Autobiography: writers Books
West Virginia University Press The Wounds That Bind Us
Book SynopsisThe improbable and powerful true story of a single mother with prosthetics for both legs who travels the globe with her young daughter in a Land Rover.The Wounds That Bind Us is the improbable true story of Kelley Shinn, an orphan at birth who loses her legs at the age of sixteen to a rare bacterial pathogen. She becomes an avid off-road racer and, as a single mother, attempts to drive around the globe in a Land Rover with her three-year-old daughter in tow to bring light to the plight of land mine survivors. With unflinching honesty, exceptional lyricism, and biting humor, Shinn (“that’s two Ns and no shins”) takes readers on a wild journey—literal and emotional—filled with striking characters and landscapes, heartbreaks, and hard-won insights, ultimately arriving at a place of profound redemption. Told with the energy and intensity of the adventure story it is, this terrifically rich and nuanced examination of a life is also a careful meditation on renewal—a remapping of the world. Guided by the narrator’s keen introspection and her ability to look resolutely at harrowing sorrows and still find hope, joy, and meaning, The Wounds That Bind Us will resonate deeply, long after the last page.Trade ReviewIt is impossible to put down this book. The story of Kelley Shinn’s often dangerous but always thrilling and adventurous life will leave you breathless and awed. The courage, compassion, and joy with which Shinn lives her life is inspiring. She is the person every parent would want to see their child grow to be, the mother every kid wishes they had." — Jessica Anya Blau, author of Mary Jane"This memoir of single motherhood, disability, and an unlikely off-road adventure around the world delivers just what I’m looking for in my reading these days: courage. That, and fine writing, unforgettable characters, suspense, humor, tenderness, and a profound yet humble sense of moral purpose. Kelley Shinn is a marvel, and her book, despite its pain, makes a better world feel possible." —Belle Boggs, author of The Art of Waiting: On Fertility, Medicine, and Motherhood"The Wounds That Bind Us offers perennial relevance in a fresh literary manner. Kelley Shinn invites the reader, the voyeur, the accidental tourist into a world that is a brilliant jewel box of precise, complex, and beautiful turns, with language that bites and soothes the wound in the same stroke. These personal narratives, written with a deliberate genius of craft, usher an arresting memoir that lifts heavy veils and becomes bountiful succor for the parched truths we share." — Jaki Shelton Green, North Carolina Poet Laureate"A beautiful book about how the things we love are torn away from us and about the ways we hold on. Shinn is an anatomist of velocity. Thrilling." —Thomas Beller, author of J.D. Salinger: The Escape ArtistTable of Contents Praise for the Book Title Page Copyright Page
£19.76
Diaphanes AG Artaud 1937 Apocalypse – Letters from Ireland
Book SynopsisAntonin Artaud’s journey to Ireland in 1937 marked an extraordinary—and apocalyptic—turning point in his life and career. After publishing the manifesto The New Revelations of Being about the “catastrophic immediate-future,” Artaud abruptly left Paris for Ireland, remaining there for six weeks without money. Traveling first to the isolated island of Inishmore off Ireland’s western coast, then to Galway, and finally to Dublin, Artaud was eventually arrested as an undesirable alien, beaten by the police, and summarily deported back to France. On his return, he spent nine years in asylums, remaining there through the entire span of World War II. During his fateful journey, Artaud wrote letters to friends in Paris which included several “magic spells,” intended to curse his enemies and protect his friends from the city’s forthcoming incineration and the Antichrist’s appearance. (To André Breton, he wrote: “It’s the Unbelievable—yes, the Unbelievable—it’s the Unbelievable which is the truth.”) This book collects all of Artaud’s surviving correspondence from his time in Ireland, as well as photographs of the locations he traveled through. Featuring an afterword and notes by the book’s translator, Stephen Barber, this edition marks the seventieth anniversary of Artaud’s death.
£10.18
Hardpress Publishing The Life and Letters of Washington Irving 1
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£19.46
Libros del Asteroide S.L.U. StopTime
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£22.79
Berenice Intensa Vida, La
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£18.43
Anagrama LOS INTIMOS
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£22.61
Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial Lo que quiero decir / Let Me Tell You What I Mean
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£18.25
Editorial Gedisa, S.A. El taller de las metamorfosis. Conversaciones con
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£14.55
Editorial Gedisa, S.A. La vida de Jorge Luis Borges una vida en el
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£21.84
Libros del Asteroide S.L.U. Una educación incompleta
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£20.13
Taylor & Francis Ltd Towards a Theory of LifeWriting
Book SynopsisTowards a Theory of Life-Writing: Genre Blending provides a look into the rules of life-writing genre blending proposing a theory to explain and illustrate the main regulations governing such genre play. It centers on fact and fiction duality in the formation of auto/biofictional genres. This book investigates the existing developments in this field, and explores major criticism and lines of inquiry in order to arrive at the theory of life-writing genre play textuality. The specific interplay of the different generic characteristics develops a specific textuality at the heart of it. This is termed biofictional preservation (biopreservation) to explain the textual transformation and the shaping of the auto/biofictional genres. Written for undergraduate and graduate students, but also for the general readers, the book further exemplifies the theory in the analyses of different biofictions about the American authors F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway featuring overTable of ContentsIntroduction1. Chapter One - Postmodern genre play1.1 Genre in literature1.2 Genre play in postmodern writing2. Chapter Two - Auto/Biography and literature2.1 Literary biography2.2 Biopreservation: the building block of postmodern literary biography 3. Chapter Three - F. Scot Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway as fictional characters3.1 Fictionalizing Hemingway3.2 Fictionalizing Fitzgerald4. Chapter Four - Narrative identity and image building in Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald5. Chapter Five - Narrative identity and image building in The Paris Wife6.Conclusion
£60.47
Taylor & Francis Ltd Towards a Theory of LifeWriting
Book SynopsisTowards a Theory of Life-Writing: Genre Blending provides a look into the rules of life-writing genre blending proposing a theory to explain and illustrate the main regulations governing such genre play. It centers on fact and fiction duality in the formation of auto/biofictional genres. This book investigates the existing developments in this field, and explores major criticism and lines of inquiry in order to arrive at the theory of life-writing genre play textuality. The specific interplay of the different generic characteristics develops a specific textuality at the heart of it. This is termed biofictional preservation (biopreservation) to explain the textual transformation and the shaping of the auto/biofictional genres. Written for undergraduate and graduate students, but also for the general readers, the book further exemplifies the theory in the analyses of different biofictions about the American authors F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway featuring over
£19.99
Cambridge University Press The Small Years
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£36.09
Cambridge University Press A Personal Record The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Joseph Conrad
a huge range and FREE tracked UK delivery on ALL orders.
£100.70
HarperCollins Publishers Inc The Boy Detective A New York Childhood
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£16.99
HarperCollins Publishers Inc After the Fire
Book SynopsisNew York Times bestselling author J. A. Jance's heartrending collection of poetry and essays recounts a dark chapter of her own life, her first marriage to an alcoholic—a powerful look at the emotional cost of addiction and an inspiring story of courage and triumph in the wake of crushing defeatBefore she found fame as a bestselling mystery author, Judith Jance wrestled with the anguish of being married to an alcoholic. For years she channeled her pain into words, composing the poems in this moving volume, first published in 1984, a year before her debut novel.In searing and direct language, After the Fire chronicles the collapse of Jance's first marriage under the weight of her husband's addiction—and her own unwitting denial and codependence while she struggled to find herself. "I will not be the price of your redemption," she wrote then. "I will not pay my life to ransom yours."An intimate, deeply pers
£16.99
HarperCollins Publishers Inc The Lost Landscape A Writers Coming of Age
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£22.39
HarperCollins Publishers Inc Pops
Book Synopsis“Magical prose stylist” Michael Chabon (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times) delivers a collection of essays—heartfelt, humorous, insightful, wise—on the meaning of fatherhood.For the September 2016 issue of GQ, Michael Chabon wrote a piece about accompanying his son Abraham Chabon, then thirteen, to Paris Men’s Fashion Week. Possessed with a precocious sense of style, Abe was in his element chatting with designers he idolized and turning a critical eye to the freshest runway looks of the season; Chabon Sr., whose interest in clothing stops at “thrift-shopping for vintage western shirts or Hermès neckties,” sat idly by, staving off yawns and fighting the impulse that the whole thing was a massive waste of time. Despite his own indifference, however, what gradually emerged as Chabon ferried his son to and from fashion shows was a deep respect for his son’s passion. The piece quickly became a vir
£16.99
HarperCollins The Uptown Local
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£22.40
HarperCollins The Uptown Local
£16.14
Penguin Putnam Inc Cherry
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£17.10
Penguin Putnam Inc Life After Death
Book SynopsisThe New York Times bestselling memoir by Damien Echols of the West Memphis Three, who was falsely convicted of three murders and spent nearly eighteen years on Death Row.In 1993, teenagers Damien Echols, Jason Baldwin, and Jessie Misskelley, Jr.—who have come to be known as the West Memphis Three—were arrested for the murders of three eight-year-old boys in Arkansas. The ensuing trial was marked by tampered evidence, false testimony, and public hysteria. Baldwin and Misskelley were sentenced to life in prison; while eighteen-year-old Echols, deemed the “ringleader,” was sentenced to death. Over the next two decades, the WM3 became known worldwide as a symbol of wrongful conviction and imprisonment, with thousands of supporters and many notable celebrities who called for a new trial. In a shocking turn of events, all three men were released in August 2011.Now Echols shares his story in full—from abuse by prison guards and warde
£17.10
Penguin Publishing Group There Was a Country
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£15.30
Penguin Putnam Inc Life Among the Savages
Book SynopsisIn a hilariously charming domestic memoir, America’s celebrated master of terror turns to a different kind of fright: raising children. In her celebrated fiction, Shirley Jackson explored the darkness lurking beneath the surface of small-town America. But in Life Among the Savages, she takes on the lighter side of small-town life. In this witty and warm memoir of her family’s life in rural Vermont, she delightfully exposes a domestic side in cheerful contrast to her quietly terrifying fiction. With a novelist’s gift for character, an unfailing maternal instinct, and her signature humor, Jackson turns everyday family experiences into brilliant adventures.
£15.30
Penguin Putnam Inc Before Night Falls A Memoir Penguin Vitae
Book SynopsisThe acclaimed memoir of homosexual Cuban author Reinaldo Arenas chronicling his tumultuous yet luminary life, from his impoverished upbringing in Cuba to his imprisonment at the hands of a Communist regime. A Penguin Vitae EditionThe astonishing memoir by visionary Cuban writer Reinaldo Arenas is a book above all about being free, said The New York Review of Books--sexually, politically, artistically. Arenas recounts a stunning odyssey from his poverty-stricken childhood in rural Cuba and his adolescence as a rebel fighting for Castro, through his supression as a writer, imprisonment as a homosexual, his flight from Cuba via the Mariel boat lift, and his subsequent life and the events leading to his death in New York. In what The Miami Herald calls his deathbed ode to eroticism, Arenas breaks through the code of secrecy and silence that protects the privileged in a state where homosexuality is a political crime. Recorded in simple, strai
£21.38
Penguin Random House India Pvt. Ltd Khushwantnama The Lessons Of My Life
£13.29
The University of Chicago Press That SelfForgetful Perfectly Useless
Book SynopsisMore than a gathering of essays, That Self-Forgetful Perfectly Useless Concentration is part memoir, part literary criticism, and an artful fusion of the two. It is an intimate portrait of a life in poetry that only Alan Shapiro could have written. In this book, Shapiro brings his characteristic warmth, humor, and many years as both poet and teacher to bear on questions surrounding two preoccupations: the role of conventions of literary and social norms in how we fashion our identities on and off the page and how suffering both requires and resists self-expression. He sketches affectionate portraits of his early teachers, revisits the deaths of his brother and sister, and examines poems that have helped him navigate troubled times. Integrating storytelling and literary analysis so seamlessly that art and life become extensions of each other, Shapiro embodies in his lively prose the very qualities he celebrates in the poems he loves. Brimming with wit and insight, this is a book for poe
£80.00
Little, Brown & Company James Patterson by James Patterson
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£23.20
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Thom Gunn
Book SynopsisA no-holds-barred biography of the great poet and sexual rebel, who could give the dead a voice, make them sing (Hilton Als, The New Yorker). Thom Gunn was not a confessional poet, and he withheld much, but inseparable from his rigorous, formal poetry was a ravenous, acute experience of life and death. Raised in Kent, England, and educated at Cambridge, Gunn found a home in San Francisco, where he documented the city's queerness, the hippie mentality (and drug use) of the sixties, and the tragedy and catastrophic impact of the AIDS crisis in the eighties and beyond. As Jeremy Lybarger wrote in The New Republic, the author of Moly and The Man with Night Sweats was an agile poet who renovated tradition to accommodate the rude litter of modernity. Thom Gunn: A Cool Queer Life chronicles, for the first time, the largely undocumented life of this revolutionary poet. Michael Nott, a coeditor of The Letters of Thom Gunn, draw
£33.75
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Alphabetical Diaries
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£21.60
Farrar, Straus and Giroux The Position of Spoons
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£17.02
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Homework
£23.20
WW Norton & Co My AvantGarde Education
Book SynopsisA wry and beautifully observed memoir about coming of age in the era of conceptual art.Trade Review"Moving…capture[s] the era…poetically." -- Peter Plagens - Wall Street Journal"We could all use an avant-garde education. If it's too late for you, please read My Avant-Garde Education. Bernard Cooper is one of the funniest writers I know, and like all the best humor, his work is tinged with the darker streams of life." -- Rachel Kushner, author of The Flamethrowers"[Cooper] put[s] together words in a combination of funny scenes, astute observations and moments of quiet poetry… The book is filled with moments…that practically require the reader to stop and savor the sentence again." -- Carolina A. Miranda - Los Angeles Times"A smart and funny coming-into-consciousness narrative of an extraordinary writer, a precise and evocative art-history lesson, and (above all) a persuasive reclamation of the everyday. A beautiful book." -- David Shields, author of Reality Hunger"[O]ne of L.A.’s great cultural critics and memoirists." -- Ed Leibowitz - Los Angeles Magazine"In My Avant-Garde Education, Bernard Cooper delivers a kind of magic. He works in a mode that is so subtle, so ingenious, so deeply rooted in the visceral that it almost defies verbal description.…This book employs the best practices of the best memoirs…By asking, "what is art?" Cooper is really asking, "what is life?" And though he gives us no easy answers, he explores these questions with such insight, humor, and generosity of spirit that we come away not only educated but genuinely enlightened." -- Meghan Daum, author of The Unspeakable: And Other Subjects of Discussion"Alternately funny and touching… Readers interested in conceptualism will especially value these personal reflections during such a critical moment in the recent history of art." -- Publishers Weekly"Bernard Cooper is among my most favorite writers for his fearlessness, his honesty, his grace. He has written eloquently about subjects, many of us can find few words for and now he’s turned his eye onto his own coming of age the world of Cal Arts—an epicenter for art, creativity and a kind of highly intellectual absurdity. Cooper brilliantly captures what it is to awaken to ones creative self and the need to find what is ones own in terms of intellectual and personal identity while making sense of the world that surrounds." -- A.M. Homes, author of May We Be Forgiven"Bernard Cooper has created another elegantly simple testament to the power of the personal story. This is a riveting, soulful, whimsical, mournful, and triumphantly moving story about that weirdly mysterious process of transferring meaning from life to art, and then back again into life." -- John D’Agata, author of About a Mountain"The paradox of making something from nothing, of threading the maze of reality, is finely illuminated in this honest, articulate, and moving memoir. Through his search for the avant-garde, Bernard Cooper found something rarer, a wisdom grounded in humility before unanswerable questions. In doing so, he has achieved a combination of 'beauty plus pity,' Nabokov's definition of art." -- Phillip Lopate, author of Portrait Inside My Head
£19.94
WW Norton & Co The Pawnbrokers Daughter
Book SynopsisFrom Pulitzer Prize–winning poet Maxine Kumin comes a timeless memoir of life, love, and poetry.Trade Review"This splendid memoir is a must for any reader. You’ve got to love the modesty of the title, The Pawnbroker’s Daughter, when if one of Kumin’s many admirers such as myself had chosen the title it would have been The Fabulous Autobiography of the World’s Best Poet. In its subtle, understated way, her prose is like her poetry, so evocative that it can make your skin prickle. It’s a quiet book, but from the first page to the last, I couldn’t put it down." -- Elizabeth Marshall Thomas"What a treat to curl up with this keenly observed, beautifully written, and altogether glorious memoir. Kumin is one of life’s great celebrants, a luminous wordsmith in both poetry and prose, a true American literary treasure." -- Diane Ackerman"This beautiful memoir evokes the beautiful, meaningful life of the groundbreaking poet and humanist Maxine Kumin. Like her poetry, her prose is direct and incandescent at once, and The Pawnbroker’s Daughter is often moving and witty and always remarkably wise. Kumin is greatly missed in the world about which she wrote with such brilliance and ardor. We are very fortunate to have her words." -- Hilma Wolitzer"Maxine Kumin’s quietly powerful memoir is so graceful we almost forget it was no easy task for a pawnbroker’s daughter, predestined housewife of the 1950s to become a Pulitzer Prize poet, mother of three children, breeder and rider of horses, grower of vegetables, expert swimmer and cross-country skier, New Hampshire farmer, and writer of novels and children’s books. And I never heard her raise her voice except in laughter and song." -- Dan Wakefield"As soon as I finished reading Maxine Kumin’s The Pawnbroker’s Daughter, I started it over again. Hers is an irresistible, no-nonsense, original voice that made itself felt in a male-dominated literature and academia, and now we know how it all came about. It belongs with her poetry, as an afterword and a sweet goodbye." -- Philip Schultz"Everything comes alive in these pages that, like her poems, always say more than the simple words. When you enter this book, this life, you enter the wonderful world that becomes her PoBiz farm, a world not just for poets but for anyone who is enthralled by the world and wants to leave it ‘full of the last clover.’" -- Richard Jackson
£18.89
WW Norton & Co Somewhere Towards the End
Book SynopsisWinner of the 2009 National Book Critics Circle Award in Autobiography and a New York Times bestseller: a prize-winning, critically acclaimed memoir on life and aging —“An honest joy to read” (Alice Munro).Trade Review"Athill writes…with clarity, calm, and common sense." -- Barbara Fisher - Boston Globe"Life, not death, is her preoccupation…Reflections on old age, rather than on a long life lived are rare…It is rarer still for a woman to write such a book: so Athill’s candor and economic prose on religion, regrets, and sex are invigorating." -- Emma Jacobs - Financial Times"Jean Rhys said that literature was a lake, and what mattered was to contribute to it, even if only a trickle. She contributed a narrow boiling river. Diana Athill has contributed a cool clear burn." -- Carole Angier - Literary Review"A great gift. . . . This is a warm, inspiring book." -- Susan Salter Reynolds - Los Angeles Times"Bracingly frank…joyful rather than grim… she offers clear-eyed wisdom of the grandma-you-wish-you’d-had variety." -- People"To paraphrase Shakespeare, wisdom is bred in neither the heart nor the head, but in the bones that carry us through the decades. A few very talented artists, like Diana Athill, may persuade their old bones to yield up a glimpse or two of what they’ve learned." -- Laura Miller - Salon"There is something terrifically comforting about a nonagenarian writing with clarity, wit and verve about getting old and facing death. . . . [Athill] evokes another grande dame of British letters in her uninhibited lifestyle and no-holds-barred, clarion voice: last year’s Nobel Prize winner, Doris Lessing." -- N. Heller McAlpin - San Francisco Chronicle"Welcome and original." -- Dwight Garner - The New York Times"She writes as a person of wide-ranging learning, a generalist, a lover of men and animals and a garden enthusiast, a person intoxicated with life." -- Erica Jong - The New York Times Book Review"A spry dispatch on the condition of being elderly." -- The New Yorker"Unusually appealing. . . . To readers Athill delivers far more than modest pleasure: Her easy-going prose and startling honesty are riveting, for whither she has gone many of us will go as well." -- Michael Dirda - Washington Post Book World"A perfect memoir of old age—candid, detailed, charming, totally lacking in self-pity or sentimentality and above all, beautifully, beautifully written." -- The Costa Award Judges
£12.34
WW Norton & Co The Critics Daughter
Book SynopsisTrade Review"Loss, grief, criticism, and love mix and mingle in this moving, literary memoir, one of the best father/daughter memoirs around." -- Zibby Owens - Good Morning America"A penetrating, plangent memoir, electric with emotional urgency and alive with self-awareness... Gilman has the gumption to look at her father, her mother and herself with clarity and without apology. She wonders if she can make radical honesty 'an act of love.' Her efforts are brave, and bracing." -- Nneka McGuire - Wall Street Journal"This revealing and clearly heartfelt memoir—a love letter to her father that doesn’t obscure the difficult and frustrating aspects of their relationship—works precisely because Gilman delivers a detailed portrait of her father, proverbial warts and all... She certainly provides the rest of us with a daughter’s thoughtful and empathetic profile of her dad." -- Daneet Steffens - Boston Globe"With bracing honesty, The Critic’s Daughter, Priscilla Gilman’s perspicacious memoir, unmasks the privilege and the burden of her beloved father’s life and his literary legacy...The Critic’s Daughter spotlights an era of formidable criticism accomplished with conscious clarity. It’s a reminder that criticism is a necessary art form. But the book is even more than that...Gilman’s skills as a memoirist, playwright, poet, critic, dramaturge, and family historian set a high bar." -- Yvonne Conza - BOMB Magazine"Priscilla Gilman tells a fascinating story about her dynamic parents and the literary world that they inhabited... While The Critic’s Daughter concerns itself with her parents’ marriage and its aftermath, it’s very much a book about the way one develops and nurtures a fascination with the arts through enthusiasm, criticism, and commerce." -- Lauren LeBlanc - LitHub"The Critic’s Daughter is about the complex love between a parent and a child... The memoir genre...pumps out innumerable rote tales of becoming, of breaking free, of learning to 'direct' one’s own life. It offers few stories of being and remaining entangled... The Critic’s Daughter is an account of a love that’s neither takeoff strip nor landing pad, a child’s confounding adoration for her parent that’s neither really resolved nor extinguished." -- Eve Fairbanks - Washington Post"One of the reasons I loved Gilman’s book is that through her father she makes a case for criticism as a worthwhile practice... The Critic’s Daughter is a book about a lot of things, but one of them is this: that a fierce and powerful voice, a voice that some people were afraid to hear, can disguise an awful lot of trouble and pain. The critic’s daughter—the writer, as opposed to the book—has the tenderness, the acuity, and the facility to explore her father and her relationship to him in ways that cannot help but resonate. Maybe this is because all of us are the children of critics, in one way or another." -- Nick Hornby - The Believer"Intimate, thoughtful... For me, this memoir read as a rare confluence of things—not so much a 'Daddy Dearest' settling of scores, but a sincere attempt to untangle a father-daughter knot of love, hurt, and grief... [S]earing." -- Misha Berson - American Theatre"In capturing the essence of its challenging subject, The Critic's Daughter is a rare combination of honesty, warmheartedness and exquisite writing... Richard Gilman would be proud of the eloquence and grace with which she has done it." -- Harvey Freedenberg - BookReporter"The Critic’s Daughter hits home not just as an insider’s chronicle of a notable literary family, but as a depiction of the pain a broken marriage inflicts... Gilman’s memoir is testament to an upbringing infused with a love of language and literature." -- Alice Sparberg Alexiou - Lilith"The Critic’s Daughter is an exquisite and rare example of how the memoir needs as much inventiveness in scope and form as our most lush fiction and poetry. Priscilla Gilman writes sentences I never see coming, and those sentences splinter into a textured model of how to write about—and through—art, perpetual discovery, and parenting. I’ve read few books in my life as skillfully executed and willfully conceived as The Critic’s Daughter. This should not work. But my goodness, it just does." -- Kiese Laymon, author of Heavy"The Critic’s Daughter holds so many joys in store for you: The joy of disappearing into a finely crafted world—in this case, of Gilman’s mind, heart, and personal history. The joy of encountering a text sprinkled with insights, like so many pearls. But most of all, the joy of basking in Priscilla Gilman’s capacious love—for her father, for her family, and for you, her reader." -- Susan Cain, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Bittersweet and Quiet"Gilman delightfully weaves the television shows, plays, and movies of her childhood into the story... [T]he heart of this memoir is the unusually powerful, fraught, and enduring father-daughter relationship. Gilman creates an emotional map of the catastrophic disruption of divorce and the devotion of a child for her parent despite his failings." -- Jane Constantineau - New York Journal of Books"A brilliant, gorgeous, miracle of a book." -- Will Schwalbe, author of The End of Your Life Book Club and We Should Not Be Friends"Passionate, resonant, and beautifully written…Evokes both a uniquely brilliant and troubled man and the poignantly relatable essence of the father-daughter connection." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"Gilman writes with resplendent clarity, meticulous candor, and incandescent love forged in the fire of extraordinarily demanding family dynamics... Gilman incisively charts her remarkable father’s intense ups-and-downs and lucidly analyzes her own struggles in a richly involving chronicle gracefully laced with literary allusions, compassion, and wisdom." -- Booklist (starred review)"Poignant... Bibliophiles will enjoy the literary cameos (Joan Didion, Toni Morrison) and reflections on literature, but Gilman’s wrenching recollections of marital, and familial, dissolution are near-universal. This is an eye-opening testament to the lasting wounds of divorce." -- Publishers Weekly"The Critic’s Daughter is first and foremost a very touching love story about a father, a daughter, and their unbreakable bond. Priscilla Gilman writes with eloquence and absolute candor of her late father Richard Gilman, the esteemed, brilliant, but deeply troubled drama and literary critic.… An unforgettable read, The Critic’s Daughter is as entertaining as it is moving." -- James Lapine, Pulitzer Prize-winning playwright"The Critic's Daughter is an exquisite love song, a riveting story, a book for our time. Any daughter with a father, anyone who has been part of a family, anyone who has struggled with loving, anyone interested in literary criticism, or the theater, or life, this is a book for you." -- Andre Gregory, theater director, writer, and star of My Dinner With Andre"The daughter of an unsparing critic, Priscilla Gilman has written a book her father would have deeply admired: a tender, unflinching memoir that is also a searching reflection on the relationship between criticism and love. The father she lost is vividly captured in this moving, gracefully written, bracingly honest book." -- Eyal Press, author of Dirty Work"Captivating and heartfelt... Gilman’s reflections on her father’s work, as well as her own struggles with identity, are both heartbreaking and inspiring... The Critic’s Daughter is an honest and moving exploration of family, identity, and the human experience. It is a must-read for anyone looking for an intimate and honest look into the life of a literary family." -- EU Times
£21.84
WW Norton & Co Blind Mans Bluff
Book SynopsisA New York Times Editors' Choice A Washington Independent Review of Books Favorite Book of 2021 A writer’s humorous and often-heartbreaking tale of losing his sight—and how he hid it from the world.Trade Review"It’s been a long time since I met such a thoroughly normal guy in a memoir…I’d buy him a beer anytime." -- Dwight Garner, New York Times"The Story of My Life by Helen Keller, Angela's Ashes by Frank McCourt, The Liars' Club by Mary Karr, Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking, and I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou are among the memoirs that leave you breathless; they're books you keep and don't pawn off on your neighbor's yard sale. Now comes another keeper: Blind Man's Bluff by James Tate Hill." -- Kitty Kelley, Washington Independent Review of Books"Hill sketches these scenes in a spare, fuss-free way…[Y]ou root for him to hold on to the little bit of joy he's found—the colors in his life, for once, sharp and bright" -- Tommy Tomlinson, New York Times Book Review"A beautiful, sad, frustrating story about how frustrating, sad and beautiful life can be…[A] triumph." -- Ben Tanzer, Lit Reactor"Hill's honesty is endearing…The story he tells in Blind Man's Bluff is, to be sure, one of living with and not being defined by a disability. It's also much more, a story that should resonate with anyone who's just trying to figure out what life is all about." -- Linda C. Brinson, Greensboro News & Record"Disarmingly honest and funny…An inspiring, often incredible story that reminds us of the strength that come from vulnerability." -- Bookpage"A coming-of-age story worthy of its hero’s stellar VHS collection of ’80s and ’90s movies. Hill’s journey toward learning to live with his blindness will have you wincing, crying, sighing, and cheering right along with him—not to mention sharing in his love of Molly Ringwald, The Golden Girls, Prince, and Tom Cruise." -- Jennifer Keishin Armstrong, best-selling author of Seinfeldia"Told with humor and grace, Blind Man’s Bluff is a story of reinventions—ones both enormous and minute, ones both forced and earned. It’s also an education, and an illumination." -- Rebecca Makkai, Pulitzer Prize–finalist author of The Great Believers"Compelling and honest, James Tate Hill writes of the isolation, confusion, and longing for connection, which is what it means to be human. A gripping and unflinching journey of love, acceptance, and finding the courage to tell your own story." -- Alison Stine, author of Road Out of Winter"Reading Blind Man’s Bluff is like going out for coffee with your funniest friend. It’s also about which Golden Girl you’d most want your doctor to resemble, assuming that your doctor must resemble a Golden Girl. (The answer is Dorothy. Obviously.) It’s a smart, thoughtful, and hilarious book, and it will engage you from the first page to the last." -- Best-selling writer Carolyn Parkhurst, author of Harmony"Once I started reading, I couldn’t stop. Hill’s narratives on disability, pop culture, and just getting through life are filled with heartbreak, humor, and hope." -- Beth (Bich Minh) Nguyen, author of Stealing Buddha’s Dinner"Stirring…This moving account doesn't disappoint." -- Publishers Weekly
£19.94
Random House USA Inc Air Traffic
Book Synopsis
£13.29
Random House USA Inc On Sunset
Book Synopsis
£15.26
Random House USA Inc The Destiny Thief Essays on Writing Writers and
Book SynopsisIn this “admirable…wry, idiosyncratic, vulnerably bighearted” collection (The New York Times Book Review), the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls powerfully considers the unexpected turns of the creative life and reveals the inner workings of one of America’s most beloved authors.“I’ve written a lot about destiny in my fiction,” admits Richard Russo, “not because I understand it, but because I’d like to.” In the first of these eleven remarkable essays, Russo shares the story of his onetime fiction workshop classmate who, of the two of them, was considered the class star, bound for literary glory. Yet it was Russo who emerged as a major writer. How, he wonders, did he manage to steal his classmate’s destiny? What twists of talent and fate determine a would-be writer’s path?In each of the pieces collected here, Russo considers the unexpected turns of the creative life.
£14.40
Penguin Putnam Inc Here We Are My Friendship with Philip Roth
Book SynopsisFinalist for the National Jewish Book Award A deeply felt, beautifully crafted meditation on friendship and loss in the vein of A Year of Magical Thinking, and a touching portrait of Philip Roth from his closest friend.I had a baseball question on the tip of my tongue: What was the name of the natural, the player shot by a stalker in a Chicago hotel room? He gave me an amused look that darkened in-to puzzlement, then fear. Then he pitched forward into the soup, unconscious. When I entered the examining room twenty minutes after our arrival at Charlotte Hungerford Hospital, Philip said, No more books. Thus he announced his retirement.So begins Benjamin Taylor's Here We Are, the unvarnished portrait of his best friend and one of America's greatest writers. Needless to say, Philip Roth's place in the canon is secure, but what is less clear is what the man himself was like. In Here We Are, Benjamin Taylor's beaut
£20.80
Penguin Putnam Inc Life in the Garden
Book Synopsis
£14.40
Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company Looking Back A Book of Memories
Book SynopsisLowry's writing often transports readers into other worlds. Now, we have the rare opportunity to travel into a real world that is her own - her life.
£13.99
Penguin Publishing Group Memorial Days
Book SynopsisA heartrending and beautiful memoir of sudden loss and a journey towards peace, from the bestselling, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of HorseMany cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz – just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy – collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk.After spending their early years together in conflict zones as foreign correspondents, Geraldine and Tony settled down to raise two boys on Martha’s Vineyard. The life they built was one of meaningful work, good humor, and tenderness, as they spent their days writing and their evenings cooking family dinners or watching the sun set with friends at the beach. But all of this ended abruptly when, on
£18.52
Penguin Random House India A Rude Life
Book SynopsisVir Sanghvi's memoir "A Rude Life" offers a glimpse into his diverse career in journalism and media, from Oxford to television. With a dispassionate yet engaging style, he shares personal anecdotes and insights into his professional journey, providing a behind-the-scenes look at the politics and glamour of his time.
£22.05
Random House USA Inc Little Failure
Book Synopsis
£22.95
Hachette Australia Dissolve
Book SynopsisThis story of a writer finding her voice, struggling to have a room of her own, is the story of ALL women finding space for themselves against the 'very important men' in their lives. It's the story of every woman's life.
£22.07
Penguin Putnam Inc Boy Erased A Memoir of Identity Faith and Family
Book SynopsisThe New York Times bestselling memoir about identity, love and understanding. Now a major motion picture starring Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, and Lucas Hedges, directed by Joel Edgerton. “Every sentence of the story will stir your soul” (O Magazine). The son of a Baptist pastor and deeply embedded in church life in small town Arkansas, as a young man Garrard Conley was terrified and conflicted about his sexuality. When Garrard was a nineteen-year-old college student, he was outed to his parents, and was forced to make a life-changing decision: either agree to attend a church-supported conversion therapy program that promised to cure him of homosexuality; or risk losing family, friends, and the God he had prayed to every day of his life. Through an institutionalized Twelve-Step Program heavy on Bible study, he was supposed to emerge heterosexual, ex-gay, cleansed of impure urges and stronger in his faith in God for
£15.30
