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In the land of pain
Par Alphonse Daudet. 2002
A collection of autobiographical notes from a nineteenth-century French writer slowly dying of syphilis. In these candid reflections, Daudet (1840-1897)…
describes fellow patients, the treatments that brought little relief, the physical agony of his symptoms, and the profound suffering and fear that left him contemplating suicide. 1930The child that books built: a life in reading
Par Francis Spufford. 2002
British author of I May Be Some Time (BR 12612) explains the importance that reading has played in the formation…
of his character and views on life. Spufford conveys his passion for fiction, from a childhood love of Tolkien's stories to his adult enthusiasm for the classics. Some strong language. 2002Charles Dickens
Par Jane Smiley. 2002
Portrays the nineteenth-century English novelist from his contemporaries' viewpoint and through his literary works. Smiley's approach is "a friendly desire…
to get to know" Dickens and his Victorian world and to comment on the role of writing in his life. 2002The life of Samuel Johnson: Introduction By Claude Rawson (Everyman's Library Classics Ser.)
Par James Boswell. 1992
Classic biography of the eighteenth-century English man of letters, originally published in 1791. Based on detailed notes compiled by Boswell…
during their twenty-year friendship, the text for the most part comprises conversations and statements of Johnson's strong opinions. 1791The secret life of john le carre
Par Adam Sisman. 2023
The extraordinary secret life of a great novelist, which his biographer could not publish while le Carré was alive. Secrecy…
came naturally to John le Carré, and there were some secrets that he fought fiercely to keep. Adam Sisman's definitive biography, published in 2015, provided a revealing portrait of this fascinating man; yet some aspects of his subject remained hidden. Nowhere was this more so than in his private life. Apparently content in his marriage, the novelist conducted a string of love affairs over five decades. To these relationships he brought much of the tradecraft that he had learned as a spy - cover stories, cut-outs and dead letter boxes. These clandestine operations brought an element of danger to his life, but they also meant deceiving those closest to him. Small wonder that betrayal became a running theme in his work. In trying to manage his biography, the novelist engaged in a succession of skirmishes with his biographer. While he could control what Sisman wrote about him in his lifetime, he accepted that the truth would eventually become known. Following his death in 2020, what had been withheld can now be revealed. The Secret Life of John le Carré reveals a hitherto-hidden perspective on the life and work of the spy-turned-author and a fascinating meditation on the complex relationship between biographer and subject. "Now that he is dead," Sisman writes, "we can know him better."Green hills of Africa (Scribner classics)
Par Ernest Hemingway. 1998
Presents Wright's complete autobiography for the first time, combining his childhood in the South (Black Boy) with his life as…
an adult in the North (American Hunger). Also contains his 1953 novel (The Outsider), a literary chronology, and extensive notes. Sequel to Richard Wright: Early Works (DB 41552, BR 10299). Violence, some strong language, and some descriptions of sexTravels with Charley: in search of America
Par John Steinbeck. 1962
Feeling that as an American writer he has lost touch with his country, the author sets out on a swing…
around the United States to see what it is really like. He travels in a trailer with "an old French gentleman poodle." Here is the leisurely account of what he saw, whom he talked with, and his conclusions, hopeful and otherwiseGrumbles from the grave
Par Robert Heinlein. 1989
It was Heinlein's wish to have his letters published after his death. Virginia, his wife of forty years, has collected…
the letter, begun in 1939, to Heinlein's editors and to his longtime friend and agent Lurton Blassingame. The letters give us an insight into the psyche of the popular science fiction author. They show his thoughts on publishers, fan mail, writing material, travel, work habits, and even house buildingBio of an ogre: the autobiography of Piers Anthony to age 50
Par Piers Anthony. 1988
Fantasy writer Piers Anthony has, by his own admission, written a highly selective and subjective account of his first fifty…
years, attempting to write not only the "what" of his life but also the "why." Each of the five sections covers a decade of his lifeEducation of a wandering man
Par Louis L'Amour. 1989
A personal reflection by the prolific and beloved writer of westerns. At fifteen Louis L'Amour left school, trusting his education…
to his own curiosity and the world's vastness. Armed with books, he roamed the world, cow-punching, working as a circus roustabout, mining, prize-fighting, hoboing, and serving as a merchant seaman. He shares the richness and variety of his education with the readerFyodor Dostoyevsky, a writer's life
Par Geir Kjetsaa. 1987
A leading Norwegian scholar quotes extensively from Dostoyevsky's notebooks and from his letters to wives and lovers. Kjetsaa chronicles the…
great Russian novelist's personal life and development as a writer and provides a stirring portrait of a driven manLives of the wives: Five literary marriages
Par Carmela Ciuraru. 2023
"The five marriages that Carmela Ciuraru explores in Lives of the Wives provide such delightfully gossipy pleasure that we have…
to remind ourselves that these were real people whose often stormy relationships must surely have been less fun to experience than they are for us to read about."—Francine Prose, author of The Vixen A witty, provocative look inside the tumultuous marriages of five writers, illuminating the creative process as well as the role of money, power, and fame in these complex and fascinating relationships. "With an ego the size of a small nation, the literary lion is powerful on the page, but a helpless kitten in daily life—dependent on his wife to fold an umbrella, answer the phone, or lick a stamp." The history of wives is largely one of silence, resilience, and forbearance. Toss in celebrity, male privilege, ruthless ambition, narcissism, misogyny, infidelity, alcoholism, and a mood disorder or two, and it's easy to understand why the marriages of so many famous writers have been stormy, short-lived, and mutually destructive. "It's been my experience," as the critic and novelist Elizabeth Hardwick once wrote, "that nobody holds a man's brutality to his wife against him." Literary wives are a unique breed, requiring a particular kind of fortitude. Author Carmela Ciuraru shares the stories of five literary marriages, exposing the misery behind closed doors. The legendary British theatre critic Kenneth Tynan encouraged his American wife, Elaine Dundy, to write, then watched in a jealous rage as she became a bestselling author and critical success. In the early years of their marriage, Roald Dahl enjoyed basking in the glow of his glamorous movie star wife, Patricia Neal, until he detested her for being the breadwinner, and being more famous than he was. Elizabeth Jane Howard had to divorce Kingsley Amis to escape his suffocating needs and devote herself to her own writing. ("I really couldn't write very much when I was married to him," she once recalled, "because I had a very large household to keep up and Kingsley wasn't one to boil an egg, if you know what I mean.") Surprisingly, the most traditional partnership in Lives of the Wives is a lesbian couple, Una Troubridge and Radclyffe Hall, both of whom were socially and politically conservative and unapologetic snobs. As this erudite and entertaining work shows, each marriage is a unique story, filled with struggles and triumphs and the negotiation of power. The Italian novelists Elsa Morante and Alberto Moravia were never sexually compatible, and it was Morante who often behaved abusively toward her cool, detached husband, even as he unwaveringly admired his wife's talents and championed her work. Theirs was an unhappy union, yet it fueled them creatively and enabled both to become two of Italy's most important postwar writers. These are stories of vulnerability, loneliness, infidelity, envy, sorrow, abandonment, heartbreak, and forgiveness. Above all, Lives of the Wives honors the women who have played the role of muses, agents, editors, proofreaders, housekeepers, gatekeepers, amaneunses, confidantes, and cheerleaders to literary trailblazers throughout history. In revisiting the lives of famous writers, it is time in our #MeToo era to highlight the achievements of their wives—and the price these women paid for recognition and freedom. Lives of the Wives is an insightful, humorous, and poignant exploration of the intersection of life and art and creativity and loveThe rigor of angels: Borges, heisenberg, kant, and the ultimate nature of reality
Par William Egginton. 2023
The New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice • A poet, a physicist, and a philosopher explored the greatest enigmas…
in the universe—the nature of free will, the strange fabric of the cosmos, the true limits of the mind—and each in their own way uncovered a revelatory truth about our place in the world "[A] mind-expanding book. . . . Elegantly written." — The New York Times "A remarkable synthesis of the thoughts, ideas, and discoveries of three of the greatest minds that our species has produced." —John Banville, The Wall Street Journal Argentine poet Jorge Luis Borges was madly in love when his life was shattered by painful heartbreak. But the breakdown that followed illuminated an incontrovertible truth—that love is necessarily imbued with loss, that the one doesn’t exist without the other. German physicist Werner Heisenberg was fighting with the scientific establishment on the meaning of the quantum realm’s absurdity when he had his own epiphany—that there is no such thing as a complete, perfect description of reality. Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant pushed the assumptions of human reason to their mind-bending conclusions, but emerged with an idea that crowned a towering philosophical system—that the human mind has fundamental limits, and those limits undergird both our greatest achievements as well as our missteps. Through fiction, science, and philosophy, the work of these three thinkers coalesced around the powerful, haunting fact that there is an irreconcilable difference between reality "out there" and reality as we experience it. Out of this profound truth comes a multitude of galvanizing ideas: the notion of selfhood, free will, and purpose in human life; the roots of morality, aesthetics, and reason; and the origins and nature of the cosmos itself. As each of these thinkers shows, every one of us has a fundamentally incomplete picture of the world. But this is to be expected. Only as mortal, finite beings are we able to experience the world in all its richness and breathtaking majesty. We are stranded in a gulf of vast extremes, between the astronomical and the quantum, an abyss of freedom and absolute determinism, and it is in that center where we must make our home. A soaring and lucid reflection on the lives and work of Borges, Heisenberg, and Kant, The Rigor of Angels movingly demonstrates that the mysteries of our place in the world may always loom over us—not as a threat, but as a reminder of our humble humanityThe pigeon tunnel: Stories from my life
Par John Carré. 2016
DON’T MISS THE PIGEON TUNNEL DOCUMENTARY—IN SELECT THEATERS AND STREAMING ON AppleTV+ OCTOBER 20TH! "Recounted with the storytelling élan of…
a master raconteur—by turns dramatic and funny, charming, tart and melancholy." – Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times The New York Times bestselling memoir from John le Carré, the legendary author of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy ; The Spy Who Came in from the Cold ; and The Night Manager , now an Emmy-nominated television series starring Tom Hiddleston and Hugh Laurie. From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, le Carré has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his first memoir, le Carré is as funny as he is incisive, reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels. Whether he's writing about the parrot at a Beirut hotel that could perfectly mimic machine gun fire or the opening bars of Beethoven’s Fifth; visiting Rwanda’s museums of the unburied dead in the aftermath of the genocide; celebrating New Year’s Eve 1982 with Yasser Arafat and his high command; interviewing a German woman terrorist in her desert prison in the Negev; listening to the wisdoms of the great physicist, dissident, and Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov; meeting with two former heads of the KGB; watching Alec Guinness prepare for his role as George Smiley in the legendary BBC TV adaptations of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley’s People ; or describing the female aid worker who inspired the main character in The Constant Gardener , le Carré endows each happening with vividness and humor, now making us laugh out loud, now inviting us to think anew about events and people we believed we understood. Best of all, le Carré gives us a glimpse of a writer’s journey over more than six decades, and his own hunt for the human spark that has given so much life and heart to his fictional charactersStalin's library: a dictator and his books
Par Geoffrey Roberts. 2022
This engaging life of the twentieth century's most self-consciously learned dictator explores the books Stalin read, how he read them,…
and what they taught him. Stalin, an avid reader from an early age, amassed a surprisingly diverse personal collection of thousands of books, many of which he marked and annotated, revealing his intimate thoughts, feelings, and beliefs. Adult. UnratedIsland home: a landscape memoir
Par Tim Winton. 2017
A beautiful, evocative, and sometimes provocative memoir of Australia's unique landscape, and how that singular place has shaped Tim Winton…
and his writing. From boyhood, Winton's relationship with the world around him--rock pools, sea caves, scrub, and swamp--has been as vital as any other connection. Camping in hidden inlets, walking in high rocky desert, diving in reefs, bobbing in the sea between surfing sets, Winton has felt the place seep into him, and learned to see landscape as a living process. In Island Home, Winton brings this landscape--and its influence on the island nation's identity and art--vividly to life through personal accounts and environmental history. Wise, rhapsodic, exalted--in language as unexpected and wild as the landscape it describes--Island Home is a brilliant, moving portrait of Australia from one of its finest writers. Provided by publisher Adult. UnratedLong players: a love story in eighteen songs (A Penguin Original)
Par Peter Coviello. 2018
A passionate, heartfelt story about the many ways we fall in love: with books, bands and records, friends and lovers,…
and the families we make. Have you ever fallen in love--exalting, wracking, hilarious love--with a song? Long Players is a book about that everyday kind of besottedness--and, also, about those other, more entangling sorts of love that songs can propel us into. We follow Peter Coviello through his happy marriage, his blindsiding divorce, and his fumbling post marital forays into sex and romance. Above all we travel with him as he calibrates, mix by mix and song by song, his place in the lives of two little girls, his suddenly ex-stepdaughters. In his grief, he considers what keeps us alive (sex, talk, dancing) and the limitless grace of pop songs Adult. Strong language. UnratedNueve lunas
Par Gabriela Wiener. 2021
"From the daring Peruvian essayist and provocateur behind Sexographies comes a fierce and funny exploration of sex, pregnancy, and motherhood…
that delves headlong into our fraught fascination with human reproduction." -- Amazon.comNuestra hambre en la Habana: memorias del Período Especial en la Cuba de los 90
Par Enrique Del Risco. 2022
"|Our Hunger in Havana| is a book of personal memories of the 90s Cuban postwar period of peace that received…
the curious euphemism of "Special Period." In a tragicomic tone, the author describes and explains the debacle that brought cats and banana skins to the status of delicacies, pigs to that of urban pets raised in bathtubs, and the practical disappearance of public transportation, gastronomy, and alcoholic beverages. A national catastrophe told through the personal experiences of one who worked in a school, a museum, and a cemetery while trying to be young, free, and happy at the worst time in Cuba's history." -- Translation provided by NLS