Autobiography: writers Books

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

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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

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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

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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

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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

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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.

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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.

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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

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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."

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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

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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

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