Showing titles in Art & Literature

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.

Dive into Tove Jansson's spellbinding memoir and be transported to early 20th-century Helsinki where you'll experience the magic and fears of a childhood infused with the freedom and natural beauty of Finland. Hailed by Ali Smith for its evocative prose, Jansson's memoir unveils the enchantments of a world where winter ice is a playground of mysteries, balalaika parties radiate warmth, and Christmas takes on epic proportions when viewed from a child's eyes.

Imagine you're at a dinner party with some of the most successful authors of our time. "Book Mama" and Beautiful Writers Podcast cocreator Linda Sivertsen is the host. As she shares her story of the many hilarious, outrageous, and practical things she did to launch her bestselling writing career, your favorite writers chime in with their own anecdotes, leaving you enlightened and newly inspired. The wisdom in this book will nourish anyone who appreciates the art of storytelling and dreams of living a creative life.

Elizabeth Bishop has been described as the "best-loved" poet in English of the second half of the twentieth century. This Very Short Introduction explores the ninety or so published poems that are at the core of her remarkable canon of verse. Drawing on biographical and critical material, Jonathan Post also makes frequent use of Bishop's letters and commentary by fellow poets. Throughout, Post places Bishop's lyric poetry alongside her other poetic genres, short stories, and translations within the context of her life and aesthetic values, showing how these shaped her work.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of Charlotte Brontë: A Life written and read by Claire Harman. Raised motherless on remote Yorkshire moors, watching five beloved siblings sicken and die, haunted by unrequited love: Charlotte Brontë's life has all the drama and tragedy of the great Gothic novels it inspired. Charlotte was a literary visionary, a feminist trailblazer and the driving force behind the whole Brontë family.

The epitaph John Keats composed for his own gravestone - 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water' - seemingly damned him to oblivion. When he died at the age of 25, having taken a battering from the conservative press, few critics imagined he would be considered one of the great English poets 200 years later, though he himself had an inkling. In this brief life, Lucasta Miller takes Keats' best-known poems - the ones you are most likely to have read - and excavates their backstories.

Laurie Lee was a poet, novelist and screenwriter renowned for his bestselling autobiographical trilogy Cider With Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and A Moment of War. Among the best loved memoirs in the English language, the books chart Lee’s life from his boyhood summers in a remote Cotswold village to joining the Republican International Brigade during the Spanish Civil War. Included here are dramatisations of the first two volumes, alongside a specially written radio play and four fascinating interview programmes.

As a true fashion insider, Kirstie Clements has seen trends come and go, from the sublime to the ridiculous, but she knows real style when she sees it - like a classic loafer that makes you feel comfortable in your own skin or a beautiful winter coat to take you through more than one season. In Why Did I Buy That?, Kirstie shares personal stories, musings on fashion trends and thoughts on everything from how to successfully edit your wardrobe to how to spend your money more wisely.

Ida B. Wells is an American icon of truth telling. Born to slaves, she was a pioneer of investigative journalism, a crusader against lynching, and a tireless advocate for suffrage, both for women and for African Americans. She cofounded the NAACP, started the Alpha Suffrage Club in Chicago, and was a leader in the early civil rights movement. This engaging memoir relates Wells’ private life as a mother as well as her public activities as a teacher, lecturer, and journalist in her fight for equality and justice.

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.

Award-winning author Helen Humphreys tells a beautiful tale in this brilliant memoir of the writing life as told through the dogs Humphreys has lived with and loved over a lifetime.

This is an audiobook about a poet, about a poem, about a city, and about a world at a point of change. More than a work of literary criticism or literary biography, it is a record of why and how we create and respond to great poetry. This an audiobook about a poet, W. H. Auden, a wunderkind, a victim-beneficiary of a literary cult of personality who became a scapegoat and a poet-expatriate largely excluded from British literary history because he left.

Born in Liverpool, Malik was taken into care at the age of nine after his seafaring father became paralysed. He would spend his adolescence in a system that proved violent, neglectful, exploitative, traumatising and mired in abuse. Aged 18, he emerged semi-literate, penniless with no connections or sense of where he was going - until a chance meeting with Gil Scott-Heron. Letters to Gil will tell the story of Malik’s empowerment and awakening while mentored by Gil, from his introduction to the legacy of Black history to the development of his voice through poetry and music.

Scritta tra il 1943 e il 1944, durante la sua militanza nel Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale, viene pubblicata nel 1945, a guerra ormai conclusa...

Published in their entirety, Sylvia Plath's journals provide an intimate portrait of the writer who was to produce in the last seven months of her life some of the most extraordinary poems of the 20th century. Faithfully transcribed from the 23 journals and journal fragments owned by Smith College, The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath includes two journals that Plath's husband, Ted Hughes, unsealed just before his death in 1998.

Generations of children have fallen in love with the pioneer saga of the Ingalls family, of Pa and Ma, Laura and her sisters, and their loyal dog. Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books have taught millions of Americans about frontier life, giving inspiration to many and in the process becoming icons of our national identity. Yet few realize that this best-selling series wandered far from the actual history of the Ingalls family and from what Laura herself understood to be central truths about pioneer life.

Burns highlights the two facets of Rand's work that make her a perennial draw for those on the right: Her promotion of capitalism, and her defense of limited government. Both sprang from her early, bitter experience of life under Communism, and became among the most deeply enduring of her messages, attracting a diverse audience of college students and intellectuals, business people and Republican Party activists, libertarians and conservatives.

During his lifetime, Buckminster Fuller was hailed as one of the greatest geniuses of the twentieth century. As the architectural designer and futurist best known for the geodesic dome, he enthralled a vast popular audience, inspired devotion from both the counterculture and the establishment, and was praised as a modern Leonardo da Vinci. To his admirers, he exemplified what one man could accomplish by approaching urgent design problems using a radically unconventional set of strategies, which he based on a mystical conception of the universe’s geometry.

As World War II approached, the six most powerful media moguls in America and Britain tried to pressure their countries to ignore the fascist threat. The media empires of Robert McCormick, Joseph and Eleanor Patterson, and William Randolph Hearst spanned the United States, reaching tens of millions of Americans in print and over the airwaves with their isolationist views.