Autobiography: writers Books

Book SynopsisBorn Elsie Dunn in 1893 Clarksville, Tennessee, Evelyn Scott lived a tumultuous life that took her to New York, Brazil, western Europe, and the Caribbean. She published twelve novels during her lifetime and was a notable literary figure in the 1920s and 1930s. Published in 1937 alongside her penultimate novel, Background in Tennessee is an autobiographical work devoted to Scott's Tennessee birthplace, her family's history, and her broad view of Southern history. Her wide-ranging exploration of the south interweaves Scott's personal history with discussions of colonial settlement of the region, local leadership of Clarksville and the larger Nashville area, and race relations. In this new edition, Bill Hardwig provides an analytical introduction that guides the reader through Scott's intricate and winding exploration of early twentieth-century Tennessee and her own past. He notes at once Scott's ambivalence toward her native South and yet the nostalgia with which she recounts personal memories. Complicated yet critical to a full understanding of Evelyn Scott and her literary legacy, this edition of Background in Tennessee makes available an important voice in Tennessee's literary history for a new generation.

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Book SynopsisWho would you be if you lost everything? Hollye Dexter and her husband Troy woke one night to find their house ablaze. To escape the fire, they had to jump from their second-story window with their toddler son—and then watch their house and home-based businesses burn to the ground. Over the next two years, the family went bankrupt, lost their cars and another home, and got dropped by their best friends. As the outer layers of her life were stripped away, Dexter began to unravel emotionally; but then she found herself on the brink of losing her marriage, and she realized that if she was going to save her family, she would have to pull herself back together somehow. As she fought to reassemble the pieces of the life she’d had, Dexter discovered that a shattered heart has the ability to regenerate in a mighty way; that even in the midst of disaster, you can find your place; and that when everything you identify with is gone, you are free to discover who you really are. Poignant and inspiring, Fire Season is a story for anyone who has ever lost hope—and found it again.Trade Review“Hollye Dexter’s book made me cry and laugh—sometimes all within one paragraph. She tells her story with power and punch, and a truth that is unsettling and astonishing and ultimately uplifting. There isn't a soul who can't relate to her memoir. It is filled with revelations, humanity, poignancy, balls-out courage, and humor. She is a role model extraordinaire.” —Amy Ferris, screenwriter (Mr. Wonderful, Funny Valentines), playwright, and author of Marrying George Clooney “In Fire Season, Hollye Dexter gives me no choice but to experience fully and passionately the horrors of a house on fire, and to remember that how we face tragedy often defines who we are. As I read about a childhood fraught with loneliness and pain, and how she fought with valor to attain the love and trust she deserved, I was reminded of the phoenix. Dexter did what so many of us can only imagine: literally rising from the ashes and beginning anew. This memoir is a reminder that the joys of life are based not on what we possess, but what we appreciate." —Victoria Zackheim, author of The Bone Weaver and Exit Laughing “Fire Season will take your breath away and singe your fingertips from turning the pages so quickly. Like Dexter, you’ll fall madly in love with her husband, Troy, who could “rock the world off its axis” and right it again. Musician that she is, Dexter's prose sings in this beautiful and complicated love story, a story that inspires both tenderness and courage, and a deep belief that we can all, like the phoenix and the author, rise from the ashes." —Amy Friedman, author of Desperado’s Wife: A Memoir

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Book SynopsisAn audacious, unabashedly transgressive memoir about two acts of escape by the author: breaking from his family to seek a freer life in Paris and then, later, deserting the French military during the Algerian War.Pierre Guyotat was one of the most radical and uncompromising writers of the twentieth century, a literary successor to the Marquis de Sade, Georges Bataille, and Jean Genet, and whose visceral fictions and extreme linguistic experimentation have earned him cult status in France and abroad. Idiocy is his searing memoir of coming of age between 1958 and 1962, when he discovered his burgeoning sexuality as well as his aptitude for rebellion—first against his father, whom he escaped to become a writer in Paris, then against the French military authorities as a conscript in the Algerian War.With unflinching honesty, Guyotat recounts the atrocities he witnessed firsthand during the war, as well as his own harrowing experience of being arrested for ostensibly inciting desertion and imprisoned in a hole in the ground for three months. Guyotat wields his prose like a scalpel, merciless in his excavation of the sensations and textures of human brutality—yet also generous and moving in his depictions of comradery and friendship.Winner of the 2018 Prix Médicis, this bracing, hallucinatory narrative is both an incisive condemnation of violence and colonialism, and an invaluable key to the oeuvre of a writer hailed by Edmund White as “one of the few geniuses of our day.”

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Book SynopsisTotal Loss Farm in Guilford, Vermont, was and is a wordy place. Its hilly acres and flimsy buildings provided a refuge from a riven country, a place to grow paragraphs and stanzas, among the tilled rows of the market garden. Peter Gould's first novel Burnt Toast was a youthful exploration of this mythic turf. Peter left the farm to pursue love and work. In Horse-Drawn Yogurt, Peter returns to offer his take on how we lived in times that seem exotic, yet oddly familiar, in this second edition, with three new stories and an introduction by Vermont author Bill Schubart. Gould is eloquent, whimsical, critical, musical, magical, and tender. The new stories in this second edtion are gems with additional line drawings by the author.

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Book SynopsisIn the summer of 1939, as a two-year-old in London, I was given away by my parents to a Chelsea friend and taken on the Irish Mail to Dublin. Thus begins this extraordinary memoir by travel writer and novelist Joseph Hone, one of eight children farmed out by impecunious and inebriate parents, who was raised at Maidenhall in County Kilkenny by the historian and essayist Hubert Butler and his wife Peggy, sister of Tyrone Guthrie of Annaghmakerrig in County Monaghan. The story is told through a cache of letters discovered on Hubert Butler’s death between he and his friend ‘Old Joe’, Little Joe’s grandfather and biographer of Yeats and George Moore, upon whom fell the financial responsibility for his grandson’s upbringing. This account of Joseph Hone’s childhood and youth during the 1940s and 50s in rural Ireland, among the privileged and artistic elite of his generation living down-at-heel if comfortable lives in a newly emergent state, is an enthralling reminder of the happenstance and precariousness of all our lives. Like William Trevor, Joe was boarded out at Sandford Park in Dublin and then at St Columba’s, both of which he documents in loving and comic detail, gaining as much stimulation from his home environment as from the excesses and disappointments of these single-sex establishments. He writes with feeling and insight of the lives of those in his circle and beyond – his teachers and foster parents and friends – working as an assistant for John Ford during the making of The Quiet Man, and finding himself as the writer he was to become. This numinous work of autobiography and self-interrogation bears comparison with Nabokov’s Speak Memory or Frank O’Connor’s An Only Child. It will take its place as a classic of the genre while illuminating unknown corners of Ireland’s cultural landscape.Trade Review“A brilliant, often hilariously funny, and above all, beautifully written story.” Irish Arts Review “An invaluable account of an unusal upbringing and a wonderful portrait of two Irish men of letters…” 5 stars – The Dubliner“A brilliant, often hilariously funny, and above all, beautifully written story.” Irish Arts Review “An invaluable account of an unusal upbringing and a wonderful portrait of two Irish men of letters…” 5 stars – The Dubliner

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Book Synopsis'A thoughtful, funny memoir on the realities of immigration' Guardian'Ebullient and sharply humorous about the conflicts and confusions of growing up and adapting to a country (and family) in a constant state of political flux and, often, social fantasy' The TimesMr Hai arrived in London in 1964. But, while becoming British via a passport had been relatively easy, becoming English was something to be studied - and then passed on, first to his wife, newly arrived from Pakistan, and then to his children. No more speaking Urdu, no more long plaits, no shalwar kameezes, and - even though they were Muslim - no more religion. Mr Hai put his family firmly on the road to assimilation, and his first-born daughter Yasmin was his star pupil. However, being second-generation British Asian was not quite so simple... especially as their Muslim community was about to go through some very profound changes and challenges.Brilliantly told, with intelligence and humour and passion, this is a fascinating story about immigration and identity, about religion and roots, and about a daughter's understanding of her father.Trade Review[Yasmin Hai] is ebullient and sharply humorous about the conflicts and confusions of growing up and adapting to a country (and a family) in a constant state of political flux and, often, social fantasy. Her personality is as engaging as her insights are illuminating * The Times *A very personal story filled with family tales, social history and politics, and making an important contribution to the debate about life in modern multicultural Britain * Waterstones Books Quarterly *Had Mr Hai succeeded in turning his daughter into an Englishwoman? I'm not sure it really matters anymore, but his kindly influence obviously enabled his little Yasmin to write this unbelievably funny, passionate autobiography * Spectator *[Yasmin Hai] is ebullient and sharply humorous about the conflicts and confusions of growing up and adapting to a country (and a family) in a constant state of political flux and, often, social fantasy. Her personality is as engaging as her insights are illuminating. * The Times *Had Mr Hai succeeded in turning his daughter into an Englishwoman? I'm not sure it really matters any more, but his kindly influence obviously enabled his little Yasmin to write this unbelievably funny, passionate autobiography. * Spectator *A thoughtful, funny memoir on the realities of immigration * Guardian (Guide - for the Radio 4 Book of the Week) *A very personal story filled with family tales, social history and politics, and making an important contribution to the debate about life in modern multicultural Britain. * Waterstones Books Quarterly *

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Book SynopsisFirst published in 1936, this is the story of Elizabeth von Arnim's extraordinary life - and her equally extraordinary dogs. From her Pomeranian idyll (celebrated in her famous first book, ELIZABETH AND HER GERMAN GARDEN), to less happy days in London following the death of her first husband; from the beautiful solitude of her Swiss mountain hideaway, to the First World War and a disastrous second marriage, the author takes us on a disarmingly witty and poignant journey of canine companionship.Trade ReviewAs much a portrait of a vanished world as the autobiography of a well-loved author told through touching takes of canine companions * Big Issue *A captivating (in no way barking) autobiography. Dogs take the leading role, but it is also about troublesome husbands, wonderfu houses, a surprising life * Observer *

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Book SynopsisEdith Sitwell (1887-1964) was, through four decades, the most prominent and celebrated woman poet in Britain. Among the notable admirers of her work were Siegfried Sassoon, WB Yeats and Gertrude Stein, Stephen Spender and Marianne Moore. Just after her death, Allen Tate described her in The New York Times as 'one of the great poets of the twentieth century'. Even as one allows for the ebb and flow of literary reputations, Edith Sitwell will have permanent claim on the attention of readers and literary scholars. She and her two brothers, Osbert and Sacheverell, were the focus of a movement in English Literature described as an 'alternative Bloomsbury'. This volume includes unpublished letters to many significant figures, including WB Yeats, Bertrand Russell and Benjamin Britten. It also contains letters that illuminate Sitwell's relations with other women writers, among them, Gertrude Stein and Rosamond Lehmann.'I am besotted with this dotty old bat. Britain's most celebrated and eccentric female poet, she dashed off reams of witty, newsy, mischievous letters in exquisitely beautiful prose. Every letter is a gem' - Val Hennessy (one of her top ten books for 1997), Daily MailTrade ReviewAmusing, painful, these letters are very entertaining * THE TIMES *Her letters are a vital expression of that personality - witty, prickly, affectionate, kind, snobbish yet vulnerable, imaginative and often over-the-top ... the letters make you laugh out loud * LITERARY REVIEW *

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Book SynopsisSelected letters of occult author Gareth Knight, written over a period of forty years and to over seventy different people. These include learned discourse with academics, exchanges of strange experiences with esoteric colleagues, and advice to seekers trying to find their path. The letters reveal extraordinary, entertaining and personal details of the life and work of a contemporary occultist. "One fault of many occult students is to read too much ...all too often the new student is so interested in reading the latest thing that he never gets round to actually doing any of it." "I suppose you can at least feel what it is like to be 'a lone voice crying in the wilderness' ...I think even John the Baptist, in time, would have packed up his traps, said 'Sod it' (or 'Sod them') and gone home, maybe to start a locust and wild honey farm." "Your remark that the devil works by compromise and subtlety is altogether too glib a simplification. He works equally well through uncompromising 'principles' very often. The thing that bothers me though is your preoccupation with the insinuations of the devil, which seems at times to verge on 'old maid's insanity'. I get the impression - I hope wrongly - that I stand a good chance of being cast in the role of the serpent offering the poisoned, or forbidden fruit."

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Book SynopsisMuch has been written on Simone de Beauvoir, one of France’s leading intellectual figures of the 20th century. The sheer volume of her autobiographical writings testifies to her indefatigable questioning of the nature of existence and her personal and public engagement in the world over the best part of a century. This study aims to re-evaluate her extensive autobiographical œuvre, exploring its place in relation to the French autobiographical canon, and in the light of recent theorisations of autobiography. It presents readings which engage critically with existentialism, feminist theory, and autobiography studies generally, in particular focusing on the question of ‘autothanatography’, a term developed by theorists such as Jacques Derrida and Louis Marin. A new reading of the autobiographies via the lens of thanatos is presented with questions of gender in mind, and the nature of autobiography as genre is also explored more fully with particular attention paid to narrative voice. Close readings of the autobiographical œuvre combine with contextual details, critical overviews and links to recent developments in critiques of Beauvoir’s fiction and philosophy. The study would be of particular interest to scholars in the following areas: 20th century French literature and culture; Autobiography studies; Literary theory; existentialism; Women’s studies.Table of ContentsList of Abbreviations Acknowledgements Introduction AUTOBIOGRAPHY CHAPTER I Mémoires d’une jeune fille rangée CHAPTER II La Force de l’âge CHAPTER III La Force des choses CHAPTER IV Tout compte fait CHAPTER V Une mort très douce CHAPTER VI La Cérémonie des adieux Conclusion Bibliography Index

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