In association with Amazon Books since 1996
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| Writers Who've Shaped
My Life and Work
Throughout my childhood and well into
early adulthood, I turned to books to learn about life,
love, sex, and the way the world worked. Here is a short
list of key writers of literary prose whose ideas have
traveled with me throughout my life, and the specific
books which have awed me.
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James Joyce
People sometimes talk about the writers they
wish they could've known. Since I have read so many biographies
of writers, I know enough to know that it's infinitely better
never to meet your literary idols and thus to preserve the images
they project in their writing. James Joyce is the one exception:
I would give anything to be able to travel through time and
spend an evening with him, perhaps during that time when he
lived in Ostende, working as a poor translator, and struggling
with his magnum opus, "Ulysses." Joyce is at once
maddeningly abstruse, cerebral, referential and complex; and
earthy, vulgar, unpredictable, hilariously funny and profoundly
emotional. He is, to my tastes, the one true genius of 20th
century letters--a kind of divine monster whose impact forever
changed the course of English literature.
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The Dubliners (if you are new to Joyce, start with these amazing
stories)
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Portrait of the Artist As A Young Man
- Ulyssess
Biographical/Critical Books
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Annotated Ulysses (the bible of Joyce scholars)
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The Letters of Ezra Pound to James Joyce
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Ayn Rand
I am not an Objectivist, but Ms. Rand makes
this list because, as a young girl, I simply couldn't get enough
of her and am quite sure that, for better or worse, her social
philosophies deeply affected me. Perhaps what affected me most
of all is that she was a woman writer who wrote with absolute
authority. As you might guess, that alone made her an important
literary mentor to me in childhood. To honor the gift she gave
me in those early years, I'm listing four Rand texts that kept
me glued together in girlhood, and made me believe that a woman
writer could be uncompromising in work and in life.
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Anthem
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Atlas Shrugged
- The Fountainhead
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We the Living
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Marguerite Yourcenar
Yourcenar is to my adult life what Rand was
to my youth: a woman writer I could admire without reservation.
I don't so much wish I could have met her as I wish I could
be her. Brilliant, solitary, sober, stunningly elegant, and
intellectually imposing, her works are breathtaking feats of
literary genius.
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The Dark Brain of Piranesi
(a slim volume of essays which changed
my life: out of print but Used copies are available)
- Dreams
and Destinies
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Memoirs of Hadrian
Biographical/Critical
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Inventing A Life
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Copyright ©Gloria Brame 2001
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