Showing titles in Authors

Jane Austen is a mystery. The first incontrovertibly great woman novelist, she is, among other things, one of the finest prose stylists in literature; the first truly modern writer, the godmother of chick lit. She is also the greatest enigma (next to Shakespeare) in English literature. Soldiers in the First World War sat in the trenches and read her novels for the civilising comforts they provided. Hard-nut literary critics such as F. R. Leavis lauded their austere complexity.

A moving and illuminating memoir about the life of world-famous author and historian Iris ChangIris Chang's best-selling book, The Rape of Nanking, forever changed the way we view the Second World War in Asia. It all began with a photo of a river choked with the bodies of hundreds of Chinese civilians that shock Iris to her core. Who were these people? Why had this happened and how could their story have been lost to history? She could not shake that image from her head.

In this Very Short Introduction Ritchie Robertson covers the life and work of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749-1832): scientist, administrator, artist, art critic, and supreme literary writer in a vast variety of genres. Looking at Goethe's poetry, novels, and drama pieces, as well as his travel writing, autobiography, and essays on art and aesthetics, Robertson analyzes some of the key themes in his works: love, nature, religion, and tragedy.

Byron, more than any other poet, has come to personify the poet as rebel; imaginative and lawless, reaching beyond race, creed or frontier, his notorious flaws redeemed by a magnetism and ultimately a heroism that by ending in tragedy raised it and him from the particular to the universal. Everything about Lord George Gordon Byron was a paradox - insider and outsider, beautiful and deformed, serious and facetious, profligate but on occasion miserly and possessed of a fierce intelligence trapped forever in a child's magic and malices.

Marilynne Robinson discusses her Pulitzer Prize-winning and New York Times best-selling second novel, the lyrical, luminous, unforgettable story of minister John Ames, as told poetically in a long letter to his young son. His powerful story spans three generations from the Civil War to the twentieth century. This is a book that is being passed hand to hand and that booksellers nationwide are recommending.

Inventory of a Life Mislaid follows Marina Warner’s beautiful, penniless young mother Ilia as she leaves southern Italy in 1945 to travel alone to London. Her husband, an English colonel, is still away in the war in the East as she begins to learn how to be Mrs Esmond Warner, an Englishwoman.

1917. Virginia Woolf arrives at Asheham, on the Sussex Downs, immobilized by nervous exhaustion and creative block. 1930. Feeling jittery about her writing career, Sylvia Townsend Warner spots a modest workman’s cottage for sale on the Dorset coast. 1941. Rosamond Lehmann settles in a Berkshire village, seeking a lovers’ retreat, a refuge from war, and a means of becoming ‘a writer again’. Rural Hours tells the story of three very different women, each of whom moved to the country and were forever changed by it.

The story of the Brontë family is one of incredible romance, immense genius, and haunting sadness. From humble beginnings in Ireland the Rev. Patrick Brontë rose to the very heart of the reforming evangelical movement of the 19th century. In The Brontës: Veins Running Fire, Derick Bingham seeks to trace the influence of Patrick Brontë's unfaltering evangelical faith on the lives and work of all his children. Here is faith in the face of unremitting tragedy, imagination soaring out of pitiful sadness and doubt vying with hope for dominance.

"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.

His best stories are the stories of his life. His father grew up in a New York poorhouse called the 'Pogie'. He worked at a psychiatric hospital where he met the singer James Taylor and the poet Robert Lowell. Both were patients. He was at Woodstock and was also an usher at the Fillmore East. He was CEO of advertising agency J. Walter Thompson North America when he was thirty-seven. He wrote the ad jingle, 'I'm a Toys 'R' Us Kid'. He once watched Norman Mailer and James Baldwin square off to fight. He's played golf with three US presidents and has nine holes-in-one.

The rich life Sir Arthur Conan Doyle (1859-1930) is featured here: His work as a doctor, his novels and journalistic writings, his support of Spiritualism and his defense of fairies. This is a unique set for the 150th anniversary of his birth. After his early years in medicine, the writing talents of Arthur Conan Doyle took over. Sherlock Holmes and Professor Challenger were among his successes.

Quarantined in a southwestern desert city in the midst of her high-risk pregnancy, Margo Steines felt her life narrow around her growing body, compelling her to reckon with the violence entangled in its history. She was a professional dominatrix in New York City, a homestead farmer in a brutal relationship, a welder on a high-rise building crew, and a Mixed Martial Arts enthusiast; each of her many lives brought a new vantage point from which to see how power and masculinity coalesce—and how her body paid the price.

What is it like to be old? Diana Athill, born in 1917, made her reputation as a writer with the candour of her memoirs. In Somewhere Towards the End she reflects frankly on the losses and occasionally the gains that old age brings, and on the wisdom and fortitude required to face death. This is a lively narrative of events, lovers and friendships: the people and experiences that have taight her to regret very little, to resist despondency and to question the beliefs and customs of her own generation.

Wie kann man über Thomas Mann heute schreiben? So: geistreich, komisch und mit lässigem Ernst. SAA STANII. Los Angeles in den 1940er-Jahren: Die Westküste ist ein Traumort, die Exilanten aus Europa trauen ihren Sinnen nicht, das Farbenspiel, das Licht, das Meer. Hier sind sie alle gestrandet, die im Deutschland der Nationalsozialisten keine Heimat mehr haben oder haben wollen: Arnold Schönberg, Vicki Baum, Theodor W. Adorno, Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger, Helene Weigel, Max Horkheimer, Hanns Eisler, Franz und Alma Werfel und allen voran: Thomas Mann.

On 10th June 2020, the scholar James Nwoye Adichie died suddenly in Nigeria. In this tender and powerful essay, expanded from the original New Yorker text, his daughter, a self-confessed daddy's girl, remembers her beloved father. Notes on Grief is at once a tribute to a long life of grace and wisdom, the story of a daughter's fierce love for a parent and a revealing examination of the layers of loss and the nature of grief.

The Aeneid stands as a towering work of Classical Roman literature and a gripping dramatization of the best and worst of human nature. In the process of creating this epic poem, Vergil (70–19 BCE) became the world’s first media celebrity, a living legend. But the real Vergil is a shadowy figure. Sarah Ruden, widely praised for her translation of the Aeneid, uses evidence from Roman life and history alongside Vergil’s own writings to make careful deductions to reconstruct the life of Rome’s greatest poet.

In interviews ranging from 1972 to 1989, Roald Dahl talks about writing for children, his medical inventions to aid his ailing son and wife (the actress Patricia Neal) when they were seriously ill and writing his short stories. He also covers his school days, military service, writing for films (including Chitty Chitty Bang Bang) and the link between cruelty and laughter.

Martina Cole joins Robin Morgan in the Audible Studios to discuss her latest book, Betrayal, the inspiration behind her writing, and the house that she dedicates to her significant book collection!

Hunter S. Thompson is often misremembered as a wise-cracking, drug-addled cartoon character. This book reclaims him for what he truly was: a fearless opponent of corruption and fascism, one who sacrificed his future well-being to fight against it, rewriting the rules of journalism and political satire in the process. This skillfully told and dramatic story shows how Thompson saw through Richard Nixon's treacherous populism and embarked on a life-defining campaign to stop it.

The goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky and a graduate of Hollywood High, Eve Babitz posed in 1963, at age 20, playing chess with the French artist Marcel Duchamp. She was naked; he was not. The photograph made her an instant icon of art and sex. Babitz spent the rest of the decade rocking and rolling on the Sunset Strip, honing her notoriety. There were the album covers she designed: for Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds, to name but a few. There were the men she seduced: Jim Morrison, Ed Ruscha, Harrison Ford, to name but a very few.