{"product_id":"the-shadow-in-the-garden-9781472153135","title":"The Shadow in the Garden","description":"\u003cb\u003eBook Synopsis\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe biographer - so often in the shadows, kibbitzing, casting doubt, proving facts - here comes to the stage.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eJames Atlas takes us back to his childhood in suburban Chicago, where he fell in love with literature and, early on, found in himself the impulse to study writers'' lives. We meet Richard Ellmann, the great biographer of James Joyce and Atlas''s professor during a transformative year at Oxford. We get to know the author''s first subject, the self-doomed poet Delmore Schwartz; a bygone cast of intellectuals such as Edmund Wilson and Dwight Macdonald (the tall trees, as Mary McCarthy described them, cut down now, Atlas writes, by the merciless pruning of mortality); and, of course, the elusive Bellow, a metaphysician of the ordinary. Atlas revisits the lives and work of the classical biographers: the Renaissance writers of what were then called lives, Samuel Johnson and the meshugenah Boswell, among them. \u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eIn what amounts to a pocket history of his own literary g\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eTrade Review\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e(An) unfailingly acute memoir of the biographer's art... entertainingly unique in its particulars - and an inspiration for compulsive biographers everywhere * the Observer *\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/p\u003e\u003cp\u003eThe biographer slips into another's skin; he is meant to assume someone else's unconscious. The idea is to know his subject better than that subject knows himself. By definition, the biographer erases himself in the process. \u003cbr\u003eWriting of and around his books, Atlas triumphantly returns that fugitive figure - part sleuth, part scholar, part analyst, part medium, an emissary between worlds - to the page. The result is \u003cb\u003ea sparkling, lyrical, tender, and unexpectedly suspenseful take on a life in literature\u003c\/b\u003e. \"There is no such thing as Biography School,\" Atlas laments at one juncture. There is now.\u003c\/p\u003e * Stacy Schiff *","brand":"Little, Brown Book Group","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":47851733221719,"sku":"9781472153135","price":27.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0817\/1739\/5799\/files\/9781472153135.jpg?v=1710643101","url":"https:\/\/bookcurl.com\/products\/the-shadow-in-the-garden-9781472153135","provider":"Book Curl","version":"1.0","type":"link"}