Biography: writers Books
Random House USA Inc This Long Pursuit
Book SynopsisRichard Holmes’s luminous meditation on the art of biography explores the fascinating relationship between fact and fiction through his own personal experience as a biographer. Ranging widely over art, science, and poetry, Holmes describes a pilgrimage of the heart that has taken him across three centuries. He powerfully evokes the lives of women both scientific and literary: Margaret Cavendish, Mary Somerville, Germaine de Staël, Mary Wollstonecraft, and the Dutch intellectual Zélide. Holmes investigates the reductive myths that have overshadowed some favorite Romantic figures: the love-stunned John Keats, the waterlogged Percy Bysshe Shelley, the opium-soaked Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and the mad visionary William Blake. This great chronicler of the Romantics has produced a chronicle of himself and his intellectual passions; it contains his most personal and most seductive writing.
£15.30
Picador USA The Talented Miss Highsmith The Secret Life and
Book SynopsisPatricia Highsmith, one of the greatest writers of 20th Century American fiction, had a life as darkly compelling as that of her favourite "hero-criminal," the talented Tom Ripley. The author maps out this richly bizarre life from her birth in Texas to Hitchcock's filming of her first novel, "Strangers On a Train", to her self-exile in Europe.Trade Review"This is a biography of clarity and style. A model of its kind.... Schenkar's writing is witty, sharp and light-handed." - The New York Times Book Review "Both dazzling and definitive... A volume as original as its contemptible, miserable, irresistible subject." - Los Angeles Times"
£21.37
Little Brown and Company Born to Be Posthumous
Book Synopsis
£31.50
Random House USA Inc The Yellow World
Book SynopsisA sensational memoir with all the emotional power of The Fault in Our Stars, The Yellow World is the story of cancer and survival that has moved and inspired readers around the world. My heroes don’t wear red capes. They wear red bands. Albert Espinosa never wanted to write a book about cancer—so he didn’t. Instead, he shares his most touching, funny, tragic, and happy memories in the hopes that others, healthy and sick alike, can draw the same strength and vitality from them. At thirteen, Espinosa was diagnosed with cancer, and he spent the next ten years in and out of hospitals, undergoing one daunting procedure after another, starting with the amputation of his left leg. After going on to lose a lung and half of his liver, he was finally declared cancer-free. Only then did he realize that the one thing sadder than dying is not knowing how to live. In this rich and rewarding book, Espino
£13.60
Random House USA Inc Chasing the Last Laugh
Book Synopsis
£15.30
Farrar, Straus & Giroux Inc The Fellowship
Book SynopsisIn The Fellowship, Philip and Carol Zaleski offer the first complete rendering of the Inklings' lives and works. Lewis maps the medieval mind, accepts Christ while riding in the sidecar of his brother's motorcycle, becomes a world-famous evangelist, and creates new forms of religiously attuned fiction while wrestling with personal crises.
£17.48
Farrar, Straus and Giroux The Plague
Book Synopsis
£21.60
Farrar, Straus and Giroux Electric Spark
£26.35
Random House USA Inc Speak Memory
Book SynopsisFrom one of the 20th century's great writers comes one of the finest autobiographies of our time. Speak, Memory was first published by Vladimir Nabokov in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised and republished in 1966. The Everyman's Library edition includes, for the first time, the previously unpublished Chapter 16–the most significant unpublished piece of writing by the master, newly released by the Nabokov estate–which provided an extraordinary insight into Speak, Memory. Nabokov's memoir is a moving account of a loving, civilized family, of adolescent awakenings, flight from Bolshevik terror, education in England, and émigré life in Paris and Berlin. The Nabokovs were eccentric, liberal aristocrats, who lived a life immersed in politics and literature on splendid country estates until their world was swept away by the Russian revolution when the author was eighteen years old. Speak, Memory vividly evoke
£20.80
Alfred A. Knopf Selected Letters of Langston Hughes
Book Synopsis
£28.00
Random House USA Inc A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland
Book SynopsisWhen in 1773 James Boswell persuaded the great Samuel Johnson—then aged sixty-three—to embark with him on a tour of Boswell’s native Scotland, the adventure resulted in two magnificent books, Johnson’s JOURNEY TO THE WESTERN ISLANDS OF SCOTLAND and Boswell’s JOURNAL OF A TOUR TO THE HEBRIDES. Later published in one volume, the very different travelogues of this unlikely duo provide a fascinating picture not only of the Scottish Highlands at a turning point in its history, but also of the relationship between two men whose fame would be forever entwined.Johnson offers a magisterial account of a remote and rugged land and of its people, whose traditional way of life, in the wake of the failed Jacobite uprising, was tragically under threat. Boswell focuses instead on the psychological landscape of his famously gruff and witty companion, throwing further light on the friend and mentor whom he later immortalized in the masterly biography that would m
£24.00
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group The Pat Conroy Cookbook
Book SynopsisAmerica’s favorite storyteller, Pat Conroy, is back with a unique cookbook that only he could conceive. Delighting us with tales of his passion for cooking and good food and the people, places, and great meals he has experienced, Conroy mixes them together with mouthwatering recipes from the Deep South and the world beyond.It all started thirty years ago with a chance purchase of The Escoffier Cookbook, an unlikely and daunting introduction for the beginner. But Conroy was more than up to the task. He set out with unwavering determination to learn the basics of French cooking—stocks and dough—and moved swiftly on to veal demi-glace and pâte brisée. With the help of his culinary accomplice, Suzanne Williamson Pollak, Conroy mastered the dishes of his beloved South as well as the cuisine he has savored in places as far away from home as Paris, Rome, and San Francisco. Each chapter opens with a story told with the inimitable brio of the a
£19.00
Random House USA Inc My Reading Life
Book SynopsisBestselling author Pat Conroy acknowledges the books that have shaped him and celebrates the profound effect reading has had on his life. Pat Conroy, the beloved American storyteller, is a voracious reader. Starting as a childhood passion that bloomed into a life-long companion, reading has been Conroy’s portal to the world, both to the farthest corners of the globe and to the deepest chambers of the human soul. His interests range widely, from Milton to Tolkien, Philip Roth to Thucydides, encompassing poetry, history, philosophy, and any mesmerizing tale of his native South. He has for years kept notebooks in which he records words and expressions, over time creating a vast reservoir of playful turns of phrase, dazzling flashes of description, and snippets of delightful sound, all just for his love of language. But for Conroy reading is not simply a pleasure to be enjoyed in off-hours or a source of inspiration for his own writing. It would hardly be an exaggerati
£18.99
Random House USA Inc A Place Within Rediscovering India
Book SynopsisA Globe and Mail Best BookThe inimitable M.G. Vassanji turns his eye to India, the homeland of his ancestors, in this powerfully moving tale of family and country. Part travelogue, part history, A Place Within is M.G. Vassanji’s intelligent and beautifully written journey to explore where he belongs. It would take many lifetimes, it was said to me during my first visit, to see all of India. The desperation must have shown on my face to absorb and digest all I possibly could. This was not something I had articulated or resolved; and yet I recall an anxiety as I travelled the length and breadth of the country, senses raw to every new experience, that even in the distraction of a blink I might miss something profoundly significant. I was not born in India, nor were my parents; that might explain much in my expectation of that visit. Yet how many people go to the homeland of their grandparents with such a heartload of exp
£15.30
Random House USA Inc Lucy Maud Montgomery
Book SynopsisMary Henley Rubio has spent over two decades researching Montgomery’s life, and has put together a comprehensive and penetrating picture of this Canadian literary icon, all set in rich social context. Extensive interviews with people who knew Montgomery - her son, maids, friends, relatives, all now deceased - are only part of the material gathered in a journey to understand Montgomery that took Rubio to Poland and the highlands of Scotland. From Montgomery’s apparently idyllic childhood in Prince Edward Island to her passion-filled adolescence and young adulthood, to her legal fights as world-famous author, to her shattering experiences with motherhood and as wife to a deeply troubled man, this fascinating, intimate narrative of her life will engage and delight.
£20.66
WW Norton & Co The Waste Land A Biography of a Poem
Book SynopsisA riveting account of the making of T. S. Eliot’s celebrated poem The Waste Land on its centenary.Trade Review"Hollis delves into the deep background from which ‘The Waste Land’ arose... There is genuine suspense in the air, as Hollis invites us to listen out for murmurs and rumors, in the poet’s letters of long ago." -- Anthony Lane - The New Yorker"Illuminating... Hollis blends rich characterization and historical background to create a vivid picture of the London literary scene... Hollis’s sharp prose sings and is poetic in its own right... This fascinating and brilliantly researched history will delight Eliot’s fans." -- Publishers Weekly (starred review)"An authoritative and beautifully written account of the peculiar alchemy that produced the most influential poem of the twentieth century. This is more than the story of T. S. Eliot's genius: Matthew Hollis reveals how the forces of friendship, love, despair, madness, and ambition shaped The Waste Land. Literary history at its finest." -- Heather Clark, author of Red Comet"Hollis succeeds brilliantly in bringing the literary landscape of the 1920s to life … [He] turns a complex process of literary composition into a rattling good story. His criticism is personally engaged...and wonderfully compelling as a result." -- Tristram Fane Saunders - Sunday Telegraph"Hollis combines a poet’s sharp eye for details with a cultural historian’s grasp of atmosphere… The richness of [his] analysis is evident on every page." -- Jason Harding - Financial Times"Like the 434-line poem, this book immerses the reader in the political, social and cultural themes of the day… [Hollis] weaves a rich body of research into a fast-paced narrative." -- Ellen Peirson-Hagger - New Statesman"[Hollis’s] quest is for all the seeds of intellectual and emotional pressure that shaped the poem. Such is the energy and engagement of Hollis in this task that you find yourself rooting for the emergence of the poem along with Eliot and his supporters, willing it into life as the book progresses... The evolution of those pages...have become folkloric among Eliot’s readers, but still Hollis invests them with fresh life." -- Tim Adams - Observer"With elegance, wit and...warmth, [Hollis] tells the story of The Waste Land’s difficult birth... At times the book reads, delightfully, as a group biography of modernism’s bright lights." -- Susannah Goldsborough - Times [UK]"A great work of art takes on a life of its own. This is the strategy equally artful and assessive of Matthew Hollis's superb new study, The Waste Land: A Biography of a Poem. The poem is brilliant, infuriating, moody, conflicted, lyrical, fractured, wildly inventive, haunted by tradition, and as full of eroticism as lament. The Waste Land helped to define modernism and lives on vividly into our present day. To tell the life story of this poem, Hollis tells the story of the poet, sometimes minute by minute, conversation by conversation. The moving result as Whitman would say of his own sweeping poetry is that 'who touches this [book] touches a man.'" -- David Baker, author of Whale Fall and professor of English at Denison University
£28.79
WW Norton & Co The Lives of Margaret Fuller A Biography
Book Synopsis“Psychologically rich. . . . Matteson’s book restores the heroism of [Fuller’s] life and work.”—The New YorkerTrade Review"Matteson's portrait of Fuller, given depth and sheen by a treasure trove of letters, is unfailingly intelligent, nuanced and intriguing." "Well-written... [Readers] will admire her spirit, intellect, and courage." "John Matteson performs a service in producing a ... biography that will introduce this learned, prolific and eccentric American to a wider audience." "[Matteson's] writing seems to derive palpable energy from Fuller's own dynamism... In the end he discovers a Fuller that is startlingly modern in her contradictions and commitments."
£15.19
WW Norton & Co A Worse Place Than Hell How the Civil War Battle
Book SynopsisPulitzer Prize–winning author John Matteson illuminates three harrowing months of the Civil War and their enduring legacy for America.Trade Review"[A] moving group portrait…[Matteson’s] firm grasp of detail, visible as well in his fine biographies of the Alcott family and Margaret Fuller, makes each of his characters vivid and distinctive." -- David S. Reynolds, Wall Street Journal"Matteson deftly unfurls many stories within stories with a confident, novelistic flair. Ambitious, nuanced, and thoroughly rewarding." -- Kirkus Reviews (starred review)"John Matteson has once again delivered a beautifully written, exhaustively researched, and brilliantly interpreted work of history. This is a riveting and eerily relevant account of America at its most divided, yet also seeking redemption." -- Debby Applegate, author of The Most Famous Man in America: The Biography of Henry Ward Beecher, winner of the 2007 Pulitzer Prize for Biography"If you already know who won the Battle of Fredericksburg, you will soon forget, as John Matteson follows the intimate and intricate lives of five people who lived through it. Courage and valor vie with fear and anxiety—on a wintertime battlefield, on the home front, and in field hospitals. This story of choices, mistakes, and shifting luck is also a portrait of war on a human scale." -- Martha Hodes, author of Mourning Lincoln"Fredericksburg in 1862 became a true touchstone of history…John Matteson’s genius flows effortlessly through the entire narrative, taking us through the blast furnace of war and its battles and hospitals, and its suffering. This is the best book I’ve ever read on the impact and meaning of Fredericksburg, where ordinary lives were made extraordinary." -- Francis A. O’Reilly, author of The Fredericksburg Campaign: Winter War on the Rappahannock"If the truest history is biography, as Emerson says, then seldom has history been better told than in this epic biography of five lives upended and transformed by the Civil War. John Matteson helps us see through the surface to the deeper currents beneath, revealing how one key battle became the inflection point transforming not only these men and women but the nation they composed, right down to the stories we tell, the poems we read, the monuments we build, the laws we live by, the prayers we utter—even the buildings we live in. Not to be missed." -- Laura Dassow Walls, author of Henry David Thoreau: A Life
£14.24
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group Oscar Wilde
£22.10
Penguin Putnam Inc To Have and Have Another A Hemmingway Cocktail
Book SynopsisErnest Hemingway is nearly as famous for his drinking as he is for his writing. Throughout his collected works, Papa's sensuous explorations of the delights of imbibing engaged both his characters and his readers. In To Have and Have Another: A Hemingway Cocktail Companion, Philip Greene, cocktail historian, spirits consultant, and cofounder of the Museum of the American Cocktail, offers us a view of Papa through the lens Papa himself preferred—the bottom of a glass. A bartender’s manual for Hemingway enthusiasts, this revised and expanded volume offers a unique take on Hemingway’s oeuvre that privileges the tastes, smells, and colors of the cocktails he enjoyed and the drinks he placed so prominently in his stories they were nearly characters themselves. To Have and Have Another delivers fascinating and lively background on the various drinks, their ingredients, their histories, and the characters—real and fictional—as
£21.85
Penguin Putnam Inc Expect Great Things The Life and Search of Henry
Book SynopsisNow in paperback, this thrilling, meticulous biography by naturalist and historian Kevin Dann fills a gap in our understanding of Henry Thoreau, one modern history's most important spiritual visionaries by capturing the full arc of his life as a mystic, spiritual seeker, and explorer in transcendental realms.This acclaimed, epic biography of Henry David Thoreau sees Thoreau's world as the mystic himself saw it: filled with wonder and mystery; Native American myths and lore; wood sylphs, nature spirits, and fairies; battles between good and evil; and heroic struggles to live as a natural being in an increasingly synthetic world. Above all, Expect Great Things critically and authoritatively captures Thoreau's simultaneously wild and intellectually keen sense of the mystical, mythical, and supernatural. Other historians have skipped past or undervalued these aspects of Thoreau's life. In this groundbreaking work, historian and naturalist Kevin Dann re
£14.39
Penguin Putnam Inc The Seven Good Years
Book SynopsisA brilliant, life-affirming, and hilarious memoir from a “genius” (The New York Times) and master storyteller. With illustrations by Jason Polan.The seven years between the birth of Etgar Keret’s son and the death of his father were good years, though still full of reasons to worry. Lev is born in the midst of a terrorist attack. Etgar’s father gets cancer. The threat of constant war looms over their home and permeates daily life.What emerges from this dark reality is a series of sublimely absurd ruminations on everything from Etgar’s three-year-old son’s impending military service to the terrorist mind-set behind Angry Birds. There’s Lev’s insistence that he is a cat, releasing him from any human responsibilities or rules. Etgar’s siblings, all very different people who have chosen radically divergent paths in life, come together after his father’s shivah to experience the grief and love t
£15.20
Penguin Putnam Inc Life On The Mississippi
Book Synopsis
£7.92
Penguin Putnam Inc Writers Between the Covers The Scandalous
Book SynopsisWhat happened off the page was often a lot spicier than what was written on it... Why did Norman Mailer stab his second wife at a party? Who was Edith Wharton’s secret transatlantic lover? What motivated Anaïs Nin to become a bigamist? Writers Between the Covers rips the sheets off these and other real-life love stories of the literati—some with fairy tale endings and others that resulted in break-ups, breakdowns, and brawls. Among the writers laid bare are Agatha Christie, who sparked the largest-ever manhunt in England as her marriage fell apart; Arthur Miller, whose jaw-dropping pairing with Marilyn Monroe proved that opposites attract, at least initially; and T.S. Eliot, who slept in a deckchair on his disastrous honeymoon. From the best break-up letters to the stormiest love triangles to the boldest cougars and cradle-robbers, this fun and accessible volume—packed with lists, quizzes and in-dept
£13.50
John Wiley and Sons Ltd The Life of Robert Frost
Book SynopsisThe Life of Robert Frost presents a unique and rich approach to the poet that includes original genealogical research concerning Frost s ancestors, and a demonstration of how mental illness plagued the Frost family and heavily influenced Frost s poetry.Trade ReviewHart did a great job of dramatizing the precariousness of Frost s life. The letters Hart found in various new sources, combined with a close reading of many of Frost s poems, enable Hart to reveal Frost as a much more complicated person and poet than some critics and biographers believed. Frank Schatz, The Virginia Gazette, May 3 2017.Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix List of Abbreviations and Author’s Note xi 1. The New England Frosts 1 2. Rebel Sons and Punitive Fathers 8 3. Strong Man’s Food and Swedenborgian Mysticism 18 4. “A Boy’s Will Is the Wind’s Will” 26 5. Reluctant Yankees 39 6. Monuments to After‐thought 55 7. “Precipitate in Love” 64 8. Adventures in the Great Dismal Swamp 80 9. From Riffraff to Harvard 93 10. Deaths of a Son and a Hired Man 104 11. Indoor and Outdoor Schooling 121 12. Hen Man in the Academy 134 13. To the Land of The Golden Treasury 148 14. The Lively Gallows 167 15. Victory at Home 180 16. Amherst Interval 202 17. Sense and Sensibility 217 18. A Home that Never Was on Land or Sea 230 19. Something beyond Conflict 240 20. Delivering Battle 251 21. Weddings, Divorces, and Funerals 261 22. A Survivalist’s Further Range 278 23. Elinor’s Final Ordeal 294 24. Inferno to Vita Nuova 302 25. A Biblical Job by a Witness Tree 320 26. Mercy for the Damned 332 27. Mr Frost Goes to Washington 344 28. A Brief Shining Moment with the Kennedys 361 29. Last Act on the Global Stage 376 Notes 390 Bibliography 415 Index 423
£80.15
University of Michigan Press The Unraveling Archive Essays on Sylvia Plath
£999.99
The University of Michigan Press Henry James at Work
Book SynopsisTheodora Bosanquet was Henry James's secretary from 1907 until his death in 1916, one of the most significant periods of his long writing career. This work recounts Bosanquet's association with James and provides a commentary on James's milieu, preferences, and attitudes, as well as on his process of writing and revision.Trade ReviewEverything that Miss Bosanquet wrote seems to me to be writerly: she's savvy, she's snappy, and there's usually a touch of sass... how one would like to have one more book by this 'salty, hearty' lady who, when slim and young, had worked so hard to keep 'a lonely old artist man - Henry James - from being interrupted.' - Larry McMurtry, New York Review of Books
£999.99
Thames and Hudson Ltd Moonlight Travellers
Book Synopsis
£16.95
Random House USA Inc Murder by the Book The Crime That Shocked
Book SynopsisEarly on the morning of May 6, 1840, the elderly Lord William Russell was found in his London house with his throat so deeply cut that his head was nearly severed. The crime soon had everyone, including Queen Victoria, feverishly speculating about motives and methods. But when the prime suspect claimed to have been inspired by a sensational crime novel, it sent shock waves through literary London and drew both Dickens and Thackeray into the fray. Could a novel really lead someone to kill? In Murder by the Book, Claire Harman blends a riveting true-crime whodunit with a fascinating account of the rise of the popular novel and the early battle for its soul among the most famous writers of the day.
£14.41
Random House USA Inc In the Land of Good Living A Journey to the Heart
Book SynopsisA wickedly smart, funny, and irresistibly off-kilter account of an improbable thousand-mile journey on foot into the heart of modern Florida, the state that Russell calls America Concentrate.In the summer of 2016, Kent Russell--broke, at loose ends, hungry for adventure--set off to walk across Florida. Mythic, superficial, soaked in contradictions, maligned by cultural elites, segregated from the South, and literally vanishing into the sea, Florida (or, as he calls it: America Concentrate) seemed to Russell to embody America's divided soul. The journey, with two friends intent on filming the ensuing mayhem, quickly reduces the trio to filthy drifters pushing a shopping cart of camera equipment. They get waylaid by a concerned citizen bearing a rifle; buy cocaine from an ex-wrestler; visit a spiritual medium. The narrative overflows with historical detail about how modern Florida came into being after World War II, and how it came to be a petri dish for life in a suddenl
£14.45
Random House USA Inc The Scandal of the Century And Other Writings
Book SynopsisCollected here for the first time: a selection of the great writer's journalism, which he considered more important to his legacy than his acclaimed novels.Late in his life, Gabriel García Márquez declared: “I don’t want to be remembered for One Hundred Years of Solitude, nor for the Nobel Prize, but rather for the newspaper. I was born a journalist. . . . It’s in my blood.” Now available for the first time in English, this selection offers a glimpse into the great novelist’s career as a reporter. Ranging from the early pieces he wrote while starting out in Colombia to his longer reportage from Paris and Rome and, later on, from Venezuela and Mexico, these fifty journalistic writings amply display the narrative gifts that made his reputation. The Scandal of the Century is a tribute to García Márquez’s dedication to the profession he believed to be “the best in the world.”
£15.26
Random House USA Inc Begin Again
Book SynopsisNEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ? ?A powerful study of how to bear witness in a moment when America is being called to do the same.??Time James Baldwin grew disillusioned by the failure of the civil rights movement to force America to confront its lies about race. What can we learn from his struggle in our own moment?One of the Best Books of the Year: Time, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune ? One of Esquire?s Best Biographies of All Time ?Winner of the Stowe Prize ? Shortlisted for the Goddard Riverside Stephan Russo Book Prize for Social Justice?Not everything is lost. Responsibility cannot be lost, it can only be abdicated. If one refuses abdication, one begins again.??James BaldwinBegin Again is one of the great books on James Baldwin and a powerful reckoning with America?s ongoing failure to confront the lies it tells itself about race. Just as in Baldwin?s ?after times,? argues Eddie S. Glaude Jr., when white Americans met the civil rights movement?s call for truth and justice with blind rage and the murders of movement leaders, so in our moment were the Obama presidency and the birth of Black Lives Matter answered with the ascendance of Trump and the violent resurgence of white nationalism.In these brilliant and stirring pages, Glaude finds hope and guidance in Baldwin as he mixes biography?drawn partially from newly uncovered Baldwin interviews?with history, memoir, and poignant analysis of our current moment to reveal the painful cycle of Black resistance and white retrenchment. As Glaude bears witness to the difficult truth of racism?s continued grip on the national soul, Begin Again is a searing exploration of the tangled web of race, trauma, and memory, and a powerful interrogation of what we must ask of ourselves in order to call forth a new America.
£15.30
Alfred A. Knopf My Twentieth Century Evening and Other Small
Book Synopsis
£14.41
Alfred A. Knopf Keats
Book SynopsisA dazzling new look into the short but intense, tragic life and remarkable work of John Keats, one of the greatest lyric poets of the English language, seen in a whole new light, not as the mythologized Victorian guileless nature-lover, but as the subversive, bawdy complex cynic whose life and poetry were lived and created on the edge.In this brief life, acclaimed biographer Lucasta Miller takes nine of Keats's best-known poems—Endymion; On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer; Ode to a Nightingale; To Autumn; Bright Star among them—and excavates how they came to be and what in Keats's life led to their creation. She writes of aspects of Keats's life that have been overlooked, and explores his imagination in the context of his world and experience, paying tribute to the unique quality of his mind. Miller, through Keats’s poetry, brilliantly resurrects and brings vividly to life, the man, the poet in all his complexity and spirit, l
£24.38
Alfred A. Knopf Year of the Monkey
Book Synopsis
£16.31
Alfred A. Knopf The Measure of Our Lives A Gathering of Wisdom
Book Synopsis
£14.24
Random House USA Inc L.E.L.
Book SynopsisA finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for Biography: the fascinating, rediscovered story of a writer who changed English poetry and explored the dark side of sexuality through a woman''s voice.On October 15, 1838, the body of a thirty-six-year-old woman was found in Cape Coast Castle, West Africa, a bottle of Prussic acid in her hand. She was one of the most famous English poets of her day: Letitia Elizabeth Landon, known as L.E.L. What was she doing in Africa? Was her death an accident, as the inquest claimed? Or had she committed suicide, or even been murdered? To her contemporaries, she was an icon, hailed as the “female Byron,” admired by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, the Brontës, and Edgar Allan Poe. However, she was also a woman with scandalous secrets, and her death prompted a cover-up that is only now unravelling. Lucasta Miller, acclaimed author of The Brontë Myth, meticulously pieces together L.E.L.’s lost career
£14.24
Alfred A. Knopf Tomorrow Perhaps the Future
Book SynopsisA NEW YORKER BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • An extraordinary account of the women artists and activists whose determination to live—and to create—with courage and conviction took them as far as the Spanish Civil War“Now, as certainly as never before, we are determined or compelled, to take sides.” —Nancy CunardAn attempted insurrection, a country divided, a democracy threatened. It was the Spanish Civil War of 1936, surprisingly, that Sarah Watling found herself drawn to when confounded by the tumultuous politics of our present day. This was a conflict that galvanized tens of thousands of volunteers from around the world to join the fight. For them, the choice seemed clear: either you were for fascism or you were against it.Seeking to understand how they knew that the moment to act had arrived, Watling sifts through archives for lost journals, letters, and manifestos, discovering a trove of work by writers and outsi
£24.00
Alfred A. Knopf Wifedom
Book SynopsisThe New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • This is the story of the marriage behind some of the most famous literary works of the 20th century —and a probing consideration of what it means to be a wife and a writer in the modern worldSimply, a masterpiece...Funder not only re-makes the art of biography, she resurrects a woman in full. —Geraldine Brooks, winner of the Pulitzer Prize, author of HorseAt the end of summer 2017, Anna Funder found herself at a moment of peak overload. Family obligations and household responsibilities were crushing her soul and taking her away from her writing deadlines. She needed help, and George Orwell came to her rescue.I’ve always loved Orwell, Funder writes, his self-deprecating humour, his laser vision about how power works, and who it works on. So after rereading and savoring books Orwell had written, she devoured six major biographies tracing his life and
£25.60
Penguin Putnam Inc Capotes Women
Book Synopsis*National Bestseller*New York Times bestselling author Laurence Leamer reveals the complex web of relationships and scandalous true stories behind Truman Capote''s never-published final novel, Answered Prayers—the dark secrets, tragic glamour, and Capote''s ultimate betrayal of the group of female friends he called his swans.“There are certain women,” Truman Capote wrote, “who, though perhaps not born rich, are born to be rich.” Barbara “Babe” Paley, Gloria Guinness, Marella Agnelli, Slim Hayward, Pamela Churchill, C. Z. Guest, Lee Radziwill (Jackie Kennedy’s sister)—they were the toast of midcentury New York, each beautiful and distinguished in her own way. Capote befriended them, received their deepest confidences, and ingratiated himself into their lives. Then, in one fell swoop, he betrayed them in the most surprising and startling way possible.Bestselling biographer Laurence Leame
£23.80
Random House USA Inc The Dictionary People
Book SynopsisA WASHINGTON POST BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A history and celebration of the many far-flung volunteers who helped define the English language, word by word.“Enthralling and exuberant, Sarah Ogilvie tells the surprising story of the making of the OED. Philologists, fantasists, crackpots, criminals, career spinsters, suffragists, and Australians: here is a wonder book for word lovers.” —Jeanette Winterson, author of Oranges Are Not the Only FruitThe Oxford English Dictionary is one of mankind’s greatest achievements, and yet, curiously, its creators are almost never considered. Who were the people behind this unprecedented book? As Sarah Ogilvie reveals, they include three murderers, a collector of pornography, the daughter of Karl Marx, a president of Yale, a radical suffragette, a vicar who was later found dead in the cupboard of his chapel, an inventor of the first American subway, a female anti-slavery activist in Philadelphia . . . and thousands of others. Of deep transgenerational and broad appeal, a thrilling literary detective story that, for the first time, unravels the mystery of the endlessly fascinating contributors the world over who, for over seventy years, helped to codify the way we read and write and speak. It was the greatest crowdsourcing endeavor in human history, the Wikipedia of its time. The Dictionary People is a celebration of words, language, and people, whose eccentricities and obsessions, triumphs, and failures enriched the English language.
£13.09
Penguin Putnam Inc Love in a Time of Hate
Book Synopsis?An enthralling and insightful cultural history?one that shows how, over the course of one pivotal decade, love, freedom and the freedom to love gave way to fear, madness and despair.? ?Malcolm Forbes, Washington Post Book ReviewAn ingeniously orchestrated popular history brings to life the most pivotal decade of the twentieth centuryAs the Roaring Twenties wind down, Jean-Paul Sartre waits in a Paris café for a first date with Simone de Beauvoir, who never shows. Marlene Dietrich slips away from a loveless marriage to cruise the dive bars of Berlin. The fledgling writer Vladimir Nabokov places a freshly netted butterfly at the end of his wife?s bed. Hannah Arendt, Walter Benjamin, Zelda and Scott, Dalí and Gala, Picasso and his many muses, Henry and June and Anaïs Nin, the entire extended family of Thomas Mann, and a host of other fascinating and famous figures make art and love, write and row, bed and wed and betray. They do not yet know that they, along with millions of others, will soon be forced to contemplate flight?or fight?as the world careens from one global conflict to the next.
£23.20
Penguin Random House India My Family
Book Synopsis
£13.25
Random House USA Inc Little Failure
Book Synopsis
£21.60
Random House USA Inc Ake
Book Synopsis
£15.26
Random House USA Inc All Gods Children Need Traveling Shoes
Book SynopsisIn 1962 the poet, musician, and performer Maya Angelou claimed another piece of her identity by moving to Ghana, joining a community of Revolutionist Returnees inspired by the promise of pan-Africanism. All God's Children Need Walking Shoes is her lyrical and acutely perceptive exploration of what it means to be an African American on the mother continent, where color no longer matters but where American-ness keeps asserting itself in ways both puzzling and heartbreaking. As it builds on the personal narrative of I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings and Gather Together in My Name, this book confirms Maya Angelou’s stature as one of the most gifted autobiographers of our time.
£13.56
Irish Academic Press Ltd Undoing Time The Life and Work of Samuel Beckett
Book Synopsis
£24.99
Penguin Putnam Inc Boy Erased A Memoir of Identity Faith and Family
Book SynopsisThe New York Times bestselling memoir about identity, love and understanding. Now a major motion picture starring Nicole Kidman, Russell Crowe, and Lucas Hedges, directed by Joel Edgerton. “Every sentence of the story will stir your soul” (O Magazine). The son of a Baptist pastor and deeply embedded in church life in small town Arkansas, as a young man Garrard Conley was terrified and conflicted about his sexuality. When Garrard was a nineteen-year-old college student, he was outed to his parents, and was forced to make a life-changing decision: either agree to attend a church-supported conversion therapy program that promised to cure him of homosexuality; or risk losing family, friends, and the God he had prayed to every day of his life. Through an institutionalized Twelve-Step Program heavy on Bible study, he was supposed to emerge heterosexual, ex-gay, cleansed of impure urges and stronger in his faith in God for
£15.30
