The lovely Susan from Other Press recently forwarded a galley of Michael Greenberg's book Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer's Life to fortunate me. For a number of reasons (love his columns, loved Hurry Down Sunshine, love the subject matter and cover of new effort), I am very excited about this book due out in September, and would like you to catch some of that same excitement. So Susan has two more galleys just ready to go to some lucky yous out there. Synopsis:
"Praising Greenberg and his column in the New York Times, Rachel Donadio wrote: “Imagine The Talk of the Town as if written by Dostoyevsky.” This is an entirely original book, whose writing is magical and whose insights are deceptively profound.
Nothing feels closer to life itself than these delightful true stories where strangers and next-of-kin, literature and the streets of New York provoke startling insights. Hilarious. Complex. Bittersweet. And always close to the bone.To the literary elite, Michael Greenberg has always been known for his trenchant and moving columns that appear bi-weekly in the Times Literary Supplement. But when critics hailed his memoir Hurry Down Sunshine as a classic, Greenberg became a household name. BEG, BORROW, STEAL is an autobiography in installments, set in New York , where the author depicts the life of a writer of little means trying to practice his craft, or simply stay alive. He finds himself writing about golf, a game which he never played; doctoring doomed movie scripts; driving trucks and taxis; selling cosmetics from an ironing board in front of a women’s department store; and botching his debut as a waiter in a coveted five-star restaurant.
Central characters include the City of All Cities, Michael’s father whose scrap metal business looms large, his elegant mother, his first wife Robin whom he met in a Greenwich Village high school, their son Aaron who grew up on the Lower East Side, a repentant communist who fought in the Spanish Civil War, a Chilean filmmaker in search of his past, rats who behave like humans, beggars who are poets, a man who becomes a woman, and a woman who prefers to live underground.
Greenberg creates a world where the familial, the incongruous, the literary, the humorous, the tragic and the prosaic not only speak to each other, but deeply enjoy the exchange.
A native New Yorker, Michael Greenberg is the author of the critically acclaimed memoir Hurry Down Sunshine (Other Press, 2008), which was chosen as one of the best books of 2008 by Time, the San Francisco Chronicle, Amazon and Library Journal. He is a columnist for the Times Literary Supplement ( London ), where his wide-ranging essays have been appearing since 2003. His fiction, criticism, and travel pieces have been published in such varied places as O, The Oprah Magazine and the New York Review of Books. He lives in New York with his wife and son." (from the publisher)
