The Disappearance Of Connie Converse

Connie stands as one of the first known modern musicians to contribute to the singer-songwriter genre. During the 1950s, she worked around New York City but was barely recognized at that time. What is perhaps better known than her music is her personal story. In the summer of 1974, she left her home, disillusioned by her lack of success in pursuit of stardom. Then, seemingly of her own accord, she disappeared. Connie has been missing for nearly 44 years. Now, she has become the subject of one of the most baffling and captivating cases of disappearances.

The mysterious true story of Connie Converse—a mid-century New York City songwriter, singer, and composer whose haunting music never found broad recognition—and one writer’s quest to understand her life This is the mesmerizing story of an enigmatic life. When musician and New Yorker contributor Howard Fishman first heard Connie Converse’s voice on a recording, he was convinced she could not be real. Her recordings were too good not to know, and too out of place for the 1950s to make sense—a singer who seemed to bridge the gap between traditional Americana (country, blues, folk, jazz, and gospel), the Great American Songbook, and the singer-songwriter movement that exploded a decade later with Bob Dylan and Joni Mitchell. And then there was the bizarre legend about Connie Converse that had become the prevailing narrative of her life: that in 1974, at the age of fifty, she simply drove off one day and was never heard from again. Could this have been true? Who was Connie Converse, really? Supported by a dozen years of research, travel to everywhere she lived, and hundreds of extensive interviews, Fishman approaches Converse’s story as both a fan and a journalist, and expertly weaves a narrative of her life and music, and of how it has come to speak to him as both an artist and a person. Ultimately, he places her in the canon as a significant outsider artist, a missing link between a now old-fashioned kind of American music and the reflective, complex, arresting music that transformed the 1960s and music forever. But this is also a story of deeply secretive New England traditions, of a woman who fiercely strove for independence and success when the odds were against her; a story that includes suicide, mental illness, statistics, siblings, oil paintings, acoustic guitars, cross-country road trips, 1950s Greenwich Village, an America marching into the Cold War, questions about sexuality, and visionary, forward thinking about race, class, and conflict. It’s a story and subject that is by turn hopeful, inspiring, melancholy, and chilling.

Winner of the River Teeth Literary Nonfiction Prize Disequilibria: Meditations on Missingness is a hybrid memoir that recounts the 1982 disappearance of the author’s stepfather, James Edward Lewis, a pilot and Vietnam veteran. Recounting his family’s experiences in searching for answers, Lunday interrogates the broader cultural and conceptual responses to the phenomenon of missingness by connecting his stepfather’s case to other true-life disappearances as well as those portrayed in fiction, poetry, and film. In doing so Disequilibria explores the transience in modern life, considering the military-dependent experience, the corrosive effects of war, and the struggle to find closure and comfort as time goes by without answers.

They just vanished... disappeared without leaving a trace. This book shed lights on some of the most intriguing missing person cases. There are countless stories all over the globe of average, everyday people suddenly vanishing under the strangest and most inopportune of circumstances. These cases have baffled the experts and remained unsolved for decades. The missing person cases presented in this book have diverse backgrounds, but they are all equally mysterious. Here we will dive headfirst into some of the most unusual disappearing acts on record. Rational explanations have been put forward for some, but many lack any plausible theories whatsoever.This book relates the true yet astonishing tales of prime ministers lost at sea, esteemed physicists vanishing without a trace, great explorers lost in the wilderness. From the World War II veteran who seemed to literally disappear into thin air on a bus ride home, to the ill-fated singer-songwriter Connie Converse who right around her 50th birthday decided to pull a "Bilbo Baggins" (Connie's own words) on the ones she loved by slipping on her very own ring of invisibility and vanishing out of sight, this book takes us through some of the saddest, the most intriguing, and the most downright bizarre accounts of lost souls that you will ever find. Scroll back up and order your copy today!

“Smart ... compelling ... persuasive .” —New York Times Book Review She’s everywhere once you start looking: the trainwreck. She’s Britney Spears shaving her head, Whitney Houston saying “crack is whack,” and Amy Winehouse, dying in front of millions. But the trainwreck is also as old (and as meaningful) as feminism itself. From Mary Wollstonecraft—who, for decades after her death, was more famous for her illegitimate child and suicide attempts than for A Vindication of the Rights of Woman—to Charlotte Brontë, Billie Holiday, Sylvia Plath, and even Hillary Clinton, Sady Doyle’s Trainwreck dissects a centuries-old phenomenon and asks what it means now, in a time when we have unprecedented access to celebrities and civilians alike, and when women are pushing harder than ever against the boundaries of what it means to “behave.” Where did these women come from? What are their crimes? And what does it mean for the rest of us? For an age when any form of self-expression can be the one that ends you, Doyle’s book is as fierce and intelligent as it is funny and compassionate—an essential, timely, feminist anatomy of the female trainwreck.

Struggling with trauma in the years following World War I, veteran Lawrence Bartram arrives in the village of Easton Deadall and is embroiled in a dangerous case involving a murdered woman who may be linked to the disappearance of a child years earlier.

Escape into the wild from the comfort of your own home this winter, with a dazzling lost classic of nature writing... Eepersip is a girl with the wild in her heart. She does not want to live locked up behind the walls of a house. So she runs away - first to the Meadow, then to the Sea, and finally to the Mountain. Her heartbroken parents follow their daughter, trying to bring her home safe, but Eepersip has other ideas... Republished by Penguin with a new introduction and hand-inked illustrations by beloved artist Jackie Morris, The House Without Windows is a timeless fable about wildness, freedom and the redemptive power of the natural world. 'I can safely promise joy to any reader of The House Without Windows. Perfection' Eleanor Farjeon, winner of the Carnegie Medal and The Hans Christian Andersen Award 'Gloriously illuminated by Jackie Morris's moving art, this is a work of strange power for our own bewildered times' Nick Drake 'A classic, as miraculous and awe-inspiring as the author' Xinran, author of The Good Women of China