Showing titles in Memoirs, Diaries & Correspondence

On January 25, 2020, after the central government imposed a lockdown in Wuhan, acclaimed Chinese writer Fang Fang began publishing an online diary. In the days and weeks that followed, Fang Fang's nightly postings gave voice to the fears, frustrations, anger and hope of millions of her fellow citizens, reflecting on the psychological impact of forced isolation, the role of the internet as both community lifeline and source of misinformation and most tragically, the lives of neighbours and friends taken by the deadly virus.

A collection of Jackson's letters from prison, Soledad Brother is an outspoken condemnation of the racism of white America and a powerful appraisal of the prison system that failed to break his spirit but eventually took his life. Jackson's letters make palpable the intense feelings of anger and rebellion that filled Black men in America's prisons in the 1960s. But even removed from the social and political firestorms of the 1960s, Jackson's story still resonates for its portrait of a man taking a stand even while locked down.

Bruce Lee: Letters of the Dragon is a fascinating glimpse of the private Bruce Lee behind the public image—a man with the patience and concern to dedicate as much effort to crafting a thoughtful personal answer to the letter of a young fan as to those from his old friends and associates; an extremely active man never too busy to make time for an old family friend in need of simple companionship; a man who never wrote without careful thought, and never thought from the head alone, but always from the head and heart together.

As chief advisor to the emperor Nero, Lucius Annaeus Seneca was most influential in ancient Rome as a power behind the throne. His lasting fame derives from his writings on Stoic ideology, in which philosophy is a practical form of self-improvement rather than a matter of argument or wordplay. Seneca's letters to a young friend advise action rather than reflection, addressing the issues that confront every generation: how to achieve a good life; how to avoid corruption and self-indulgence; and how to live without fear of death.

This is Christopher back to his original and best - exploring the downright creepy correspondence with murderers, serial killers and psychopaths behind bars, with exclusive scans of letters and eerily designed envelopes.

The extant letters of Pliny, written between AD 97 and 112, give us a unique insight into Imperial Rome under the early Antonine emperors. Organised into 10 books, the letters reflect a wide range of topics, mirroring Pliny’s own public and private interests. Among many other subjects, the letters also include an eye-witness account of the eruption of Vesuvius in AD 79, with the final book containing the exchange of letters between the writer (whose career culminated as Governor of Bithynia) and the emperor Trajan.

In 2012, Beck Dorey-Stein was just scraping by in Washington, DC, when a posting on Craigslist landed her, improbably, in the Oval Office as one of Barack Obama's stenographers. She joined the elite team who accompanied the president wherever he went, recorder and mic in hand. On whirlwind trips across time zones, Beck forged friendships with a tight group of fellow travellers - young men and women who, like her, left their real lives behind to hop aboard Air Force One in service of the president.

A born storyteller, Charlie May's vivid eye for detail and warm good humour brings his experience in the trenches to life for a 21st-century audience. A journalist before the war and a born storyteller, May's diaries give a vivid picture of battalion life in and behind the trenches during the build-up to the greatest battle fought by a British army and are filled with the friendships and tensions, the home-sickness, frustrations, the fog of ignorance, the combination of boredom and terror to which every man that has ever fought could testify.

Mary fears she’s losing the two people she most admires—her lover and her father—after she’s lost her reputation. She regains them with the publication of Frankenstein. As Scott is crafting his biography of the Shelleys and Godwins a century later, he fears that he’s losing his audience and his wife. He regains them with the publication of his other “work” he’s authoring at the same—The Great Gatsby. As eternal celebrities of Western culture—the Shelleys, the Godwins, and the Fitzgeralds—their brief victories are dramatically retold in What Light Was as dialogues, verse, and meditations.

In Letters of Note: Art, Shaun Usher celebrates extraordinary correspondence about art, from missives on the agony of being overlooked, the ecstasy of producing work that excites, to surprising sources of inspiration and rousing manifestos. A star-studded cast of readers brings the letters to life, with contributions from Sanjeev Bhaskar, Louise Brealey, Simon Callow, Crystal Clarke, Benedict Cumberbatch, Stephen Fry, Neil Gaiman, Toby Jones, Ferdinand Kingsley, Jude Law, Helen McCrory, Stephen Mangan, Clarke Peters, Juliet Stevenson, Mark Strong and Meera Syal.

In Tales from the Farm by the Yorkshire Shepherdess, Amanda takes listeners on an evocative journey to Ravenseat, where she lives with husband Clive and their nine children, not to mention their flock of sheep, herd of cows, hardworking dogs and a formidable chicken called Linda.

Nguyen Nhat Anh's journal does not just discuss Quang noodles. He said everything in the sky under the pool. From food to calligraphy, from theater to movie, from home to office, from supermarket to street, from Saigon to the West...He discusses everything: From big and small, from fake goods to Hollywood uprising, from Cophaco fans to Ba Tieu fans...He also likes everything: From reading advertisements to listening to reforms on the Tien River, from watching football to watching flowers dig in paintings, then "chat"...

When actress and activist Brittany Snow was a teenager, she read an article about another woman’s hardship that made her feel seen and less alone. She carried that story in her back pocket for a long time. This experience was a gift that Brittany then paid forward when she revealed her own experience in a published article. Brittany’s story resonated with a young reader, who kept that story in her back pocket, where it was when the two crossed paths serendipitously.

Beginning with Nin's arrival in New York, this volume is filled with the stories of her analytical patients. There is a shift in emphasis also, as Nin becomes aware of the inevitable choice facing the artist in the modern world.

Letter to My Younger Self is back with another incredible selection of letters from well-known figures. In this edition, interviewer Jane Graham asks one simple question to a wide range of women from the worlds of entertainment, politics, food, sport, literature and business. This collection of 50 of the most moving, inspiring and honest letters includes Fearne Cotton on battling imposter syndrome, Billie Piper on feeling burnt out, Dame Kelly Holmes on not giving up, Nancy Sinatra on marrying young and so much more.

A work that has inspired generations, this new edition of Letters to a Young Poet features a fresh translation of Rilke's 10 classic letters, along with the missing letters from the young poet himself.

In October of 1949, a few months after publication of George Orwell‘s masterpiece, Nineteen Eighty-Four, he received a letter from fellow author Aldous Huxley, a man who, 17 years previous, had seen his own nightmarish vision of society published in the form of the classic, Brave New World. What begins as a letter of praise soon becomes a brief comparison of the two novels, and an explanation as to why Huxley believes his own earlier work to be a more realistic prediction

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 BC-AD 65), also known as Seneca the Younger, was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist from the Silver Age of Latin literature. This edition of Seneca's Epistles includes all 124 of the letters in a single volume, with explanatory notes, an appendix, and an index of the names occurring in the text. The letters were written by Seneca during his retirement and sent to his friend Lucilius Junior, a procurator of Sicily.

Over 10 years ago, The Big Issue began to ask some of the best known, most interesting and most successful figures in entertainment, politics, food, sport and business to give advice, offer hope and share a few jokes with their younger selves. They opened up, in ways they never had, to interviewer Jane Graham, reflecting on their lives and themselves with affection, sympathy and sometimes disbelief.

From the critically acclaimed Colum McCann, author of the National Book Award winner Let the Great World Spin, comes a paean to the power of language, and a direct address to the artistic, professional and philosophical concerns that challenge and sometimes torment an author. Comprising fifty-two short prose pieces, Letters to a Young Writer ranges from practical matters of authorship, such as finding an agent, the pros and cons of creative writing degrees and handling bad reviews