Mary Karr

"In this sequel, Karr dashes down the trail of the teen years with customary sass, only to run up against the paralyzing self-doubt of a girl in bloom. She flees the thrills and terrors of her sexual awakening by butting up against authority in all its forms - from the school principal to various Texas law officers. Looking for a lover or heart's companion who'll make her feel whole, she hooks up with an outrageous band of surfers and heads, wannable yogis and bone fide geniuses. There's Meredith, who tempers Karr's penchant for rock and roll with literary wit. And Donnie is the wild-man beach aficionado who crawls into her life "on his hands and knees like a reptile.""--BOOK JACKET.

"Every year there are one or two commencement speeches that strike a chord with audiences far greater than the student bodies for which they are intended. In 2015 Mary Karr's speech to the graduating class of Syracuse University caught fire, hailed across the Internet as one of the most memorable in recent years, and lighting up the Twittersphere. In Now Go Out There, Karr explains why having your heart broken is just as-if not more-important than falling in love; why getting what you want often scares you more than not getting it; how those experiences that appear to be the worst cannot be so easily categorized; and how to cope with the setbacks that inevitably befall all of us. "Don't make the mistake of comparing your twisted up insides to other people's blow-dried outsides," she cautions. "Even the most priviliged person in this stadium suffers the torments of the damned just going about the business of being human." An ideal-and beautifully designed-gift for a graduate or for anyone looking for some down-to-earth life advice, Now Go Out There is destined to become a classic"--Jacket.

"For its twentieth anniversary, a stunning Graphic Deluxe Edition of Mary Karr's pathbreaking, award-winning, mega-bestselling memoir, with a new foreword by Lena Dunham When it was first published twenty years ago, The Liars' Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr's comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D. Salinger's--a hard-drinking daddy, a sister who can talk down the sheriff at age twelve, and an oft-married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all. Now in a stunning Penguin Classics Graphic Deluxe Edition with a new foreword by Lena Dunham--a creative game changer in her own right--this unsentimental and profoundly moving account of an apocalyptic childhood is as "funny, lively, and un-put-downable" (USA Today) today as it ever was. For more than sixty-five years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators"--

The Liars' Club brought to vivid, indelible life Mary Karr's hardscrabble Texas childhood. Cherry, her account of her adolescence, "continued to set the literary standard for making the personal universal" (Entertainment Weekly). Now Lit follows the self-professed blackbelt sinner's descent into the inferno of alcoholism and madness-and to her astonishing resurrection.Karr's longing for a solid family seems secure when her marriage to a handsome, Shakespeare-quoting blueblood poet produces a son they adore. But she can't outrun her apocalyptic past. She drinks herself into the same numbness that nearly devoured her charismatic but troubled mother, reaching the brink of suicide. A hair-raising stint in "The Mental Marriott," with an oddball tribe of gurus and saviors, awakens her to the possibility of joy and leads her to an unlikely faith. Not since Saint Augustine cried, "Give me chastity, Lord-but not yet!" has a conversion story rung with such dark hilarity.Lit is about getting drunk and getting sober; becoming a mother by letting go of a mother; learning to write by learning to live. Written with Karr's relentless honesty, unflinching self-scrutiny, and irreverent, lacerating humor, it is a truly electrifying story of how to grow up-as only Mary Karr can tell it.

"Long before she earned accolades for her genre-defining memoirs, Mary Karr was winning poetry prizes. Now the beloved author returns with a collection of bracing poems as visceral, deeply felt, and hilarious as her memoirs. In Tropic of Squalor, Karr dares to address the numinous--that mystery some of us hope toward in secret, or maybe dare to pray to. The "squalor" of meaninglessness that every thoughtful person wrestles with sits at the core of human suffering, and Karr renders it with power--illness, death, love's agonized disappointments. Her brazen verse calls us out of our psychic swamplands and into that hard-won awareness of the divine hiding in the small moments that make us human. In a single poem she can generate tears, horror, empathy, laughter, and peace. She never preaches. But whether you're an adamant atheist, a pilgrim, or skeptically curious, these poems will urge you to find an inner light in the most baffling hours of darkness." --Front flap of dust jacket.

Avec verve, l'auteur, qui est poète à l'origine, et enseigne la littérature et le "creative writing" à l'université de Syracuse, raconte son enfance texane dans une famille allumée, où sévissent violence, drogue, alcoolisme, secrets et mensonges. Ce livre a obtenu un grand succès aux Etats-Unis en 1995 à sa sortie.