Search results for ""author francesca wade""

Wine and dine with Victorian London's literati in a heatwave in one of the first ever group biographies, introduced by Francesca Wade (author of Square Haunting).Though she loved the heat she could do nothing but lie on the sofa and drink lemonade and read Monte Cristo .'One of the most illuminating and insufficiently praised books of the last 60 years.' Observer'Never bettered.' Guardian'Brilliant.' Julian Barnes'Wholly original.' Craig Brown'A pathfinder.' Richard Holmes'Extraordinary.' Penelope LivelyJune 1846. As London swelters in a heatwave - sunstroke strikes, meat rots, ice is coveted - a glamorous coterie of writers and artists spend their summer wining, dining and opining.With the ringletted 'face of an Egyptian cat goddess', Elizabeth Barrett is courted by her secret fiancé, the poet Robert Browning, who plots their elopement to Italy; Keats roams Hampstead Heath; Wordsworth visits the zoo; Dickens is intrigued by Tom Thumb; the Carlyles host parties for a visiting German novelist and suffer a marital crisis. But when the visionary painter Benjamin Robert Haydon commits suicide, they find their entwined lives spiralling around the tragedy . . .One of the first-ever group biographies, Alethea Hayter's glorious A Sultry Month is a lively mosaic of archival riches inspired by the collages of the Pop Artists. A groundbreaking feat of creative non-fiction in 1965, her portrait of Victorian London's literati is just as vivid, witty and enticing today.'Elegant Hayter more or less invented the biographical form which is a close study of a brief period in the life of an individual or a group . . . A rigorous scholar [with] an artist's eye.' A. S. Byatt'Hayter's clever, innovative book turned a searchlight on a time, a place, a circle of people; it has surely inspired the subsequent fashion for group biographies.' Penelope Lively'Nothing I've ever read has flung me so immediately into those streets, that weather, that period. Hayter never forgets that people want stories, that lives are stories.' Margaret Forster'Hayter could take a tiny chip of life [and] find within it the seeds of a whole existence.' Richard Holmes'A pioneer . . . Beautifully written vignettes . . . Immaculate scholarship and intense readability.' Jonathan Bate'Outstanding . . . A small masterpiece.' Anthony Burgess'A brilliant recreation of London literary life in 1846, which is highly original in its form and narrative cross-cutting.' Julian Barnes

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In this collection, readers will rediscover Gertrude Stein as the bearer of a joyfully radical literary vision. A bold experimenter, her writing sparks with vitality, relishing in rhythm, repetition, sound and colour in its central vision: to prise apart language and association and find thrilling new ways to express the true essence of her subject with charming joie de vivre Stein considered her shorter writings to be the truest expressions of her enrapturing style. Her fascination with people and personalities can be located in expressive portraits of close friends such as Pablo Picasso, Henri Matisse and Juan Gris, whilst her decades-long relationship with Alice B. Toklas is immortalised with shimmering eroticism. There are also playful meditations on her unique writing process, conveying her serious delight in meddling with conventions of grammar and composition.

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By turns a handbook of countercultural living, a manual for street protest, and a feminist broadside against the repressive state apparatus, Revolutionary Letters is a modern classic, as relevant today as it was at its inception, 50 years ago. During the tumult of 1968, Beat poet Diane di Prima began writing her ‘letters’, poems filled with a potent blend of utopian anarchism and Zen-tinged ecological awareness that were circulated via underground newspapers and stapled pamphlets. First published in 1971 by Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights in the US, di Prima would go on to publish four subsequent editions, expanding the collection each time. During the last years of her life, di Prima got to work on the final iteration of this lifelong project, collecting all of her previously published ‘letters’ and adding the new work, poems written from 2007 up to the time of her death in October 2020.

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