Showing results by publisher "Tantor Media" in Authors

A Writer Prepares, an examination of the first quarter century of one writer's life, is arguably the work of two writers. There's the middle-aged fellow who wrote about half of it at a blistering pace in 1994, and there's the octogenarian who finished the job another quarter century later. The older fellow brought less raw energy to the task, and his memory is a long way from infallible, but one can only hope he's offset these losses with a slight edge in judgment, in perspective, in maturity.

The Life of the Author: William Shakespeare delivers a fresh and exciting new take on the life of William Shakespeare, offering listeners a biography that brings to the foreground his working life as a poet, playwright, and actor. It also explores the nature of his relationships with his friends, colleagues, and family and asks important questions about the stories we tell about Shakespeare based on the evidence we actually have about the man himself.

Frances Hodgson Burnett's favorite theme in her fiction was the reversal of fortune, and she herself knew extremes of poverty and wealth. Born in Manchester in 1849, she emigrated with her family to Tennessee because of the financial problems caused by the cotton famine. From a young age she published her stories to help the family make ends meet. Only after she married did she publish Little Lord Fauntleroy that shot her into literary stardom.

FATHER AND SON ISSUES: The Secret History of Spider-Man is the true story of someone with a great power, and a great responsibility. That man, artist John Romita, was the best comics artist no one had ever heard of. After Spider-Man's creators had a falling out, Jazzy John (as Stan Lee called him) had to become the new tale-spinner for the web-spinner.

Beloved by children and adults worldwide, the writings of C. S. Lewis have a broad and enduring appeal. Although he is best known for the iconic Chronicles of Narnia series, C. S. Lewis was actually a man of many literary parts.

Lord Byron was the most celebrated of all the Romantic poets. Troubled, handsome, sexually fluid, disabled, and transgressive, he wrote his way to international fame—and scandal—before finding a kind of redemption in the Greek Revolution. He also left behind the vast trove of thrilling letters (to friends, relatives, lovers, and more) that form the core of this remarkable biography.

In this revelatory biography of one of Canada's most internationally celebrated writers, Mary Henley Rubio looks far beyond Montgomery's own published journals and draws on years of primary research and interviews, as well as a wealth of previously undiscovered material. The result is an account of a fascinating life that is certain to surprise. This comprehensive account of Montgomery's life, all set in rich social context, has taken its place as the definitive biography of this Canadian literary icon.

The long-awaited memoir from one of the most acclaimed radical writers in American literature. Gary Indiana is a true radical whose caustic voice has by turns haunted and influenced the literary and artistic establishments. With I Can Give You Anything but Love, Gary has composed literary and revealing montage of excursions into his life and work—from his early days growing up gay in rural New Hampshire to his escape to Haight-Ashbury in the post-summer-of-love era, the sweltering 1970s in Los Angeles, and ultimately his existence in New York in the 1980s as a bona fide downtown personality.

Acclaimed Irish novelist Colm Tóibín first read James Baldwin just after turning eighteen. He had completed his first year at an Irish university and was struggling to free himself from a religious upbringing. Inspired by the novel Go Tell It on the Mountain, Tóibín found a writer who would be a lifelong companion and exemplar.

Because Plath drew so heavily on her own life in both her poetry and her fiction, the outlines of her life are familiar to listeners. Like most writers, Plath changed the facts of her life in her writing. In her determination to be both wife and mother, on the one hand, and teacher and writer on the other, Plath tried simultaneously to fulfill and to fight the conventions that bound women in the 1950s. In this biography, the first to draw on unpublished journals and letters recently made available, Wagner-Martin examines the ironies, contradictions, and achievements of Plath's life.

Quintus Horatius Flaccus (65-8 BCE) wrote some of ancient Rome's greatest poetry, melding languages and cultures with youthful ideals and a realist's recognition of the dictatorial world around him. Horace is famed for his fine phrases, lyric sex, and guidance on how to live, but he was a poet maddened by war, and many of his most self-revealing poems have rarely been seen. He could be sublime and obscene, amusing and abusive, a model of moderation and anything but.

During the late 1950s through the early 1970s, Helen Hoover's stories and essays of life in the wilderness on northern Minnesota's Gunflint Lake, published in popular magazines and several bestselling books, found millions of fans and earned her accolades. Hoover's own unlikely history of leaving a corporate career in Chicago for a small cabin without electricity or running water—with no interest in hunting or fishing—is just one chapter of the remarkable life that David Hakensen describes in Her Place in the Woods.

Émile Zola was the leader of the literary movement known as "naturalism" and is one of the great figures of the novel. In his monumental Les Rougon-Macquart (1871-93), he explored the social and cultural landscape of the late 19th century in ways that scandalized bourgeois society. Zola opened the novel up to a new realm of subjects, including the realities of working-class life, class relations, and questions of gender and sexuality, and his writing embodied a new freedom of expression, with his bold, outspoken voice often inviting controversy.

After serving in the First World War, Milne wrote a number of well-received plays, but his greatest triumph came when he created Winnie-the-Pooh, Piglet, Tigger, Eeyore, and, of course, Christopher Robin, the adventurous little boy based on his own son. Goodbye Christopher Robin inspired the film directed by Simon Curtis and starring Domhnall Gleeson, Margot Robbie, and Kelly Macdonald. It offers the listener a glimpse into the relationship between Milne and the real-life Christopher Robin, whose toys inspired the magical world of the Hundred Acre Wood.

Casting new light on one of the first modern self-identifying witches in the US, Jason Mankey invites you deep into Buckland's life. Known for bringing Wicca to America and sharing it through his writing, Buckland penned more than forty titles, placing him among the most prolific occult authors of all time.

Agatha Christie is a global bestseller. Her work has been translated into over 100 languages and adapted for stage and screen. Christie's writing life ran from 1920 to the 1970s, and she didn't just write puzzles, she wrote plays, supernatural stories, thrillers, satires, and domestic noir. She...

A classic portrait of immigrant life in the early decades of the twentieth century, A Walker in the City is a tour of tenements, subways, and synagogues—but also a universal story of the desires and fears we experience as we try to leave our small, familiar neighborhoods for something new.

For almost two centuries after his death, Shakespeare had no biography. The makings of one were not available. No chronology had been devised by which to coordinate the events in his life with the writing of his works. Nor was there an archive of primary materials on which to base a life. And the only work by Shakespeare written in the first person, the Sonnets, had yet to be critically edited and incorporated into the canon. Without a biography, how could Shakespeare have been valued and understood?

The only place in the United States that Hemingway could really call home after he started writing was the tropical island of Key West. During his decade here in the 1930s, he acquired his famed macho persona as Papa, the biggest Big Daddy of them all. This vivid portrait of Ernest Hemingway's Key West reveals both Hemingway, the writer, and Hemingway, the macho, hard-drinking sportsman. His Key West years turned out to be his most productive: he finished A Farewell to Arms, started For Whom the Bell Tolls, and wrote several other books, including Green Hills of Africa.

Ghost of the Hardy Boys is a fascinating, funny, and always charming look back at a vanished era of journalism, writing, and book publishing. It is for anyone who's curious about solving the mystery of the fascinating man behind one of the most widely read and enduring children's book series in history.