Showing results by publisher "----RM Alexander" in Art & Literature

An Italian Mannerist architect and painter, Giorgio Vasari was acquainted with many of the most famous artists of his day. He is best-known today for his biographies of artists including Leonardo da Vinci, Raphael, Michelangelo, Titian and Giotto. This recording is read with clarity and authority by Neville Jason.

Known to millions mainly as the author of the "The Lottery", Shirley Jackson has been curiously absent from the mainstream American literary canon. A genius of literary suspense and psychological horror, Jackson plumbed the cultural anxiety of postwar America more deeply than anyone. Ruth Franklin reveals the tumultuous life and inner darkness of the author of The Haunting of Hill House and We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

When twenty-five-year-old Judith Jones began working as a secretary at Doubleday’s Paris office in 1949, she spent most of her time wading through manuscripts in the slush pile and passing on projects—until one day, a book caught her eye. She read it in one sitting, then begged her boss to consider publishing it. A year later, Anne Frank: The Diary of a Young Girl became a bestseller. It was the start of a culture-defining career in publishing. Legendary editor Judith Jones finally gets her due in this intimate biography.

In arguably his most personal and lasting work, America's most daringly original and controversial critic gives us brief, luminous readings of more than 80 texts by canonical authors - texts he has had by heart since childhood.

In a remarkable feat of biography, Matthew Hollis reconstructs the intellectual creation of the poem and brings the material reality of its charged times vividly to life. Presenting a mosaic of historical fragments, diaries, dynamic literary criticism and illuminating new research, he reveals the cultural and personal trauma that forged The Waste Land through the lives of its protagonists.

Acclaimed best-selling author Francine Prose offers a listen of Guggenheim's life that will enthrall enthusiasts of 21st-century art as well as anyone interested in American and European culture and the interrelationships between them. The lively and insightful narrative follows Guggenheim through virtually every aspect of her extraordinary life, from her unique collecting habits and paradigm-changing discoveries to her celebrity friendships, failed marriages, and scandalous affairs.

Au début des années soixante, Thompson, alors journaliste à San Francisco, est fasciné par les Hell's Angels. Son article sur ces seigneurs de la route fait sensation, il se lance dans la version longue : un an passé à rouler et à écrire à leurs côtés. Mais l'équipée se termine sauvagement : parce qu'il refuse de partager ses royalties, les Angels abandonnent l'homme de lettres sur une route, à moitié mort et le crâne défoncé à coups de pierres.

Ibn-e-Insha, real name Sher Muhammad Khan, born on June 15, 1927, died on January 11, 1978, was a Leftist Urdu poet, humorist, travelogue writer, and columnist. He is regarded as one of the best humorists in Urdu. His writing has a distinctive diction laced with language reminiscent of Amir Khusro in its use of words and construction. He was associated with several governmental services including Radio Pakistan, Ministry of Culture, and National Book Centre of Paksitan.

"I intend to do everything...I shall anticipate pleasure everywhere and find it too, for it is everywhere! I shall involve myself wholly...everything matters!" This first selection from Susan Sontag's diaries (from 1947-1963) takes us from early adolescence through to when Sontag was in her early 30s. It is an astonishingly affecting and honest self-portrait which is also a fascinating, revealing account of an artist and critic being born. We see Sontag honing her skills and fashioning herself, by a supreme act of will, into an intellectual force.

May Sarton's parrot chatters away as Sarton looks out the window at the rain and contemplates returning to her "real" life - not friends, not even love, but writing. In her bravest and most revealing memoir, Sarton casts her keenly observant eye on both the interior and exterior worlds. She shares insights about everyday life in the quiet New Hampshire village of Nelson, the desire for friends, and need for solitude - both an exhilarating and terrifying state.

Following the success of her debut crime thriller The Dry, Jane Harper talks to Audible about the path that lead her to become a celebrated novelist and her approach to writing a best-selling debut. We explore the socio-political issues raised within the novel and discuss the much anticipated film adaptation, now in development. Tune in for this and a taste of what is to come from Jane and her protagonist, Aaron Falk.

Rutger Bregman joins Gabriel Fleming in the Audible Studios to discuss his latest best-selling publication, Utopia for Realists. Rutger Bregman is one of Europe's most prominent young thinkers. At 29, he is a historian and an author with four books already under his belt, not to mention a regular spot on the revered online journalism platform The Correspondent and publications in The Washington Post and The Guardian.

The first full-length biography of the Nobel laureate to appear in a quarter century, Mad at the World illuminates what has made the work of John Steinbeck an enduring part of the literary canon: his capacity for empathy. Angered by the plight of the Dust Bowl migrants who were starving even as they toiled to harvest California's limitless bounty and appalled by the country's refusal to recognize the humanity common to all of its citizens, Steinbeck took a stand against social injustice - paradoxically given his inherent misanthropy.

A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India. Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man, and a deluded American religious seeker.

’n Baie lang brief aan my dogter is Marita van der Vyver, een van Afrikaans se mees geliefde skrywers, se ontroerende jeugmemoires. Dit is 'n speurtog deur die skrywer se beginjare, maar dit is ook ’n liefdesbrief aan ’n dogter en ’n taal en ’n land. En bowenal is dit ’n ma se poging om sin te maak van hierdie onverskillige en wrede wêreld waarin sy haar nou begewe.

YouTube sensation, Les Mis actress and author of All I Know Now, Carrie Hope Fletcher talks to Robin Morgan about her first ever fiction book, On the Other Side.

Get Changed is for the countless women out there who are wondering whether they know who they are anymore. Loss of identity is an experience all too familiar to Instagram style guru and professional stylist Kat Farmer. In her own life, she found that fashion helped her regenerate herself and rediscover her confidence. In Get Changed, Kat's authentic down-to-earth voice, trademark humour and insights into some of her personal anxieties make you feel like she's right there in the room with you.

Hugh Fraser is a man of many talents. He will probably be best known to you as an actor; he played Captin Hastings to David Suchet’s Poirot on over forty occasions. But he’s also been a musician and a composer and now, having narrated over 90 Agatha Christie audiobooks, he’s writing his own crime fiction. Hugh visits the Audible Studios to discuss his crime series, his pedigree as an audiobook narrator, and his time starring in the Inspector Maigret TV adaptations.

Georgia O'Keeffe, one of the most original painters America has ever produced, left behind a remarkable legacy when she died at the age of 98. Her vivid visual vocabulary, sensuous flowers, bleached bones against red sky and earth, had a stunning, profound, and lasting influence on American art in this century.

Philip K. Dick was a visionary writer. From post-apocalyptic San Francisco to Nazi-occupied America, his strange alternative futures have transfixed the world. But his life was every bit as unusual as his fiction. A Life of Philip K Dick opens a window into PKD's unique mind. Written with close cooperation with two of his ex-wives and a number of his friends, we are taken through his five marriages, his periods living in squalor, and his souring literary success. We are also given unparalleled insight into his transcendental experiences.