Taxi Driver

Elman, Richard

Bantam]

Namedropping: Mostly Literary Memoirs

Candid snapshots in prose of literary and other figures--ranging from Aldous Huxley and Isaac Bashevis Singer to Faye Dunaway and Hunter S. Thompson--whom the author encountered during four decades as a working writer and journalist. In the course of the same old race I find myself writing about knowing some people―how fame seems to set some people apart from us, once known: I was astonished by Ernest Hemingway’s small, weak handshake when we were introduced at Scribners by John Hall Wheelock and by the jolt of force with which Elie Wiesel squeezed my hand. How long ago seems knowing, too: when I first meet Isaac Singer he asks me, “Who is Mr. Saul Bellow?” We’re on the Upper West Side in his apartment next to the funeral parlor. A yellow parakeet hops around on Singer’s bald forehead. Singer’s great comic story of faith, “Gimpel the Fool,” has only recently been published from Yiddish into English in a translation by Saul Bellow. They’re both still a long way from Stockholm. “Do you know him? Can you tell me who this Mr. Bellow is?” he asks. It was not always possible to guess Singer’s motives in acting as though he was not impressed with worldly reputations. His features of a medieval Polish saint, even to a faint white-haired tonsure effect around the crown of his skull, were backlit by the glowing monitor from his mischievous incubus.―from the Preface These are Richard Elman’s candid snapshots in prose of the various, mostly literary celebrities he encountered during his four decades as a working writer and journalist―among them Isaac Bashevis Singer, Tillie Olsen, Bernard Malamud, Faye Dunaway, Hunter S. Thompson, and other important artists and writers who were Elman’s teachers and, occasionally, adversaries. Engagingly written and never superficial, these portraits and anecdotes in many cases strike to the center of each subject’s art. To many readers, these persons are just “names”; Elman brings them to life while never simplifying or overdramatizing their work.

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

State University of New York Press

Candid snapshots in prose of literary and other figures--ranging from Aldous Huxley and Isaac Bashevis Singer to Faye Dunaway and Hunter S. Thompson--whom the author encountered during four decades as a working writer and journalist. In the course of the same old race I find myself writing about knowing some people―how fame seems to set some people apart from us, once known: I was astonished by Ernest Hemingway’s small, weak handshake when we were introduced at Scribners by John Hall Wheelock and by the jolt of force with which Elie Wiesel squeezed my hand. How long ago seems knowing, too: when I first meet Isaac Singer he asks me, “Who is Mr. Saul Bellow?” We’re on the Upper West Side in his apartment next to the funeral parlor. A yellow parakeet hops around on Singer’s bald forehead. Singer’s great comic story of faith, “Gimpel the Fool,” has only recently been published from Yiddish into English in a translation by Saul Bellow. They’re both still a long way from Stockholm. “Do you know him? Can you tell me who this Mr. Bellow is?” he asks. It was not always possible to guess Singer’s motives in acting as though he was not impressed with worldly reputations. His features of a medieval Polish saint, even to a faint white-haired tonsure effect around the crown of his skull, were backlit by the glowing monitor from his mischievous incubus.―from the Preface These are Richard Elman’s candid snapshots in prose of the various, mostly literary celebrities he encountered during his four decades as a working writer and journalist―among them Isaac Bashevis Singer, Tillie Olsen, Bernard Malamud, Faye Dunaway, Hunter S. Thompson, and other important artists and writers who were Elman’s teachers and, occasionally, adversaries. Engagingly written and never superficial, these portraits and anecdotes in many cases strike to the center of each subject’s art. To many readers, these persons are just “names”; Elman brings them to life while never simplifying or overdramatizing their work.

The Penn Greek Drama Series presents original literary translations of the entire corpus of classical Greek drama: tragedies, comedies, and satyr plays. It is the only contemporary series of all the surviving work of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, Aristophanes, and Menander.
This volume includes translations by Fred Chappell (Alcestis), Mark Rudman and Katharine Washburn (Daughters of Troy), Richard Elman (The Phoenician Women), Elaine Terranova (Iphigenia at Aulis), and George Economou (Rhesus).

Euripides, 3 : Alcestis, Daughters of Troy, the Phoenician Women, Iphigenia at Aulis, Rhesus (Penn Greek Drama Series)

Literature & Fiction

Economou, George

Terranova, Elaine

Dramas & Plays

University of Pennsylvania Press

Euripides, 3: Alcestis, Daughters of Troy, The Phoenician Women, Iphigenia at Aulis, Rhesus (Penn Greek Drama Series)

Washburn, Katharine

Eurípides

Disco Frito

Gibbs-Smith

A journalist describes his experiences in Nicaragua during the Sandinista revolution and looks at the nation after Somoza's demise

Cocktails at Somoza's: A Reporter's Sketchbook of Events in Revolutionary Nicaragua

History

Americas

Applewood Books

A journalist describes his experiences in Nicaragua during the Sandinista revolution and looks at the nation after Somoza's demise

Cocktails at Somoza's

Tar Beach is New York slang for the roof where one sunbathes in the summer. Some of the naked sunbathers on the roof of their Brooklyn synagogue in 1947 in Richard Elman's fantastic novel imagine they are in Uganda, which, in place of Palestine, the British Government offered the Zionists at the turn of the century as a Jewish National Homeland. The Second World War has only recently ended; there's trouble in the Middle East, and trouble as well for Izzy Berliner and Peter Pintobasco, and for Sam, Lillian, Big Sam Rostok, and the smart-talking feminist "angel" named Jezebel. Their sun-baked world of gossip and backbite bakes and rocks to an intoxicating babble of Yiddish, Swahili, and Brooklynese as they come to terms with each other and the meaning of their lives.

Tar Beach (New American Fiction Series)

Sun & Moon Press

Cathedral-Tree-Train

Poetry

Junction Press

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