Autobiography: writers Books
Penguin Putnam Inc The Pigeon Tunnel
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£17.10
Penguin Books Canada They Left Us Everything
£13.77
New Directions Publishing Corporation Selected Letters Volume ll 19451957
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£17.09
The University Press of Kentucky George Keats of Kentucky A Life Topics in
Book SynopsisJohn Keats's biographers have rarely been fair to George Keats (1797--1841) -- pushing him to the background as the younger brother, painting him as a prodigal son, or labeling him as the "business brother."
£40.46
The University Press of Kentucky Silas House Exploring an Appalachian Writers Work
Book SynopsisThe first collection of critical essays on Silas House's work.Table of ContentsForeword Introduction The Stories of Silas House and the Scent of Words: Looking at Appalachia and the World from the Inside Out Redeeming Appalachia: Deconstructing Stereotypes of Gender, Race, and Religion in Silas House's Appalachian Trilogy Funny Looks and Queer Perspectives: Quareness and Quare Characters in the Writing of Silas House Looking at the Hurting Parts: Diversity and A New Appalachia in the Plays of Silas House This Land Is Our Land? Silas House Holds Up a Mirror in his Young Adult Literature Reclaiming Music, Mountains, and Voice: Silas House as Journalist and Activist Music in the Coal Tattoo and Clay's Quilt Lyricism and Metaphor in A Parchment of Leaves Interview with Silas House
£28.50
The University of Alabama Press The Myth of Ephraim Tutt Arthur Train and His
Book SynopsisIn The Myth of Ephraim Tutt Molly Guptill Manning explores the controversy and the impact of the Ephraim Tutt autobiography on American culture. She also considers Tutt's ruse in light of other noted incidents of literary hoaxes, such as those ensuing from the publication of works by Clifford Irving, James Frey, and David Rorvik, among others.
£26.96
The University of Alabama Press The Astonishment Tapes Talks on Poetry and
Book SynopsisThis is the edited transcript of revealing autobiographical audiotapes recorded by the groundbreaking poet Robin Blaser, a founding member of the Berkeley contingent of the San Francisco Renaissance in New American Poetry. In twenty autobiographical audiotapes, Blaser talks about his childhood in Idaho, his time in Berkeley, and his participation in the making of a new kind of poetry.
£40.80
Te Herenga Waka University Press Grass Catcher
Book SynopsisFrom early childhood in postwar Blenheim to the remote regions of Bangladesh, from an English boarding school to 1960s Auckland, and from Jordan during the civil war of 1969â70 to family homes full of children, this dazzling book traces the many shifts in Ian Wedde's life. Haunted by the ghosts of his restless German and Scottish great grandparents, and of his wandering parents, Wedde is always looking over his shoulder as he writes. His companion throughout is his twin brother Dave, who shared their first homeâtheir mother Linda's wombâand who, as the book ends, hosts a lunch where the brothers raise their glasses to the transit lounges of their lives. Affectionate, funny, sad, analytical, but above all honest, The Grass Catcher is at once a moving personal memoir and an engaging and reflective essay on the nature of memory.
£28.45
Wisconsin Historical Society Press Old Farm A History
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£22.46
Boosey & Hawkes Inc Music for Very Little People 50 Playful
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£16.14
Random House USA Inc How to Be a Heroine
Book SynopsisWhile debating literature’s greatest heroines with her best friend, thirtysomething playwright Samantha Ellis has a revelation—her whole life, she's been trying to be Cathy Earnshaw of Wuthering Heights when she should have been trying to be Jane Eyre. With this discovery, she embarks on a retrospective look at the literary ladies—the characters and the writers—whom she has loved since childhood. From early obsessions with the March sisters to her later idolization of Sylvia Plath, Ellis evaluates how her heroines stack up today. And, just as she excavates the stories of her favorite characters, Ellis also shares a frank, often humorous account of her own life growing up in a tight-knit Iraqi Jewish community in London. Here a life-long reader explores how heroines shape all our lives.
£13.46
Random House USA Inc Collected Nonfiction of Mark Twain Volume 2
Book SynopsisThe second of two hardcover volumes collecting the major nonfiction by the father of American literature, including excerpts from The Innocents Abroad, Roughing It, A Tramp Abroad, and Life on the Mississippi. Twain’s playful exuberance and remarkable storytelling gifts are on full display as he regales readers with real-life adventures in these rollicking, shrewd, and hilarious autobiographical works. In these pages, we follow him through his stint as a fledgling reporter out West to his attempt to navigate a steamboat on the Mississippi River, and all during his experiences as an irreverent and skeptical traveler through Europe and the Holy Land. Gleefully iconoclastic, whether he is puncturing the pretensions of others or aiming his satirical barbs squarely at himself, Twain also proves to be deeply compassionate, as fierce in his condemnation of injustice as he is skillful in mining the humor in human folly. Long hailed as “the Lincoln of our literature,” Twain harbored as rich and fertile a blend of contradictions as the dynamic nation he came to embody—and define.
£24.00
Random House USA Inc Goodbye to All That
Book SynopsisOn the hundredth anniversary of the end of World War I: a hardcover edition of one of the best and most famous memoirs of the conflict.Good-bye to All That was published a decade after the end of the first World War, as the poet and novelist Robert Graves was preparing to leave England for good. The memoir documents not only his own personal experience, as a patriotic young officer, of the horrors and disillusionment of battle, but also the wider loss of innocence the Great War brought about. By the time of his writing, a way of life had ended, and England and the modern world would never be the same. In Graves's portrayal of the dehumanizing misery of the trenches, his grief over lost friends, and the surreal absurdity of government bureaucracy, Graves uses broad comedy to make the most serious points about life and death.
£23.80
Random House USA Inc Hope Against Hope
Book SynopsisNadezhda Mandelstam’s memoir of life with her husband, the poet Osip Mandelstam, is a vital eyewitness account of Stalin’s Soviet Union and one of the most moving testaments to the value of literature and imaginative freedom ever written.In 1933, Osip Mandelstam (1891–1938) wrote a satiric poem about Joseph Stalin, and the result of his defiance was arrest, interrogation, and exile, followed by re-arrest and death in a transit camp of the Siberian gulag in 1938. Osip’s wife, Nadezhda (1899–1980), loyally accompanied him into exile in the Urals and later worked courageously to rescue the manuscripts of his poems and to discover the truth about his death. Hope Against Hope is her harrowing account of their last years together and a window into Stalin’s persecution of Russia’s literary intelligentsia in the 1930s and beyond. But it is also a profoundly inspiring love story that relates their determination to keep both love and art alive in the most desperate circumstances.After years of circulating privately in the Soviet Union, Hope Against Hope was smuggled out and published in the West in 1970 and has since achieved the status of a classic, not only for its essential testimony to a dramatic period of history but also for the enduring brilliance of Mandelstam’s writing.Everyman's Library pursues the highest production standards, printing on acid-free paper, with full-cloth cases with two-color foil stamping, decorative endpapers, silk ribbon markers, European-style half-round spines, and a full-color illustrated jacket. Contemporary Classics include an introduction, a select bibliography, and a chronology of the author's life and times.
£25.60
Random House USA Inc My History
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£14.40
Random House USA Inc I Will Be Complete
Book SynopsisFrom the bestselling author of Carter Beats the Devil and Sunnyside, a big-hearted memoir told in three parts: about growing up in the wake of the destructive choices of an extremely unconventional mother.“Extraordinary ... An audacious, boundary-shattering work.” —Los Angeles Times Glen David Gold’s earliest memories are of a childhood in which he had everything he could possibly want. But when his father’s fortune disappeared and his parents divorced, Gold fell out of his well-curated Southern California life. He was now growing up by the side of his increasingly erratic mother, among con men and get-rich schemes in ‘70s San Francisco.Gold brings all his gifts as a novelist to a kaleidoscope of his most formative experiences: his salvation at boarding school; his dream job at an independent bookstore; a punk rock riot; a romance with a femme fatale; the start of his writing career; and his es
£16.16
St Martin's Press Magical Thinking
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£15.30
Picador USA Experience
£17.42
St Martin's Press Newsroom Confidential
Book SynopsisSullivan remains the critic American journalism requires, a veteran practitioner with street cred, still in touch with the unaccountable joy' of reporting and writing that continues to draw talented young people to the field. Steve Coll, The New York Times Book ReviewMargaret Sullivan began her career at the Buffalo News, where she rose from summer intern to editor in chief. In Newsroom Confidential she chronicles her years in the trenches battling sexism and throwing elbows in a highly competitive newsroom. In 2012, Sullivan was appointed the public editor of The New York Times, the first woman to hold that important role. She was in the unique position of acting on behalf of readers to weigh the actions and reporting of the paper''s staff, parsing potential lapses in judgment, unethical practices, and thorny journalistic issues. Sullivan recounts how she navigated the paper's controversies, from Hillary Clinton''s emails to Elon Musk''s a
£15.99
WW Norton & Co Patricia Highsmith Her Diaries and Notebooks
Book SynopsisTrade Review"The whole book is excellent. Highsmith is pointed and dry about herself and everything else. But the early chapters are special. They comprise one of the most observant and ecstatic accounts I’ve read — and it’s a crowded field! — about being young and alive in New York City." -- Dwight Garner - New York Times"The boldest of von Planta’s editorial decisions has been to bring the diary and cahier entries together, “interwoven and interlocked”.... It works well.... Patricia Highsmith’s lacerating diaries and notebooks... will be seen as one of the great twentieth-century artistic self-portraits." -- Frances Wilson - New York Review of Books"Provides stunning access to the mind of a notoriously secretive author." -- Keziah Weir - Vanity Fair"The Diaries... record [Highsmith's] exultation upon realizing the kind of murder-minded writer that she is.... Exemplary.... [Highsmith's] great contribution to the mystery genre turns out to be nothing else than her diaries and journals." -- Benjamin Kunkel - The New Republic"To immerse yourself in [Highsmith's] private sphere, which she willingly discloses (she knew her writing would be read and published one day) is breath-taking." -- Alexandra Schwartzbrod - Libération"Now, in the year of her 100th birthday – Patricia Highsmith was born on January 19, 1921 – a 1,000 page volume of her intimate diaries and notebooks (1941-1995) is being released, which allows a close-up look of this astonishing destiny: ruled by the passion to write, crowned by success and ground down by disastrous love affairs." -- Josyane Savigneau - Les Echos Week-End"Highsmith’s company, while reading these diaries, is fascinating. It means slipping from the joyous effervescence of a youth spent in Mad Men Manhattan (smoky bars, cocktails, nightly encounters and hidden loves) to misanthropy and disillusion in Switzerland." -- Nelly Kaprièlian - Les Inrockuptibles"In these diaries and notebooks, one gets to know unknown sides to the crime writer: the lyrical, ecstatic and aphoristic." -- Tobias Gohlis - Die Zeit"Reading Patricia Highsmith's diary entries filled me with a joy that goes beyond the thrill of such a literary treasure being published for the first time after almost thirty years." -- Anuschka Roshani - Das Magazin zum Tages-Anzeiger"Offer[s] intimate insights into a writer’s soul – and into [Highsmith's] attempt to write a lesbian novel, which she published under a pseudonym in 1952." -- Welt am Sonntag"Her writing owes everything to this attitude: of confronting the world armed with a steel needle." -- Claudia Voigt - Spiegel"The Highsmith community has been eagerly awaiting this moment: The Diaries and Notebooks are finally being published." -- Linda Stift - Die Presse"A fascinating document of cultural history." -- Maike Albath - Deutschlandfunk Kultur"[Her Diaries and Notebooks] testify to the recalcitrant, unrelenting spirit of this great American curmudgeon and gifted crime writer." -- Focus"More than 50 years of the novelist’s diaries and notebooks have been assembled in this volume, painstakingly annotated for context by Highsmith’s longtime editor Von Planta . . . An exceptional effort . . . Sure to be a resource for future scholars . . . offering a frank and detailed account of a woman and writer coming of age." -- Asa Drake, Library Journal, starred review"A quarter century after the death of novelist Highsmith (1921–1995), fans are given a fascinating and unprecedented look into the ‘playground for [her] imagination’ . . . Devotees and historians alike will linger over every morsel." -- Publishers Weekly"Disclosures from a meticulously documented life. . . An admirably edited volume for scholars and voracious fans." -- Kirkus Reviews
£30.39
Random House USA Inc Mom Me Mom
Book SynopsisNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A moving memoir about the legendary author’s relationship with her own mother.Emma Watson’s Our Shared Shelf Book Club Pick!The story of Maya Angelou’s extraordinary life has been chronicled in her multiple bestselling autobiographies. But now, at last, the legendary author shares the deepest personal story of her life: her relationship with her mother. For the first time, Angelou reveals the triumphs and struggles of being the daughter of Vivian Baxter, an indomitable spirit whose petite size belied her larger-than-life presence—a presence absent during much of Angelou’s early life. When her marriage began to crumble, Vivian famously sent three-year-old Maya and her older brother away from their California home to live with their grandmother in Stamps, Arkansas. The subsequent feelings of abandonment stayed with Angelou for years, but their r
£20.80
Gale, a Cengage Group Roman Year
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£38.95
Gale, a Cengage Group Backstage
£37.00
Grand Central Publishing Three Weeks with My Brother
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£16.14
University of Arkansas Press Hoop Crazy: The Lives of Clair Bee and Chip
Book SynopsisClair Bee (1896-1983) was a hugely successful basketball coach at Rider College and Long Island University with a 412 and 87 record before his career was derailed in 1951 by a point-shaving scandal. In the trial that sent his star player, Sherman White, to prison, the judge excoriated Bee for creating a morally lax culture that contributed to his players' involvement with gambling. To a certain extent, Bee agreed with the judge's scolding, concluding that coaches, himself included, had become so driven to succeed on the court that they had lost sight of the educational role sports should play. His coaching career effectively over, Bee launched an effort to reform the ills he saw in college sports, and he did so in the pages of the Chip Hilton novels for young readers. He began the series in 1948, but it was the post-scandal books that he used as teaching tools. The books mirrored some of the events of the gambling scandal and were Bee's attempt to reform the problems plaguing college sports. He used his fiction to posit a better sports world that he hoped his young readers would construct and inhabit. The Chip Hilton books were extremely popular and have become a classic series, with over two million copies sold to date. Hoop Crazy is the fascinating story of Clair Bee and his star character Chip Hilton and the ways in which their lives, real and fictional, were intertwined.Trade Review[T]his book presents a truly unique look at one of the greatest and most controversial college basketball coaches—and one of the most popular authors of adolescent sports fiction—of all time."" - Journal of Sport History, Spring 2015
£32.26
The New York Review of Books, Inc Black Sun: The Brief Transit and Violent Eclipse
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£19.51
Library of America Joan Didion Memoirs Later Writings LOA 386
Book SynopsisThe ultimate Didion edition concludes with the brilliant and haunting works from her incomparable late phase.Library of America now completes its definitive, three-volume edition of one of the most electric writers of our time with the final seven books: Political Fictions (2001) offers a behind-the-scenes look at the American political landscape of the 1980s, 1990s, and early 2000s, its reflections on sound bites, photo ops, and an increasingly dysfunctional system still bracingly relevant. Fixed Ideas (2003), restored to print in this collection, traces the efforts of the Bush administration to “stake new ground in old domestic wars” in the wake of 9/11. Where I Was From (2003) explores the sunny myths and darker realities of Didion's native California, her personal recollections interwoven with sketches of water wars, sexual predators, mass incarceration, and corporate corruption. The Year of Magical Thinking (2005), which brought Didion the National Book Award and legions of new readers, registers the shock of the death of her husband, John Gregory Dunne, amid her daughter Quintana’s ultimately terminal illness. Looking back on her marriage of four decades, she faces the abyss of a grief that “turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it.” The Year of Magical Thinking: The Play (2007) is Didion's lauded dramatic adaptation of the memoir. Blue Nights (2011) is Didion's raw and haunting search for consolation amid despair. South and West (2017) revisits Didion's notebooks from a happier time, recalling a roadtrip with her husband through the American South, and 1970s California. Here are the achingly beautiful memoirs and masterful collections of reportage and observation with which Joan Didion crowned the final decades of her extraordinary career.
£26.19
Chicago Review Press A Mysterious Something in the Light: The Life of
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£16.19
WW Norton & Co Passing: A Memoir of Love and Death
Book SynopsisIt was a warm April in Pleasant Valley when Margaret Korda, normally a fearless horsewoman, dropped her horsewhip while she was riding. Such a mild slip was easy to ignore, but when other troubling symptoms accumulated, she confided to her husband, “Michael, I think something serious is wrong with me.” Within a few rapid weeks, the fiercely independent, former fashion model was diagnosed with brain cancer, while Michael, once reliant on her steeliness, became her caregiver, deciphering bewildering medical reports and packing her beloved toiletries for the hospital. An operation performed by a renowned surgeon allowed Margaret to ride her favorite competition horse Logan go Bragh a few more times, but Margaret’s tumors quickly returned—leaving her to grapple with the reality of impending death. In rapturous prose, Korda, a modern- day Orpheus, braids her heroic story with heartrending details of their final year together. Passing, a tender memoir, is a testament to the transcendent possibilities of love.Trade Review"[Michael Korda] delivers a heartfelt look at his wife, Margaret... This intimate memoir is both a tribute to their 45-year marriage... and an account of how looking ‘after someone who is dying gradually fills one’s life to the exclusion of everything else’... Lovingly told, Korda’s memoir movingly captures the complexities of dealing with the death of a loved one." -- Publishers Weekly ("Books of the Week")"Anyone who has ever cared for a loved one at the end of life will identify with Korda’s escalating feelings of despair and uselessness as he tries to save his wife from a disease with no rescue. His book, and his life, illustrate the essential truth that no matter our circumstances, we will one day die. His unsparing account nudges us to reconsider life’s trivial grievances until we do." -- Connie Schultz, Washington Post"Written in plain, straightforward prose, Passing is the memoir of a man who stuffs himself with facts and information about brain tumors and cancer in hopes that knowledge will help him get through the anguish of watching his beautiful wife die.... Korda’s book keeps you reading because of the graceful, understated way he conveys his anguish, his love and his admiration for his spirited wife.... Passing is a moving book." -- Laurie Hertzel, Minneapolis Star Tribune"Passing, the story of a woman stricken with cancer and the husband who loved her, is an unforgettable tribute to the raw emotions that evolve from shock to acceptance." -- Mary Higgins Clark"A sensitive and absorbing chronicle of his wife's death from cancer a year after she was diagnosed with a brain tumor... Joining a growing genre about death and dying that includes Sherwin Nuland's How We Die and Atul Gawande's Being Mortal, Korda's memoir is both a celebration of his 45-year marriage to his 'lover, companion, and best friend' and a clear-eyed account of the benefits and limits of medical intervention... A compassionate chronicle of a couple's last year." -- Kirkus Reviews"This harrowing account of Margaret Korda’s death is also a deeply moving testimonial to the beauty and strength of a remarkable marriage. I am grateful to Michael for this honest and painful book that cannot have been easy to write." -- Robert Gottlieb"In this harrowing, engrossing, meticulous account of his wife’s deterioration from cancer, Michael Korda presents both the medical and the psychic details of dying. His writing is disciplined and unsentimental, but deeply evocative and ultimately very generous. He opens the private world of the extremely private woman to whom he was married, fully capturing her spirit, their marriage, and her untimely demise." -- Andrew Solomon"Michael Korda’s Passing is a singular account of his wife’s gallant battle against a relentless cancer and a description of that tragic journey. T.S. Eliot wrote, ‘In my end is my beginning... Or let us hope.' " -- Larry McMurtry
£17.09
WW Norton & Co Thinking Again: A Diary
Book SynopsisThe irrepressible Jan Morris—author of such classics as Venice and Trieste—is at it again: offering a vibrant set of reminiscences that remind us “what a good, wise and witty companion Jan Morris has been for so many readers for so long” (Alexander McCall Smith, New York Times Book Review). “Like Michel de Montaigne” (Danny Heitman, Wall Street Journal), Morris waxes on the ironies of modern life in all their resonant glories and inevitable stupidities—from her daily exercise (a “statutory thousand paces of brisk walk”) to the troubles of Brexit; her enduring yet complicated love for America; and honest reflections on the vagaries and ailments of aging. Both intimate and luminously wise, Thinking Again is a testament to the virtues of embracing life, creativity, and, above all, kindness.
£18.04
Other Press LLC Nicotine: A Love Story Up in Smoke
Book SynopsisNAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE ECONOMISTBy turns philosophical and darkly comic, an ex-smoker’s meditation on the nature and consequences of his nearly lifelong addiction.Written with the passion of an obsessive, Nicotine addresses a lifelong addiction, from the thrill of the first drag to the perennial last last cigarette. Reflecting on his experiences as a smoker from a young age, Gregor Hens investigates the irreversible effects of nicotine on thought and patterns of behavior. He extends the conversation with other smokers to meditations on Mark Twain and Italo Svevo, the nature of habit, and the validity of hypnosis. With comic insight and meticulous precision, Hens deconstructs every facet of dependency, offering a brilliant analysis of the psychopathology of addiction.This is a book about the physical, emotional, and psychological power of nicotine as not only an addictive drug, but also a gateway to memory, a long trail of streetlights in the rearview mirror of a smoker’s life. Cigarettes are sometimes a solace, sometimes a weakness, but always a witness and companion.This is a meditation, an ode, and a eulogy, one that will be passed hand-to-hand between close friends.
£13.49
Autonomedia After Kathy Acker – A Literary Biography
Book SynopsisThe first authorized biography of postmodernism's literary hero, Kathy Acker.Acker's life was a fable; and to describe the confusion and love and conflicting agendas behind these memorials would be to sketch an apocryphal allegory of an artistic life in the late twentieth century. It is girls from which stories begin, she wrote in her last notebook. And like other lives, but unlike most fables, it was created through means both within and beyond her control.—from After Kathy AckerRich girl, street punk, lost girl and icon… scholar, stripper, victim, and media-whore: The late Kathy Acker's legend and writings are wrapped in mythologies, created mostly by Acker herself. Twenty years after her death, Acker's legend has faded, making her writing more legible.In this first, fully authorized, biography, Chris Kraus approaches Acker both as a writer and as a member of the artistic communities from which she emerged. At once forensic and intimate, After Kathy Acker traces the extreme discipline and literary strategies Acker used to develop her work, and the contradictions she longed to embody. Using exhaustive archival research and ongoing conversations with mutual colleagues and friends, Kraus charts Acker's movement through some of the late twentieth century's most significant artistic enterprises.Beginning in her mid-teens, Acker lived her ideal of the Great Writer as Cultural Hero, and as Kraus argues, she may well have been the only female writer to succeed in assuming this role. She died of untreated cancer at an alternative clinic in Tijuana when she was fifty years old, but the real pathos of Acker's life may have been in the fact that by then she'd already outlived her ideal.Trade ReviewCompletely enthralling…A new generation of writers will be inspired by Kathy. It's a gift to Kathy Acker and her legacy, and a gift to all the women who read Chris' books.—Lenny Letter—This critical biography is a wonderful read for long-time fans of both Acker and Kraus, and it will likely be an engaging one even for those unfamiliar with their work, but who are interested in the development and vicissitudes of an accomplished artist's life.—Chicago Review of Books—
£13.90
Semiotext (E) Hervelino
Book SynopsisOn Hervé Guibert and the difficulty of writing and speaking about someone beloved and revered.“Soon that was my nickname for Hervé, what with my habit of italianizing the names of my nearest and dearest … Hervelino: that didn’t make me think so much of Hervé as of us both. The word might not seem like much but it was him and it was me, he took it for himself.” Mathieu Lindon met the writer and photographer Hervé Guibert in 1978. The nickname Hervelino marked the start of their friendship, which was cemented a decade later by the years they both spent in Rome. Guibert was a pensionnaire at the Villa Médicis starting in 1987; Lindon became a fellow pensionnaire the next year, and the two would stay in Italy until 1990. These Roman years are at the heart of this autobiographie à deux that alternates between humor and melancholy. Guibert had just learned that he was HIV-positive and would die not long after returning to France and rising to fame with his searing masterpiece To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life—in which Lindon himself was a character. Hervelino is a book about the difficulty of writing and speaking about someone beloved and revered. In recounting their time in Italy, Lindon contends with the impossibility of writing about Guibert: “To write about Rome is to skip over everything I don’t dare to write because it’s so hard to make sense of Hervé.” Hervelino is a story of a singular friendship, and of the books read and shared by the friend who was loved and lost. As it closes with each inscription Guibert wrote for his friend Mathieu and with Lindon’s present-day commentary below it, what remains are shards and fragments of a friendship sealed by illness and death, enshrined by literature and love.
£14.39
Counterpoint The Lost Prince: A Search for Pat Conroy
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£20.39
Counterpoint The Doll: A Portrait of My Mother
Book SynopsisIn this autobiographical novel, Albania’s most renowned novelist and poet Ismail Kadare explores his relationship with his mother in a delicately wrought tale of home, family, creative aspirations, and personal and political freedom.“Houses like ours seemed constructed with the specific purpose of preserving coldness and misunderstanding for as long as possible.”In his father’s great stone house with hidden rooms and even a dungeon, Ismail grows up with his mother at the center of his universe. Fragile as a paper doll, she finds herself at odds with her tight-lipped and wise mother-in-law who, as is the custom for women of a certain age, will never again step foot over the threshold to leave her home. Young Ismail finds it difficult to understand his mother’s tears, though he can understand her boredom. She told him the reason herself in a phrase that terrified and obsessed the boy: “The house is eating me up!”As Ismail explores his world, his mother becomes fearful of her intellectual son—he uses words she does not understand, writes radical poetry, falls in love far too easily, and seems to renounce everything she believes in. He will, she fears, have to exchange her for some other superior mother when he becomes a famous writer.The Doll is a delicate and disarming autobiographical novel, an exploration of Kadare’s creative aspirations and their tangled connections to his childhood home and his mother’s tenuous place within it.
£12.34
Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial (USA) LLC Lo que yo vi / What I Saw
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£16.96
Catapult Autoportrait
Book SynopsisNominated for the Chicago Review of Books AwardA work of unflinching honesty, Autoportrait is a hypnotic memoir of reflection, loss, and everyday joy from one of America's best contemporary novelistsJesse Ball has produced fourteen acclaimed works of deeply empathetic absurdism in poetry and fiction. Now, he offers readers his first memoir, one that showcases his “humane curiosity” (James Wood) and invites the reader into a raw and personal account of love, grief, and memory. Inspired by the memoir Édouard Levé put to paper shortly before his death, Autoportrait is an extraordinarily frank and intimate work from one of America's most brilliant authors.The subtle power of Ball's voice conjures the richness of everyday life. On each page, half-remembered moments are woven together with the joys and triumphs—and the mistakes and humiliations, too—that somehow tell us who we are, why we are here. Held at the same height as tragic accounts of illness or death are moments of startling beauty, banality, or humor: I wake in the morning, I sit, I walk long distances. If there is somewhere to swim, I may swim. If I have a bicycle, I will ride it, especially to meet someone. There is no more preparing for me to do, other than preparing for death, and I do that by laughing. Not laughing at death, of course. Laughing at myself. An extraordinary memoir that reminds us what is possible and builds to the kind of power one might feel reading Anne Carson's Glass Essay, or Joe Brainard's I Remember. Autoportrait will leave you feeling utterly invigorated, inspired, and a little afraid.
£17.00
Catapult Now Beacon, Now Sea: A Son's Memoir
Book SynopsisA NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF THE YEARA wrenching debut memoir of familial grief by a National Book Award finalist—and a defining account of what it means to love and lose a difficult parent, for readers of Joan Didion and Dani Shapiro.When Christopher Sorrentino's mother died in 2017, it marked the end of a journey that had begun eighty years earlier in the South Bronx. Victoria's life took her to the heart of New York's vibrant mid-century downtown artistic scene, to the sedate campus of Stanford, and finally back to Brooklyn—a journey witnessed by a son who watched, helpless, as she grew more and more isolated, distancing herself from everyone and everything she'd ever loved.In examining the mystery of his mother's life, from her dysfunctional marriage to his heedless father, the writer Gilbert Sorrentino, to her ultimate withdrawal from the world, Christopher excavates his own memories and family folklore in an effort to discover her dreams, understand her disappointments, and peel back the ways in which she seemed forever trapped between two identities: the Puerto Rican girl identified on her birth certificate as Black, and the white woman she had seemingly decided to become. Meanwhile Christopher experiences his own transformation, emerging from under his father's shadow and his mother's thumb to establish his identity as a writer and individual—one who would soon make his own missteps and mistakes.Unfolding against the captivating backdrop of a vanished New York, a city of cheap bohemian enclaves and a thriving avant-garde—a dangerous, decaying, but liberated and potentially liberating place—Now Beacon, Now Sea is a matchless portrait of the beautiful, painful messiness of life, and the transformative power of even conflicted grief.Acute, intimate and exceedingly fair, Sorrentino’s memoir is a post-mortem that examines not the causes of his parents’ deaths but the endurance and effects of their confounding marriage . . . This is the story of a son who is trying to dissect and understand the love that remains—and sometimes emerges—after death. We may have a greater cultural appetite for eulogies, but an autopsy, in looking directly at the cold corpse of a family in all its gruesomeness and mystery, can be just as profound, and in the hands of a writer as restrained and humane as Sorrentino, just as beautiful. —Eleanor Henderson, The New York Times Book Review
£15.26
The New York Review of Books, Inc Three Rings: A Tale of Exile, Narrative, and Fate
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£13.56
Carcanet Press Ltd There and Then: Personal Terms 6
Book Synopsis"We had been instructed to start promptly at six, since the hall was needed again at eight. We pushed through the curtained doorway, like instrumentalists without instruments, and onto the stepped stage. The audience was still coming in. Uncertain of our running time, and with no one to introduce us, I thought we had better start. I got as far as 'Byr - ' when Alan decided he did indeed need his glasses. He delivered his rehearsed ad lib, claiming that his vanity was second only to Byron's, and put on his specs." It is July 1981, and Alan Bates succumbs to a fit of nerves as he and Frederic Raphael attempt to carry off an underrehearsed performance at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. This wry glimpse behind the scenes of the London literary scene sits, in Raphael's notebooks, amid clear-eyed analysis of the riots and social unrest then erupting in Britain's cities under Margaret Thatcher's government. Compulsively readable, by turns mischievous and coruscating, this latest volume of Raphael's reflections casts light on a period that saw the beginnings of a decisive shift in British and American culture. Along the way, there are finely incised pen-portraits of public figures ranging from Shirley Conran to Peter Sellers and from Robert Redford to Mary Whitehouse.Trade Review"Shrewd, funny, gossipy and elegantly written, it combines rueful self-analysis with perceptive and, one suspects, all too accurate character assessments of well-known contemporaries, together with musings on Lord Byron, drama in ancient Greece and the state of the nation under Thatcher." --Jeremy Lewis, Literary Review "This is a thoroughly enjoyable read. Diaries promise indiscretions, and the joy of gossip... Is it right to invoke Pepys or Evelyn? When Personal Terms have concluded they will prove to be Raphael's lasting work, so perhaps it is." -- Wynn Wheldon, Spectator "There are entries in this fifth volume of Raphael's notebooks that would sound profound in any grove of academe, some one-liners that would now be perfectly fit for Twitter, some that are permissibly snarky comments on colleagues and rivals, and some that smartly pocket the small coin of everyday living. And that's only to pitch the first few pages to you ... read on at random for the full variety and vitality of Raphael's genius for recording the primary sources of a rich writing life." --"Times "on "Ifs and Buts"Table of ContentsIntroduction 1979 1980 1981 Index
£18.95
Missouri Historical Society Press The Boyhood Memoirs of A. E. Hotchner
Book SynopsisKing of the Hill is A. E. Hotchner's memoir of his impoverished childhood in St. Louis, originally published in 1972. Hotchner's story is one of ingenuity and spirit in the face of economic hardship during the Great Depression. Left to live alone in a rundown hotel while his traveling salesman father is on the road, his mother is hospitalized, and his younger brother is sent to live with relatives, young Hotchner's determination to survive overcomes the challenge of keeping his situation secret. ""Looking for Miracles"" is a sequel to ""King of the Hill"", originally published in 1975. The story takes place in 1936, three years after ""King of the Hill"", when Hotchner bluffs his way into a job as a summer counselor at a camp in the Ozarks. The story is poignant and uplifting, as well as hilariously entertaining. Bound together for the first time, these two boyhood memoirs of Hotchner's will touch readers with their truth, innocence, and joy. Hotchner's ability to convey times of intense hardship in warm and witty language attests to his stature as one of America's great storytellers.
£16.86
Tin House Books Wondering Who You Are A Memoir
Book Synopsis
£14.36
Allen & Unwin Drawn Out: A seriously funny memoir
Book SynopsisDrawn Out is a hilarious, heartbreaking, heart-warming account of Tom Scott's tragicomic childhood, his manic student-newspaper days, his turbulent years stumbling through the corridors of power, his fallings out with prime ministers, his collaborations with comic legends John Clarke, A.K. Grant and Murray Ball, his travels to the ends of the earth with his close friend Ed Hillary, and more...'A first-class memoir of a highly memorable life. Here is an important (often hilarious) writer and immensely gifted cartoonist, insightfully chronicling quite momentous changes in our political and social landscape.'Jim Mora, New Zealand BooksTrade Review'A first-class memoir of a highly memorable life. Here is an important (often hilarious) writer and immensely gifted cartoonist, insightfully chronicling quite momentous changes in our political and social landscape.'Jim Mora, New Zealand Books
£24.61
Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial Mi tormenta y mi refugio Mother Mary Comes to Me
£20.15
Ma Non Troppo Historias Curiosas de la Literatura: Anécdotas Y
Book Synopsis
£22.12
Los rostros que tengo
Book SynopsisLas memorias de la ganadora del Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras, una de las más grandes escritoras en lengua portuguesa. (ABC)Tan actual y universal que no tiene nada que envidiar a la obra de autores como John Banville, Philip Roth y Paul Auster. Jonatan Silva.Literatura pura, auténtica, íntegra, hecha a partir del amor a la palabra, a la vocación, al arte, a la belleza y a la creación.Mario Vargas LlosaEn esta obra póstuma e inédita, Nélida Piñon -Premio Príncipe de Asturias de las Letras y la primera mujer que llegó a presidir la Academia Brasileña de las Letras-, cose su testamento literario y lo convierte en una celebración de la vida donde relata su pasión por la creación, ahonda en el sentido de pertenencia a un territorio y canta su amor a la música y al arte entretejiendo episodios e recuerdos sobre sus amigos más íntimos: Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa, Susan Sontag o Clarice Lispector. Introduciendo reta
£30.97
Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial Sur y Oeste / South and West
£19.69
Penguin Random House Grupo Editorial Cosas que no quiero saber, Autobiografía en construcción / Things I Don't Want to Know: On Writing
£22.31
