Biography: writers Books
Reaktion Books Bertolt Brecht Critical Lives
Book Synopsis
£999.99
Reaktion Books Susan Sontag Critical Lives
Book SynopsisA new biography, which assesses the astonishing scope and offers captivating insight into the life and work of one of the most influential thinkers of the twentieth-century, Susan Sontag.
£999.99
Reaktion Books Roland Barthes Critical Lives
Book SynopsisRoland Barthes (1915-1980) is one of France's most important writers and theorists of the second half of the twentieth century. Andy Stafford offers a clear-sighted, readable account of Barthes' work and life. This cogent introduction to a vital figure will interest students and specialists alike.
£999.99
Reaktion Books Tennessee Williams Critical Lives
Book SynopsisIn this gripping biography Paul Ibell discusses Williams as a poet as well as a playwright, at the same time revealing the crises of doomed relationships, promiscuous sex, alcohol and prescription drug abuse that gave the writer the raw material for his plays, but which ultimately destroyed him.
£999.99
Reaktion Books Vclav Havel Critical Lives
Book SynopsisThis biography is the first to pay close attention to Havel's poetry and to place his later work as a writer of plays, essays, prison letters and presidential speeches in the context of his poetic beginnings.
£999.99
Reaktion Books Virginia Woolf Critical Lives
Book SynopsisFeaturing new details about Virginia Woolf's homes and personal life, this engaging biography offers a fresh insight into her work, focusing on how place as much as imagination fashioned her writing.
£999.99
Reaktion Books Herman Melville
Book SynopsisAmerican novelist and poet Herman Melville is considered by many to be the finest author his nation has produced. Born in New York in 1819, he achieved recognition as a leader of world literature with his daring stylistic innovations, and his masterpiece Moby-Dick continues to capture the attention of readers around the globe. This fast-paced biography surveys Melville's major works and tells the compelling story of his unpredictable professional and personal life. Kevin J. Hayes explores the revival of interest in Melville's work thirty years after his death, coinciding with the aftermath of the First World War and the rise of modernism. He examines the composition and reception of Melville's works, including his first two books, Typee and Omoo, his more ambitious works, and the short fiction, novels and poetry he wrote during the last forty years of his life. Incorporating a wealth of new information about Melville's life and the time in which he lived, Hayes offers an engaging introduction to the life of this celebrated but often misunderstood writer.
£999.99
Reaktion Books Gustave Flaubert
Book SynopsisGustave Flaubert (1821-1880) is widely regarded as one of the world's greatest novelists, whose work continues to influence and inspire writers, artists and musicians to this day. Determined from a young age to become a writer, Flaubert found sudden fame in 1857 when his first published novel, Madame Bovary, resulted in an unsuccessful prosecution for obscenity. In his subsequent work, Flaubert continued to reflect on the human condition and on the rapidly changing society of his time, while constantly striving for new forms of literary and stylistic perfection. Drawing on Flaubert's voluminous correspondence and unpublished manuscript material, Anne Green reveals the extent to which his writing was haunted by traumatic early experiences. She weaves discussion of Flaubert's work into an intimate account of his life and volatile character, as she follows him from his upbringing in a Rouen hospital, through his days in Paris as a reluctant student, his extensive travels in North Africa and the Middle East and his experiences of the 1848 revolution and of the imperial court of Napoleon III. This concise and informative biography is required reading for lovers of literature everywhere.
£999.99
Reaktion Books Pierre Loti
Book SynopsisFew authors have led lives as interesting as the French novelist and travel writer Pierre Loti (1850-1923) - nor have they worked harder to make it appear even more romantic than it already was. As a career officer in the French navy, Loti participated in expeditions that took him to places that even today seem exotic to Westerners. For four decades he published a series of novels, travelogues and autobiographical narratives, some of which went through hundreds of editions in France and were translated into dozens of languages around the world. With financial and artistic success came notoriety, which Loti delighted in enhancing by staging elaborate costume balls - to which he invited the photographic press. He was also sought out by some of the artistically inclined royalty of the day, including Princess Alice of Monaco and Queen Elizabeth of Romania, and the beloved actress Sarah Bernhardt had him write plays for her. The parties and titled nobility hurt his standing as a serious author in his last years, but they take nothing away from the best work of an artist whom Henry James hailed as a `remarkable genius'. Willa Cather confessed that she 'would swoon with joy if anyone saw traces of Loti in her work'. The extravagances of his often very public private life make his biography as astonishing as his art.
£999.99
Reaktion Books William Faulkner
Book SynopsisAt various stages of his life, the celebrated American writer William Faulkner (1897-1962) presented himself as a literary dandy, a shabby bohemian, a wounded war veteran, a humble farmer, a courtly lover, and a genteel but aloof Southerner. In private and public, he was masterful at making people wonder who he really was. As Kirk Curnutt acknowledges, Faulkner was first and foremost a storyteller. Faulkner's experiments in style and form radically challenged conceptions of the American South, race and the experience of time in narrative. Beginning with the 1929 publication of The Sound and the Fury (his fourth novel), Faulkner produced a dazzling series of masterpieces - novels and stories that alternately exhilarated and exacerbated critics and left readers gasping to keep pace with his storytelling innovations. As prolific as he was, his career was neither easy nor carefree. Faulkner was perpetually strapped for cash, burdened with supporting a large extended family, ambivalent towards a marriage in which he felt honour-bound to remain, and vulnerable to alcoholism. This book examines how he strained to balance these pressures to pursue his artistic vision with single-minded determination. As generations of readers have struggled to appreciate, understanding the relationship of Faulkner's life to his art is not a matter of discovering the `man behind the myth'; it is of learning how the man created the myth.Trade Review`This well-researched and engaging study provides a clear and useful introduction to Faulkner's life and work, a formidable task for a short book, but one that Curnutt performs admirably. It will be invaluable to Faulkner neophytes as well as Faulkner scholars.' - Deborah Clarke, Professor of English, Arizona State University and author of Robbing the Mother: Women in Faulkner
£999.99
Merrion Press Looking Through You: Northern Chronicles
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£14.24
Verso Books The Two Lolitas
Book SynopsisDoes it ring a bell? The first-person narrator, a cultivated man of middle age, looks back on the story of an amour fou. It all starts when, traveling abroad, he takes a room as a lodger. The moment he sees the daughter of the house, he is lost. She is a pre-teen, whose charms instantly enslave him. Heedless of her age, he becomes intimate with her. In the end she dies, and the narratormarked by her foreverremains alone. The name of the girl supplies the title of the story: Lolita.We know the girl and her story, and we know the title. But the author was Heinz von Eschwege, whose tale of Lolita appeared in 1916 under the pseudonym Heinz von Lichberg, forty years before Nabokov's celebrated novel took the world by storm. Von Lichberg later became a prominent journalist in the Nazi era, and his youthful work faded from view. The Two Lolitas uncovers a remarkable series of parallels between the two works and their authors. Did Vladimir Nabokov, author of an imperishable Lolita who remained in Berlin until 1937, know of von Lichberg's tale? And if so, did he adopt it consciously, or was this a classic case of "cryptoamnesia," with the earlier tale existing for Nabokov as a hidden, unacknowledged memory?In this extraordinary literary detective story, Michael Maar casts new light on the making of one of the most influential works of the twentieth century.Translated by Perry AndersonTrade ReviewThe essay works not only as a shining example of exhaustive research, but as a noteworthy case study of artistic copyright and intellectual property ... Surprisingly enjoyable * Time Out *Elegant * Guardian *Genuinely original piece of work, startling in its revelations and fascinating, perhaps even a little troubling, in its implications ... Striking * Irish Times *Micheal Maar is an acute analyst and an elegant stylist who can make even a wild-goose chase highly readable * Times Literary Supplement *Maar is a literary sleuth, his method a Holmesian combination of instinct, some intellectual delegation and close reading. He makes John Sutherland seem like bumbling Inspector Lestrade of Scotland Yard. * Glasgow Herald *
£12.52
O'Brien Press Ltd Best-Loved Bernard Shaw
Book SynopsisAn attractive & approachable selection of the work of Bernard Shaw, one of the most remarkable people of the 20th century. Hissteely self-determination turned the conviction that he would become a great writer into reality. With extracts from his plays, essays and personal letters.
£17.47
O'Brien Press Ltd Arise And Go
Book SynopsisThe idea of place runs like a river through the life and works of the poet and playwright W.B. Yeats. This book focuses on his time in Dublin, London, Sligo and elsewhere in the west of Ireland, embracing the homes, landscapes and people that impacted his life and stimulated his vast body of work.
£13.99
Reaktion Books Thomas Mann
Book SynopsisThis concise yet thorough critical biography throws new light on the work of German novelist, short-story writer, essayist, and social critic Thomas Mann. It also offers a fresh look at the value of his short stories. Looking closely at how Mann's brother Heinrich as well as the work of philosophers (notably Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Goethe) influenced Mann's writing, Herbert Lehnert and Eva Wessell reveal how Mann's fictional worlds criticized the prevailing bourgeois order, and how his first novel, Buddenbrooks, signaled the need for change. Lehnert and Wessell also explore the lasting significance of such groundbreaking works as The Magic Mountain, Death in Venice, and Doctor Faustus, a novel that, in view of fascism, asks whether the bourgeois culture of the individual has not become diseased. Thomas Mann also investigates Mann's political views, from his anti-Nazi speeches to his anti-McCarthyist activities. The book offers an engaging, fresh account of an essential German writer, one which illustrates how the context of Mann's life shaped his achievements.
£999.99
Reaktion Books Stendhal
Book SynopsisThis is a book about the life and work of a singular writer, known for his biographies and travel writing but most famous for his novels The Red and the Black and the Charterhouse of Parma. As a child, Stendhal witnessed the unfolding of the French Revolution; as a young man, he served Napoleon first as a soldier and then as an administrator; and, as a middle-aged man, he made it his task not to pursue his career, but instead to take as much paid leave as possible in order to be free and to be happy, and to write. Stendhal's works often take the form of conversations with his readers - the `Happy Few' as he called them - about the things that matter most. He once claimed that he spent the majority of his life `carefully considering five or six main ideas'. This book shows what those main ideas were, why they mattered to Stendhal, and why they continue to matter to his readers.
£999.99
Reaktion Books Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
Book SynopsisThis new critical biography provides a complete picture of German novelist, playwright and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The book offers fresh, thought-provoking interpretations of all the major works, including novels such as The Sorrows of Young Werther and The Elective Affinities, plays such as Egmont and Iphigenia in Tauris, and Goethe’s greatest work, Faust. Alongside these works the incidents of his life are analysed, including his love affairs and his meetings with the great people of the age, such as Napoleon Bonaparte. Jeremy Adler shows how Goethe’s encyclopedic interest in many fields influenced later thinkers such as Charles Darwin and Sigmund Freud, Émile Durkheim and Susan Sontag. Goethe has often been called the last Renaissance man. This biography shows that Goethe was in fact the first of the moderns – a maker of modernity.Table of ContentsIntroduction 1 The Birth of a Poet 2 Sturm und Drang 3 First Years in Weimar 4 The Italian Turn 5 The Classical Centre 6 The Intellectual Capital of the World 7 The Faustian Age References Select Bibliography Acknowledgements Photo Acknowledgements
£999.99
Reaktion Books Jack London
Book Synopsis"Jack London (1876–1916) by any standards lived a life of excess. London’s exuberant energies propelled him out of the working class to become a world-famous writer by the age of 27, after stints as a child labourer, an oyster pirate, a Pacific seaman and a convict. He wrote extensively about his travels to Japan, the Yukon, the slums of London’s East End, Korea, Hawaii and the South Seas. The author of classics such as The Call of the Wild and The Sea-Wolf emerges in Kenneth K. Brandt’s new biography as a vital and flawed embodiment of conflicting yearnings. London’s writings, bolstered by their wildly clashing philosophical viewpoints derived from thinkers like Nietzsche, Marx, and Darwin, continue to engross readers with their depictions of primal urges, raw sensations and reformist politics."Trade Review“In bold, declarative sentences, Brandt states the facts of Jack London's life by tying them together in a thrilling and economical narrative. It should be the first biography anyone consults.” -- Jay Williams, author of the three-volume "Author Under Sail: The Imagination of Jack London" and general editor of "The Complete Works of Jack London""Brandt presents this 'visionary storyteller' through careful analysis of each of [London’s] literary works: a must read for those who want to know the story behind this author’s great works." -- Iris Jamahl Dunkle, author of '"Charmian Kittredge London: Trailblazer, Author, Adventurer"
£999.99
Hesperus Press Ltd Brief Lives: Charlotte Bronte
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£12.09
New Island Books A Very Strange Man: A Memoir of Aidan Higgins
Book SynopsisThis is a love story, set in the Irish literary world between 1986 and 2015. When they were first introduced by the poet Derek Mahon, Alannah Hopkin was an arts journalist turned full-time writer and Aidan Higgins, twenty-three years her senior, was a literary stylist, often cited as the heir to Ireland’s great Modernist tradition. They wrote steadily during their twenty-nine years together, but their careers could not have been more different: while Aidan focused on fiction and memoirs, Alannah prioritised work that paid the bills. This gave Aidan the most stable and productive years of his life. But as his eyesight failed and his memory began to fade, Alannah became his carer and had to fight to keep her own writing career alive. Drawing from diaries and notebooks, and correspondence with writers such as Samuel Beckett, Alice Munro and Harold Pinter, this is a unique record of a major Irish writer. From the joyful honeymoon years – filled with launches, festivals and visits to their Kinsale home by Richard Ford, Edna O’Brien and other literary legends – to the increasingly difficult years of Aidan’s decline, Hopkin tells their story candidly and without commentary. She shows us how, in spite of all, they remained the best of friends, in love until Aidan’s very last breath. A Very Strange Man is an exceptional piece of writing, objective and authoritative, personal, honest and moving. Trade ReviewI can't remember when I've read such a moving memoir, or one written with such raw honesty ... It’s also compelling; I couldn’t put it down. It stands out for the clear-eyed view of a wife who doesn’t shy away from sometimes portraying herself in an unfavourable light. -- Sue Leonard * Books Ireland *a subtle and memorable book ... clear-eyed and candid, but generous too and wise -- Colm Tóibín * The Irish Times *Powerful and moving. Above all, this is a book about the emotional challenges of caring for someone with dementia – proving that grief really is the price we pay for love. * Sunday Business Post *Your book of the year? So far, A Very Strange Man, by Alannah Hopkin. This is a strangely consoling memoir, and a very rare thing, being an accurate, candid, and moving book about what it is like to be a writer and to live with a writer. I began it the other morning outside in the sun and finished it some hours later, with a mild sunburn and a sense of great gratitude. -- Sebastian Barry * Irish Independent *‘among the richest accounts I’ve ever read of lives devoted to writing.’ -- Rob Doyle * Irish Times *Hopkin’s straightforward approach suits the biographical record, but her writing comes into its own whenever she exercises her gift for topographical evocation: “Every tiny stone-walled field had a wealth of meadow grasses and wild flowers” -- Patricia Craig * The Times Literary Supplement *
£15.19
Reaktion Books Simone De Beauvoir Critical Lives
Book SynopsisA concise, critical appraisal of the life and works of Simone de Beauvoir (1908-86), the quintessential feminist intellectual, best known for her pioneering work "Le Deuxieme Sexe" (1949). Ursula Tidd draws on the latest scholarship on Beauvoir, as well as the extant volumes of her diaries and correspondence.
£999.99
Reaktion Books Pablo Neruda Critical Lives
Book SynopsisPablo Neruda (1904 1973) is Latin America's best known and, for many, greatest poet. He was also perhaps its most controversial. This title focuses on what the poetry sometimes strategically hides about Neruda the creator, the lover and the political proselytiser, as well as on what it reveals.
£999.99
Reaktion Books Edgar Allan Poe Critical Lives
Book SynopsisThe life of Edgar Allan Poe (1809 1849) is the quintessential writer's biography great works arising from a life of despair, poverty, alcoholism, and a mysterious solitary death. This title argues that Poe's work anticipated many of the directions Western thought would take in the century to come.
£999.99
Reaktion Books Samuel Beckett Critical Lives
Book SynopsisA biography of Samuel Beckett, one of the most innovative and influential, yet most private, literary figures of the twentieth century. Andrew Gibson focuses on Beckett's life in a particular place and moment in time, and on the specific text or texts that he wrote during that period.
£999.99
Reaktion Books Stephane Mallarme
Book SynopsisAt the age of fifty Stephane Mallarme (1842-98) spoke of his published work as very precise reference points on my mind's journey. In "Stephane Mallarme", Roger Pearson charts that journey for the first time, blending a biographical account of the poet's life with a detailed analysis of his evolving poetic theory and practice. A poet on this earth must be uniquely a poet', he declared at the age of twenty-two, and he duly lived a poet's life. But what is a poet's life? What is a poet's function? In his poems, in complex prose statements, and by the example of his life, Mallarme provided answers to these questions. To Mallarme, being a poet meant many things: a continuous, lifelong investigation of language and its expressive potential; and bringing people together, as much in life as in poetry. His Tuesday salons were famous with visitors including Yeats, Rilke and Verlaine, as well as the artists Manet, Renoir, Whistler and Gauguin; his poetry inspired music by Debussy, Ravel and Boulez; and his poem "A Throw of the Dice will Never Abolish Chance" spread over 20 pages and combining verse with varied typography inspires poets and visual artists to this day. Poetry was a way of bringing all human beings together in heightened awareness and an understanding of the magnificent act of living. "Stephane Mallarme" chronicles a fascinating and utterly unique voice in French poetry. It will not only prove an essential resource for students of English and French literature, but an engaging book for anyone interested in nineteenth-century France.Table of ContentsIntroduction: Critical Moments 1 Classrooms, 1842-63 2 Crossroads, 1862-6 3 Chasms, 1866-70 4 Tombs, 1870-79 5 Tuesdays, 1879-87 6 Toasts, 1887-94 7 Dies, 1894-8 Epilogue: Beyond the Indies Bibliography Acknowledgements Photo Acknowledgements
£999.99
Reaktion Books Fyodor Dostoevsky
Book SynopsisIf it is true that great art comes from great suffering, then the art of Fyodor Dostoevsky (1821 - 81) must be truly great indeed. The second of seven children, he developed epilepsy and was ruled over by a drunken, violent father. From this harsh childhood, to his brief forays in the army, through the years of exile and imprisonment in Siberia, Dostoevsky's troubled life shaped his character and art in profound ways. Robert Bird traces Dostoevsky's path from a political revolutionary to one who fought his battles through the printed word. Bird describes how Dostoevsky came into contact with the poor and oppressed who attended the Mariinsky Hospital for the Poor in Moscow, where his father practiced medicine, and how Dostoevsky was to champion the downtrodden throughout his career. He outlines the years Dostoevsky spent in prison after his arrest and near-execution in 1849, and how these experiences, in combination with his difficult childhood, epileptic seizures, religious and political views, contributed to the writing of acclaimed novels such as Crime and Punishment (1867). The author also describes how Dostoevsky's craving for social justice and 'quest for form' spurred his literary achievements. Writers such as Ernest Hemingway, James Joyce and Virginia Wolfe admired and praised Dostoevsky, and he is often acknowledged as one of the pre-eminent psychologists in literature - the parricide in The Brothers Karamazov even attracted the attention of Sigmund Freud. Fyodor Dostoevsky will fascinate all lovers of literature and Russian history.
£999.99
Reaktion Books John Berger
Book SynopsisWith a career in literature and art spanning more than sixty years, John Berger is characterized by an independent and anti-institutional approach to creativity. Working in a range of media including novels, painting, essays and scriptwriting, Berger's voice has resounded through mainstream and alternative culture alike. He is perhaps best known for his seminal book of art criticism Ways of Seeing, published in 1972. Tied directly into a four-part BBC television series, the book presented a radical new interpretation of Western cultural aesthetics. In the same year, Berger's experimental novel G. was awarded the Man Booker Prize for Fiction, cementing his reputation as a boundary-pushing writer and thinker. In this concise yet detailed study of Berger's life and work, the first for decades, Andy Merrifield sheds light on Berger the man, the artist, and the concerned citizen. Merrifield shows Berger to be a figure who constantly strives to open up new horizons, and also reveals the depth of feeling that infuses even his most intellectual work. In this sense, Berger is a creator who feels reality like the irrationalist Rousseau, yet is also a meticulous realist, probing objects critically and rationally like Rousseau's confessor Spinoza. John Berger stitches together art, literature, biography and politics into a lucid, coherent whole. The result is a reader-friendly, freewheeling narrative, which gives fascinating insight into one of the most influential thinkers of our times. The book is essential reading for students and scholars of art, literature and twentieth-century culture.
£999.99
Parthian Books Edward Thomas and Wales
Book SynopsisEdward Thomas and Wales offers a fascinating re-evaluation of Thomas's writing. Bringing together for the first time the prose and poetry centred in Thomas's ancestral land of Wales, it explores the `Welshness' of Thomas's work and of Thomas himself.
£999.99
Sandstone Press Ltd Josephine Tey: A Life, 125th Anniversary Edition
Book SynopsisJosephine Tey was the pen-name of Elizabeth MacKintosh (1896-1952). Born in Inverness, MacKintosh lived several lives: Best known as Golden Age Crime Fiction writer Tey, she was also successful novelist and playwright Gordon Daviot. During her exceptional career, she had plays on simultaneously in the West End in London and on Broadway, and even wrote for Hollywood, all from her home in the north of Scotland. Celebrating the 125th anniversary of MacKintosh’s birth, this updated edition of the definitive biography includes a new preface. Trade Review‘The biographer reveals the moving story of Elizabeth MacKintosh’s life with tact and superior investigative tenacity.’ * The Wall Street Journal *‘Jennifer Morag Henderson presents us with an intelligent, industrious and interesting woman who knew her own mind. She has written a sympathetic, well-researched biography...’ * The Times Literary Supplement *‘The playwright and author Jennifer Morag Henderson has taken on the Alan Grant mythbuster role and written a full-length biography, the first of Tey to appear.’ * The Telegraph, Best Books of 2016 *‘It strips away a lot of the myth surrounding Mackintosh; and it also tells the moving story of a major leading Scots writer for whom the detective novel became “a medium as disciplined as any sonnet”.’ * The Observer, Best Biographies of 2015 *The life of one of the great golden age crime writers is granted a forensic examination in Josephine Tey.’ * The Independent, Best Crime Books of 2015 *‘Her biography is scrupulously researched, narrated with sympathy and full of information previously not readily available. It reads like a labour of love.’ * Literary Review *‘In Henderson's loving, meticulously-researched book we have a first and vital account of that life...hugely valuable to anyone who cares about the story of writing in Scotland, what it has been, how it has changed, and where it may go next.’ * The Scotsman *‘This is the first biography of Josephine Tey and Henderson goes through the few facts of Mackintosh’s life with a forensic thoroughness and finds no secrets lurking. Henderson here pays important tribute to a mind boiling with creativity that came to fruition in the ordered habits of a quiet life.’ * The Oldie *‘Henderson is an Invernessian herself and she seems to take MacKintosh’s neglect personally. In the age of Google-aided, instant biography it’s a pleasure to read one that is the product of time, care and passion.’ * The National *‘A book which, by foregrounding the life and work of a writer who should never have been neglected, deserves the widest of readership.’ * Scottish Review *‘...becomes at a stroke the definitive volume.’ * Crime Time *‘Sterling, superb, and all manner of superlatives -- this book is a must-read for anyone even remotely interested in Josephine Tey. Henderson has done an invaluable service to Tey fans everywhere through her meticulous research...there's so much here about this woman's life that frankly, if you're a Tey reader, you will not want to miss a single word.’ * Crime Segments *‘Absorbing first biography of the crime and mystery writer.’ * The Bookseller *‘This is an interesting read and it was good to add some meat to the bones of this elusive writer.’ * Crime Squad *‘[Tey] was in danger of being forgotten before the publication of a new and comprehensive account of her life and work.’ * Celtic Connection *‘Jennifer Morag Henderson's is the first full biography of this enigmatic and original writer. Painstakingly researched, Henderson is keen to place Tey firmly in the canon of modern Scottish literature, a status never given to her in life.’‘A much needed biography of one of the great mystery writers of the twentieth century. ‘Josephine Tey’ is also a well-kept secret in Scottish Literature: a forensic stylist and the most elegant of minds.’ * University of Glasgow *‘This biography by Jennifer Morag Henderson is to be warmly welcomed and will be read eagerly by anyone curious about Josephine Tey, modern theatre, crime genre fiction, women’s writing, or Scottish literature, in all its multi-faceted complexity.’ * Scottish Literature, University of Glasgow *
£14.24
For Beginners Jane Austen for Beginners
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£13.29
Tin House Books Low Down: Junk, Jazz, and Other Fairy Tales from
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£10.99
Tin House Books The Other Side
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£14.41
Archipelago Books The Bottom Of The Jar
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£13.49
For Beginners Proust for Beginners
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£11.99
For Beginners Joyce for Beginners
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£11.39
Tin House Books The Journal of Jules Renard
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£15.26
Schaffner Press Anything That Burns You: A Portrait of Lola
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£17.99
Amherst College The Networked Recluse: Connected World of Emily
Book SynopsisThe image is so well known it is practically iconic: The reclusive poet, feminine and fragile, weaving verse of beguiling complexity from the room in which she kept herself sequestered from the world. The Belle of Amherst, the distinctive American voice, the singer of the soul's mysteries: Emily Dickinson. Yet that image scarcely captures the fullness and vitality of Dickinson's life, most notably her many connectionsto family, to friends, to correspondents, to the literary tastemakers of her day, even to the unnamed, and perhaps unknowable, Master to whom she addressed three of her most breathtaking works of prose. Through an exploration of a relatively small group of items from Dickinson's vast literary remains, this volumean accompaniment to an exhibition on Dickinson mounted at The Morgan Library & Museum in New Yorkdemonstrates the complex ways in which these often humble objects came into conversation with other people, places, and events in the poet's life. Seeing the network of connections and influences that shaped Dickinson's life presents us with a different understanding of this most enigmatic yet elegiac poet in American letters, and allows us more fully to appreciate both her uniqueness and her humanity. The materials collected here make clear that the story of Dickinson's manuscripts, her life, and her work is still unfolding. While the image of Dickinson as the reclusive poet dressed only in white remains a popular myth, details of Dickinson's life continue to emerge. Several items included both in the exhibit and in this volume were not known to exist until the present century. The scrap of biographical intelligence recorded by Sarah Tuthill in a Mount Holyoke catalogue, or the concern about Dickinson's salvation expressed by Abby Wood in a private letter to Abiah Root, were acquired by Amherst College in the last fifteen years. What additional pieces of evidence remain to be uncovered and identified in the attics and basements of New England? Published to accompany The Morgan Library & Museum's pathbreaking exhibit I'm Nobody! Who are You? The Life and Poetry of Emily Dickinsonpart of a series of exhibits at the Morgan celebrating and exploring the creative lives of significant women authorsThe Networked Recluse offers the reader an account of the exhibit itself, together with a series of contributions by curators, scholars of Dickinson, and poets whose own work her words have influenced.
£999.99
Tin House Books My Autobiography of Carson McCullers A Memoir
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£15.26
Rutgers University Press My Language Is a Jealous Lover
Book SynopsisMany great writers have been fluent in multiple languages but have never been able to escape their mother tongue. Yet if a native language feels like home, an adopted language sometimes offers a hospitality one cannot find elsewhere. My Language Is a Jealous Lover explores the plights and successes of authors who lived and wrote in languages other than their mother tongue, from Samuel Beckett and Vladimir Nabokov to Ágota Kristóf and Joseph Brodsky. Author Adrián N. Bravi weaves their stories in with his own experiences as an Argentinian-Italian, thinking and writing in the language of his new life while recalling that of his childhood. Bravi bears witness to the frustrations, the soul-searching, the pain, and the joys of embracing another language. Trade Review“A wonderful semi-autobiographical book about thinking and writing in a second language, about embracing many languages without betraying one’s mother tongue. A thoughtful book about the languages in which global citizens think and write.” -- Graziella Parati * author of Migration Italy: The Art of Talking Back in a Destination Culture *"A masterful assemblage of intimate memories from the author and utterly persuasive arguments from fellow travelers, this book offers readers a multifaceted and nuanced portrait of what it means to live in and between languages. That it has now been admirably and creatively translated into a third language, beyond the author’s own Spanish and Italian, triangulates Bravi’s defense of linguistic relativity into an irrefutable work of realism." -- Jim Hicks * Executive Editor of Massachusetts Review *Table of ContentsTranslators’ Note Preface Introduction Childhood Displacements My Aunt’s Languages The Maternity of Language I The Language of Love The Hospitality of Language The Enemy Language The Possessiveness of Languages The Fluidity of Language Without Style The Scent of the Panther Prisoners of Our Own Language Two Short Stories: Landolfi and Kosztolányi Two Old Children Poetics of Chaos Exile Writing in Another Language False Friends Interference Every Foreigner Is in Their Own Way a Translator Some Cases of Self-Translation Identity and National Language The Language of Death Language as Property The Abandonment of Language The Difficulty of Abandoning One’s Own Language Language as a Line of Defense The Maternity of Language II Notes Bibliography Notes on Contributors
£999.99
Random House USA Inc Jack Kirby: The Epic Life of the King of Comics
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£21.60
Penguin Putnam Inc Soldiers Don't Go Mad: A Story of Brotherhood,
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£23.20
Random House USA Inc Anthony Powell: Dancing to the Music of Time
Book SynopsisThe author of the award-winning Matisse: A Life gives us the definitive biography of writer Anthony Powell--and takes us deep into the heart of twentieth-century London's literary life.Insightful, lively, and enthralling, this biography is as much a brilliant tapestry of a seminal era in London’s literary life as it is a revelation of an iconic literary figure. Best known for his twelve-volume comic masterpiece, A Dance to the Music of Time, the prolific writer and critic Anthony Powell (1905–2000) kept company between the two world wars with rowdy, hard-up writers and painters—and painters’ models—in the London where Augustus John and Wyndham Lewis loomed large. He counted Evelyn Waugh and Henry Green among his lifelong friends, and his circle included the Sitwells, Graham Greene, George Orwell, Philip Larkin, and Kingsley Amis. Drawing on letters, diaries, and interviews, Hilary Spurling—herself a longtime friend of Powell’s as well as an award-winning biographer—has produced a fresh and powerful portrait of the man and his times.
£15.30
Random House USA Inc Borges and Me: An Encounter
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£15.30
Les Belles Lettres L'Homme a la Cle d'Or: Autobiographie
Book Synopsis
£22.54
Les Belles Lettres Ma Vie Avec Virginia
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Les Belles Lettres Dante
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Les Belles Lettres Oeuvres Completes
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