A lively, elegantly concise historic tour of Italy’s city by the bayAn invaluable addition to the art of literary travel writing, Naples Declared presents an informative and compulsively readable account of three thousand years of Naples history. From the catacombs of San Gennaro to the luminous paintings of Caravaggio to the ruins of Pompeii in nearby Campania, renowned author Benjamin Taylor takes readers on a stroll around the city Italians lovingly call Il Cratere. Gracefully written and full of good humor, wisdom, and amusing anecdotes, Naples Declared is a wholly original work that will be welcomed by anyone seeking to know more about the art, culture, and history of this fabled place.

Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay

Biographies & Memoirs

Taylor, Benjamin

Historical

Penguin Publishing Group

The award-winning memoir of one tumultuous year of boyhood in Fort Worth, Texas, opening with a handshake with JFK, and recalling the changes and revelations of the months that followed. Winner of the LA Times Christopher Isherwood Prize for Autobiographical Prose, and a New York Times Editor's Choice. “A marvel of a book—elegant, touching, singular.” —Mary Karr “Brief and moving . . . An elegantly written book, erudite, perceptive and at times painfully candid.”—Moira Hodgson, Wall Street Journal After John F. Kennedy’s speech in front of the Hotel Texas in Fort Worth on November 22, 1963, he was greeted by, among others, an 11-year-old Benjamin Taylor and his mother waiting to shake his hand. Only a few hours later, Taylor’s teacher called the class in from recess and, through tears, told them of the president’s assassination. From there Taylor traces a path through the next twelve months, recalling the tumult as he saw everything he had once considered stable begin to grow more complex. Looking back on the love and tension within his family, the childhood friendships that lasted and those that didn’t, his memories of summer camp and family trips, he reflects upon the outsized impact our larger American story had on his own. Benjamin Taylor is one of the most talented writers working today. In lyrical, translucent prose, he thoughtfully extends the story of twelve months into the years before and after, painting a portrait of the artist not simply as a young man, but across his whole life. As he writes, “[A]ny twelve months could stand for the whole. Our years are so implicated in one another that the least important is important enough . . . Any year I chose would show the same mettle, the same frailties stamping me at eleven and twelve.”

The Hue and Cry at Our House: A Year Remembered

Arts & Literature

Penguin??Books

Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award\nA deeply felt, beautifully crafted meditation on friendship and loss in the vein of A Year of Magical Thinking, and a touching portrait of Philip Roth from his closest friend.\nI had a baseball question on the tip of my tongue: What was the name of "the natural," the player shot by a stalker in a Chicago hotel room? He gave me an amused look that darkened in-to puzzlement, then fear. Then he pitched forward into the soup, unconscious. When I entered the examining room twenty minutes after our arrival at Charlotte Hungerford Hospital, Philip said, "No more books." Thus he announced his retirement.\nSo begins Benjamin Taylor's Here We Are, the unvarnished portrait of his best friend and one of America's greatest writers. Needless to say, Philip Roth's place in the canon is secure, but what is less clear is what the man himself was like. In Here We Are, Benjamin Taylor's beautifully constructed memoir, we see him as a mortal man, experiencing the joys and sorrows of aging, reflecting on his own writing, and doing something we all love to do: passing the time in the company of his closest friend.\nHere We Are is an ode to friendship and its wondrous ability to brighten our lives in unexpected ways. Benjamin Taylor is one of the most talented writers working today, and this new memoir pays tribute to his friend, in the way that only a writer can. Roth encouraged him to write this book, giving Taylor explicit instructions not to sugarcoat anything and not to publish it until after his death. Unvarnished and affectionately true to life, Taylor's memoir will be the definitive account of Philip Roth as he lived for years to come.

Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth

From the prizewinning Jewish Lives series, an arresting new study of the life, times, and achievement of one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century “Taylor’s endeavor is not to explain the life by the novel or the novel by the life but to show how different events, different emotional upheavals, fired Proust’s imagination and, albeit sometimes completely transformed, appeared in his work. The result is a very subtle, thought-provoking book.”—Anka Muhlstein, author of Balzac’s Omelette and Monsieur Proust’s Library Marcel Proust came into his own as a novelist comparatively late in life, yet only Shakespeare, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky were his equals when it came to creating characters as memorably human. As biographer Benjamin Taylor suggests, Proust was a literary lightweight before writing his multivolume masterwork In Search of Lost Time, but following a series of momentous historical and personal events, he became—against all expectations—one of the greatest writers of his, and indeed any, era. This insightful, beautifully written biography examines Proust’s artistic struggles—the “search” of the subtitle—and stunning metamorphosis in the context of his times. Taylor provides an in-depth study of the author’s life while exploring how Proust’s personal correspondence and published works were greatly informed by his mother’s Judaism, his homosexuality, and such dramatic events as the Dreyfus Affair and, above all, World War I. As Taylor writes in his prologue, “Proust’s Search is the most encyclopedic of novels, encompassing the essentials of human nature. . . . His account, running from the early years of the Third Republic to the aftermath of World War I, becomes the inclusive story of all lives, a colossal mimesis. To read the entire Search is to find oneself transfigured and victorious at journey’s end, at home in time and in eternity too.” About Jewish Lives: Jewish Lives is a prizewinning series of interpretative biography designed to explore the many facets of Jewish identity. Individual volumes illuminate the imprint of Jewish figures upon literature, religion, philosophy, politics, cultural and economic life, and the arts and sciences. Subjects are paired with authors to elicit lively, deeply informed books that explore the range and depth of the Jewish experience from antiquity to the present. In 2014, the Jewish Book Council named Jewish Lives the winner of its Jewish Book of the Year Award, the first series ever to receive this award. More praise for Jewish Lives: "Excellent." –New York Times "Exemplary." –Wall Street Journal "Distinguished." –New Yorker "Superb." –The Guardian

Proust: The Search (Jewish Lives)

Yale University Press

An arresting new study of the life, times, and achievement of one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century “Taylor’s endeavor is not to explain the life by the novel or the novel by the life but to show how different events, different emotional upheavals, fired Proust’s imagination and, albeit sometimes completely transformed, appeared in his work. The result is a very subtle, thought-provoking book.”—Anka Muhlstein, author of Balzac’s Omelette and Monsieur Proust’s Library Marcel Proust came into his own as a novelist comparatively late in life, yet only Shakespeare, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky were his equals when it came to creating characters as memorably human. As biographer Benjamin Taylor suggests, Proust was a literary lightweight before writing his multivolume masterwork In Search of Lost Time, but following a series of momentous historical and personal events, he became—against all expectations—one of the greatest writers of his, and indeed any, era. This insightful, beautifully written biography examines Proust’s artistic struggles—the “search” of the subtitle—and stunning metamorphosis in the context of his times. Taylor provides an in-depth study of the author’s life while exploring how Proust’s personal correspondence and published works were greatly informed by his mother’s Judaism, his homosexuality, and such dramatic events as the Dreyfus Affair and, above all, World War I. As Taylor writes in his prologue, “Proust’s Search is the most encyclopedic of novels, encompassing the essentials of human nature. . . . His account, running from the early years of the Third Republic to the aftermath of World War I, becomes the inclusive story of all lives, a colossal mimesis. To read the entire Search is to find oneself transfigured and victorious at journey’s end, at home in time and in eternity too.”

A novel set in turn-of-the-century Texas recounts the coming-of-age of a gay fourteen-year-old as viewed through his eyes and those of each member of his privileged, eccentric family. Reprint.

Tales Out of School

Literature & Fiction

Grand Central Publishing

Finalist for the National Jewish Book Award &nbsp; A deeply felt, beautifully crafted meditation on friendship and loss in the vein of A Year of Magical Thinking, and a touching portrait of Philip Roth from his closest friend. I had a baseball question on the tip of my tongue: What was the name of "the natural," the player shot by a stalker in a Chicago hotel room? He gave me an amused look that darkened in-to puzzlement, then fear. Then he pitched forward into the soup, unconscious. When I entered the examining room twenty minutes after our arrival at Charlotte Hungerford Hospital, Philip said, "No more books." Thus he announced his retirement. So begins Benjamin Taylor's Here We Are, the unvarnished portrait of his best friend and one of America's greatest writers. Needless to say, Philip Roth's place in the canon is secure, but what is less clear is what the man himself was like. In Here We Are, Benjamin Taylor's beautifully constructed memoir, we see him as a mortal man, experiencing the joys and sorrows of aging, reflecting on his own writing, and doing something we all love to do: passing the time in the company of his closest friend. Here We Are is an ode to friendship and its wondrous ability to brighten our lives in unexpected ways. Benjamin Taylor is one of the most talented writers working today, and this new memoir pays tribute to his friend, in the way that only a writer can. Roth encouraged him to write this book, giving Taylor explicit instructions not to sugarcoat anything and not to publish it until after his death. Unvarnished and affectionately true to life, Taylor's memoir will be the definitive account of Philip Roth as he lived for years to come.

A brief and tender biography of one of the greatest authors of the 20th century and an elegant exploration of artistic endurance, as told by a life-long lover of Willa Cather's work. The story of Willa Cather is one defined by a lifetime of determination, struggle, and gradual emergence. Some show their full powers early; yet Cather was the opposite. She took her time, and gradually transformed. The writer who leapt into the forefront of American letters with O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Antonia (1918), was already well into middle-age. Through years of provincial journalism in Nebraska, brief (hated) spells of teaching, and editorial work on magazines, she persevered in pursuit of the ultimate goal - literary immortality. Unlike Hemingway, Faulkner, and Fitzgerald, her idealism was unironic, and she stood alone among the great modern authors, at odds with the time in which she lived. Combining intricate analysis with an empathetic, lyrical voice, Benjamin Taylor uncovers the reality of Cather's artistic development, from provincial beginnings to the triumphs of her mature years. Simultaneously an homage to her character, a warm consideration of her work, and a case being made to read Cather with renewed vigor.

Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather

Humor & Entertainment

VIKING

Into the Open is a philosophical and literary inquiry into the deeper meanings of genius. What precisely do we mean when we describe someone this way? What legacy do we invoke when we apply this term? To address this question, Benjamin Taylor here explores how three great minds—Walter Pater, Paul Valry, and Sigmund Freud—viewed a figure widely considered the first great modern genius, Leonardo da Vinci. For each of these great thinkers, Da Vinci is of central importance because for each the received idea of genius has ceased to be a romantic certitude or sacred truth and has become a problem.
Invoking Nietzsche's drastic critique of genius, Taylor assesses the less programmatic and more anxious cases of Pater, Valry, and Freud. Whereas Nietzsche sought for and found an escape from romantic humanism, Pater, Valry, and Freud cannot relinquish the idea of genius and serve as troubled witnesses to the dilemma posed by the notion of genius. A myth of genius has been our way of making good the losses romantic modernity entails, Taylor writes, A myth of genius has existed to affirm that, among human lives, some have sacramental shape; that, among human lives, some put into abeyance the equation between life and loss. Such is the post-theological, post-metaphysical role into which we have compelled our geniuses. They make for us one last claim on the sublime. A shift away from the special pleading that has lately plagued literary studies, Taylor's unfazed humanism reasserts the timeless standards of substantiveness, clarity, and grace.

Into the Open: Reflections on Genius and Modernity

History & Criticism

NYU Press

Storyology

History

BiblioLife

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

Books by Taylor, Benjamin

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

Naples Declared: A Walk Around the Bay

The Hue and Cry at Our House: A Year Remembered

Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth

Proust: The Search (Jewish Lives)

Proust: The Search (Jewish Lives)

Tales Out of School

Here We Are: My Friendship with Philip Roth

Chasing Bright Medusas: A Life of Willa Cather

Into the Open: Reflections on Genius and Modernity

Storyology