Tim Page

A poignant portrait of a lifelong search for answers by Pulitzer Prize winner Tim Page, "Parallel Play" provides a unique perspective on Asperger's and the well of creativity that can spring forth as a result of the condition.

Over the past decade, the works of Dawn Powell (1896-1965) have enjoyed a spectacular revival. Now Tim Page has written the first biography of this brilliant and insightful American author, whose longtime cult following has blossomed into well-deserved general popularity. Powell came to New York City at the age of twenty-one, a gifted and ambitious young woman from small-town Ohio. There she would live for another forty-seven years, but she always managed to maintain the fresh perspective of a "permanent visitor," exalting the multiplicity and sheer sensory overload of her beloved Manhattan. This is what she distilled into her extensive and impressive body of work: hundreds of short stories and articles, dozens of poems, at least ten plays, a magnificent diary that spans thirty-five years, and - the achievement that meant the most to her - a number of dizzying and inventive novels. For such a witty woman, Powell lived a restless and troubled life. Her youth was a ghastly one, a long series of deaths, disruptions, and petty cruelties. Her only son was born mentally and emotionally impaired, and her husband became an alcoholic. She drank too much herself and suffered from mysterious health problems for most of her life. Her mood swings were drastic and sometimes incapacitating. In her sixties, she was desperately poor and, indeed, essentially homeless for a time. Throughout it all, she persevered - and now, with the reissue of her life's work, she has triumphed.

Since his debut fourteen years ago, Tim Page has established himself as one of our most original and perceptive music critics, and one of the very few to maintain a serious involvement with the music of our own time. Gathering many of Page's liveliest articles and interviews, Music from the Road introduces a remarkable critical sensibility to a wider audience while offering thought-provoking new perspectives on composers, performers, and trends that dominate the current scene. Page covers a characteristically wide range of topics, from Irving Berlin's complex sweetness to Milton Babbitt's elegant ferocity, from Nadja Salerno-Sonnenberg's wild-woman glamour to Mitsuko Uchida's infinitely articulated restraint, from Pavarotti at the Garden to Sweeney Todd in the opera house. Special highlights are two moving profiles of Leonard Bernstein, a revealing survey of musical prodigies, a trenchant discussion of opera fanatics, and Page's famous Piano Quarterly interview with Glenn Gould. Other interviews offer surprising insights into the thought and works of Babbitt, John Gage, and, in a remarkable joint interview, Philip Glass and Steve Reich. Balancing an intimate knowledge of the music with an eternal capacity for being surprised, Page is an ideal guide to the new, the old, and the radically unexpected.

"Selected Letters of Dawn Powell, 1913-1965 traces a writer's fifty-two-year journey from her childhood in a small Ohio town to the glitter of Manhattan cosmopolitan life."--BOOK JACKET. "Living most of her life in Greenwich Village, Powell supported herself as a writer through the Depression and two world wars while nursing an autistic son, an alcoholic husband, and her own parade of illnesses. In her correspondence we find the record of a life that produced fifteen novels, ten plays, and more than one hundred stories."--BOOK JACKET. "Letters to such luminaries as Edmund Wilson, John Dos Passos, and the legendary editor Max Perkins are filled with gossip and literary commentary; they also provide and in-depth look at Powell's own writing-in-progress and the events and ideas that obsessed her."--BOOK JACKET.