Biography: writers Books

Book SynopsisA most impressive achievement'' Michael Holroyd''Enthralling'' Sunday Times''Masterly'' Telegraph_______________________''The web of our Life is of mingled Yarn''- John KeatsIn Young Romantics Daisy Hay shatters the myth of the Romantic poet as a solitary, introspective genius, telling the story of the communal existence of an astonishingly youthful circle. The fiery, generous spirit of Leigh Hunt, radical journalist and editor of The Examiner, took centre stage. He bound together the restless Shelley and his brilliant wife Mary, author of Frankenstein; Mary''s feisty step-sister Claire Clairmont, who became Byron''s lover and the mother of his child; and Hunt''s charismatic sister-in-law Elizabeth Kent. With authority, sparkling prose and constant insight Daisy Hay describes their travels in France, Switzerland and Italy, their artistic triumphs, their headstrong ways, their grievous losses and their devastating tragedies.Trade Review‘A most impressive achievement' * Michael Holroyd *'Truly, it's delicious...the book's pace and sweep induce you to investigate nooks and crannies into which Hay is able to shine a torch only briefly, to take down from your shelves books you haven't touched in two decades' * Observer *‘A masterly achievement. Lively, innovative and brimming with insights, it offers a wonderfully intimate and well-researched story of collaboration, rivalry and passion during a fascinating period in literary history' * Daily Telegraph *'Enthralling' * Sunday Times *

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Book SynopsisJohn Buchan's name is known across the world for The Thirty-Nine Steps. In the past one hundred years the classic thriller has never been out of print and has inspired numerous adaptations for film, television, radio and stage, beginning with the celebrated version by Alfred Hitchcock. Yet there was vastly more to JB'. He wrote more than a hundred books fiction and non-fiction and a thousand articles for newspapers and magazines. He was a scholar, antiquarian, barrister, colonial administrator, journal editor, literary critic, publisher, war correspondent, director of wartime propaganda, member of parliament and imperial proconsul given a state funeral when he died, a deeply admired and loved Governor-General of Canada.His teenage years in Glasgow's Gorbals, where his father was the Free Church minister, contributed to his ease with shepherds and ambassadors, fur-trappers and prime ministers. His improbable marriage to a member of the aristocratic Grosvenor family means that Trade Review[An] outstanding biography ... Though factual, it reads like a big, rambling Victorian novel, and takes you, as novels do, into other people’s lives -- John Cary * Sunday Times *Page-turning, buccaneering stuff -- Laura Freeman * The Times *Apart from Buchan’s relentless work ethic, what shines forth from these pages is his generosity of spirit … Ursula Buchan shows a similar generosity of spirit in this wonderfully fluent biography -- Justin Marozzi * Financial Times *Excellent … [Ursula Buchan] gives us a strong sense of both the man and his milieu -- Allan Massie * Spectator *John Buchan was a writer of considerable significance but he was also a man who led a remarkable public life. This magnificent biography leads us through that life with great style and understanding -- Alexander McCall SmithDrawing on recently discovered family documents, this fascinating biography grants us the fullest picture of Buchan and his public and private life that we have ever had. Perhaps it will inspire some overdue screen adaptations of the ‘rollicking adventure stories’ of this most visual of novelists * Country Life *The great strength of this book is to make Buchan not just the writer of “shockers”, but a man whose influence helped change government policy … Ursula Buchan has done an admirable piece of work … She rightly puts his faith at the centre of the book and this lays a line towards a reimagination of Buchan -- Stuart Kelly * i *Buchan’s thrillers exploited contemporary events (and anxieties) which made them extensions of his political life. Both are integral to this excellent book in which Ursula Buchan has balanced her grandfather’s public and literary achievements with his family life and internal tensions. He emerges as a thoroughly decent man and she as a brilliant biographer * Standpoint *[An] exemplary, diligent biography -- William Boyd * New Statesman *

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Book SynopsisThe second volume of exuberant, lively letters from legendary travel writer Patrick Leigh FermorThe first collection of letters from Patrick Leigh Fermor, Dashing for the Post, delighted critics and public alike. This second volume, More Dashing, presents a further selection of letters that exude a zest for life and adventure characteristic of the man known to all as Paddy'. Paddy's exuberant letters contain glimpses of the great and the good: a chance conversation with the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, when Paddy opens the wrong door, or a glass of ouzo under the pine trees with Harold Macmillan. They describe encounters with such varied figures as Jackie Onassis, Camilla Parker-Bowles, Oswald Mosley and Peter Mandelson, while also relating adventures with the humble: a pick-nick' with the stonemasons at Kardamyli, or a drunken celebration in the Cretan mountains with his old comrades from the Resistance, most of them simple shepherds and goatherds. Paddy was at ease in any company unfailingly charming, boyish, gentle and fun. Patrick Leigh Fermor has long been recognised as one of the greatest travel writers of his time. Nowhere is his restless curiosity and delight in language more dazzlingly displayed than in his letters, skilfully edited in this collection by Adam Sisman.Trade ReviewPaddy Leigh Fermor was a soaring prose virtuoso with hardly an equal in his generation ... The letters are flirty, funny, lively and revealing. A few bring to mind his extravagant, generous, witty, meandering style of conversation; others show his magpie mind; the best contain some of the finest descriptive writing he ever committed to paper. Adam Sisman should be congratulated on this feat of literary archaeology and for excavating for Paddy’s fans a last marvellous treasure trove of Leigh Fermor prose -- William DalrympleRemarkably, this second volume, again expertly edited by Adam Sisman, contains, if anything, a more varied and colourful selection than the first … No fan will be disappointed -- Hamish Robinson * Oldie *Wow - one tour de force after another! The best letters are as good as - if not better than - any in the language: Byron's, Walpole's, Henry James's, Freya Stark's. Often I laughed aloud, tears coursing down the cheeks -- Praise for 'Dashing for the Post', John Julius NorwichAdam Sisman is a model editor ... Reading these letters is like gobbling down a tray of exotically filled chocolates, with no horrible orange creams to put you off -- Praise for 'Dashing for the Post', Harry Mount * Literary Review *Zest, verbal finesse, almost pristine receptivity and a richly informed cultural and historical consciousness make these letters, even when the erosions of time and illness shadow them, irresistibly exhilarating -- Praise for 'Dashing for the Post' * Sunday Times *

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Book SynopsisThe dramatic story of the legal and emotional battle that raged between two of Oscar Wilde's closest friends â both former lovers â following the playwright's deathTrade Review‘A fascinating account’ -- COLM TÓIBÍN

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Book SynopsisIn June of 1961, A.E. Hotchner visited an old friend in the psychiatric ward of St. Mary's Hospital. It would be the last time they spoke--a few weeks later, Ernest Hemingway was released home, where he took his own life. Their final conversation was also the final installment in a story whose telling Hemingway had spread over more than a decade.In characteristically pragmatic terms, Hemingway revealed to Hotchner the details of the affair that destroyed his first marriage: the truth of his romantic life in Paris and how he lost Hadley, the true part of each literary woman he'd later create and the great love he spent the rest of his life seeking. And he told of the mischief that made him a legend: of impotence cured in a house of God; of a plane crash in the African bush, from which Hemingway stumbled with a bunch of bananas and a bottle of gin in hand; of F. Scott Fitzgerald dispensing romantic advice and champagne in the buff with Josephine Baker; of adventure, human Trade ReviewIn this piercingly intimate new volume, A. E. Hotchner plumbs the depths of Hemingway's most poignant realizations and regrets - not just whom he loved and ultimately lost, but the very nature of his heart. A tender and devastating portrait...and one I will personally treasure -- Paula McLain, author of The Paris WifeA. E. Hotchner is a natural storyteller, and it has been our good fortune that among his friends and acquaintances are bullfighters, glamorous women, talented actors, painters, poets, and interesting poseurs - people who attract and enlighten readers. Hemingway in Love is the crowning achievement in Hotchner's lifetime study of Hemingway, and I admire it immensely -- Gay TaleseThe first complete understanding of the writer as a man...an important book -- Library Journal (starred review)A portrait of triumphant highs, melancholic lows, and the pervading tone of the subject's generation-a human being's love lost -- Publishers WeeklyHotchner tells an engaging and harrowing story. . .offers us something of a 'behind the scenes' glimpse at how Hemingway was processing his past, and dealing with the lingering trauma of regret, physical pain, and his deteriorating creative ability. . .The final years of Hemingway's life have never been told with such eloquence and compassion * PopMatters *A. E. Hotchner's Hemingway in Love is a poignant postscript to A Moveable Feast. . .a book of elegiac charm * BookPage *

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Book Synopsis''Make this your next inspirational read. Trust us, it's Oprah's Book Club worthy'' ViceIn London in 1958, a play by a 19-year-old redefined women's writing in Britain. It also began a movement that would change women's lives forever. The play was A Taste of Honey and the author, Shelagh Delaney, was the first in a succession of young women who wrote about their lives with an honesty that dazzled the world. They rebelled against sexism, inequality and prejudice and in doing so challenged the existing definitions of what writing and writers should be. Bypassing the London cultural elite, their work reached audiences of millions around the world, paved the way for profound social changes and laid the foundations of second-wave feminism. After Delaney came Edna O'Brien, Lynne Reid-Banks, Charlotte Bingham, Nell Dunn, Virginia Ironside and Margaret Forster; an extraordinarily disparate group who were united in their determination to shake the traditional concepts of woTrade ReviewWriters who changed lives. Rebel Writers is a startling new approach to literary criticism - not just what was done, but why it had to be done - mingled with astute social history. All sorts of things we should know but don’t know about the sixties, all smoothly and elegantly written and as readable as any novel. Six writers to whom we owe a debt of gratitude, all in their own ways sowing the seeds of how we live today. Marvellously interesting! -- Fay WeldonMake this your next inspirational read. Trust us, it’s Oprah’s Book Club worthy. * Vice *Brayfield's equally illuminating book homes in on the late 1950s and early 1960s, revealing that (Shelagh) Delaney wasn't the only one showing that female experience was about more than just falling in love... Brayfield offers us perceptive analysis of the writing and ratifies these women's position in the canon in the process. Perfect companion volumes, Tastes of Honey and Rebel Writers make for entertaining, edifying and important reading. * Financial Times Weekend *Table of ContentsIntroduction Part One: Seven Writers 1. Innocence and Experience 2. A Man’s World: Sexism 3. Forbidden Kisses: Class 4. All False: Love 5. ‘I Wish I Had a Career’: Aspiration 6. The Great Unmentionable: Sex 7. Drowning in Delight: Motherhood 8. A Rotten Bargain: Marriage 9. Good Old John: Race 10. Before the Urban Family: Friendship Part Two: Out into the World 11. ‘Where is your Baby?’ 12. Losing It at the Movies: Screen Adaptation 13. A Stain Upon Womanhood 14. The Angry Young Men: The Literary Movement That Never Was 15. Backwards in High Heels: Success And After 16. We Were Pioneers Epilogue Endnotes Bibliography Acknowledgements Index

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Book SynopsisThe first book about a generation of women writers who challenged the world.Make this your next inspirational read. Trust us, it''s Oprah''s Book Club worthy.--ViceIn London in 1958, a play by a 19-year-old redefined women''s writing in Britain. It also began a movement that would change women''s lives forever. The play was A Taste of Honey and the author, Shelagh Delaney, was the first in a succession of young women who wrote about their lives with an honesty that dazzled the world. They rebelled against sexism, inequality and prejudice and in doing so challenged the existing definitions of what writing and writers should be. Bypassing the London cultural elite, their work reached audiences of millions around the world, paved the way for profound social changes and laid the foundations of second-wave feminism. After Delaney came Edna O''Brien, Lynne Reid-Banks, Charlotte Bingham, Nell Dunn, Virginia Ironside and Margaret Forster; Trade ReviewWriters who changed lives. Rebel Writers is a startling new approach to literary criticism - not just what was done, but why it had to be done - mingled with astute social history. All sorts of things we should know but don’t know about the sixties, all smoothly and elegantly written and as readable as any novel. Six writers to whom we owe a debt of gratitude, all in their own ways sowing the seeds of how we live today. Marvellously interesting! -- Fay WeldonMake this your next inspirational read. Trust us, it’s Oprah’s Book Club worthy. * Vice *Brayfield's equally illuminating book homes in on the late 1950s and early 1960s, revealing that (Shelagh) Delaney wasn't the only one showing that female experience was about more than just falling in love... Brayfield offers us perceptive analysis of the writing and ratifies these women's position in the canon in the process. Perfect companion volumes, Tastes of Honey and Rebel Writers make for entertaining, edifying and important reading. * Financial Times Weekend *Table of ContentsIntroduction Part one: Seven Writers 1. Innocence and Experience 2. A Man’s World: Sexism 3. Forbidden Kisses: Class 4. All False: Love 5. ‘I Wish I Had a Career’: Aspiration 6. The Great Unmentionable: Sex 7. Drowning in Delight: Motherhood 8. A Rotten Bargain: Marriage 9. Good Old John: Race 10. Before the Urban Family: Friendship Part two: Out into the World 11. ‘Where is your Baby?’ 12. Losing It at the Movies: Screen Adaptation 13. A Stain Upon Womanhood 14. The Angry Young Men: The Literary Movement That Never Was 15. Backwards in High Heels: Success And After 16. We Were Pioneers Epilogue Endnotes Bibliography Acknowledgements Index

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Book SynopsisNOMINATED FOR THE H.R.F. KEATING AWARD, 2022. My New Year's Eve Toast: to all the devils, lusts, passions, greeds, envies, loves, hates, strange desires, enemies ghostly and real, the army of memories, with which I do battle may they never give me peace' Patricia Highsmith (New Year's Eve, 1947). Made famous by the great success of her psychological thrillers, The Talented Mr Ripley and Strangers on a Train, Patricia Highsmith is renowned as one of the most influential and celebrated modern writers. However, there has never been a clear picture of the woman behind the books. The relationship between Highsmith's lesbianism, her fraught personality by parts self-destructive and malicious and her fiction, has been largely ignored by biographers in the past. As an openly homosexual writer, she wrote the seminal lesbian love story Carol for which she would be venerated, in modern times, as a radical exponent of the LGBTQ+ community. Alas, her status as an LGBTQ+ icon is underminedTrade ReviewThis book is as snappy as an alligator … those who wish to see Patricia Highsmith devoured will no doubt applaud it. * Mail on Sunday *What makes the present biography poignant, is that there’s no redemption for a life of restlessness, despair, and torturous, doomed affairs. * Los Angeles Review of Books *Serial biographer Richard Bradford has written a captivating biography that carves out its own space... Bradford entertainingly deduces aspects of her literary characters from Highsmith’s own experiences… His lucidity is evident, his research thorough and his writing always immensely readable. Anyone interested in Highsmith would enjoy this book... * The Sydney Morning Herald *Bradford’s comprehensive investigations into the devils, lusts and strange desires in the works and life of Patricia Highsmith inspire further reading of her masterpieces. * Out in Perth *Bradford writes in this engrossing biography, “an incomparable individual,” for she was—among other things—an alcoholic and an equal-opportunity hater (…) he gives careful attention to her individual books, praising some, criticizing others (“ponderous and fatiguing”). Though it breaks little new ground, the book is a happy mixture of biography and criticism. Near its end, Bradford, in judgment, refers to Highsmith's "execrable true self.” Readers will find it hard to disagree. * Booklist *Bradford’s caustic wit helps to make this shortish book an entertaining summary of Highsmith’s life. * Daily Express *In this centenary year of her birth, her satisfyingly ruthless biographer Richard Bradford sets out the essence of her character and lifestyle in four-and-a-half withering introductory pages, to whet (or perhaps stifle) our appetites. * Daily Mail *Tom Ripley, described by Richard Bradford as 'one of the most fascinating exercises in autobiographical fiction ever produced', is a fraudster, psychopath and murderer who remains remote from the suffering he causes and gets no evident pleasure from his achievements. The Ripliad, as the series is known, makes bleak and compulsive reading, and so too does Bradford's biography... Bradford is less concerned with making sense of Highsmith than with making sense of her novels, and in this he succeeds handsomely. * Oldie *The outrageous stories Professor Bradford chooses to tell about her have all been told before, by her previous biographers, but are well worth hearing again, like a much-loved album of greatest hits. * The Mail on Sunday *There have already been two significant biographies of Highsmith - Andrew Wilson's Beautiful Shadow (2003) and Joan Schenkar's The Talented Miss Ripley (2009). Bradford thus covers a lot of already familiar ground but benefits from producing a book in the centenary of Highsmith's birth as well as a more concise biography. * The Canberra Times *Devils, Lusts and Strange Desires is certainly an engrossing book. * The New Criterion *Bradford’s biography employs a more critical approach than previous studies on Highsmith. * The Dallas Morning News *Drawing on her lifelong diaries, Richard Bradford's biography is the first to closely examine the relationship between Highsmith's troubled life and her brilliant, daring fiction. [...] this well-researched book is a must for any fan of film noir or crime fiction. * The Lady *Table of ContentsAcknowledgements Introduction 1. The Beginning 2. Barnard 3. Boarding the Train 4. Yaddo and Consequences 5. Carol 6. Ellen 7. Ripley 8. Marijane 9. ‘So Much in Love’ 10. Eccentricity 11. France 12. Animals and Us 13. ‘It’s Good You Never Had Children’ 14. Her Last Loves 15. ‘I’m Sick of the Jews!’ 16. Those Who Walk Away Primary Sources Suggested Further Reading Index

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Book SynopsisThe first volume of the definitive collection of Dylan Thomas's letters.Trade ReviewDylan Thomas's life and letters read like a cry of despair, interspersed with rare moments of happiness in Wales . . . A moving book. The pain is too real, the tragedy too pitiful to leave any reader untouched - Sunday TimesHis letters are as funny, and nearly as witty, as Oscar Wilde's, and sometimes almost as wise as Keats's - Sunday Telegraph

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Book SynopsisAfter arriving in London just before the Second World War as a penniless and friendless Austrian-Jewish refugee, George Weidenfeld went on to transform not only the world of publishing but the culture of ideas. The books that he published include momentous titles such as Lolita, Double Helix, The Group and The Hedgehog and the Fox, with authors he championed ranging from Joan Didion, Mary McCarthy and Edna O''Brien to Henry Miller, Harold Wilson, Saul Bellow and Henry Kissinger.In this first biography, Thomas Harding provides a full, unvarnished and at times difficult history of this complex and fascinating character and crafts a portrait of the publisher''s life that is inextricable from the efforts and intricacies of putting a book into the world. Structured around twenty books associated with George Weidenfeld, and intercut with explorations of contemporary concerns such as the right to publish, freedom of speech and separating the art from th

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Book SynopsisHemingway's passion was writinghe was inspired by a lifetime of daring adventures and encouraged by the many women in his life. He nurtured his creativity by purposely seeking dangerous situations to test his own levels of courage and to create literary heroes that displayed grace under pressure. His masculine, adventurous spirit appealed to women of all ages, including his four wives and a long list of legendary actresses, and he frequently transformed the women in his life into memorable fictional characters.In 1950, Hemingway told Marlene Dietrich that he truly loved only five women. Who were these five women and why did he love them? In Hemingway's Passions, Hemingway scholar Nancy Sindelar answers these questions. Through quotations from his works and personal letters, as well as fifty photographsmany of which have not been previously publishedshe captures Hemingway's life and romantic adventures, revealing his own feelings about his romantic relationships and the ways h

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Book SynopsisCharles Dickens called his sister-in-law Georgina Hogarth his ‘best and truest friend’. Georgina saw Dickens as much more than a friend. They lived together for twenty-eight years, during which time their relationship constantly changed. The sister of his wife Catherine, the sharp and witty Georgina moved into the Dickens home aged fifteen. What began as a father–daughter relationship blossomed into a genuine rapport, but their easy relations were fractured when Dickens had a mid-life crisis and determined to rid himself of Catherine. Georgina’s refusal to leave Dickens and his desire for her to remain in his household led to rumours of an affair and even illegitimate children. He left her the equivalent of almost £1 million and all his personal papers in his will. Georgina’s commitment to Dickens was unwavering but it is far from clear what he did to deserve such loyalty. There were several occasions when he misused her in order to protect his public reputation.Why did Georgina betray her once much-loved sister? Why did she fall out with her family and risk her reputation in order to stay with Dickens? And why did the Dickenses’ daughter Katey say it was ‘the greatest mistake ever’ to invite a sister-in-law to live with a family?Trade Review'Essential for anyone interested in Charles Dickens’s personal life. Christine Skelton’s thoroughly researched and brilliantly written book fills in a missing piece of the jigsaw. It makes for enthralling reading.' Jenny Hartley, author of Charles Dickens and the house of fallen women and Charles Dickens: A very short introduction'Georgina Hogarth has been given a voice at last! Christine Skelton has done an admirable job of bringing ‘aunty Georgy” out of the shadow of her celebrity brother-in-law. This is an engaging biography that takes the reader into the heart of one of Victorian Britain’s most famous homes.' Lucinda Hawksley, author, biographer, and great-great-great-granddaughter of Charles Dickens'A major, and much-needed, contribution to our knowledge and understanding of both the private and the professional life of our greatest novelist.' Professor Michael Slater, author of The Great Charles Dickens Scandal and Dickens and Women -- .Table of ContentsIntroduction1 The Hogarths and Dickens become in-laws 2 Friends and flirting (1836–42)3 Dickens and his ‘little Pet’ (1842–7)4 A ‘lively young damsel’ (1848–51)5 Dickens’s mid-life crisis (1852–7) 6 Loyalty and disloyalty (1857–8)7 ‘Poor Miss Hogarth’ (1858–63)8 ‘His own decision will be the best’ (1864–70)9 ‘A hard, hard trial’ (1870–1917) 10 AftermathIndex

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Book Synopsis'An intimate portrait ... Critical, generous and heartfelt' Ahdaf Soueif, Guardian 'An intriguing account of an alluring but evasive character’ Daily Telegraph Drawing on extensive archival sources and hundreds of interviews, Timothy Brennan’s Places of Mind is the first comprehensive biography of Said, one of the most controversial and celebrated intellectuals of the 20th century. In Brennan’s masterful work, Said, the pioneer of post-colonial studies, a tireless champion for his native Palestine, and an erudite literary critic, emerges as a self-doubting, tender, and eloquent advocate of literature’s dramatic effects on politics and civic life. Places of Mind charts the intertwined routes of Said’s intellectual development, revealing him as a study in opposites: a cajoler and strategist, a New York intellectual with a foot in Beirut, an orchestra impresario in Weimar and Ramallah, a raconteur on national television, a Palestinian negotiator at the State Department, and an actor in films in which he played himself. Brennan traces the Arab influences of Said’s thinking along with his tutelage under Lebanese statesmen, off-beat modernist auteurs, and New York literati, as Said grew into a scholar whose influential writings changed the face of university life forever. With both intimidating brilliance and charm, Said turned these resources into a groundbreaking counter-tradition of radical humanism, set against the backdrop of techno-scientific dominance and religious war. With unparalleled clarity, Said gave the humanities a new authority in the age of Reaganism that continues today. Drawing on the testimonies of family, friends, students, and antagonists alike, and aided by FBI files, unpublished writing, and Said’s drafts of novels and personal letters, Places of Mind captures Said’s intellectual breadth and influence in an unprecedented, intimate, and compelling portrait of one of the great minds of the twentieth century.Trade ReviewA patient and thorough biography … An intriguing account of an alluring but evasive character * Daily Telegraph *A powerful book which is at times as difficult and demanding as its subject … Here was a superstar who blazed a rich cultural and literary legacy * Spectator *Brennan draws on an imposing array of material to write the first comprehensive portrait of one of America’s most distinguished postwar intellectuals * New York Times Book Review, Editor’s Choice *An exceptionally fluent intellectual biography that synthesises the complex influences on his work while outlining the details of his life -- Patrick French * Sunday Times *The life of the author of Orientalism * Sunday Times, The Books of 2021 *Critical, generous and heartfelt ... An intimate portrait … Brennan’s achievement is to do justice to the many things Said was and to articulate the synapses that connected his different worlds ... He has provided us with what you might call a manual of Said; a map of his thoughts and his positions, which, change as they did, could always be traced to a core set of ideas and drives and to do this without ever blunting Said’s subtlety or smudging the clarity of his ideas -- Ahdaf Soueif * Guardian *Brennan – a former student of Said who is now a professor of comparative literature at the University of Minnesota – was given unprecedented access by Said’s family to the unpublished manuscripts … Places of Mind: a Life of Edward Said, which is published by Bloomsbury, sheds new light on how, after a lifetime of teaching literature, Said came to reject the novel in 1992 as a literary form * Observer *An impressive and rigorous study * Irish Times *A remarkably unhindered and often incisive intellectual portrait of its subject * New Statesman *In the first comprehensive biography of Said, Brennan, a former student, highlights the Palestinian scholar’s complexity, delivering a portrait of a thinker, activist and musician endowed with an unusually restless and protean intellect * New York Times, Books of the Week *Almost 20 years after his death, one of Said’s former students, Timothy Brennan, has written an expansive new biography of Said’s life and ideas ... Brennan presents the scholarly Said as a dazzling processing power operating at warp speed, a mind capable of metabolizing, reorienting and rendering theory with technological precision * Washington Post *[An] intense and rewarding book * Wall Street Journal *Masterful and accomplished … Impressively researched and powerfully written, it charts Said’s many triumphs * New Republic *Steeped in Western culture, the great critic of Western narratives came to his post-colonialist convictions gradually but with growing intensity -- Pankaj Mishra * New Yorker *A comprehensive biography of the celebrated intellectual and pioneer of postcolonial studies, authorised by his estate and drawing on extensive archival sources and interviews * Irish Independent, Books to Look Out for in 2021 *

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Book SynopsisA SPECTATOR, NEW STATESMAN AND THE TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR ‘The best biography I have read in years' Philippe Sands ‘Spectacular’ Observer ‘A remarkable portrait’ Guardian W. G. Sebald was one of the most extraordinary and influential writers of the twentieth century. Through books including The Emigrants, Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn, he pursued an original literary vision that combined fiction, history, autobiography and photography and addressed some of the most profound themes of contemporary literature: the burden of the Holocaust, memory, loss and exile. The first biography to explore his life and work, Speak, Silence pursues the true Sebald through the memories of those who knew him and through the work he left behind. This quest takes Carole Angier from Sebald’s birth as a second-generation German at the end of the Second World War, through his rejection of the poisoned inheritance of the Third Reich, to his emigration to England, exploring the choice of isolation and exile that drove his work. It digs deep into a creative mind on the edge, finding profound empathy and paradoxical ruthlessness, saving humour, and an elusive mix of fact and fiction in his life as well as work. The result is a unique, ferociously original portrait.Trade ReviewA remarkable biography . . . The first major study of revered author and academic WG Sebald reveals an obsessive and brilliant mind . . . In her long and scholarly book, a testament to the powers of research and detailed dissection, Angier has presented a remarkable portrait of a writer consumed by work * Guardian *Meticulously researched … The brilliance of [this] biography, a spectacularly agile work of criticism as well as a feat of doggedly meticulous research, lies in Angier’s ability to look her subject straight in the eye while holding on to the sense of adoration that made her want to write it in the first place * Observer *The product of years of sleuthing … Angier’s openness about the difficulties she has encountered in trying to untangle [Sebald’s] enigma if anything adds to her portrait … The portrait which ultimately emerges convinces: of a tormented man, an isolated misfit, riven by self-doubt, who wrote to stave off depressive breakdowns and even madness and suicidal impulses * Spectator *It is a considerable achievement to unpick, so convincingly, mysteries Sebald has taken care to contrive. And to do it with such respect, and indeed generosity, that the great originals are burnished -- Iain SinclairSpeak, Silence is an extraordinary achievement. Carole Angier has been able to capture the genius of Sebald without trapping him in facile definitions, allowing his portrait the many hues and changing angles that those who knew him will recognize as profoundly true -- Alberto ManguelSebald once wrote to me that he would just like to be “a guardian of the lesser domains”. His work is enough, but this enticing and thorough book on his life and art proves that he was, in spite of his tragic and early death, an absolute master of the highest domains of literature -- Javier MaríasCarole Angier extends the scope of biography by turning her intense admiration for Sebald’s work into a personal quest for this enigmatic and disturbing writer -- Hilary SpurlingA biographer of great sympathy -- Michael HolroydEnthralling . . . I was exhilarated from start to finish, by subject, style and substance. It is the best biography I have read in years -- Philippe SandsA suitably unorthodox life of this singular writer . . . Angier’s strategy pays off: this is an insightful, compulsively readable book * Atlantic *W.G. Sebald so deliberately and cunningly blurs the boundaries between fact and fiction in his books that every reader longs for a clear-eyed guide to what is invented and what is ‘real’, while at the same time dreading the damage this might do to the delicate webs he weaves. Carole Angier’s tireless detective work has cleared up many of the mysteries, both in his life and in his work, while her critical acumen and manifest admiration for the latter ensures that it emerges enhanced rather than diminished from her labours. A riveting book -- Gabriel JosipoviciRemarkable, the definitive biography . . . Deeply researched, subtle, sympathetic * Claire Tomalin on 'Jean Rhys' *An acute literary intelligence . . . The reader comes to trust instinctively Angier’s assessments * New York Times on 'Jean Rhys' *Allows us to see Levi’s life in its full historical meaning * Financial Times on 'The Double Bond: Primo Levi' *Marvellous and visionary . . . Remarkable in all senses of the word * New York Times on 'The Double Bond: Primo Levi' *Angier writes with brio and occasional brilliance . . . By the end, I felt convinced that she had got to the heart of Levi * Guardian on 'The Double Bond: Primo Levi' *

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Book SynopsisVERY few authors can ever dream of coming close to the legacy left by AA Milne. He remains a household name in almost every corner of the globe thanks to a phenomenally popular collection of whimsical children s stories about a boy named Christopher Robin and his beloved teddy bear. Generations of children have grown up loving the tales of Winnie The Pooh and his friends from the Hundred Acre Wood, which are still among the most popular and profitable - fictional characters in the world. But while the adorable poems and stories have brought unparalleled joy to millions, Alan Alexander Milne, himself was never able to enjoy the fame and fortune they brought him. He died deeply resenting Pooh s success, as far as he was concerned those stories were just such a tiny fraction of his literary work, but nothing else he produced came close in terms of public appreciation. Milne died still unable to reconcile the fact that no matter what else he wrote, regardless of all the plays and stories for adults he had published, he would always be remembered as a children s storyteller. And his son, widely hailed as the inspiration for the adorable character of Christopher Robin, could never accept his unique place in literary history either. He had barely reached his teens before he grew to loathe his famous father, who he bitterly accused of exploiting his early years. _The Extraordinary Life of AA Milne_ delves deep into the life of Milne and sheds light on new places, and tells stories untold.

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Book Synopsis*For those aspiring authors who are interested in the path to success*'I read this yesterday in one glorious sitting! What an absolute treat of a book!' Lesley Kara'Illuminating, revealing and absolutely fascinating, Will Brooker offers us the keys to the Jewell kingdom.' Vanessa Fox O'Loughlin aka Sam Blake__________Have you ever thought about what it takes to become a bestselling writer?If so, The Truth About Lisa Jewell is the book for you. It is the story of how a novel is written, from before the start to after the finish; it's an in-depth analysis of how that novel fits into a bestselling author like Lisa Jewell's career and her previous work, and what her style shares with authors from James Joyce to Martin Amis.But this is more than just a study of an author at the top of her game. Like Lisa Jewell's much-loved novels, it's also the story of a relationship - between the bestselling author and the professor of cultural studies who has made her his muse - evolving slowly as the world comes gradually out of Covid. It's the story of two very different writers getting to know each other gradually through words; two complete strangers becoming something more like friends.A must-have for fans of Lisa Jewell, for aspiring authors who are interested in the path to success - and a testament to the way books can bring us together. . .__________Readers LOVE The Truth About Lisa Jewell . . .***** 'This book is perfect for fans and aspiring writers alike ... It's faultless to the point that I'd say it's a must read for anyone interested in Lisa Jewell or her work.'***** 'An insightful and well written book.'***** 'Brooker ... succeeds in being a great guide to [Lisa Jewell's] progression.'

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Book Synopsis'Entirely original and thrilling . . . this is Gatsby made real' JULIET NICOLSON'This witty, fascinating book is a delight. Read it.' MIRIAM MARGOLYESIn the 1920s a new generation stepped forward to invigorate the Bloomsbury Group - creative young people who tantalised the original 'Bloomsberries' with their captivating looks and provocative ideas. Young Bloomsbury introduces us to an extraordinarily colourful cast of characters, including novelist and music critic Eddy Sackville-West, 'who wore elaborate make-up and dressed in satin and black velvet'; sculptor Stephen Tomlin; and writer Julia Strachey. Talented and productive, these larger-than-life figures had high-achieving professional lives and extremely complicated emotional lives.Bloomsbury had always celebrated sexual equality and freedom in private, feeling that every person had the right to live and love in the way they chose. But as transgressive self-expression became more public, this younger generation gave Old Bloomsbury a new voice. Revealing an aspect of Bloomsbury history not yet explored, Young Bloomsbury celebrates an open way of living that would not be embraced for another hundred years.Trade ReviewI want to climb inside this book and live there -- PHOEBE WALLER-BRIDGE This witty, fascinating book is a delight. Read it. * MIRIAM MARGOLYES *This captivating history explores the second generation of queer British writers and artists who pushed the original Bloomsbury Group . . . to live more publicly and go farther creatively * New York Times *Gender fluidity? Pansexuality? Throuples? Chosen families? Cross-dressing? Kinks? How avant-garde - and how old-fashioned. In her colourful Young Bloomsbury Nino Strachey explores a place and time when queer life blossomed * Washington Post *A superb, sparky and reflective book charting the doings of the younger members of the artistic and intellectual coterie * The Spectator *Enjoyably intimate and assured in tone . . . packs far more of an emotional punch than its title might suggest. Nino Strachey's strength as a biographer is to draw sensitive and non-judgemental portraits of people whose private agonies seemed at odds with their outwardly confident appearance. * TLS *Like Lytton Strachey and Michael Holroyd, Ms. Strachey underpins her narrative with concerns from her own time . . . these sections are the most affecting parts of the book . . . It's only a slight exaggeration to say that the story of Bloomsbury is the story of modern literary biography itself * Wall Street Journal *Illuminating . . . Lashings of lust and society larks * Daily Mail *A highly entertaining, pacy volume, based on considerable research, and a must for modern Bloomsbury fans, whether young or old. -- Jeremy Musson * Country Life *A lively account of a group of bright young things in the 1920s. A hundred years ahead of their time, these creative souls were pushing the boundaries of gender identity and sexual expression, and - surprisingly - finding acceptance among their friends and families. * ROBERT SACKVILLE-WEST, author of The Searchers: The Quest for the Lost of the First World War *Young Bloomsbury just BRIMS with the same kind of sexy vitality embodied by the characters Nino Strachey describes in such effervescent detail. Just when you might have wondered if there could possibly be room for a new and revealing study of a group of lives which have been so meticulously and extensively documented, Nino's exhilarating lens offers an entirely original and thrilling focus. As scepticism, admiration, envy, and confusion ebb and flow between one chattering, seductive, thinking, inspiring generation and another, this is Gatsby made real. * JULIET NICOLSON *With a deft turn of the Bloomsbury kaleidoscope, and an impressive gift for finding treasures in the archives, Nino Strachey reveals colourful new patterns of experiments in living which speak trenchantly to our own cultural moment. * MARK HUSSEY, author of Clive Bell and the Making of Modernism *Great fun and, for all fans of the Bloomsbury Group, enormously informative - like being transported back to "dancing the night hours away underground in the pitch dark and smoke-filled avant-garde nightclubs of that day", you never know who you're going to meet. * SIMON FENWICK, author of The Crichel Boys *An extraordinary account of the bustling non-binary heart of the literary and artistic roaring twenties, filled with the most vivid characters, who lived and loved under the shadow of the horror of conversion therapy and yet found ways to express themselves so boldly and beautifully. Young Bloomsbury gives new context to the later stages of life for the original Bloomsbury group. I loved every page. * JACK THORNE, BAFTA, Tony and Olivier Award-winning Screenwriter and Playwright *Above all else, Bloomsbury was a liberating force, as Nino Strachey shows in her sparkling new book. The younger friends and relations of the Bells, Stracheys and Woolfs lived, worked and loved freely, finding their own ways to personal and artistic fulfilment. This book is packed with their brilliant, subversive energy * ANNE CHISHOLM, author of Frances Partridge: A Biography *A brisk, light tonic . . . Joyfully transgressive . . . Strachey provides frothy accounts of their gatherings at the Gargoyle; or at the all-male Cranium Club, founded by Bunny Garnett, where sherry was sipped from a skull and conversation permitted only on "abstract and literary subjects"; or in private homes, like Gerald Reitlinger's, at which Lytton Strachey danced with Nancy Mitford, and young men writhed in orgiastic heaps * Harper’s Magazine *The book is a rich, varied world of competing narratives . . . one would struggle to imagine anyone doing each one justice with the skill and finesse that is demonstrated here * James T Bowen, Virginia Woolf Bulletin *

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Book Synopsis'Making Darkness Light is an illumination' Adam Phillips'His sympathetic yet challenging account will undoubtedly win Milton new readers - and for that a chorus of Hallelujahs' SpectatorFor most of us John Milton has been consigned to the dusty pantheon of English literature, a grim puritan, sightlessly dictating his great work to an amanuensis, removed from the real world in his contemplation of higher things. But dig a little deeper and you find an extraordinary and complicated human being.Revolutionary and apologist for regicide, writer of propaganda for Cromwell's regime, defender of the English people and passionate European, scholar and lover of music and the arts - Milton was all of these things and more.Making Darkness Light shows how these complexities and contradictions played out in Milton's fascination with oppositions - Heaven and Hell, light and dark, self and other - most famously in his epic poem Paradise Lost. It explores the way such brutal contrasts define us and obscure who we really are, as the author grapples with his own sense of identity and complex relationship with Milton. Retracing Milton's footsteps through seventeenth century London, Tuscany and the Marches, he vividly brings Milton's world to life and takes a fresh look at his key works and ideas around the nature of creativity, time and freedom of expression. He also illustrates the profound influence of Milton's work on writers from William Blake to Virginia Woolf, James Joyce to Jorge Luis Borges.This is a book about Milton, that also speaks to why we read and what happens when we choose over time to let another's life and words enter our own. It will change the way you think about Milton forever.Trade ReviewMaking Darkness Light is elegant, nuanced, and comprehensive. Moshenska gives us a fresh and vivid account of Milton as an individual and a poet while pushing beyond the boundaries of conventional biography. Blending the personal with the historical and the literary, the results are compelling' -- Bart van Es, author of The Cut Out GirlJoe Moshenska's superb new biography of Milton is, like the poetry of his subject, a miracle of form, moving from moments of arresting detail to vast contemplations of time, history, and art, all set within an intimate narrative that is at once deeply embedded in its historical moment and aware of how that history connects through other moments to the present. The result is a stirring and compelling account of how great poetry gets written and gets read -- Edward Wilson-Lee, author of The Catalogue of Shipwrecked BooksMoshenska has written a new kind of literary biography. At once glancingly a memoir, a rivetingly informative biography, and a fascinating reading of Milton as poet, scholar and ordinary man in his everyday life, Making Darkness Light is an illumination. Milton and everything and everybody around him are seen in a quite different, intriguing light. -- Adam Phillips, author of On Kissing, Tickling and Being Bored and Becoming FreudJoe Moshenska is professionally committed to creating a readership for Milton among those for whom Genesis, Virgil, Homer and Tasso are closed books . . . A great imaginative exercise . . . His sympathetic yet challenging account will undoubtedly win Milton new readers - and for that a chorus of Hallelujahs -- A.N. Wilson, SpectatorStrikingly original . . . a poetic tour of 17th-century England . . . Literature lovers of all sorts will find something to savor here -- Publishers WeeklyOxford literature professor Moshenska takes a fresh perspective on John Milton (1608-1674), the art of biography, and the experience of reading . . . An inspired biographical and autobiographical journey -- KirkusMaking Darkness Light is unlike any book on Milton I have ever read. It is often densely erudite, but also richly inventive . . . [its] avoidance of easy certainties is typical of this subtle, challenging book -- John Carey, The Sunday TimesJoe Moshenska . . . is astute in placing music, especially rhythm (a word neither Milton nor Shakespeare used) and its visceral relationship to the body, at the root of this original, penetrating, cleverly constructed and occasionally frustrating biography -- Paul Lay, The TimesTantalisingly different and new...an extraordinary, seductive work of intellectual imagination -- Financial TimesMoshenska . . . brings his own experiences into this searching creative portrait of the visionary English poet. The book . . . comes alive in its alert close readings -- New York TimesMaking Darkness Light is not a conventional biography . . . despite the ambitious and demanding nature of his project, Moshenska writes with humility and agility -- Literary ReviewOf course, anyone looking for a deeper understanding of the facts of Milton's life and the context for his poetry will certainly find what they're looking for here. Making Darkness Light includes not only moments in Milton's life and the landscape of 17th century England as well as close readings of his work. But it's the exploration of what the author describes as one of Milton's deepest occupations, "the place of literature in a life," that sets the book apart. Moshenska has no aspirations to separate the biographer from the biography, and Making Darkness Light is richer for his presence throughout the book -- Jessie Gaynor, Lit Hub Senior EditorMoshenska knows his way around Milton's world... Making Darkness Light privileges us with a peek inside its author's mind in contemplation of such a life and makes a compelling case that it could be told in no other way -- Boston Globe

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Book Synopsis'Sleepless has changed how I feel about sleep . . . I was captivated' The Times, Book of the Week'This book will inspire you to get up, light a candle, and experience your own Night Self' Financial TimesTHE NIGHT SELF IS: CREATIVE. CURIOUS. VULNERABLE. ENCHANTED. COURAGEOUS.In the winter of 2020, Annabel Abbs experienced a series of bereavements. As she grieved, she kept busy by day, but at night sleep eluded her. And yet her sleeplessness led to a profound and unexpected discovery: her Night Self. As the night transformed into a place of creativity and liberation, Annabel found she wasn't alone. From the radical fifteenth-century philosopher Laura Cereta and subversive artist Louise Bourgeois, to Virginia Woolf and the activist Peace Pilgrim, women have long found sanctuary, inspiration and courage in darkness.Drawing on the latest science, which shows we are more imaginative, open-minded and reflective at night, Annabel set out to discover the potential of her Night Self. Sleepless follows her journey, from midnight hikes to starlit swims, from Singapore, the brightest city on Earth, to the darkest corner of the Arctic Circle, and finally to that most elusive of places - sleep.A moving, revelatory voyage into the dark, Sleepless invites us to feel less anxious about our sleep, and to embrace the possibilities of the night.Trade ReviewThis book will inspire you to get up, light a candle, and experience your own Night Self -- ERICA WAGNER * Financial Times *Reveals a wondrous night world . . . Sleepless is more than an antidote to sleep zealotry; it marks a special place to embrace and enjoy -- CATHERINE DE LANGE * New Scientist *Abbs invites the reader to lean right in . . . lyrical prose . . . and extensive research illustrate the value many women have found historically in embracing their Night Selves * Irish Times *[Full of] numerous examples of creative women whose greatest, most avant-garde works were conceived and produced at night . . . Abbs urges us to mine our night brains for creative profit . . . to stop catastrophising about how you'll cope the following day * Sunday Times Magazine *The beautiful prose in this book is otherworldly and an ode to insomnia . . . Having skilfully merged her research and personal experiences, Abbs takes us on a journey through her own psyche. Not only is this book extremely readable, it is also deeply relatable * The Lady *I have never read a writer who could turn the lemons of sleep deprivation into the lemonade of creative inspiration quite like Annabel Abbs . . . Weaving history, scientific research on brain chemistry and Abbs's own personal nocturnal explorations, Sleepless is uniquely engaging and hopeful account of a condition that is more typically a truly miserable experience * Salon *Transforms the dead of the night into a place alive with feminine creativity, curiosity and self-discovery. You'll find yourself longing for the dark -- Tabitha CarvanA beautiful book that weaves together science, storytelling and self-discovery. Soft, soothing and soulful -- Nicola Jane Hobbs, author of The Relaxed WomanThis book asks one of the most beautiful questions a Big Soul can ask herself: What if our insomnia was a wondrous, life-thriving thing? As a reader, we answer it together with weary but deeply fulfilled relief, yes, yes, it is! -- Sarah Wilson, New York Times bestselling author of This One Wild and Precious LifeA rich and revelatory exploration of the creative and liberating potential of the night, and a paean to the life-enhancing power of the dark. My newborn Night Self was left longing for more -- Sharon Blackie, author of The Enchanted LifeI adore all of Annabel's vibrant and insightful writing, but this walk in the dark was an utter revelation. Beautifully written in engaging first-person narrative, I now have an idea of the beauty of this side of our lives -- Kathryn AaltoFascinating . . . seeking to avoid what she later comes to value, Annnabel's relationship with the dark shows us the night can become a time of creative potential and healing -- Nina Edwards, author of DarknessAbbs strikes a contrarian note by daring to extol and even 'befriend' the sleep deprivation she experienced after a series of bereavements . . . Abbs is right to push back against the current sleep cult, as one thing is clear: anxiety about sleep will only make it more elusive * Tablet *Award-winning author Annabel Abbs strikes a contrarian note by daring to extol and even "befriend" the sleep deprivation she experienced after a series of bereavements, seeing it as a pathway to self-discovery. * Tablet *

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Book Synopsis"An enthralling, heartening study of a man of unflagging interest in life" Independent"A thoroughly researched biography" New York Review of Books"Provides readers of English with a perfect introduction to the life and works of an outstanding writer, one whom everyone should read" Irish Times"I am thoroughly convinced by Gudmundsson's portrayal of Laxness" J. M COETZEEA strong and memorable portrayal of a man who fought heroically to write for the world, but in one of its rarest languages. Halldór Laxness won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1955. During his life, which spanned nearly the entire century, he not only wrote sixty books, but also became an active participant in Europe's idealistic debates and struggles.In the 1930s, Laxness became attracted to Soviet communism. He travelled widely in the Soviet Bloc and, despite witnessing some atrocities, remained a defender of communism until the 1960s. But his political leanings never dominated his work. Laxness continually sought to divulge the world of beauty that lurks beneath the everyday, ensuring his artistry remained a sanctuary of humanism and reflection.In this biography, Guðmundsson has been granted access to unique material by Laxness' family. As a result, the interrelationships between Laxness' personal life, his politics and his career are meticulously examined. What emerges is a grand description of a fascinating personality in which the manifold conflicts of the 20th century are mirrored."Laxness is a writer of the first degree, a writer I dreamed of coming close to" BORIS PASTERNAK, 1960"When in a bad mood I have picked one of your books. And there the pure and deep sound has welcomed me, strong and charming from the first page" KAREN BLIXEN in an open letter to Laxness in 1952Translated from Icelandic by Philip RoughtonTrade ReviewGudmundsson, as judicious in his treatment of Laxness's Stalinism as of his distant relationships with his two wives, has written an enthralling, heartening study of a man of unflagging interest in life. -- Paul Binding * Independent *The author's life is vividly recounted . . . detailed chapters and powerful quotes allow for an honest assessment of the author's career. * Sunday Herald *I have read the biography with great interest and admiration. I am thoroughly convinced by Gudmundsson's portrayal of Laxness. -- J. M. CoetzeeGudmundsson interweaves the diverting story of Laxness's life with critical commentary on his work in the manner of the best literary biographies. His tone is appealing, intimate and understanding but far from hagiographical and not averse to critical irony . . . he conveys a vivid sense of Laxness's personality, in all its complexity and ambivalence. The man comes to life in the pages of the work - something that does not always happen, even in the best biographies . . . the translation of this exemplary biography in English is very welcome. It provides readers of English with a perfect introduction to the life and works of an outstanding writer, one whom everyone should read -- Eilis Ni Dhubhne * Irish Times *The biography still provides a lively soup-to-nuts account, including the dizzying sequence of travels Laxness began after he left home -- Salvatore Scibona * New Yorker *A thoroughly researched biography -- Ruth Margalit * New York Review of Books *A thoroughly researched biography -- Ruth Margalit * New York Review of Books *Gudmundsson interweaves the diverting story of Laxness's life with critical commentary on his work in the manner of the best literary biographies. His tone is appealing, intimate and understanding but far from hagiographical and not averse to critical irony . . . he conveys a vivid sense of Laxness's personality, in all its complexity and ambivalence. The man comes to life in the pages of the work - something that does not always happen, even in the best biographies . . . the translation of this exemplary biography in English is very welcome. It provides readers of English with a perfect introduction to the life and works of an outstanding writer, one whom everyone should read -- Eilis Ni Dhubhne * Irish Times *I have read the biography with great interest and admiration. I am thoroughly convinced by Gudmundsson's portrayal of Laxness -- J. M. CoetzeeGudmundsson, as judicious in his treatment of Laxness's Stalinism as of his distant relationships with his two wives, has written an enthralling, heartening study of a man of unflagging interest in life -- Paul Binding * Independent *The author's life is vividly recounted . . . detailed chapters and powerful quotes allow for an honest assessment of the author's career * Sunday Herald *

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Book SynopsisExploring drawing, fate, and the mysterious human body, Boruch embarks on a journey of dark wonder in The Figure Going Imaginary.Marianne Boruch embarks on a journey of dark wonder in The Figure Going Imaginary. A gathering of journal entries, lyrical prose, poetry, and sketches from the author’s “Life Drawing” notebook, this hybrid collection recounts the unnerving and otherworldly experience of studying Gross Human Anatomy and life-drawing at Purdue University—an experience that also fueled her 2014 collection, Cadaver, Speak. In the studio, it’s the music of “charcoal to paper, a netherworld sound” and learning to bring human models alive on paper. In the cadaver lab, its “flashing knives and probes and forceps” that focus on another kind of beauty, the body as “map, a tracing, evidence of a life.” Guided by “the ancient task of learning to see,” this poet explores drawing, fate, and at the fragile center of it all, the mysteries of the human figure.

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Book Synopsis“One of the Year’s Best,” Times Literary Supplement When a writer tracks down his literary hero, Graham Greene, who is living quietly on the shores of the Mediterranean, the author finds his new friend is every bit as complex as the fiction he’s famous for. While living in southern France in 1972, Michael Mewshaw engineered a meeting with Graham Greene. Mewshaw was an ambitious young journalist and novelist, Greene was an internationally revered elder statesman of letters. The pair became fast friends and corresponded for the next twenty years. My Man in Antibes is an intimate portrait of what it was like to eat, drink, and gossip with one of the most revered—and complicated—authors of the twentieth century. Growing up Catholic with literary aspirations, Mewshaw believed Greene was the author to emulate. Not only did Greene demonstrate how religious belief and church dogma could be subjects for fiction, he also wrote murder mysteries and political thrillers where his characters’ inner conflicts played out dramatically in exotic settings. Under Greene’s sway, Mewshaw traveled through Mexico like the whiskey priest in Greene’s The Power and the Glory and honeymooned at the Hotel Oloffson in Haiti, the setting of The Comedians. When Mewshaw tracked down Greene in Antibes, he found the author was far from a reclusive, close-mouthed figure: Greene garrulously recounted tales about the many women in his life—and husbands of those women—as well as his extraordinary interviews with political figures such as Fidel Castro and Ho Chi Minh. Over the next two decades, Mewshaw and Greene ate meals together, discussed their travels, and talked about writers they knew in common, such as Anthony Burgess, Shirley Hazzard, and Gore Vidal. While young Mewshaw looked up to the world-weary Greene, their relationship was never simply that of mentor and mentee. My Man in Antibes bristles with misunderstandings, arguments, and one young writer’s desire to get to know a legendary older writer who, in many ways, actively sought to remain unknowable.Trade Review“I savored Michael Mewshaw’s funny, gossipy, thoughtful account of his fractious friendship with Graham Greene.” —Damon Galgut, “One of the Year’s Best,” Times Literary Supplement “Lovely book....Mewshaw’s account, especially of Greene’s last years, is moving and perceptive.” —Library Journal “An up-close portrait of Greene, with many juicy details. A rare, firsthand look at the one of the 20th century's greatest authors.”—Shelf Awareness “Mewshaw finds much in Greene's life and work to admire and emulate, along with human frailty, and he conveys the ups and downs of their relationship with genuine intimacy. The humanity of a renowned literary figure is fascinatingly revealed through a long friendship.” —Kirkus “Mewshaw draws on two decades of encounters and correspondence [with Graham Greene] for an intriguing analysis . . . about the tortured soul behind the writer’s persona of the global traveler, friend of rebels and priests, who found in beleaguered countries a church that nurtured hope.” —Commonweal “This is a fond but never less than candid memoir of a defining figure of his time. Graham Green was calculatedly elusive, but Michael Mewshaw has given us a glimpse behind the altar at the man divested of his vestments. Wonderfully entertaining.” —John Banville, author of April in Spain “Graham Greene, top British novelist of the twentieth century, his writing by turns (and often all at once) political, romantic, thrilling, satiric, curt, hilarious, his life full of old-school adventure, possibly even espionage, plenty of danger in any case: what more fascinating friend could a person have? And what better chronicler than Graham Greene’s friend Michael Mewshaw, eager young novelist in the orbit of the master, more and more trusted as time went on, closer than almost anyone got. This elegant account of decades of often warm, sometimes prickly companionship offers fascination, revelation, laughter, and ultimately pathos. A beautiful memoir of parallel lives, My Man in Antibes kept me turning pages into the wee hours, crisp glass of gin at my side.” —Bill Roorbach, author of Lucky Turtle “Michael Mewshaw, an award-winning novelist, has already chronicled his fascinating friendships with Gore Vidal and Pat Conroy. Here he combines and contrasts the remarkable story of his deprived upbringing with that of an older and already established Catholic writer: Graham Greene. Mewshaw’s account of his long friendship with a notoriously private man joins Shirley Hazzard’s memorable account of Greene on Capri in providing an intriguing, entertaining and enlightening glimpse behind the mask of one of twentieth century literature’s most enigmatic authors. I found the book most fascinating.” —Miranda Seymour, author of I Used to Live Here Once: The Haunted Life of Jean Rhys “Michael Mewshaw, surprisingly, is at least as fascinating as his famous subject. Personal and candid and full of great inside gossip, My Man in Antibes explores the complexity of being friends with a literary icon when you’re not nearly in the same reputational league.” —Lionel Shriver, author of Should We Stay or Should We Go “The novelist Michael Mewshaw’s infatuation with Graham Greene, with whom he had a long and rocky friendship, is riveting. By artfully interweaving his own story with that of Greene’s, he shows his literary idol in all his complexity, as combative, querulous, secretive, unreliable, yet possessed of remarkable strength and courage. In a prose at times as vivid and dramatic as that of its subject, and with a comparably economical sense of place, Mewshaw’s memoir offers valuable lessons about the limits of the life Greene chose to lead, a life he himself has long admired and emulated.” —Zachary Leader, author of The Life of Saul Bellow: Love and Strife, 1965-2005

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Book SynopsisThe life of Charles Bukowski—laureate of lowlife Los Angeles—a novelist and poet who wrote as he lived. This is the only biography of Bukowski written by a close friend and collaborator. Neeli Cherkovski began a deep friendship with Bukowski in the 1960s while guzzling beer at wrestling matches or during quieter evenings discussing life and literature in Bukowski’s East Hollywood apartment. Over the decades, those hundreds of conversations took shape as this biography—now with a new preface, “This Thing Upon Me Is Not Death: Reflections on the Centennial of Charles Bukowski.” Bukowski, author of Ham on Rye, Post Office, and other bestselling novels, short stories, and poetry collections only ever wanted to be a writer. Maybe that’s why Bukowski’s voice is so real and immediate that readers felt included in a conversation. “In his written work, he’s a hero, a fall guy, a comic character, a womanizing lush, a wise old dog,” biographer Neeli Cherkovski writes. “His readers do more than glimpse his many-sidedness. For some, it’s a deep experience. They feel as if his writing opens places inside of themselves they might never have seen otherwise. Often a reader comes away feeling heroic, because the poet has shown them that their ordinary lives are imbued with drama.” Full of anecdotes, wisdom, humor, and insight, this is an essential companion to the work of a great American writer. Long-time Bukowski fans will come away with fresh insights while readers new to his work will find this an exhilarating introduction. “In his death, I hear him clearly,” Cherkovski writes. “His voice comes to me resonant, full of unforced authority, a message of endurance, self-reliance, and honesty of expression. At the same time, he is also saying, ‘Poetry is a dirty dishrag. Keep laughing at yourself on the way out the door.’ ”Trade ReviewPraise for Bukowski, A Life“Cherkovski does justice to [Bukowski's] commitment to rebellion ... he brings an insider’s familiarity, having been Bukowski’s friend for many years. Some of the most insightful and moving parts of the narrative are Cherkovski’s personal recounting of his on-again off again relationship with the writer, which has the poignancy of personal memoir.”—David Daniel, The Arts Fuse “A serious appraisal . . . a treasure trove for Bukowski fans....Cherkovski’s access to his subject allows him an intimacy otherwise impossible as he guides us through the poet-author’s miserable childhood; his early drinking; his years as a serf in the post office; the poetry readings that became circuses...”—John Rechy, Los Angeles Times“One of those rare biographies that is both academically satisfying and full of life.”—Washington Post “Bukowski remains a symbol for artistic perseverance in the face of constant rejection, lifelong critical disdain and suggestions that he compromise his unique, if unsavory, vision....Cherkovski’s major achievement comes as he traces the roots of the heroic, unsung literary movement that wouldn’t let Bukowski’s work die on the vine.” —Chicago Tribune “This profile partially de-romanticizes the Bukowski myth, allowing the integrity of the poet’s works to prove him an admirable, if contradictory character.” —Publishers Weekly “Cherkovski’s compassion and respect for his subject are almost heartwarmingly ever-present. He gives fans and non-fans alike another, if not totally different, picture of the great Bukowski.”—Library Journal

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Book SynopsisHistorian Jeremy Black is comprehensive, as ever, but in his treatment of the British Gothic novel his greatest service is the preservation of the detail––namely, the human impetus behind art that is often undervalued. Gothic novelists were purposeful, thoughtful, and engaged questions and feelings that ultimately shaped a century of culture. Black notes that the Gothic novel is also very much about "morality and deploying history accordingly." The true interest of the Gothic novel is more remarkable than it is grisly: the featured darkness and macabre are not meant to usurp heroism and purity, but will fall hard under the over-ruling hand of Providence and certainty of retribution. Black's understanding of the Gothic writer is a remarkable contribution to the legacy of British literature and the novel at large. Once again, in Black thoroughness meets fidelity and the reader is overcome with his own insights into the period on the merit of Black's efforts. In The Weight of Words Series, Black is devoted to the preservation of the memory of British literary genius, and in so doing he is carving out a niche for himself. As in the Gothic novel where landscapes give quarter to influences that seem to interact with the human fates that freely wander in, reading Black is an experience of suddenly finding oneself in possession of an education, and his allure takes a cue from the horrific Gothic tempt.

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Book SynopsisJack Kerouac was one of America's great writers of the latter half of the 20th century, yet he endured a life characterized by persistent hardship and disillusion. Leading Kerouac scholar Paul Maher Jr. targets the writer's embattled insight of self as central to his life and work. He reveals how Kerouac's troubled interactions with alcohol, drugs, and spirituality stamped its importance on his autobiographical prose and poetry and created a singular language that united thoughts on the human condition and spiritual liberation. Becoming Kerouac: A Writer In His Time affixes Kerouac's life and art in a fresh way, giving readers a rich perspective from which to understand this 20th-century literary genius.Using unpublished archival material, Becoming Kerouac focuses on the writer's critical formative years ––1940 to 1957–– to demonstrate his growth as a novelist and poet. Maher contends that Kerouac developed his singular language to capture human consciousness as it never had before. His futilities catapulted American literature to reflect its restless post-World War II anxieties. Narrating the events that comprised Kerouac's life, biographers have long struggled to illustrate his complexness and the contradictions that shaped his determinations and dogged his relationships. But without consideration of the writing, the troubles in life fail to reveal their deeper resonances by skillfully analyzing the work while tracing the events. Maher achieves a full portrait, revealing struggles that problematize his work. Becoming Kerouac fuses Kerouac's life and art to comprehend this misunderstood literary genius.

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Book SynopsisBev Stohl ran the MIT office of the renowned linguist and social critic Noam Chomsky for nearly two and a half decades. This is her account of those years, working next to a man described by the New York Times as “arguably the most important intellectual alive today.” Through these pages we observe the comings and goings of a constant and varied stream of visitors: the historian Howard Zinn; activists Alex Carey, Peggy Duff, and Dorie Ladner; the inventor of the World Wide Web, Tim Berners Lee; actors Catherine Keener and Wallace Shawn; the writer Norman Mailer; gaggles of fourteen-year-old school students, and the world’s leading linguists. All make appearances in these stories. Many who visit are as careless of their allotted time as Chomsky is generous with his. Shepherding them out in mid-conversation is one of Bev’s more challenging responsibilities. Other duties include arranging lectures to overflow crowds around the world, keeping unscrupulous journalists at bay, preventing teetering ziggurats of paper and books from engulfing her boss, and switching on his printer when it is deemed “broken” by a mind that is engaged less by mundane technology than the realms of academia and activism. Over the years, what has commenced as a formal working arrangement blossoms into something more: a warm and enduring friendship that involves work trips to Europe, visits with her partner and dog to Noam’s summer home on Cape Cod, and a mentorship that challenges Bev with all manner of intriguing mental and practical puzzles. Published with the approval of its subject and written with affection, insight and a gentle sense of humor, Chomsky and Me describes a relationship between two quite different people who, through the happenstance of work, form a bond that is both surprising and reciprocally rich.Trade Review“This is a beautiful, tender and profound book about one of the most important thinkers of our time, by one of the people who knows him best. A masterpiece of observation and memoir.”—Johann Hari, author of New York Times Bestseller Chasing the Scream “A ringside seat on the life and times of a man regarded by millions as a remote intellectual deity, but who comes into sharp focus through the delightfully warm and humorous lens of Bev Stohl as a relatable mortal … If you want to know the real Noam Chomsky, this is the book for you.”—Amir Amirani

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Book Synopsis"Enclosed in this beautiful package, please find: an agile mind, a perfect style, a canny and undeceivable heart, and a welcome, enduring presence in the reader's life." --Michael Chabon A portrait of a keen social observer at the center of the last 50 years of cultural life, captured through a vivid selection of O'Brien's own writings on music to fashion to downtown art and, just as importantly and unexpectedly, the political temperature of America. Glenn O'Brien collaborated with visual artists, writers, fashion houses, and musicians throughout his almost 50-year career. Intelligence for Dummies gathers Glenn O'Brien's essays, aphorisms and tweets, to create a portrait of the artist as cultural bellwether, complimented by artwork and photographs from his collaborators. A full color, hardcover edition, Intelligence for Dummies is a deeply personal apercu into Patti Smith and Jean Michel Basquiat's New York, and the culture of money that ensued. It also reveals O'Brien's incisive and prescient understanding of America's political culture, and of our current president.Trade Review"The smartly designed book features critical reviews, profiles, and essays alongside poems, freeform meditations, diatribes, tweets, and works of fiction. Intelligence for Dummies is not just a melange of O'Brien's greatest (and quirkiest) hits, however; the rounded selection pointedly reflects his virtuosity with form and the imaginative fluency he had within the medium of words." -Eugenie Dalland, Los Angeles Review of Books "The real keepers in this volume are precisely detailed and often moving evocations of his friends: Warhol, Basquiat, Nan Goldin, Richard Prince, James Nares. He conveys them in ways that are strangely difficult to quote, since they are contingent on chatter, circumstance, anecdote, and location, and evoke by accretion." -Luc Sante, New York Review of Books

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Book Synopsis"Bradshaw was a famously charming man, and his lounge-lizard urbanity fully suffuses his prose. This new anthology is a necessary book for all men and women of letters." -Martin Amis A collection of magazine writer Jon Bradshaw's essential writings, The Ocean is Closed rediscovers a memorable talent, and offers us a shadow reality to the established literary canon of the mid-century. With droll wit and keen intelligence, Bradshaw's cinematic prose brings the '70s to vibrant life-from the lurid pick-up scenes at hotspots like Maxwell's Plum in New York, and the Beverly Hills Hotel in L.A., to full-bodied portraits of literary figures such as W.H. Auden and Tom Stoppard; affectionate profiles of hustlers and con men such as Bobby Riggs and Minnesota Fats, to chilling reportage about street gangs in the Bronx, terrorism in Germany, and mercenary freedom fighters in India. Jon Bradshaw, a man of tremendous personal charm, good humor and rugged beauty, was a literary concoction of his own devising: the magazine writer as world-weary traveler and man about town. Adored by British royalty, magazine editors, movie executives, and professional mercenaries, alike, Bradshaw first made a splash in London during the Swinging Sixties. Pals with the likes of Anna Wintour, Timothy Leary, Gore Vidal, and Martin Amis, his career flourished at a time when magazines were at the center of the cultural conversation, delivering stories that were talked about for weeks. For twenty years, he cut a distinct figure in this world, before his untimely death. A forgotten master of longform magazine writing, Bradshaw is ripe for rediscovery as one of the sharpest chroniclers of his age.Trade Review"A long-overdue anthology of writings by a great-and now largely forgotten-long-form journalist. Charming, handsome, and erudite, Bradshaw, who died in 1986 at age 48, surprised no one when Mick Jagger crossed a room to spend an hour chatting with him. Said biographer A. Scott Berg, according to editor Belth, 'he was possibly the most social animal I ever knew.' Yet while the parties were in full swing, Bradshaw would get to his typewriter, writing impeccable stories that embodied top-flight literary journalism...Exemplary journalism by a writer who deserves to be in every nonfiction anthology and textbook henceforth." -Kirkus Reviews, Starred Review

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Book SynopsisShe was 'amused, cynical, ironic, loving, gay, ferocious, cold, ardent but never gentle'. She was a whirlwind. She created around her the atmosphere of a Court at which her friends were either in disgrace or favour, a butt or a blessing.Elizabeth von Arnim may have been born on the shores of Sydney Harbour, but it was in Victorian London that she discovered society and society discovered her. She made her Court debut before Queen Victoria at Buckingham Palace, was pursued by a Prussian count and married into the formal world of the European aristocracy. It was the novels she wrote about that life that turned her into a literary sensation on both sides of the Atlantic and had her likened to Jane Austen.Her marriage to the count produced five children but little happiness. Her second marriage to Bertrand Russell's brother was a disaster. But by then she had captivated the great literary and intellectual circles of London and Europe. She brought into her orbit the likes of Nancy Astor, Lady Maud Cunard, her cousin Katherine Mansfield and other writers such as E.M. Forster, Somerset Maugham and H.G. Wells, with whom it was said she had a tempestuous affair.Elizabeth von Arnim was an extraordinary woman who lived during glamorous, exciting and changing times that spanned the innocence of Victorian Sydney and finished with the march of Hitler through Europe. Joyce Morgan brings her to vivid and spellbinding life.

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Book SynopsisAfter the success and celebrity of her coming of age novel My Brilliant Career, Miles Franklin disappeared. This is the story of the decade that made her second career as a fearless advocate for working women.

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Book SynopsisAuthoritative biography of cult writer and author of NAKED LUNCH, William Burroughs (1914-1997).It has been 50 years since Norman Mailer asserted, 'I think that William Burroughs is the only American novelist living today who may conceivably be possessed by genius.' This assessment holds true today. No-one since then has taken such risks in their writing, developed such individual radical political ideas, or spanned such a wide range of media - Burroughs has written novels, memoirs, technical manuals and poetry, he has painted, made collages, taken thousands of photographs, made visual scrapbooks, produced hundreds of hours of experimental tapes, acted in movies and recorded more CDs than most rock groups.Made a cult figure by the publication of NAKED LUNCH, Burroughs was a mentor to the 1960s youth culture. Underground papers referred to him as 'Uncle Bill' and he ranked alongside Bob Dylan and the Beatles, Buckminster Fuller and R.D. Laing as one of the 'gurus' of the youth movement who might just have the secret of the universe.Based upon extensive research, this biography paints a new portrait of Burroughs, making him real to the reader and showing how he was perceived by his contemporaries in all his guises - from icily distant to voluble drunk. It shows how his writing was very much influenced by his life situation and by the people he met on his travels around America and Europe. He was, beneath it all, a man torn by emotions: his guilt at not visiting his doting mother; his despair at not responding to reconciliation attempts from his father; his distance from his brother; the huge void that separated him from his son; and above all his killing of his wife, Joan Vollmer.Trade Review'Occult guru, literary genius, dystopian visionary, violent psychopath - no post-war writer has been so mythologised.' * THE DAILY TELEGRAPH *'...An astonishing and wholly successful attempt to give order to the glorious, terrifying chaos of Burroughs's long life. This 700-page book reads like a picaresque adventure and is utterly compelling.' -- PD Smith * THE GUARDIAN *Burrough's work I can do without. But the life- the life! The example of the life is indispensable: The ultimate un-American Dream... Barry Miles's book... has a kind of speed-freak intensity, with every detail recalled and brought vividly to life, a book of a million wows... Giant, blistering, painful warts, reproduced in brilliant Technicolour. A 700-page literary anatomy textbook: one of the most gratifying, sickening detailed biographies I have ever read. -- Ian Sansom * LITERARY REVIEW *It is an action-packed, sensational story -- Edmund Gordon * THE SUNDAY TIMES *Barry Miles has achieved something quite phenomenal: 600 oppressive yet irresistible pages that recount in intricate detail a sordid life...Miles is a great admirer of his subject, worked with him for 30 years and catalogued his archives. Yet despite that close connection he has produced a biography remarkable for its detachment and devoid of the obsessive worship that characterises the Burroughs cult. The life of this disturbing and disturbed man has never been so perfectly told. -- Gerard deGroot * THE TIMES *William S. Burroughs lived his life in the grand transgressive tradition of Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde and, like all dandies, he had a nose for hedonistic hot sports which he could mythologise along with himself. On the occasion of his centenary, Barry Miles takes us through these gorgeous, macabre scenarios with an attention to detail reminiscent of Dadd of Bosch... -- Duncan Fallowell * THE SPECTATOR *Mile's biography separates the cult from the man and shows us that there were, in fact, deep roots to Burroughs's other-worldly, alienated and unsettlingly affectless fiction - about which literary opinion is still divided. Which, 100 years after his birth, is quite impressive, really. -- Nicholas Lezard * EVENING STANDARD *It's enough to put you off breakfast * THE MAIL ON SUNDAY *In the first biography to include the writer's final years, longstanding friend and Burroughs scholar, Barry Miles, documents his journey in unflinching detail. * THE INDEPENDENT *One long, strange, profoundly American literary life. Burroughs's work has had a profound if often oblique influence on the writing of his century and this one. I can scarcely imagine what it would be like to read Barry Miles's biography without being thoroughly familiar with the outline of the narrative. Truly, stranger than fiction. -- William GibsonWilliam S. Burroughs takes us deeply inside the magical life of the great writer. Miles's decision to tell the epic story through William Burroughs's search for his 'Ugly Spirit' makes for sensational reading. Burroughs called his life an evil river. In Miles's biography he negotiates it with courage and remarkable drive. Brilliant, tragic, controversial, and inspiring, William S. Burroughs is a beautiful work. -- Victor Bockris * author of With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker, Conversations with William Burroughs and Andy Warhol, and Burroughs in the Bunker *William S. Burroughs is the most intimate portrait to date of one of the twentieth century's most complicated, troubled, and influential figures. Miles's deep knowledge of the man and the work also provides a cultural history of the scene in Tangiers in the 1950s, the Beat era, and the emerging Punk scene in New York in the 1980s. The end of Burroughs's days, spent in Lawrence, Kansas, explore Burroughs's deep reckoning of what he called 'The Ugly Spirit'-the force which rendered him powerless, for most of his life over the demons that plagued him. It is a compelling biography and social history unlike any other." -- Ira Silverberg * coeditor of Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader *William S. Burroughs is full of energy and surprise and is a delight to read. Barry Miles combines his intimate knowledge of Burroughs with the meticulous research of Burroughs's companion James Grauerholz, to produce an extremely accurate, readable, and entertaining biography of one of the most inventive writers of the twentieth century. Reading this extraordinary book is like hanging around with Burroughs himself and is impossible to forget. -- Bill Morgan * author of I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg and The Typewriter is Holy *By any standard Burroughs's was an unusual life, full of scandal, subversion, and sensitivity hidden behind a cold blue gaze. He brought elegance to the Bowery, eloquence to the language of an underworld, and an international mystique to American letters. Miles enriches this 'life of an artist' with decades of dedicated immersion in the work both published and unpublished, digging deep into archival material and manuscripts, incorporating journals of friends and acquaintances. With great authority and verve, he brings up to date the legacy of a true American original who grows, even years after his death, in fascination. -- Regina Weinreich * author of Keroauc's Spontaneous Poetics and editor of Kerouac's Book of Haikus *'Counterculture chronicler Barry Miles and William Burroughs are the perfect match, and Miles's biography of the cult writer...is as insightful as you'd expect, placing Burroughs in his wider social and cultural context.' -- Simon Evans * CHOICE *Barry Miles has achieved something quite phenomenal: 600 oppressive yet irresistible pages that recount in intricate detail a sordid life... Miles is a great admirer of his subject, worked with him for 30 year and catalogued his archives. Yet despite that close connection he has produced a biography remarkable for its detachment and devoid of the obsessive worship that characterises the Burroughs cult. The life of this disturbing and disturbed man has never been so perfectly told. -- Gerard deGroot * THE TIMES *Burrough's work I can do without. But the life - the life! The example of the life is indispensable: the ultimate un-American Dream... Barry Miles's book... has a kind of speed-freak intensity, with every detail recalled and brought vividly to life, a book of a million wows... Giant, blistering, painful warts, reproduced in brilliant Technicolour. A 700-page literary anatomy textbook: one of the most gratifyingly, sickeningly detailed biographies I have ever read. -- Ian Sansom * LITERARY REVIEW *It is an action-packed, sensational story -- Edmund Gordon * THE SUNDAY TIMES *William S. Burroughs lived his life in the grand transgressive tradition of Lord Byron and Oscar Wilde and, like all dandies, he had a nose for hedonistic hot spots which he could mythologise along with himself. On the occasion of his centenary, Barry Miles takes us through these gorgeous, macabre scenarios with an attention to detail reminiscent of Dadd or Bosch... -- Duncan Fallowell * THE SPECTATOR *Miles's biography separates the cult from the man and shows us that there were, in fact, deep roots to Burroughs's other-worldly, alienated and unsettlingly affectless fiction - about which literary opinion is still divided. Which, 100 years after his birth, is quite impressive, really -- Nicholas Lezard * EVENING STANDARD *It's enough to put you off your breakfast * THE MAIL ON SUNDAY *In the first biography to include the writer's final years, longstanding friend and Burroughs scholar, Barry Miles, documents his journey in unflinching detail. * THE INDEPENDENT *One long, strange, profoundly American literary life. Burroughs's work has had a profound if often oblique influence on the writing of his century and this one. I can scarcely imagine what it would be like to read Barry Miles's biography without being thoroughly familiar with the outline of the narrative. Truly, stranger than fiction. -- William GibsonWilliam S. Burroughs takes us deeply inside the magical life of the great writer. Miles's decision to tell the epic story through William Burroughs's search for his 'Ugly Spirit' makes for sensational reading. Burroughs called his life an evil river. In Miles's biography he negotiates it with courage and remarkable drive. Brilliant, tragic, controversial, and inspiring, William S. Burroughs is a beautiful work. -- Victor Bockris * author of With William Burroughs: A Report from the Bunker, Conversations with William Burroughs and Andy Warhol, and Burroughs in the Bunker *William S. Burroughs is the most intimate portrait to date of one of the twentieth century's most complicated, troubled, and influential figures. Miles's deep knowledge of the man and the work also provides a cultural history of the scene in Tangiers in the 1950s, the Beat era, and the emerging Punk scene in New York in the 1980s. The end of Burroughs's days, spent in Lawrence, Kansas, explore Burroughs's deep reckoning of what he called 'The Ugly Spirit'-the force which rendered him powerless, for most of his life over the demons that plagued him. It is a compelling biography and social history unlike any other." -- Ira Silverberg * coeditor of Word Virus: The William S. Burroughs Reader *William S. Burroughs is full of energy and surprise and is a delight to read. Barry Miles combines his intimate knowledge of Burroughs with the meticulous research of Burroughs's companion James Grauerholz, to produce an extremely accurate, readable, and entertaining biography of one of the most inventive writers of the twentieth century. Reading this extraordinary book is like hanging around with Burroughs himself and is impossible to forget. -- Bill Morgan * author of I Celebrate Myself: The Somewhat Private Life of Allen Ginsberg and The Typewriter Is Holy *By any standard Burroughs's was an unusual life, full of scandal, subversion, and sensitivity hidden behind a cold blue gaze. He brought elegance to the Bowery, eloquence to the language of an underworld, and an international mystique to American letters. Miles enriches this 'life of an artist' with decades of dedicated immersion in the work both published and unpublished, digging deep into archival material and manuscripts, incorporating journals of friends and acquaintances. With great authority and verve, he brings up to date the legacy of a true American original who grows, even years after his death, in fascination. -- Regina Weinreich * author of Kerouac’s Spontaneous Poetics and editor of Kerouac’s Book of Haikus *

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Book SynopsisPoet. Actor. Matinee idol. Playwright. Theatre theoretician. Artist. Orientalist. Surrealist. Asylum inmate. Drug addict. Electroshock patient. Antonin Artaud. This biography, exploring the life of one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic personalities and idiosyncratic thinkers, reveals the artist's navigation through the first half of the century in the company of many of France's most influential cultural figures. However, Artaud's own existential journey was a lonely and largely isolated one, an existential ellipsis.Despite being born into the material comfort of a bourgeois family from Marseille, Artaud uncompromisingly rejected such values and norms. Forsaking the renown he had garnered as a stage and film actor, theatre director and published author of The Theatre and its Double and many other writings, Artaud relentlessly challenged contemporary assumptions about the superiority of the West, the function of speech, the purpose of culture and an individual's agency over his/her body. In his mind, if not his deeds, he incarnated France's revolutionary tradition.Though conflicted by his inability to align his thoughts with his words, disoriented by his incessant demand for narcotics and debilitated by increasing paranoia, Artaud channelled his intense alienation into an assault on social and cultural conventions through theatre, poetry, essays and art. Preserving the profundity of Artaud's words without trivializing his complexity, and situating them within his frenetic life, this book is a compelling and fresh interpretation of Artaud and his continuing cultural reverberations.Trade ReviewWhy do Americans speak so eruditely about French writers? This is a mystery, and David Shafer, with his outstanding study of Antonin Artaud, continues the tradition. --Laurent Binet, author of HHhH"

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Book SynopsisErnest Hemingway has enjoyed a rich legacy as the progenitor of modern fiction, an oversized character in literary lore who wrote some of the most honest and moving accounts of the twentieth century, set against such grand backdrops as the bullrings of Spain, the savannahs of Africa and the rivers of the American Midwest. Verna Kale challenges many of the long-standing assumptions Hemingway's legacy has created. She offers a real-life portrait of the historical figure as he really was: a writer, a sportsman and a celebrity with a long and turbulent career.Ernest Hemingway follows Hemingway's adventures as a Red Cross volunteer in the First World War, an expatriate 'Lost Generation' poet in 1920s Paris, a young novelist navigating the burgeoning middlebrow fiction market, and a seasoned writer trying to craft his masterpiece - a novel that would blow open the boundaries of American fiction. Exploring his four marriages, his struggles with his celebrity and craft and the steep decline of his health in later life, this concise biography offers an insightful portrait of one of the most important figures of American arts and letters.

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Book SynopsisOrwell's Nose, now available in paperback, is an original and imaginative account of the life and work of George Orwell, exploring the 'scent narratives' that abound in Orwell's fiction and non-fiction. This illuminating and irreverent book provides a new understanding of one of our most iconic and influential writers.Trade Review'Sutherland is able, with the straightest of faces, to talk about Coming Up for Air being "the most aromatic of Orwell's novels" - a book that, his researches insist, "fairly caresses the nostrils". A conventional academic critic - which Sutherland is not - would probably throw up his or her hands in horror at this insouciance, but it takes only the briefest saunter through the Eng Lit canon to establish that the University of London's former Lord Northcliffe Professor is on to something, not merely in the matter of Orwell's nose but with literary life in general.' - DJ Taylor, The Times; 'This clever little book packs in a great deal: a prefatory essay on smell in literature, a breakneck biography of George Orwell and three quirky appendices including "smell narratives" of two of his books. Sutherland has an impressive nose for the pongs in Orwell's prose ... this biography is redolent, above all, of Sutherland's enduring enthusiasm for a writer he has been reading for more than half a century.' - Sunday Times Culture; 'Orwell's Nose is highly readable in a quick, casual style with many felicities ... this book sent me walking about nose aloft, like a Bisto Kid, hungry for (in Sutherland's phrase) "life's olfactions".' - Financial Times; 'Orwell's Nose is an olfactory cornucopia, a brilliant thematic biography and a compassionate exposure of an almost clean conscience in an invariably dirty age.' - Wall Street Journal; 'In this "pathological biography," a noted critic rereads Orwell and determines that the writer "was born with a singularly diagnostic sense of smell." In addition to the infamous assertion in The Road to Wigan Pier that "lower classes smell," Sutherland, who recently lost his own sense of smell, turns up other pungent landmarks of Orwell's life.' - The New Yorker; 'Do we need another biography of George Orwell? The answer is yes, if it is as racily readable as Orwell's Nose.' - David Lodge

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Book SynopsisRimbaud was the original enfant terrible. A poetic genius, he destroyed all those who attempted to befriend him, most notoriously wrecking the marriage and sanity of the poet Verlaine. Having conquered the literary world of Paris, he abandoned France and in the dogdays of August 1880 he disembarked in Aden, on the coast of Yemen, a lean twenty-five-year-old Frenchman carrying only a brown suitcase fastened with four leather straps and a touch of fever. The subsequent period, the lost years , is the subject of this biographical quest.

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Book SynopsisWhen Rilke died in 1926, his reputation as a great poet seemed secure. But as the tide of the critical avant-garde turned, he was increasingly dismissed as apolitical, too inward. In Rilke: The Last Inward Man, acclaimed critic Lesley Chamberlain uses this charge as the starting point from which to explore the expansiveness of the inner world Rilke created in his poetry. Weaving together searching insights on Rilke's life, work and reception, Chamberlain casts Rilke's inwardness as a profound response to a world that seemed ever more lacking in spirituality. In works of dazzling imagination and rich imagery, Rilke sought to restore spirit to Western materialism, encouraging not narrow introversion but a heightened awareness of how to live with the world as it is, of how to retain a sense of transcendence within a world of collapsed spiritual certainty.Trade Review“Deeply perceptive and passionately argued study of Rainer Maria Rilke... always illuminating.” --John Banville, The New York Review of Books

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Book SynopsisNational Geographic Traveller's the best books on European cities, 2019In the autumn of 1948 Hemingway was approaching fifty and hadn't published a novel in nearly a decade. He travelled for the first time to Venice and there, at a duck shoot in the lagoon he met and fell in love with Adriana Ivancich, a striking young Venetian woman just out of finishing school. What followed was a platonic love affair; he continued to visit her in Venice; she in turn came to Cuba while he wrote The Old Man and the Sea. This is the illuminating story of a writer and a muse that intimately examines both the cost to Adriana and the fractured heart and changing art of Hemingway in his fifties.'Hemingway [is] an enduringly fascinating character, one whom di Robilant, with his easy-paced style, has sympathetically brought to life.' Literary Review'Effortlessly and expertly explores the secret desires, successes, and depressive obstacles that shrouded Ernest Hemingway's final productive years.' New York Journal of BooksTrade ReviewA saga that grips and enthrals from start to finish. * Sunday Times *Hemingway [is] an enduringly fascinating character, one whom di Robilant, with his easy-paced style, has sympathetically brought to life. -- Andrew Lycett * Literary Review *Effortlessly and expertly explores the secret desires, successes, and depressive obstacles that shrouded Ernest Hemingway's final productive years. * New York Journal of Books *Fascinating and mildly addictive * Culture Calling *Rich with new material, some based on Italian sources, di Robilant's lively and affecting double portrait brings a fresh perspective to the much-examined life of an all-too-human writer. * Booklist (starred review) *A sensitive recounting of a writer's doomed fantasy. * Kirkus Reviews *An evocative and alluring tale of love and death . . . In his effusive letters to Adriana, Hemingway laid bare his extremely passionate, generous, and contradictory nature. * La Stampa (Italy) *One of the most wrenching and scandalous love stories in all of literary biography . . . di Robilant reconstructs their tale with remarkable precision and a wealth of unpublished materials . . . what emerges is an ample, finely detailed fresco of the last stage of Hemingway's life, a kaleidoscopic succession of relationships, passions, trips, editorial disputes, drinking binges, set against the backdrop of northeast Italy . . . [Autumn in Venice] has all the intrigue and emotion of a novel. * Il Piccolo (Italy) *

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Book Synopsis'A dazzling celebration and recalibration of Mozart's genius, written with an energy to match its subject' Ian Bostridge Mozart is one of the most familiar and beloved icons of our culture, but how much do we really understand of his music, and what can it reveal to us of the great composer? In exhilarating, transformative prose, Patrick Mackie mixes biographical storytelling with deep dives into the experience of listening to Mozart''s music to reveal a musician in dialogue with culture at its most sweepingly progressive, when Europe was caught between two historical worlds. We follow Mozart from his adolescence in Salzburg to his early death; from his close and rivalrous relationship with his father to his romantic attachments; from his hugely successful operas to intimate compositions on the keyboard. Mackie leads the reader through the major and lesser-known moments of the composer''s life and brings alive the teeming, swivelling, modernity of eighteenth-century Europe. In this era of rococo painting, surrealist aesthetics and political turbulence, Mozart reckoned with a searing talent which threatened to overwhelm him, all the while pushing him to extraordinary feats of musicianship. Returned to the volatility of the eighteenth century, we hear Mozart''s music in all its audacious vividness, gaining fresh perspectives on why his works still move us so intensely today, as we continue to search for a modernity he imagined into being.Trade ReviewAn exhilarating and stimulating new survey of one of our civilization's greatest creative figures. Mackie sheds new light on both Mozart's music and his motivation, with an often piercingly original sideways glance - typically, Mackie ends his molto allegro romp through the works not with Mozart's famous unfinished Requiem but with a tiny keyboard Gigue that sums up his genius -- Nicholas Kenyon, Managing Director, Barbican CentreThis book is like a set of virtuoso cadenzas on themes from Mozart's life and works: improvisatory, thought-provoking, quirky and constantly inventive -- Stephen HoughA dazzling celebration and recalibration of Mozart's genius, written with an energy to match its subject -- Ian Bostridge, author of Schubert's Winter JourneyWritten with the kind of energy and inventiveness of its subject, Mozart in Motion brings Mozart and his milieu into focus in a startling and original way. At once vividly evocative and dazzlingly informative and informed, this book changes the way we think about how art works, and how writing about art should work -- Adam PhillipsAs "kaleidoscopic" as the composer's own genius... an immersive and thought-provoking experience that will send you back to Mozart's oeuvre with a renewed appetite * Financial Times *Some sections flare into flame... he brings into vivid life the decadence of 18th-century Paris as it slides towards the Revolution... this book is as much about literary virtuosity as anything else * BBC Music Magazine *A brilliant whirlwind of a book that makes us listen to Mozart's music in new ways and brings new ideas about the enlightenment, modernity, the rococo, Goethe, Kant, Prince -- Lara Feigel, Books of the Year * White Review *Patrick Mackie's book places us firmly in [a] new world, and that's the best part of it - a feeling of looking over Mozart's shoulder * TLS *[Mackie's] sentences sizzle and explode from the page like an elaborate firework display... Luminous * Morning Star *Erudite, ambitious and elegantly written . . . Mackie's assertions about the ways Mozart's identification with his era come through in the music are intriguing and insightful . . . His writing is fresh and imaginative, showing feeling for the musical character and dramatic narrative of a piece * New York Times Book Review *An exemplary intervention in this kind of cultural critique . . . Mackie is a sensitive and highly intelligent appraiser of musical form, with a gift for analyzing Mozart's music as the dynamic enactment-rather than the simple expression-of larger cultural and biographical energies * New Yorker *[A] stimulating, often profound exploration... Mr. Mackie gives us fresh, revealing and poetic perceptions... He demonstrates persuasively-and passionately-how the nuances of a Mozart score don't merely reflect but embody the central concerns of biography and history... Such resonant understanding of the deep implications of Mozart's music is the main reason to read yet another book on Mozart, though I don't want to minimize Mr. Mackie's excellence as a traditional biographer * Wall Street Journal *Mackie's extraordinary knowledge, thoughtful insights, and exemplary prose make the book insightful, thought provoking, and enjoyable. Reading the essays is like attending a concert with a friend who is exceptionally well-read and articulate. Rare is the reader who will digest these essays without immediately wanting to listen to whatever piece of music has just been examined * Christian Science Monitor *Writing a biography of Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart nowadays is no easy task . . . But Patrick Mackie exploits his background in both poetry and academia in an effort to bring Mozart to life in new ways . . . The result is still a familiar portrait of Mozart, but one that is painted in new colors * Associated Press *A book that will unquestionably stand among the more poignant investigations of Mozart and his genius, Mozart in Motion . . . is a serious study of the composer's character and music as it first within the context of European manners and mores in the second half of the eighteenth century * Chicago Review of Books *Delightfully instructive... Mackie achieves for Mozart what Mozart himself did for music, time and time again: to make the old new, and intelligible as such * New Criterion *Ambitious and brilliant: a book that rethinks Mozart's place in history and one that should win him new fans along the way... A unique, wide-ranging study of the canonical composer * Kirkus Reviews *In an intriguing blend of biography and deft musical analysis, poet Mackie creates a gallery of the composer's masterpieces expertly framed in the cultural setting of eighteenth-century Europe... Clear and insightful... After perusing the pages of this thoughtful and beautifully written book, readers will want to discover, or rediscover, the timeless music of this beloved composer * Booklist *Patrick Mackie's vibrant biography has something of the 18th-century dash and panache that he evokes in Mozart . . . Mr. Mackie is a soloist who writes on a world stage with a sententiousness that made 18th-century biography seem not merely the story of another's life, but a story that could only emanate from a singular voice that had something unique to tell us * New York Sun *Mackie's prose gathers momentum by tackling the music's rich contradictions . . . If Mackie's voice flirts with pretense, a close reading reveals keen ears and a lively imagination, especially for opera fans . . . Mackie challenges received ideas and offers descriptions that may yet prove worthy of his subject * Truthdig *

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Book SynopsisPatrick Deeley's train journey home to rural East Galway in autumn 1978 was a pilgrimage of grief: his giant of a father had been felled, the hurley-making workshop silenced. From this moment, Patrick unfolds his childhood as a series of evocative moments, from the intricate workings of the timber workshop run by his father to the slow taking apart of an old tractor and the physical burial of a steam engine; from his mother’s steady work on an old Singer sewing machine to his father’s vertiginous quickstep on the roof of their house. There are many wonderful descriptions of the natural world and delightful cameos of characters and incidents from a not-so-long-ago country childhood. In a style reminiscent of John McGahern’s Memoir, Deeley’s beautifully paced prose captures the rhythms, struggles and rough edges of a rural life that was already dying even as he grew. This is an enchanting, beautifully written account of family, love, loss, and the unstoppable march of time.Trade ReviewA glorious book, a perfect elegy, a gorgeous tumble of memories of life, death, love and, above all, family.The Hurley Maker's Son is suffused with warmth and joy and an ineffable sadness. The closing passages, like many in this book, are exquisite and almost unbearable. -- Donal RyanThere is something both eerie and deeply convincing about Deeley's re-inhabiting of the landscape that formed him, the family that shaped and nourished him. Every sentence rings true, like an axe biting into seasoned wood, a hurley striking the ball cleanly. -- Theo DorganBeautifully written. -- Michael HardingA courageous and heartfelt work, a lament and an act of recuperation, deceptively artless and engagingly plainspoken. -- George O'Brien * Irish Times *Gloriously poetic . . . Every sentence counts in this beautiful, evocative memoir. The prose shimmers. I adored it. -- Sue Leonard * Irish Examiner *

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Book Synopsis'Hastings is one of our greatest living biographers' Simon Heffer, Daily TelegraphSybille Bedford's life contained all the grand feeling and seismic events of the twentieth century: war and peace, love and trauma, friendship and death. Her father died when she was just fourteen and her mother, a great socialite and litterateur, fell victim to a debilitating morphine addiction. A bon viveur, she roamed from country to country in search of fresh experience, with ear and eye attuned to her surroundings, typewriter at the ready. Full of intense friendships (Aldous Huxley, Martha Gellhorn and Elizabeth Jane Howard among them), a fierce commitment to the craft of writing, as well as an insatiable appetite for love and sex, Sybille Bedford blazed her own path in her life and her art.'Selina Hastings' wonderful, gossipy biography is a gem, revealing not just the shy writer, but also the colourful, turbulent 20th-century literary world in which she lived' Sunday Times, Books of the Year'A wonderful biography' Sara Wheeler, Spectator'An extraordinary story' The Times'A richly entertaining biography' Daily Mail, Books of the YearTrade ReviewA wonderful biography... Elegant, deft and restrained -- Sara Wheeler * Spectator *[An] elegantly written, intimate biography... This is a remarkably candid, minutely detailed and compulsively readable book about a life lived to the full -- Rebecca Wallersteiner * Lady *So good, so full of naughty detail, evocation and grudging affection that you can enjoy it without ever having to read the works of Sybille Bedford -- Barry Humphries * Oldie *Selina Hastings's wonderful, gossipy biography is a gem -- Lucy Atkins * Sunday Times, *Books of the Year* *[Bedford's life is] elegantly related by Selina Hastings -- Brooke Allen * New York Times *

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Book Synopsis*A NEW STATESMAN AND THE TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR**WINNER OF THE TONY LOTHIAN PRIZE*'Interesting women have secrets. They also ought to have sisters.'From the beginning of their lives, the Olivier sisters stood out: surprisingly emancipated, strikingly beautiful, markedly determined, and alarmingly 'wild'. Rupert Brooke was said to be in love with all four of them; D. H. Lawrence thought they were frankly 'wrong'; Virginia Woolf found them curiously difficult to read. In this intimate, sweeping biography, Sarah Watling brings the sisters in from the margins, tracing lives that span colonial Jamaica, the bucolic life of Victorian progressives, the frantic optimism of Edwardian Cambridge, the bleakness of two world wars, and a host of evolving philosophies for life over the course of the twentieth century.Noble Savages is a compelling portrait of sisterhood in all its complexities, which rediscovers the lives of four extraordinary women within the varied fortunes of the feminism of their times, while illuminating the battles and ethics of biography itself.Trade ReviewThe best group biography of the year – of many years, in fact – is Sarah Watling’s Noble Savages, the story of the four Olivier sisters... Their mother was the model for Tess of the D’Urbevilles, their joint best friend was Rupert Brooke, and they had, said Virginia Woolf, strange glass eyes which they took out at night. But this is not why they are interesting. After feral childhoods in Surrey, where their parents lived in a Fabian utopia, each woman struggled with postwar realities: insanity, grief, poverty, catastrophic marriages. Elegantly structured in “seven fragments”, Watling’s book gives us a riveting drama that begins as pastoral comedy and ends as tragedy. -- Frances Wilson * New Statesman, Books of the Year *This is the first time [the Olivier sisters] have had a biography to themselves, and a very fine job Sarah Watling makes of it… thoroughly fascinating... This book is interesting on a dozen levels. * Daily Telegraph *Four remarkable sisters born at the end of the 19th century, and I didn’t know about any of them before reading this utterly absorbing book in which their whole lives are laid before us. Their story has opened my eyes to whole new areas of early 20th-century British life. * Daily Mail *In this compelling biography Sarah Watling tells [the Olivier sisters’] tale for the first time. It is the story of the end of Victorianism and the birth of the modern age. It is also, grippingly, the story of the early feminist movement, and a vital contribution to the construction of an alternative women’s history… [Watling] is quite brilliant. * Guardian *A story of four girls rebelling against Edwardian stuffiness is vividly told… in this thoughtful, compassionate biography… I found much to celebrate and admire here. * The Times *

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Book SynopsisAmid the flames of the culture wars, politicians have taken up arms over controls on literary culture, spurred on in part by universities 'triggering' canonical texts. Jonathan Swift's 'Battle of the Books' has flared up again. But is 'triggering' utter wokery or responsible pedagogic practice? Through dozens of case studies of triggered works, from Romeo and Juliet to Gender Queer, John Sutherland explores the recent phenomenon of triggering and its consequences for university English departments and literature itself. He maintains that what is routinely overlooked in the heat of polemic is that triggering is categorically different from traditional institutional (religious, educational, dictatorial) controls on literature. Triggering is in essence an alert. Done responsibly it does not erase or meddle; it stimulates curiosity and thought. It honours the fact that great literature is great because it is, as Franz Kafka says, powerful. In this characteristically nuanced and calmly objective study, the witty literary critic guides us through the increasingly rocky terrain of triggering. His advice rings clear: literature matters, to us and what we make of our world, and it must be handled with critical care.

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Book SynopsisPart memoir, part manifesto, part history, We Are What We Read is not just about how education can place you back on the right side of the tracks. It is also a rallying cry for the importance of literature in a world where the arts are being squeezed out at every level and where book bans in schools and libraries have surged to record highs.

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Book SynopsisA Book of the Year in The Times & Sunday Times, Daily Mail, Spectator, Irish Times and TLS. 'Superb' Daily Mail, 'Book of the Week''Brilliant' The Times, 'Book of the Week''[A] vivid, detailed account' Guardian, 'Book of the Week''Hugely enjoyable' Daily Telegraph'Fascinating' SpectatorCharles Dickens was a superb public performer, a great orator and one of the most famous of the Eminent Victorians. Slight of build, with a frenzied, hyper-energetic personality, Dickens looked much older than his fifty-eight years when he died. Although he specified an unpretentious funeral, it was inevitable that crowds flocked to his open grave in Westminster Abbey. Experiencing the worst and best of life during the Victorian Age, Dickens was not merely the conduit through whom some of the most beloved characters in literature came into the world. He was one of them.Filled with twists, pathos and unusual characters, The Mystery of Charles Dickens looks back from the legendary writer's death to recall the key events in his life. In doing so, A. N. Wilson seeks to understand Dickens's creative genius and enduring popularity. Following him from cradle to grave, it becomes clear that Dickens's fiction drew from his own experiences - a fact he acknowledged. Like Oliver Twist, Dickens suffered a wretched childhood, then grew up to become not only a respectable gentleman but an artist of prodigious popularity. Dickens knew firsthand the poverty and pain his characters endured, including the scandal of a failed marriage.Going beyond standard narrative biography, Wilson brilliantly revisits the wellspring of Dickens's vast and wild imagination, revealing why his novels have such instantaneous appeal and why they continue to resonate today. He also uncovers the double standards of both the man and his times.Trade ReviewDelightful, riveting... In this superb book, [Wilson] has succeeded in prising open the layers and revealing the inner child inside Charles Dickens. * Daily Mail, 'Book of the Week' *Fascinating... The greatest compliment one could pay this book is to say that it doesn't only read like something written about Dickens; animated by a restless, rummaging critical intelligence, and a curiosity about many of the things others simply take for granted, at times it reads more like something written by Dickens. * Spectator *This is the stylish and outspoken A N Wilson at his provocative best. * 'Books of the Year', Daily Mail *A brilliant denunciation of the sickness of Victorian England.[Wilson] is especially vivid on the moral horror of a self-confident, capitalist society without a safety net for those at the bottom. * The Times, 'Book of the Week' *Hugely enjoyable... A wonderfully fresh and vivid account, fluently integrating life and work, teasingly constructed without being relentlessly chronological, and personally charged by an impassioned gratitude to Dickens... Wilson's unquenchable gusto, sharp critical intelligence and buoyant prose make compelling reading - a vindication not so much of the mystery of Charles Dickens as the miracle. * Daily Telegraph *Wilson's attempt to pin down the Dickens we don't know is energetic. He leads the reader, like one of the ghosts in A Christmas Carol, to visit moments in the writer's life... Compelling * Financial Times *A sprightly retelling of a well-known narrative... vivid, detailed. * Guardian, ‘Book of the Week’ *Enthralling... In each section, themes and ideas spool out with Wilson's characteristic fluency and narrative flair. He both loves and is appalled by Dickens * Literary Review *Utterly satisfying... A marvelous exploration by an author steeped in the craft of his subject's elastic, elusive work. * Kirkus Reviews (starred review) *Beyond the eye-opening analysis, Wilson also offers a moving personal account of why Dickens has meant so much to him * Booklist (starred review) *Charles Dickens had succeeded in lodging all his phobias and foibles within his characters without leaving many traces of his personal life in Tolstoy-like autobiographical confessions. But A. N. Wilson, who three decades ago wrote one of the best biographies of Tolstoy, shows in The Mystery of Charles Dickens that similar demons haunted the nightmarish duality of Dickens's personality as well. * Zinovy Zinik, 'Books of the Year', TLS *Table of Contents1: The Mystery of fifteen pounds, thirteen shillings and ninepence 2: The Mystery of his childhood 3: The Mystery of the cruel marriage 4: The Mystery of the charity of Charles Dickens 5: The Mystery of the public readings 6: The Mystery of Edwin Drood 7: The Mystery of Charles Dickens

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Book SynopsisJohn Berger was one of the most influential thinkers and writers of postwar Europe. As a novelist, he won the Booker Prize in 1972, donating half his prize money to the Black Panthers; as a TV presenter he changed the way we looked at art in Ways of Seeing; as a storyteller and political activist he defended the rights and dignity of workers, migrants and the oppressed around the world. In 1953 he wrote: "Far from dragging politics into art, art has dragged me into politics." He remained a revolutionary up to his death in January, 2017. In A Writer of Our Time, Joshua Sperling places Berger's life and works within the historical narrative of postwar Britain and beyond. The book also explores, through the work, the larger questions that vexed a generation: the purpose of art, the nature of creative freedom, the meaning of commitment. Drawing on extensive interviews, close readings and a wealth of archival sources only recently made available, the book brings the many different faces of John Berger together and shows him as one of the most vital, and brilliant, thinkers and storytellers of our time.Trade ReviewThe remarkable John Berger has gotten the thoughtful, sensitive study he deserves. Joshua Sperling is at ease in every aspect of this extraordinarily multifaceted writer's life: his art criticism, his fiction, his passionate political commitment, his immersion in the lives of Alpine villagers, and more. Lovers of Berger's work will find a rich array of background here, and those who don't yet know Berger will, I hope, be inspired to read him -- Adam Hochschild, author of King Leopold’s GhostThe author of G., A Seventh Man and Ways of Seeing was of course a lifelong controversialist and revolutionary. But, ultimately, he was a man 'defined less by what he was against than by what he loved.' Occasionally critical, always passionate, Joshua Sperling's study of John Berger is as observant, rigorous, profound and as surprisingly entertaining as its subject. -- David Edgar, author of Written on the HeartAcross the 90 years of John Berger's life, he was by turns, and sometimes at the same time, an art critic and novelist, documentarian and screenwriter, farm laborer and historian, poet and polemicist...Does this mass of apparent contradictions add up to anything? The trick for any would-be biographer of John Berger is to find the unity in variety. Joshua Sperling is up to the task. -- Robert Minto * LARB *With sophistication and passion to match his subject, Sperling unfolds a chronological and thematic assessment of Berger...[A Writer of Our Time] is a lively and astute contribution to the writing on Berger, as well as to scholarship on the last 50 years of the cultural left in general. * Publishers Weekly *This engaging intellectual biography traces Berger's creative evolution, analyzes highlights from his vast output ... and situates them within his empathetic Marxism. * The New Yorker *A Writer of Our Time, switches expertly from the political to the personal and back, mapping the highs and lows of an eventful-and sometimes turbulent-life. * Sunday Guardian Live *Switches expertly from the political to the personal and back, mapping the highs and lows of an eventful-and sometimes turbulent-life. * Sunday Guardian *Excellent ... Sperling writes crisply as a Berger fan without hagiography. * Sydney Morning Herald *An excellent introduction not only to Berger but also to the aesthetic and political issues of his era. Sperling is a clear and elegant writer, and the book is very well researched. * Choice *A first-order intellectual biography of John Berger . . . Sperling explores the context of Berger's development with reference to the rapidly evolving social and political climate. * Choice, editor's picks *Sharp, moving, and immensely readable -- Bruce Robbins * The Nation *Sperling provides context for the art and political movements of Berger's years such that we now have a full context for the evolution of his ideas and style-and the remarkable variety of his sustained output. ... There is no question that Berger is one of the most influential arts and culture intellectuals of the past 50 years. -- Ron Slate * On the Seawall *An extraordinary and analytical biography of an extraordinary and influential life, A Writer of Our Time: The Life and Work of John Berger is an especially and unreservedly recommended addition to both community and academic library Contemporary Biography collections in general, and John Berger supplemental studies reading lists in particular * Midwest Book Review *

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Book SynopsisBooks about the work of James Joyce are an academic industry. Most of them are unreadable and esoteric. Adrian Hardiman's book is both highly readable and strikingly original. He spent years researching Joyce's obsession with the legal system, and the myriad references to notorious trials in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake. Joyce was fascinated by and felt passionately about miscarriages of justice, and his view of the law was coloured by the potential for grave injustice when policemen and judges are given too much power. Hardiman recreates the colourful, dangerous world of the Edwardian courtrooms of Dublin and London, where the death penalty loomed over many trials. He brings to life the eccentric barristers, corrupt police and omnipotent judges who made the law so entertaining and so horrifying. This is a remarkable evocation of a vanished world, though Joyce's scepticism about the way evidence is used in criminal trials is still highly relevant.Trade ReviewEven to those who find Ulysses somewhat impenetrable and to those who never even attempt to read Finnegans Wake, Joyce in Court is a pleasure to read and a real treasury of Joycean history in context * Dublin Sunday Business Post *He has the gifts of clarity, expertise and a deep knowledge of what he is talking about... This book is a worthy tribute to a person of many talents who fortunately chose to devote a lot of them to a body of work which was ideally suited for him' * Irish Times *Hardiman has approached the oeuvre with refreshing clarity... he is a highly enlightened and consistently humane reader of Joyce' * Daily Telegraph *This tremendously well-researched and marvellously insightful book is a delight for lawyers and lovers of literature alike * Irish Independent *With forensic care, Hardiman takes us through the trials of Emmet and the invincibles. His advantage is that he knows the book as well as he knows the law, and so misses no chance to connect what happened legally with what enters the minds and conversations of the fictional characters... [Hardiman] writes with clarity and with a lawyer's eye as he describes what the authorities did to prevent the book being published' -- Colm Toibin, GuardianHardiman's enthusiastic tracing and interpretation [...] does it a great service * The Sunday Times *Hardiman's detailed survey of [insurance law, libel, the tort of criminal conversation] undoubtedly renews and enriches our reading of Joyce's work as a whole... Its treatment of individual cases is fascinating' * Literary Review *The book reads like one of [Hardiman's] elaborate court arguments and it is redolent with the knowledge for which he was renowned. It is a seemly memorial of his professional life in the courts as well as his parallel life as historian and literary scholar * Irish Examiner *A fascinating exploration of Joyce's obsession with the legal system that looks at the many trials referenced in Ulysses and Finnegan's Wake * Irish Times, Best books of 2017. *[Hardiman] sheds new light on James Joyce's Ulysses by way of the 18 civil cases referred to in its text... Provides an insightful consideration of Joyce's masterpiece from a refreshingly different angle' * Publishers Weekly. *Consistently informative and entertaining, and very often fascinating. It deserves a place in ever Irish lawyer's library * Law Society Gazette *

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Book Synopsis"And now comes a man who thinks like, looks like, talks like and is as close to the real Conan Doyle as possible. He is Mark McPherson."- John Bennett ShawBut on his own account, since childhood Mark McPherson''s interest in the worlds of Arthur Conan Doyle and his Great Detective have become a realized dimension of his life. A professed student of the mysterious and arcane who turned his love toward investigation, he would eventually create the DAEDALOS Investigative Agency and address a host of the world''s greatest literary, historical, paranormal, and criminal enigmas. Called "a real life Sherlock Holmes" and "Michigan''s Indiana Jones," McPherson''s explorations have involved the hunt for the Loch Ness Monster, the probing of sacred sites of Egypt''s Giza Plateau and a methodical pursuit of the Shakespeare Authorship Mystery. He has also examined the enigma of the Shroud of Turin, conducted The Final Houdini Séance and sponsored an underwater hunt for Atlantis and numerous archaeological expeditions in Britain in quest of the mytho-historical Arthurian legends. Reflecting his enduring interest in the subject of Sherlock Holmes, Mark McPherson sought and found the Dartmoor location of the "true Baskerville Hall" in conjunction with the Sherlock Holmes Society of London and in 1979 consulted with Scotland Yard in the unparalleled manhunt for the "Yorkshire Ripper." He was the first to present a commemorative plaque at the legendary site of "221B, Baker Street" in London in 1978. Nine years later he would confer with his friends Dame Jean Conan Doyle and Richard Lancelyn Green to create a dramatic "Evening With Sir Arthur Conan Doyle," followed by a decade-long series of critically acclaimed performances throughout America, Britain and Canada. As a popular lecturer, journalist, author, actor, playwright, film-maker and historical detective, Mark McPherson''s personal adventures have garnered him many distinctions, not the least of them being his honorific investiture as "Cecil Barker" for the Baker Street Irregulars. A member of the Amateur Mendicants and Old Soldiers of Baker Street, he was founder of the Napoleons of Crime of Detroit. He has also received numerous accolades from the Arthur Conan Doyle Society and a host of international scion organizations. Currently residing at "Gray Gables," a 169-year-old riverfront manse on the island of Grosse Ile, Michigan, Mark McPherson currently shares his reputedly haunted residence with his wife Dori and his ever-faithful "canine Watson," Bradbury. By his own Profession, An Irregular Life is "the first and last of my memoirs."

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Book SynopsisShortlisted for the 2022 Plutarch Award A Washington Post 2021 Non-Fiction Book of the Year New York Times Review of Books Editors' Choice Non-Fiction Title Longlisted for the 2022 PEN / Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography A Sunday Times Best Paperback of 2022 'Brilliant, heart-stopping ... reads like a thriller, a memoir and a provocative piece of literary fiction all at the same time ... magical and compelling' Washington Post 'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,' Elizabeth Barrett Browning famously wrote, shortly before defying her family by running away to Italy with Robert Browning. But behind the romance of her extraordinary life stands a thoroughly modern figure, who remains an electrifying study in self-invention. Elizabeth was born in 1806, a time when women could neither attend university nor vote, and yet she achieved lasting literary fame. She remains Britain's greatest woman poet, whose work has inspired writers from Emily Dickinson to George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. This vividly written biography, the first full study for over thirty years, incorporates recent archival discoveries to reveal the woman herself: a literary giant and a high-profile activist for the abolition of slavery who believed herself to be of mixed heritage; and a writer who defied chronic illness and long-term disability to change the course of cultural history. It holds up a mirror to the woman, her art - and the art of biography itself.Trade ReviewBeautifully told. It is high time Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Aurora Leigh were once again household names -- Frances Wilson * Mail on Sunday *Sampson explores Elizabeth's long illness ... with compassion and scepticism ... Sampson is an astute, thoughtful and wide-ranging guide * The Times *A fine contribution to a growing number of biographies that try to pick off the barnacles of rumour and legend that have attached themselves to the lives of writers, and instead reveal them as they really were. -- Robert Douglas Fairhurst * Spectator *This new biography [shows that she was ... determined, ambitious and engaged in the public debates of her day. It] restores her to her proper place as one of the leading voices of the Victorian era ... This book is an empathetic - and much-needed - reassessment which tells a fascinating story. The decision to use the present tense [may not be to every reader's taste, but it] underlines the sense that the biographer is bringing her subject back to life. Most importantly, Sampson makes one want to read Barrett Browning -- Lucasta Miller * Telegraph *The first biography of Barrett Browning in more than 30 years is a nuanced and insightful account, dismantling previous studies [that viewed the poet only in relation to her domineering father or husband]. Fiona Sampson, a poet herself as well as a biographer of Mary Shelley, argues that central to Barrett Browning's story is the construction of identity - both in her life and the myth-making that surrounds it. Such a construction is itself a two-way creation, argues Sampson. "That the life of the body both enables and limits the life of the mind is the paradox of the thinking self." * New Statesman *"[It is [the] publicly engaged Elizabeth that Fiona Sampson sets before us in] this fine biography, the first since Margaret Forster's more than 30 years ago. For her frame and point of reference Sampson uses Aurora Leigh... [which tells the story of a young female writer's early career, specifically an artist's development. At first glance this might seem to mark a retreat to the personal and the biographic, but] Sampson's point is that Aurora Leigh provides us with a model for understanding how Barrett Browning forged a new relationship between female subjectivity and public utterance. ... The content... is spot-on. Sampson is particularly interested in Barrett Browning's personal and political entanglement with empire and race. ... Sampson is not too fastidious to deprive herself - or us - of the schlockier pleasures of biographical speculation. ... Sampson is ... judicious... but she understands enough about the pleasures of transgression to leave ... possibility in play. -- Kathryn Hughes * Guardian *The award-winning poet Fiona Sampson ... in her intriguing biography of and meditation on EBB, making the convincing claim that she was the first female lyric poet ... Sampson's book is timely [in its examination of EBB's political awakening] ... as a poet she puts the work before the life, and that surely is the right way round. -- Daisy Goodwin * Sunday Times *Brilliant, heart-stopping ... reads like a thriller, a memoir and a provocative piece of literary fiction all at the same time ... magical and compelling -- Charlotte Gordon * Washington Post *Two-Way Mirror pushes back against the neglect, bordering on amnesia, that has descended on a poet once widely celebrated ... battling polite silence more than the mistakes or omissions of earlier critics and biographers, Sampson wants readers to see Barrett Browning afresh -- John Plotz * The New York Times *Sampson's central argument is that the real drama and interest of EBB's life are to be found in her work ... Sampson has written an often absorbing study of EBB's risk-taking and originality as a poet, covering ground missing from Margaret Forster's biography, published in 1988 -- Claudia Fitzherbert * Literary Review *Fiona Sampson [is] a sympathetic biographer -- Constance Craig Smith * Daily Mail *Fiona Sampson's passionate and exacting biography of Elizabeth Barrett Browning is a surprisingly compact volume, a bristling lyric sandwich of philosophy and action. It is also a page-turner. ... Sampson addresses her subject as "Elizabeth" rather than "Barrett Browning", rendering her intense sustained gaze extraordinarily intimate. Her deep sense of identification and unerring detail reels the reader in. ... Two-Way Mirror is a long overdue remaking of Barrett Browning's extraordinary appropriated life ... Each chapter is prefaced by a short philosophical lyrical essay or "frame", each a meditation on portraiture and reflection which doubles as an act of self-examination for Sampson ... It feels as if the stakes couldn't be higher for Sampson, and this gives an enormous charge to a vividly personal account... -- Martina Evans * Irish Times *Sampson treats the couple's marriage and elopement with tenderness and realism ... Sampson evokes a privileged world that occasionally smacks of Bridgerton ... yet which was starting to fulfil Blake's dark satanic vision ... and one of Sampson's key arguments is Elizabeth Barrett Browning's role in shaping and defining the poetic tastes of the time. ... Two-Way Mirror successfully sent me back to my selection of Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poems ... -- Harry Cochrane * Tablet *It takes a biographer of Fiona Sampson's lateral brilliance to re-argue EBB's importance [and to put her verse novel Aurora Leigh ... back where it belongs among the great works of the period]. She does by very carefully framing not just the life, which is far more vivid and complex than usually supposed. .. Sampson is superb on how much EBB's work is ... "written on the body". ... Armed with Sampson's complex portrait, with its multiple frames and mirror effects, it's possible ... to read Elizabeth Barrett Browning again ... She has come suddenly up to date -- Brian Morton * Herald *

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