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4 books match the query 'Rooney, Kathleen'
Leaf Town Forever
Beth Rooney
University of Minnesota Press, 2025
The true story of a Midwestern “town” created with leaves, sticks, and children’s imaginations
Leaf Town suddenly springs up. One day the clearing outside the school is empty, and the next it’s a bustling town complete with a hotel, shop, and mayor. Children gather and find treasures everywhere: feathers, acorns, lost rings, an old medal, and plenty of leaves and pine needles. They even uncover a silver skeleton key in the muddy banks of a nearby creek and proclaim it the heart of Leaf Town. As the town grows, it attracts the attention of the kids up the street, and a colossal fight threatens to destroy everything that was built. But the heart of Leaf Town is saved, and the kids rally to rebuild their city together, expanding to welcome the neighboring kids as well as all sorts of birds and animals. They hang a sign, Leaf Town Forever, and pass the key to the next generation of children who will look after their beloved town.
Based on a true story, Leaf Town Forever is the gentle tale of a town created by children with vivid imaginations. The timeless and universal saga, written in haiku, reminds both kids and adults that some dreams are worth protecting. Unfurling over the cycle of seasons, this is the story of an enchanting place full of tenacity and hope, creativity and fun—a connection to the natural world within reach for us all if we unite to make and maintain it.
Live Nude Girl
My Life as an ObjectKathleen Rooney
University of Arkansas Press, 2008
Reading with Oprah
The Book Club that Changed AmericaKathleen Rooney
University of Arkansas Press, 2008
Adored by its fans, deplored by its critics, Oprah’s Book Club has been at the center of arguments about cultural authority and literary taste since it began in 1996. Reading with Oprah explores the club’s revolutionary fusion of books, television, and commerce and tells the engaging and in-depth story of the OBC phenomenon.
Kathleen Rooney combines extensive research with a dynamic voice to reveal the club’s far-reaching cultural impact and its role as crucible for the clash between “high” and “low” literary taste. Comprehensive and up-to-date, the book covers the club from its inception in 1996, through the Jonathan Franzen contretemps, the surprising suspension in 2002, and, after the club’s return in 2003, the progression from “great books” to memoir. New material includes an extensive look at the James Frey scandal and Oprah’s turn to contemporary fiction, including The Road and Middlesex.
Through close examination of Winfrey’s picks and personal interviews with book club authors and readers, Rooney demonstrates how the club that Barbara Kingsolver calls “one of the best possible uses of a television set” has, according to Wally Lamb, “gotten people of all ages to read, to read more, and to read widely.”
First edition published in 2005.
René Magritte
Selected WritingsRené Magritte
University of Minnesota Press, 2016
Available for the first time in an English translation, this selection of René Magritte’s writings gives non-Francophone readers the chance to encounter the many incarnations of the renowned Belgian painter—the artist, the man, the aspiring noirist, the fire-breathing theorist—in his own words. Through whimsical personal letters, biting apologia, appreciations of fellow artists, pugnacious interviews, farcical film scripts, prose poems, manifestos, and much more, a new Magritte emerges: part Surrealist, part literalist, part celebrity, part rascal.While this book is sure to appeal to admirers of Magritte’s art and those who are curious about his personal life, there is also much to delight readers interested in the history and theory of art, philosophy and politics, as well as lovers of creativity and the inner workings of a probing, inquisitive mind unrestricted by genre, medium, or fashion.