{"title":"Carol Sklenicka","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"raymond-carver-book-carol-sklenicka-9780743262453","title":"Raymond Carver","description":"When Raymond Carver died at age fifty, readers lost a distinctive voice in its prime. Carver was, the \u003ci\u003eTimes \u003c\/i\u003eof London said, the Chekhov of middle America. His influence on a generation of writers and on the short story itself has been widely noted. Not so generally known are how Carver became a writer, how he suffered to achieve his art, and how his troubled and remarkable personality affected those around him. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eCarol Sklenicka's meticulous and absorbing biography re-creates Carver's early years in Yakima, Washington, where he was the nervous, overweight son of a kindly, alcohol-dependent lumbermill worker. By the time he was nineteen, Ray had married his high school sweetheart, Maryann Burk. From a basement apartment where they were raising their first child and expecting their second, they determined that Ray would become a writer. Despite the handicaps of an erratic education and utter lack of financial resources, he succeeded. Sklenicka describes Carver's entry into the literary world via little magazines and the Iowa Writers' Workshop; his publication by \u003ci\u003eEsquire \u003c\/i\u003eeditor Gordon Lish and their ensuing relationship; his near-fatal alcoholism, which worsened even as he produced many of the unforgettable stories collected in \u003ci\u003eWill You Please Be Quiet, Please? \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eWhat We Talk About When We Talk About Love\u003c\/i\u003e. She examines the dissolution of his first marriage and his partnership with poet Tess Gallagher, who helped him enjoy the full measure of his success. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eCarol Sklenicka draws on hundreds of interviews with people who knew Carver, prodigious research in libraries and private collections, and all of Carver's poems and stories for \u003ci\u003eRaymond Carver\u003c\/i\u003e. Her portrait is generous and wise without swerving from discordant issues in Carver's private affairs. Above all Sklenicka shows how Carver's quintessentially American life fostered the stories that knowing readers have cherished from their first publication until the present day.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49529048105233,"sku":"CIN074326245XG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49619583959313,"sku":"GOR009669220","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50034377752849,"sku":"CIN074326245XVG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50490701545745,"sku":"GOR003330671","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/074326245X.jpg?v=1750945614"},{"product_id":"raymond-carver-book-carol-sklenicka-9780743262460","title":"Raymond Carver","description":"When Raymond Carver died at age fifty, readers lost a distinctive voice in its prime. Carver was, the \u003ci\u003eTimes \u003c\/i\u003eof London said, the Chekhov of middle America. His influence on a generation of writers and on the short story itself has been widely noted. Not so generally known are how Carver became a writer, how he suffered to achieve his art, and how his troubled and remarkable personality affected those around him. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eCarol Sklenicka's meticulous and absorbing biography re-creates Carver's early years in Yakima, Washington, where he was the nervous, overweight son of a kindly, alcohol-dependent lumbermill worker. By the time he was nineteen, Ray had married his high school sweetheart, Maryann Burk. From a basement apartment where they were raising their first child and expecting their second, they determined that Ray would become a writer. Despite the handicaps of an erratic education and utter lack of financial resources, he succeeded. Sklenicka describes Carver's entry into the literary world via little magazines and the Iowa Writers' Workshop; his publication by \u003ci\u003eEsquire \u003c\/i\u003eeditor Gordon Lish and their ensuing relationship; his near-fatal alcoholism, which worsened even as he produced many of the unforgettable stories collected in \u003ci\u003eWill You Please Be Quiet, Please? \u003c\/i\u003eand \u003ci\u003eWhat We Talk About When We Talk About Love\u003c\/i\u003e. She examines the dissolution of his first marriage and his partnership with poet Tess Gallagher, who helped him enjoy the full measure of his success. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eCarol Sklenicka draws on hundreds of interviews with people who knew Carver, prodigious research in libraries and private collections, and all of Carver's poems and stories for \u003ci\u003eRaymond Carver\u003c\/i\u003e. Her portrait is generous and wise without swerving from discordant issues in Carver's private affairs. Above all Sklenicka shows how Carver's quintessentially American life fostered the stories that knowing readers have cherished from their first publication until the present day.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49622009905425,"sku":"GOR006633903","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ WELL_READ \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49757450305809,"sku":"GOR013777670","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50362897137937,"sku":"CIN0743262468G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51006390206737,"sku":"NIN9780743262460","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ LIKE_NEW \/ SBYB","offer_id":51435482579217,"sku":"CIN0743262468LN","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51490879996177,"sku":"GOR014301880","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53234742395153,"sku":"GOR005099390","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":53425834033425,"sku":"CIN0743262468VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0743262468.jpg?v=1751440627"},{"product_id":"alice-adams-book-carol-sklenicka-9781451621310","title":"Alice Adams","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe first full-scale biography of prolific writer Alice Adams, whose celebrated stories and bestselling novels traced women's lives and illuminated an era characterized both by drastic cultural changes and by the persistence of old expectations, conventions, and biases (\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e). \u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eNobody writes better about falling in love than Alice Adams, a \u003ci\u003eNew York Times \u003c\/i\u003ecritic said of the prolific writer. Born in 1926, Alice Adams grew up in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, during the Great Depression and came of age during World War I. After college at Radcliffe and a year in Paris, she moved to San Francisco. Always a rebel in good-girl's clothing, Adams used her education, sexual and emotional curiosity, and uncompromising artistic ambition to break the strictures that bound women in midcentury America. Divorced with a child to raise, she worked at secretarial jobs for two decades before she could earn a living as a writer. One of only four winners of the O. Henry Special Award for Continuing Achievement, Adams wove her life into her fiction and used her writing to understand the changing tides of the 20th century. Her work portrays vibrant characters both young and old who live on the edge of their emotions, absorbed by love affairs yet always determined to be independent and to fulfill their personal destinies. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eCarol Sklenicka interweaves Adams's deeply felt, elegantly fierce life with a cascade of events--the civil rights and women's rights movements, the sixties counterculture, and sexual freedom. Her biography's revealing analyses of Adams's stories and novels from \u003ci\u003eCareless Love \u003c\/i\u003eto \u003ci\u003eSuperior Women\u003c\/i\u003e to \u003ci\u003eThe Last Lovely City\u003c\/i\u003e, and her extensive interviews with Adams's family and friends, among them Mary Gaitskill, Diane Johnson, Anne Lamott, and Alison Lurie, give us the definitive story of a writer often dubbed America's Colette. \u003ci\u003eAlice Adams: Portrait of a Writer\u003c\/i\u003e captures not just a beloved woman's life in full, but a crucial span of American history.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49804302057745,"sku":"CIN1451621310G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51328036602129,"sku":"CIN1451621310VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1451621310.jpg?v=1751371358"},{"product_id":"alice-adams-book-carol-sklenicka-9781451621334","title":"Alice Adams","description":"\u003cb\u003eThe first full-scale biography of prolific writer Alice Adams, whose celebrated stories and bestselling novels traced women's lives and illuminated an era characterized both by drastic cultural changes and by the persistence of old expectations, conventions, and biases (\u003ci\u003eThe New Yorker\u003c\/i\u003e). \u003c\/b\u003e \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eNobody writes better about falling in love than Alice Adams, a \u003ci\u003eNew York Times \u003c\/i\u003ecritic said of the prolific writer. 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Her work portrays vibrant characters both young and old who live on the edge of their emotions, absorbed by love affairs yet always determined to be independent and to fulfill their personal destinies. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\u003eCarol Sklenicka interweaves Adams's deeply felt, elegantly fierce life with a cascade of events--the civil rights and women's rights movements, the sixties counterculture, and sexual freedom. 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