Tracy Daugherty: 15 books

With Let Us Build Us a City Tracy Daugherty considers the principles of literary art in a series of essays that focus on the nature of artistic vision and the creative individual’s relationship to the world. The book reads like a master class on writing as practice, while performing a deep reading...

In The Last Love Song, Tracy Daugherty, the critically acclaimed author of Hiding Man (a New Yorker and New York Times Notable book) and Just One Catch, and subject of the hit documentary The Center Will Not Hold on Netflix delves deep into the life of distinguished American author and journalist...

Acclaimed by critics as a second F. Scott Fitzgerald, Billy Lee Brammer was once one of the most engaging young novelists in America. “Brammer’s is a new and major talent, big in scope, big in its promise of even better things to come,” wrote A. C. Spectorsky, a former staffer at the New Yorker....

The themes woven through The Woman in the Oil Field involve action and passivity and the different perspectives they inspire. Tracy Daugherty's characters walk the margins of life; seeking the safe periphery from which they assess their friends, lovers, and relatives who lead real lives. Daugherty treats perspective and insight as topics in themselves.

The New York Times bestselling writer Tracy Daugherty illuminates his most vital subject yet in this first biography of the Catch-22 author Joseph Heller Joseph Heller was a Coney Island kid, the son of Russian immigrants, who went on to great fame and fortune. His most memorable novel took...

A stunning tour de force, Tracy Daugherty’s fourth novel explores the volatility of race, class, and economics as they affect three generations of a Houston, Texas, family, and traces the rise and decline of an inner city neighborhood from the point of view of a prodigal daughter. Twenty-something...

In Tracy Daugherty's third novel, childhood innocence and political ambition meet just prior to the First World War in the person of Harry Shaughnessy, an Oklahoma farmer' son. Gifted with a booming speaking voice and a charismatic presence, the boy learns the socialist credo from his father, who takes...

In this, his third collection, Tracy Daugherty focuses on social and cultural forces shaping people's intimate behavior. Set in Texas and Oklahoma, the stories and novella suggest that even politics is a kind of family squabble whose elusive solutions often come from unexpected quarters. In "Power Lines,"...

In the spare and deliberate stories in The Empire of the Dead, through situations both comic and bluntly melancholy, the future remains open for people—but at an indeterminate cost. Daily, characters weigh their indecision against the consequences of choice. Through a series of five linked...

The novellas and stories in American Originals c*onvey the power of the West Texas desert to swallow people—literally, or through the rituals of labor, or through the raptures of ecstatic vision, induced by blessings or madness—and people’s ability to forge connections in spite of extreme conditions....

In the 1960s Donald Barthelme came to prominence as the leader of the Postmodern movement. He was a fixture at the New Yorker, publishing more than 100 short stories, including such masterpieces as "Me and Miss Mandible," the tale of a thirty-five-year-old sent to elementary school by clerical...

Explore the evolution of astronomy from Dante to Einstein, as seen through the eyes of trailblazing Victorian astronomer Mary Acworth Evershed   In 1910, Mary Acworth Evershed (1867–1949) sat on a hill in southern India staring at the moon as she grappled with apparent mistakes in Dante’s Divine...

The narrative interweaves history, myth, rumor, and news with the experiences of a young girl living in the flatness of South Florida. Like Grace Paley's narrators, she is pensive and eager, hungry for experience but restrained. Into the sphere of her regard come a Ted Bundy reject, the God Osiris, a...

Everyday Psychokillers reaches to the edge of the psychoanalytical and jolts the reader back to daily life. The reader becomes the killer, the watcher, the person on the verge, hiding behind an everyday face.