Ira B. Nadel

Reissued with a new afterword Leonard Cohen is back! With a #1 bestselling poetry collection, The Book of Longing, flying off bookshelves; Lian Lunson’s acclaimed documentary, Leonard Cohen: I’m Your Man, in theatres this summer (the DVD will release this fall); and the superb soundtrack in music stores everywhere, Leonard Cohen proves he is Canada’s most enduring icon. Now, in the newly reissued Various Positions, Ira Nadel peels back the many layers to reveal the man and explain the fascinating relationship between Leonard Cohen’s life and his art. This book is a remarkable and rare look at Leonard Cohen, up close and personal. For nearly forty years, Leonard Cohen has endured the ups and downs of an international career that has alternately identified him as the "Prince of Bummers" and Canada's most respected poet and performer. Now, author Ira Nadel brings us closer to understanding these conflicting descriptions and allows us to enter Cohen's private world. He peels back the many layers to reveal the man and explain the fascinating relationship between Cohen's life and his art. This is a remarkable and rare look at Leonard Cohen, up close and personal.

A Life of Leonard Cohen

Various Positions

Known as the “Prince of Bummers,” Leonard Cohen is a multi-talented poet, singer-songwriter, novelist, and Zen Buddhist whose career has spanned more than forty years and inspired countless other artists. In this critically acclaimed biography originally published in 1996 by Pantheon Books, Ira Nadel draws on extensive interviews with Cohen, as well as excerpts from his unpublished letters, journals, notebooks, songs, and other writings, to offer a full portrait of this enigmatic man and his artistic career. A new concluding chapter brings Cohen’s story up-to-date, including the release of the albums Dear Heather, Ten New Songs, The Essential Leonard Cohen, and Blue Alert, as well as the publication of Book of Longing and the screening of the documentary film Leonard Cohen, I’m Your Man.

Demetres P. Tryphonopoulos

Offers pedagogical techniques for teaching works by Ezra Pound, including his prosody, his references to classical and Asian traditions, and his role in modernism, as well as his fascism, anti-Semitism, and other problematic beliefs. Gives syllabus suggestions for undergraduate and graduate literature courses, including many online resources.

Approaches to Teaching Pound's Poetry and Prose

Long at the centre of the modernist project, from editing Eliot's The Waste Land to publishing Joyce, Pound has also been a provocateur and instigator of new movements, while initiating a new poetics. This is the first volume to summarize and analyze the multiple contexts of Pound's work, underlining the magnitude of his contribution and drawing on new archival, textual and theoretical studies. Pound's political and economic ideas also receive attention. With its concentration on the contexts of history, sociology, aesthetics and politics, the volume will provide a portrait of Pound's unusually international reach: an American-born, modern poet absorbing the cultures of England, France, Italy and China. These essays situate Pound in the social and material realities of his time and will be invaluable for students and scholars of Pound and modernism.

Ezra Pound in Context

Fiction, Fact and Form

Biography

As the best-selling author of Exodus, Mila 18, QB VII, and Trinity, Leon Uris blazed a path to celebrity with books that readers could not put down. Uris's thirteen novels sold millions of copies, spent months on the best-seller lists, appeared in fifty languages, and have been adapted into equally popular movies and TV miniseries. Few other writers equaled Uris's fame in the mid-twentieth century. His success fueled the rise of mass-market paperbacks, movie tie-ins, and celebrity author tours. Beloved by the public, Uris was, not surprisingly, dismissed by literary critics. Until now, his own life—as full of drama as his fiction—has never been the subject of a book. In Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller, Ira Nadel traces Uris from his disruptive youth to his life-changing experiences as a marine in World War II. These experiences, coupled with Uris's embrace of his Judaism and desire to write, led to his unprecedented success and the lavish excesses of a career as a best-selling author. Nadel reveals that Uris lived the adventures he described, including his war experiences in the Pacific (Battle Cry), life-threatening travels in Israel (Exodus), visit to Communist Poland (Mila 18), libel trial in Britain (QB VII), and dangerous sojourn in fractious Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic (Trinity). Nadel also demonstrates that Uris's talent for writing action-packed, yet thoroughly researched, novels meshed perfectly with the public's desire to revisit and understand the tumultuous events of recent history. This made him far more popular (and wealthy) than more literary authors, while paving the way for writers such as Irving Wallace and Tom Clancy.

Life of a Best Seller

Leon Uris

An international team of scholars provides an invaluable introduction to Pound's work and life.

The Cambridge Companion to Ezra Pound

As the best-selling author of Exodus, Mila 18, QB VII, and Trinity, Leon Uris blazed a path to celebrity with books that readers could not put down. Uris’s thirteen novels sold millions of copies, spent months on the best-seller lists, appeared in fifty languages, and have been adapted into equally popular movies and TV miniseries. Few other writers equaled Uris’s fame in the mid-twentieth century. His success fueled the rise of mass-market paperbacks, movie tie-ins, and celebrity author tours. Beloved by the public, Uris was, not surprisingly, dismissed by literary critics. Until now, his own life and work—as full of drama as his fiction—have never been the subject of a book. In Leon Uris: Life of a Best Seller, Ira Nadel traces Uris from his disruptive youth to his life-changing experiences as a marine in World War II. These experiences, coupled with Uris’s embrace of his Judaism and desire to write, led to his unprecedented success and the lavish excesses of a career as a best-selling author. Nadel reveals that Uris lived the adventures he described, including his war experiences in the Pacific (Battle Cry), life-threatening travels in Israel (Exodus), visit to Communist Poland (Mila 18), libel trial in Britain (QB VII), and dangerous sojourn in fractious Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic (Trinity). Nadel also demonstrates that Uris’s talent for writing action-packed, yet thoroughly researched, novels meshed perfectly with the public’s desire to revisit and understand the tumultuous events of recent history. This made him far more popular (and wealthy) than more literary authors, while paving the way for writers such as Irving Wallace and Tom Clancy.

Ira B. Nadel

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