Showing results by publisher "-emdashery books-" in Authors

When Chloe Hooper’s partner is diagnosed with a rare and aggressive illness, she has to find a way to tell their two young sons. By instinct, she turns to the bookshelf. Can the news be broken as a bedtime tale? Is there a perfect book to prepare children for loss?

In this dazzling memoir, the acclaimed writer behind Babylon 5, Sense8, Clint Eastwood’s Changeling, and Marvel’s Thor reveals how the power of creativity and imagination enabled him to overcome the horrors of his youth and a dysfunctional family haunted by madness, murder, and a terrible secret.

On August 5, 1949, a crew of 15 of the United States Forest Service's elite airborne firefighters, the Smokejumpers, stepped into the sky above a remote forest fire in the Montana wilderness. Two hours after their jump, all but three of these men were dead or mortally burned. Haunted by these deaths for 40 years, Norman Maclean puts back together the scattered pieces of the Mann Gulch tragedy.

Natalie Goldberg has been writing for the past fifty years. But at the beginning of the pandemic, she suddenly wasn’t able to write anymore. Her imaginative wellspring had dried up, and she was forced to ask herself: what do I do when what has always worked for me doesn’t work anymore? In this beautifully written, inspiring personal account, Natalie shares her harrowing journey out of creative paralysis and back onto the page.

After Unreliable Memoirs, Falling Towards England, and May Week Was in June comes the next instalment in the ongoing saga that is Clive James's life. His fourth volume of autobiography is every bit as eventful, entertaining, engrossing, and honest as the previous three.

“I do not want people to be very agreeable, as it saves me the trouble of liking them a great deal.” Jane Austen at her witty, observant, intelligent, and sympathetic best, in this collection of her letters written to family and friends. Compiled by her niece Fanny Knight’s son Edward Hugessen Knatchbull-Hugessen (the first Baron Brabourne), and edited by Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, this collection includes a preface written by the editor and notes from Lord Brabourne. It was originally published in 1892.

A famous autobiographical account of life as a young soldier in the first World War trenches. Robert Graves, who went on to write I, Claudius, has given to posterity here one of the all-time great insights into the experience of war.

Una exitosa periodista que durante muchos años ocultó un gran secreto. El de su familia. Una familia al mismo tiempo profundamente disfuncional y tremendamente viva, vibrante. El padre, Rex, es un hombre carismático y entusiasta, que logra transmitir a sus hijos la pasión por vivir. Les enseña física, geología, les cuenta historias. Pero Rex es alcohólico, y cuando está borracho se convierte en una persona destructiva y poco de fiar. La madre es un espíritu libre, una pintora muy orgullosa de su arte que aborrece la idea de una vida convencional.

Theroux began his career in America working on Michael Moore's TV Nation, and from this sprang his Weird Weekends (1998-2000) where Theroux spent time on porn sets, with swingers, body builders and white supremacists, to name but a few. Then came the hugely popular series When Louis Met..., in which Theroux spent time with the likes of Max Clifford, Chris Eubank and Jimmy Savile.

In his memoir Waypoints, Heughan digs into his Scottish heritage by hiking the West Highland Way, and along the journey he recounts the life and career events that have shaped him and his personal values. We spoke to Sam Heughan about the joys and trials of West Highland Way, his journey towards processing the absence of his dad, and how the creation of his Outlander family came at just the point he needed in his career.

Sometime religious outsider and social disaster, sometime celebrity preacher and establishment darling, John Donne was incapable of being just one thing. He was a scholar of law, a sea adventurer, an MP, a priest, the Dean of St Paul's Cathedral—and perhaps the greatest love poet in the history of the English language. He converted from Catholicism to Protestantism, was imprisoned for marrying a high-born girl without her father's consent, struggled to feed a family of 10 children and was often ill and in pain.

Since her death, Sylvia Plath (1932–1963) has become an endless source of fascination for a wide audience ranging from readers of The Bell Jar, her semiautobiographical novel, to her groundbreaking poetry as exemplified by Ariel. Beyond her writing, however, interest in Plath has also been fueled in part by the tragic nature of her death. As a result, a steady stream of biographies of Plath have appeared over the last fifty-five years that mainly focus on her death or contain projections of an array of points of view about the writer.

In five years, Jesmyn Ward lost five young men in her life - to drugs, accidents, suicide and the bad luck that can follow people who live in poverty, particularly Black men. Dealing with these losses, one after another, made Jesmyn ask the question: why? And as she began to write, she realised the truth - and it took her breath away. Her brother and her friends all died because of who they were and where they were from, because they lived with a history of racism and economic struggle that fostered drug addiction and the dissolution of family and relationships.

The Mitford family is one of the century's most enigmatic, made notorious by Nancy's novels, Diana's marriage to Sir Oswald Mosley, Unity's infatuation with Hitler, Debo's marriage to a duke and Jessica's passionate commitment to communism. Hons and Rebels is an enchanting and deeply absorbing memoir of an isolated and eccentric upbringing which conceals beneath its witty, lighthearted surface much wisdom and depth of feeling.

Dramatis Personae is a four part autobiographic collection, published by Yeats in 1936 and detailing incidents, events, and people he met who influenced his artistic development as a poet. The first section is Dramatis Personae and describes Yeats' meetings with Lady Augusta Gregory at Coole Park, Galway, which eventually led to the creation of the Irish National Theatre Society and the opening of the Abbey Theatre in 1904.

Upon her mother’s death from Alzheimer’s, Annie Ernaux embarks on a daunting journey back through time, as she seeks to “capture the real woman, the one who existed independently from me, born on the outskirts of a small Normandy town, and who died in the geriatric ward of a hospital in the suburbs of Paris.” She explores the bond between mother and daughter, tenuous and unshakable at once, the alienating worlds that separate them, and the inescapable truth that we must lose the ones we love.

From Leonardo Da Vinci to John Dee and Comenius, from George Eliot to Oliver Sacks and Susan Sontag, polymaths have moved the frontiers of knowledge in countless ways. But history can be unkind to scholars with such encyclopaedic interests. All too often these individuals are remembered for just one part of their valuable achievements. In this engaging, erudite account, renowned cultural historian Peter Burke argues for a more rounded view.

The comprehensive collection of letters spanning the adult life of one of the world’s greatest storytellers, now revised and expanded to include more than 150 previously unseen letters, with revealing new insights into The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.

Un viaggio appassionato e travolgente nella vita di ventuno personaggi straordinari, uomini e donne fuori dal comune per talento, fragilità, spregiudicatezza. Storie intense e incandescenti, raccontate con la maestria di chi sa andare oltre la superficie: storie che, se non facessero capo a eventi storici ben delineati, farebbero pensare al dominio del romanzo e della finzione, più che alla realtà. La tragica poesia di Marina Cvetaeva, la vita tormentata di Edgar Allan Poe, l'arte dirompente e oscura di Picasso, vampiro di anime.

Like millions of women, Eve Ensler has been waiting much of her lifetime for an apology. Sexually and physically abused by her father, Eve has struggled her whole life from this betrayal, longing for an honest reckoning from a man who is long dead. After years of work as an anti-violence activist, she decided she would wait no longer; an apology could be imagined, by her, for her, to her.