insightful—Katie Hafner’s brave and loving book answers questions about the universal truths of family that are central to the lives of so many. Praise for Mother Daughter Me “The most raw, honest and engaging memoir I’ve read in a long time.”—KJ Dell’Antonia, The New York Times “A brilliant, funny, poignant, and wrenching story of three generations under one roof, unlike anything I have ever read.”—Abraham Verghese, author of Cutting for Stone “Weaving past with present, anecdote with analysis, [Katie] Hafner’s riveting account of multigenerational living and mother-daughter frictions, of love and forgiveness, is devoid of self-pity and unafraid of self-blame. . . . [Hafner is] a bright—and appealing—heroine.”—Cathi Hanauer, Elle “[A] frank and searching account . . . Currents of grief, guilt, longing and forgiveness flow through the compelling narrative.”—Steven Winn, San Francisco Chronicle “A touching saga that shines . . . We see how years-old unresolved emotions manifest.”—Lindsay Deutsch, USA Today “[Hafner’s] memoir shines a light on nurturing deficits repeated through generations and will lead many readers to relive their own struggles with forgiveness.”—Erica Jong, People “An unusually graceful story, one that balances honesty and tact . . . Hafner narrates the events so adeptly that they feel enlightening.”—Harper’s “Heartbreakingly honest, yet not without hope and flashes of wry humor.”—Kirkus Reviews “[An] emotionally raw memoir examining the delicate, inevitable shift from dependence to independence and back again.”—O: The Oprah Magazine (Ten Titles to Pick Up Now)

An Arab and a Jew open a restaurant together across the street from the United Nations.... It sounds like the beginning of an ethnic joke, but it's the axis around which spins this gutsy, fun-loving, and alarmingly provocative novel, in which a bean can philosophizes, a dessert spoon mystifies, a young waitress takes on the New York art world, and a rowdy redneck welder discovers the lost god of Palestine--while the illusions that obscure humanity's view of the true universe fall away, one by one, like Salome's veils. Skinny Legs and All deals with today's most sensitive issues: race, politics, marriage, art, religion, money, and lust. It weaves lyrically through what some call the "end days" of our planet. Refusing to avert its gaze from the horrors of the apocalypse, it also refuses to let the alleged end of the world spoil its mood. And its mood is defiantly upbeat. In the gloriously inventive Tom Robbins style, here are characters, phrases, stories, and ideas that dance together on the page, wild and sexy, like Salome herself. Or was it Jezebel?

In this acclaimed biography, the late Peter Ostwald--himself an accomplished violinist and longtime personal friend of Gould's--raises many questions about Gould and his music, and lays bare the energy and contradiction behind his brilliance. Photos. NPR feature.

Several times they saw prisoner exchanges between East and West on the famous bridge. Then in 1989 they were eyewitnesses to history as the Wall began to crumble.

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"Dreams of Love: Playing the Romantic Pianist explores the attractions of the concert pianist from an innovative interdisciplinary perspective, demonstrating how such meanings have evolved over two centuries through technology and the popular media, including literature and cinema. Author Ivan Raykoff uses romantic both as the label for a historical era and musical style, as well as the more colloquial adjective referring to love, desire, and sensual feeling. Through this two-fold interpretive approach, music history and cultural mythology are read alongside one another to reveal the interconnected processes of music's social mediation. The word playing also invites multiple readings: performance or practicing, as pastime or profession, as play-acting and other modes of representation, or reproduction like a player piano. The Romantic pianist signifies more than just music; through established rituals and familiar representations of practicing, performing, and listening, the pianist also plays within a larger system of cultural ideology linking music to aspects of gender, sexuality, personal identity and social relationships, and the politics of the body."