Showing titles in Art & Literature

It was one of the happiest and strangest marriages there has ever been. Both Vita and Harold were always in love with other people and each gave the other full liberty 'without enquiry or reproach', knowing that their love for each other would be unaffected and even strengthened by the crises which it survived. This account of their love story is now a modern classic.

In David Lipsky's view, David Foster Wallace was the best young writer in America. Wallace's pieces for Harper's magazine in the '90s were, according to Lipsky, like hearing for the first time the brain voice of everybody I knew: Here was how we all talked, experienced, thought. It was like smelling the damp in the air, seeing the first flash from a storm a mile away. You knew something gigantic was coming.

Before turning to her life of crime - running a one-woman forgery business out of a phone booth in a Greenwich Village bar and even dodging the FBI - Lee Israel had a legitimate career as an author of biographies. But by 1990, almost broke and desperate to hang onto her Upper West Side studio, Lee made a bold and irreversible career change: inspired by a letter she’d received once from Katharine Hepburn, and armed with her considerable skills as a researcher and celebrity biographer, she began to forge letters in the voices of literary greats.

Language of War is about what happens when your world changes overnight. When you wake up to the sound of helicopters and the smell of gunpowder. When your home is hit by shells or broken into by gunmen, and you spend another night in a basement-turned-bomb shelter. When, even though you’ve never held a weapon before, you realise the only choice is to fight back. It is about things one can never forget, or forgive.

Everyone knows Steve Madden's name and his shoes, but few are familiar with his story. Over the past 30 years, Steve Madden has taken his eponymous shoe company from the fledgling start-up he founded with a mere $1,100 to a global, multibillion-dollar brand. But Madden's mistakes, from his battle with addiction to the financial shortcuts that landed him in prison, are as important to his story as his most iconic shoes. In this raw, intimate, and ultimately inspiring book, Madden holds nothing back as he shares what it took to get here and the lessons he's learned along the way.

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.

The visionary poet and painter William Blake is a constant presence throughout contemporary culture - from video games to novels, from sporting events to political rallies and from horror films to designer fashion. Although he died nearly 200 years ago, something about his work continues to haunt the 21st century. What is it about Blake that has so endured? In this illuminating essay, John Higgs takes us on a whirlwind tour to prove that far from being the mere New Age counterculture figure that many assume him to be, Blake is now more relevant than ever.

Picasso has often been called the greatest artist of this century. This biography defines his greatness: his accomplishment and versatility as a painter, sculptor, graphic artist, ceramicist, and designer. Most of the innovations in 20th century art are associated not only with his work but with the legend he built of himself as the quintessential modern artist.

Morrie Schwartz, the beloved subject of the classic, multimillion-copy number one bestseller Tuesdays with Morrie, explores these questions and many more in this profound, poetic and poignant masterpiece of living and aging joyfully and creatively. Later life can be filled with many challenges, but it can also be one of the most beautiful and rewarding passages in anyone's lifetime. Morrie draws on his experiences as a social psychologist, teacher, father, friend and sage to offer us a road map to navigate our futures.

In Sometimes the Magic Works, New York Times best-selling author Terry Brooks shares his secrets for creating unusual, memorable fiction. Spanning topics from the importance of daydreaming to the necessity of writing an outline, from the fine art of showing instead of merely telling to creating believable characters who make readers care what happens to them, Brooks draws upon his own experiences, hard lessons learned, and delightful discoveries made.

In A Girl's Story, Annie Ernaux revisits a night 50 years earlier when she found herself submerged and controlled by another person's desire and willpower. It was the summer of 1958, the year she turned 18, and the man she had given herself to had moved on. She'd submitted her will to his and then found that she was a slave without a master.

Katharine Smyth was a student when she first read Virginia Woolf's modernist masterpiece To the Lighthouse in the comfort of an English sitting room, and in the companionable silence she shared with her father. After his death - a calamity that claimed her favourite person - she returned to that beloved novel as a way of understanding her own grief. Smyth's story moves between the New England of her childhood and Woolf's Cornish shores and Bloomsbury squares, exploring universal questions about family, loss and homecoming.

Barely educated and valued since childhood strictly for his labor, Ernaux's father had grown into a hard, practical man who showed his family little affection. Narrating his slow ascent towards material comfort, Ernaux's cold observation reveals the shame that haunted her father throughout his life. She scrutinizes the importance he attributed to manners and language that came so unnaturally to him as he struggled to provide for his family with a grocery store and cafe in rural France.

In this disarming and gently self-deprecating collection of vignettes about ageing, Lily Brett gives us snapshots of her everyday life in New York. After waving enthusiastically to a tall, grey-haired woman she has mistaken for her husband and avoiding a large dog that turns out to be a fire hydrant, Lily has to concede that her ophthalmologist is right: she does need cataract surgery.

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.

K. L. Slater joins Claire O'Neill in the Audible Studios to discuss her latest book, Blink.

How did a photographer who was a relentless playboy, an unashamed womaniser and a leather-clad motorcyclist marry the queen's sister and become the establishment figure Lord Snowdon? The brilliantly talented Antony Armstrong-Jones often humiliated Princess Margaret, yet he was compassionate to the causes he cared about. Since his death in 2017, Snowdon still hasn't escaped the limelight, as more and more is revealed about his wild and intriguing life.

Keith Brymer Jones is the star presenter and judge of Channel 4's The Great Pottery Throw Down, famous for his emotional responses to the heartfelt and personal pieces made by contestants on the show. He is also the ultimate professional craftsman who's done the hard yards to get where he is today, working his way up from being a skivvy in an industrial pottery to running his own hugely successful international ceramics business.

In 1926, Henry Beston spent two weeks in a two-room cottage on the sand dunes of Cape Cod. He had not intended to stay longer, but, as he later wrote, "I lingered on, and as the year lengthened into autumn, the beauty and mystery of this earth and outer sea so possessed and held me that I could not go."

Dedicated to the memory of two wrestling coaches and two writer friends, The Imaginary Girlfriend is John Irving's candid memoir of his twin careers in writing and wrestling. The award-winning author of best-selling novels from The World According to Garp to In One Person, Irving began writing when he was 14, the same age at which he began to wrestle at Exeter. He competed as a wrestler for 20 years, was certified as a referee at 24, and coached the sport until he was 47.