What is the most baffling period in our lives? Not childhood, not old age, but the decades of our forties and fifties, the period now generously known as middle age. It's both an occasion for regret and an opportunity for coming to terms, the moment when we come up against our limits and discover -- for better and worse -- who we are.
My Life in the Middle Ages is a portrait of what that unnerving experience is like. A collection of unified essays about the pleasures and pathos that attend the threshold of old age, it charts an original course between reportage and confession. Drawn from the author's own life, from the testimony of parents, children, teachers, and friends, from the books he's read and the life that he chose -- and that chose him -- My Life in the Middle Ages is a comic, poignant memoir that's both personal and generational.
Whether he is struggling with God (or trying to find out if he believes in one), celebrating the books he's loved and regretting those he'll never read, or leafing through the snapshots in his family album and marveling at the passage of time, James Atlas is always alert to the surprises of everyday life. He parses the fine points of success and failure among New York's "lower upper-middle class" (several of the chapters began as essays in The New Yorker) and expresses the largest themes: "I tried to remind myself that death was a part of life. I was here, then I wouldn't be here."
Atlas writes movingly about watching his parents age and his father die. In a wry and soul-searching piece, he recounts his perplexing quest for spiritual meaning after a secular lifetime, a quest that takes him to a private synagogue and a Buddhist meditation center. On the tennis court, he ruefully capitulates to his teenage son's blossoming athletic prowess, recalling a similar passing of the torch with his own father forty years earlier.
At once pensive and funny, lighthearted and profound, My Life in the Middle Ages is a tale of survival, but also a meditation on how it feels to flourish -- how to live.

My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor's Tale

Atlas, James

Parenting & Relationships

Harper

What is the most baffling period in our lives? Not childhood, not old age, but the decades of our forties and fifties, the period now generously known as middle age. It's both an occasion for regret and an opportunity for coming to terms, the moment when we come up against our limits and discover -- for better and worse -- who we are.My Life in the Middle Ages is a portrait of what that unnerving experience is like. A collection of unified pieces about the pleasures and pathos that attend the threshold of old age, it charts an original course between reportage and confession. Drawn from the author's own life, from the testimony of parents, children, teachers, and friends, from the books he's read and the life that he chose -- and that chose him -- My Life in the Middle Ages is a comic and poignant memoir that's both personal and generational.Whether he is struggling with God (or trying to find out if he believes in one), celebrating the books he's loved and regretting those he'll never read, leafing through the snapshots in his family album and marveling at the passage of time, or parsing the fine points of success and failure, James Atlas is always alert to the surprises of everyday life.At once pensive and funny, lighthearted and profound, My Life in the Middle Ages is a tale of survival, but also a meditation on how it feels to flourish -- and how to live.

My Life in the Middle Ages CD: A Survivor's Tale

Biographies & Memoirs

HarperAudio

Eminent Lives in american political historyA perfect gift for your favorite history buff, or for your own collection, this audio set from the acclaimed Eminent Lives series is a must for anyone interested in the story of America.George Washington: The Founding FatherCelebrated journalist and historian Paul Johnson paints a vivid portrait of George Washington as a young entrepreneur, masterly commander-in-chief, patient Constitution maker, and wise president.Thomas Jefferson: Author of AmericaInternationally renowned writer and political commentator Christopher Hitchens explores the life of Thomas Jefferson within the context of America's evolution, bringing him to life as both a man of his time and as a visionary who could see beyond it.Ulysses S. Grant: The Unlikely HeroLegendary editor and bestselling author Michael Korda provides a shrewd but sympathetic portrait of Ulysses S. Grant's successes and failures -- both military and political -- as he guided America through a crucial juncture in its history.Read by Sam Tsoutsouvas

Eminent Lives: The Presidents Collection CD Set: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Ulysses S. Grant

Leaders & Notable People

Striving children, aging parents, job pressures, financial anxieties, physical ailments, generalized hope and dread―a memoir of middle age that is both literary and confessional What is the most baffling period in our lives? Not childhood, not old age, but the decades of our forties and fifties, the period now generously known as middle age. Of all the challenges that face us in this time of reckoning, the effort to accept the limits of our character, the dwindling of possibilities, and the gap between our aspirations and reality is perhaps the most daunting. It’s both an occasion for regret and an opportunity for coming to terms, the moment when we come up against our limits and discover―for better and worse―who we are.
 My Life in the Middle Ages is a portrait, in 12 chapters, of what that unnerving experience is like. A collection of unified essays about the pleasures and pathos that haunt us on the threshold of old age, it charts an original course between reportage and confession. Drawn from the author’s own life, from the testimony of parents, children, teachers, and friends, from the books he’s read and the life that he chose (and that chose him), My Life in the Middle Ages is a comic and poignant memoir that’s both personal and generational.

My Life in the Middle Ages

Arts & Literature

Harper-perennial

Ben Janis's assault on the citadels of culture carries him and his poems from a Chicago suburb, through a confused love life, to poetry contests, the Harvard "Advocate," and the quadrangles of Oxford

The Great Pretender (Contemporary American Fiction)

Literature & Fiction

Penguin??Books

Interviews, letters, and unpublished papers inform a biography of Schwartz that follows him from his Washington Heights childhood, through his college years and literary successes, to his death in a midtown Manhattan hotel

Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet

Harcourt

Delmore Schwartz: The life of an American poet

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

About the Author\nJAMES ATLAS (1949 - 2019) is the author of several books, including Bellow: A Biography; Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet and the memoir My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor’s Tale.\nDelmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet is based on interviews, letters, and an extraordinary collection of unpublished papers that had never before been examined.\nDelmore Schwartz was only twenty-four in 1938 when his first book, In Dreams Begin Responsibilities, was published. He received praise from T. S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, Allen Tate, John Crowe Ransom, Wallace Stevens, and William Carlos Williams. For Tate, it was “the only genuine innovation we’ve had since Eliot and Pound.” A decade later, the short-story collection The World Is a Wedding was published; many critics characterized it as the definitive portrait of their generation.\nIn this biography, the first about the man whom John Berryman called “the most underrated poet of the twentieth century,” James Atlas traces Schwartz’s history, from the arrival of his Romanian ancestors in New York, to his youth in Washington Heights, to his career at Harvard as a graduate student in philosophy, and onward to the flowering of his generation in the '40s, when he and the critics, poets, and novelists who were his friends made their reputations. Schwartz’s brilliant satires of his friends and acquaintances, his autobiographical stories, and his letters to his illustrious peers contribute to this vivid portrait of an era―and of that era’s most trenchant chronicler.

With this masterly and original work, Bellow: A Biography, National Book Award nominee James Atlas gives the first definitive account of the Nobel Prize–winning author’s turbulent personal and professional life, as it unfolded against the background of twentieth-century events—the Depression, World War II, the upheavals of the sixties—and amid all the complexities of the Jewish-immigrant experience in America, which generated a vibrant new literature. Drawing upon a vast body of original research, including Bellow’s extensive correspondence with Ralph Ellison, Delmore Schwartz, John Berryman, Robert Penn Warren, John Cheever, and many other luminaries of the twentieth-century literary community, Atlas weaves a rich and revealing portrait of one of the most talented and enigmatic figures in American intellectual history. Detailing Bellow’s volatile marriages and numerous tempestuous relation-ships with women, publishers, and friends, Bellow: A Biography is a magnificent chronicle of one of the premier writers in the English language, whose prize-winning works include Herzog, The Adventures of Augie March, and, most recently, Ravelstein.

Bellow: A Biography (Modern Library)

Humor & Entertainment

Random House Publishing Group

Clear, precise, graceful...(Atlas') biographical style makes the book read with the pleasure of a good novel.--Leonard Michaels, The New York Times Book Review

Discus/Avon

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Atlas, James. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Atlas, James

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Atlas, James. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

My Life in the Middle Ages: A Survivor's Tale

My Life in the Middle Ages CD: A Survivor's Tale

Eminent Lives: The Presidents Collection CD Set: George Washington, Thomas Jefferson and Ulysses S. Grant

My Life in the Middle Ages

The Great Pretender (Contemporary American Fiction)

Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet

Delmore Schwartz: The life of an American poet

Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet

Bellow: A Biography (Modern Library)

Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet