Fountain Of St James Court Or Portrait Of The Artist As An Old Woman The

New York Times bestselling author Sena Jeter Naslund explores the artistic processes and lives of creative women in her groundbreaking literary opus The Fountain of St. James Court; or Portrait of the Artist as an Old Woman. Sena Jeter Naslund's inspiring novel-within-a-novel depicts the lives of both a fictional contemporary writer and a historic painter whose works now hang in the great museums of Europe and America. The story opens at midnight beside a beautifully illumined fountain of Venus Rising from the Sea. Kathryn Callaghan has just finished her novel about painter Élisabeth Vigée-LeBrun, a survivor of the French Revolution hated for her sympathetic portraits of Marie Antoinette. Though still haunted by the story she has written, Kathryn must leave the eighteenth-century European world she has researched and made vivid in order to return to her own life as an American in 2012. Naslund's spellbinding new novel presents the reader with an alternate version of The Artist: a woman of age who has created for herself, against enormous odds, a fulfilling life of thoroughly realized achievement.

When writer Kathryn Callaghan finishes her novel about painter Elisabeth Vigee-LeBrun, a French Revolution survivor, she has a hard time leaving the eighteenth-century European world she has researched and returning to her own American life of 2012.

"From the critically acclaimed bestselling author of Ahab's Wife, Four Spirits, and Abundance comes a new novel, The Fountain of St. James court or Portrait of the artist as an old woman."--

This is a book that champions older women’s stories and challenges the limiting outcomes we seem to hold for them. The Book of Old Ladies introduces readers to thirty stories featuring fictional “women of a certain age” who increasingly become their truest selves. Their stories will entertain and provide insight into the stories we tell ourselves about the limits and opportunities of aging. A celebration of women who push back against the limiting stereotypes regarding older women’s possibility, The Book of Old Ladies is a book lover’s guide to approaching old age and dealing with its losses while still embracing beauty, creativity, connection, and wonder.

This study examines how selected authors of the late 20th and early 21st centuries write about their creative processes in old age and thus purposefully produce a late style of their own. Late-life creativity has not always been viewed favourably. Prevalent "peak-and-decline" models suggest that artists, as they grow old, cease to produce highquality work. Aiming to counter such ageist discourses, the present study proposes a new ethics of reading literary texts by elderly authors. For this purpose, it develops a methodology that consolidates textual analysis with cultural gerontology.

O, The Oprah Magazine “Title to Pick Up Now” American Library Association “Over the Rainbow List” selection Welcome to Palmerino, the British enclave in rural Italy where Violet Paget, known to the world by her pen name and male persona, Vernon Lee, held court. In imagining the real life of this brilliant, lesbian polymath known for her chilling supernatural stories, Melissa Pritchard creates a multilayered tale in which the dead writer inhabits the heart and mind of her lonely, modern-day biographer. Positing the art of biography as an act of resurrection and possession, this novel brings to life a vividly detailed, subtly erotic tale about secret loves and the fascinating artists and intellectuals—Oscar Wilde, John Singer Sargent, Henry James, Robert Browning, Bernard Berenson—who challenged and inspired each other during an age of repression. Melissa Pritchard is the author of eight books of fiction, including The Odditorium, a San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of the Year. Among other honors, her books have received the Flannery O'Connor, Janet Heidinger Kafka, and Carl Sandburg awards, and two of her short fiction collections were New York Times Notable Book and Editors’ Choice selections.

“[Norman Lock’s fiction] shimmers with glorious language, fluid rhythms, and complex insights.” —NPR In the sixth stand-alone book in The American Novels series, Shelby Ross, a merchant ruined by the depression of 1873–79, is hired as a New York City Custom House appraiser under inspector Herman Melville, the embittered, forgotten author of Moby-Dick. On the docks, Ross befriends a genial young man and makes an enemy of a despicable one, who attempts to destroy them by insinuating that Ross and the young man share an unnatural affection. Ross narrates his story to his childhood friend Washington Roebling, chief engineer of the soon-to-be-completed Brooklyn Bridge. As he is harried toward a fate reminiscent of Ahab’s, he encounters Ulysses S. Grant, dying in a brownstone on the Upper East Side; Samuel Clemens, who will publish Grant’s Memoirs; and Thomas Edison, at the dawn of the electrification of the city. Feast Day of the Cannibals charts the harrowing journey of a tormented heart during America’s transformative age. Norman Lock is the award-winning author of novels, short fiction, and poetry, as well as stage, radio, and screenplays. He lives in Aberdeen, New Jersey, where he is at work on the next books of The American Novels series.

In The Myth of Water: Poems from the Life of Helen Keller, Alabama poet Jeanie Thompson offers a rich collection of poems that form an illuminating first-person narrative through the life of writer and activist Helen Keller.