Showing titles in Letters & Correspondence

In Letters of Note: Dogs, Shaun Usher brings together a delightful collection of correspondence about our canine friends, featuring affectionate accounts of pups’ playful misdemeanours, heartfelt tributes to loyal fidos and shared tales of remarkable hounds.

For almost fifty years Michael Harding has been crafting words in a bid to express himself and explore truths about the human condition. But even still he found himself unable to say certain things he really wanted to. Then, while in recovery from surgery, he travelled to a cottage on the Atlantic coast and thought again about life and the people who had profoundly affected him; mentors, lovers and old friends. There at the ocean he wrote letters, with an intimacy not previously risked. Letters that were never posted, but that appear now in this audiobook.

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.

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.

A Man of Letters traces the life, career, and commentaries on controversial issues of Thomas Sowell over a period of more than four decades through his letters to and from family, friends, and public figures ranging from Milton Friedman to Clarence Thomas, David Riesman, Arthur Ashe, William Proxmire, Vernon Jordan, Charles Murray, Shelby Steele, and Condoleezza Rice. These letters begin with Sowell as a graduate student at the University of Chicago in 1960 and conclude with a reflective letter to his fellow economist and longtime friend Walter Williams in 2005.

Ranier Maria Rilke challenges you, "...to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps then, someday far in the future, you will gradually, without even noticing it, live your way into the answers." Rilke's ability to combine the sensual and the spiritual into an inspired vision of the art of living is brought to vivid life in his letters. Through his eyes, the everyday difficulties of love, sex, solitude, sadness, and doubt are seen as the archetypal elements of the drama called life.

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.

Edward "Ned" Kelly (1854 -1880) was the last and most celebrated Australian bushranger (outlaw). After being implicated in the shooting of three policemen at Stringybark Creek in October, 1878, Kelly and his gang were declared by the Victorian government to be outlaws, and were the subjects of an extensive manhunt over the next two years.

In 1922 Agatha Christie set sail on a 10-month voyage around the British Empire with her husband as part of a trade mission to promote the forthcoming British Empire Exhibition. Leaving her two-year-old daughter behind with her sister, Agatha set sail at the end of January and did not return until December, but she kept up a detailed weekly correspondence with her mother, describing in detail the exotic places and people she encountered as the mission travelled through South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Hawaii and Canada.

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.

This letter is the closest that Kafka came to setting down his autobiography. He was driven to write it by his father's opposition to his engagement with Julie Wohryzek. The marriage did not take place; the letter was not delivered.

Now in the pantheon of great thinkers, Simone Weil (1909–1943) lived largely in the shadows, searching for her spiritual home while bearing witness to the violence that devastated Europe twice in her brief lifetime. The letters she wrote to her parents and brother from childhood onward chart her intellectual range as well as her itinerancy and ever-shifting preoccupations, revealing the singular personality at the heart of her brilliant essays. The first complete collection of Weil's missives to her family, A Life in Letters offers new insight into her personal relationships and experiences.

The deepest currents of passion seldom break the surface of literature. Romantic classics abound; but however skilled a writer may be in verbalising an emotional experience, he cannot publicly evoke the heat of blood, the yearning of soul, bared in perfect intimacy between two beings. But letters can do this, and songs never meant to be sung by any but the lover, or the beloved.

One of France's greatest writers, Voltaire was frequently persecuted for his ideas and as a result, spent time in the famed Bastille. He fled his native land for England in 1726, at which time he witnessed the differences between the two countries. His celebrated Letters on England was first published in that nation in 1733 and contained 24 succinct letters on subjects ranging from religion and politics, to trade, the arts, philosophy, and science.

These letters, in the form of a frank and amusing diary, were written by a private in Wellington's army who fought throughout the Napoleonic Wars. Private Wheeler's record covers the Peninsular Campaign, keeping order during the coronation of Louis XVIII (whom he called 'an old bloated poltroon') and his later posting to Corfu.

History cannot be relived, but thanks to a tradition that spans millennia, we can revisit it in the letters of the people who influenced or witnessed the moments it changed forever. In Written In History, acclaimed historian Simon Sebag Montefiore selects some of the greatest letters ever written from ancient times to the 20th century: declarations of war, petitions for peace, diplomatic entanglements, steamy love letters and beyond.

This collection of letters forms a fascinating day-by-day account of Steinbeck's writing of East of Eden, his longest and most ambitious novel. The letters, ranging over many subjects - textual discussion, trial flights of workmanship, family matters - provide an illuminating perspective on Steinbeck, the creative genius, and a private glimpse of Steinbeck, the man.

"If war spares me," wrote Vera Brittain to her brother, Edward, in 1916, "it will be my one aim to immortalise in a book the story of us four." Seventeen years later, Vera was to achieve her aim with the acclaimed Testament of Youth. This series of letters was the inspiration behind Testament. Written between Vera; her brother; her fiancé, Roland Leighton; and their two best friends, Victor Richardson and Geoffrey Thurlow, they give a unique perspective on the most horrifying conflict the world has ever seen.

John Keats' letters paint an unforgettably vivid and moving picture of the richly productive but also tragic final years of the poet's life. As he ponders on the nature of the writer's craft, he must first confront his brother's death from tuberculosis and then the imminent prospect of his own, tormented by the fear that he will not live to consummate his relationship with Fanny Brawne.

A literary treasure of over 100 unpublished letters from National Book Award-winning author Flannery O'Connor and her circle of extraordinary friends. Flannery O’Connor is a master of 20th-century American fiction, joining, since her untimely death in 1964, the likes of Hawthorne, Hemingway, and Faulkner. Those familiar with her work know that her powerful ethical vision was rooted in a quiet, devout faith and informed all she wrote and did.