"Boldly imagined, subtly crafted . . . eloquently documents the existence of women who lived as they wished to, instead of as society expected them to." —Catherine Stimpson, New York Times Book Review

The Ladies is a touching, imaginative retelling of the story of two of history's most interesting characters: Eleanor Butler and Sarah Psonsonby, well-born Irish women who defied all conventions of their eighteenth-century Irish homeland and eloped to the small hamlet of Llangollen in Wales, where they lived as a married couple. There, removed from the eyes of the world, they hoped to live out their quiet lives. But the world outside gradually came to claim the Ladies—first out of curiousity, but eventually on the basis of profound respect, and even love. Visited by such luminaries as Edmund Burke, William Wordsworth, Walter Scott, and Horace Walpole, among many others, Eleanor and Sarah became known throughout Britain and to history as the "Ladies of Llangollen."

"Grumbach is acutely sensitive to the quiet hum of everyday living and the small acquired habits that bond lovers over long periods. It is especially touching to watch the women age as the pages turn, affecting a kind of time-lapse realism that doesn't diminish the Ladies' passion or love for each other." —Diane Salvatore, Ms.

In this stunning first book, Rosanna Warren writes with wisdom, grace, and pure intelligence as though to seize on a new life. Exploring the complexities of nature and art, she traces continuous travail between the earth in its tangle of roots and cyclical consolation and the restless and protesting mind. Thus we encounter the struggle for sustaining generations of life in the villages of Europe, the ruins of Crete, a fresco or bas-relief."

The surviving authors of Our Examination have very kindly asked its former publisher to contribute to the re-issue of their work a few words about its origin. Many of the essays include were first published by Eugene Jolas in his review, transition: what, therefore, could be more fitting than an introduction by Mrs. Eugene Jolas? But she has declined the honour, Mr. Stuart Gilbert has too, so it is left to me to tell how this little volume came about.

This book talks about William Carlos Williams's work in poetry, friction, autobiography, drama and essays-shows conclusively that his prose was also remarkably original, versatile and powerful.

The tomboy narrator of this funny, sad, ultimately disturbing novel is wise and compassionate beyond her years, like Scout in To Kill a Mockingbird. And she s as cynical as The Catcher in the Rye s Holden Caulfield. But Maggie is very much her own person all six of them. Carol Peace, People"

Lovers and Tyrants is at once an erotic, urgent, and beautifully written novel that established Francine du Plessix Gray as one of the most brilliant and exuberant fiction talents to emerge in America s literary history. This is the story of Stephanie, whose life we follow from her extraordinary childhood in France, through her father's mysterious disappearance, her emigration with her mother to America, her private schooling in New York, her tempestuous sexual relationships with a European nobleman, her marriage to an American, her children, and ultimately, her self-liberation. Every phase of Stephanie s life illustrates our painful ambivalence toward the irreconcilable poles of love and liberation, security and freedom."

'Stories of Happy People' is a collection of ten short fictions that maps the range of contentment, from inner joy to the edges of despair.

Drawing on his own experiences during the Klondike Gold Rush of 1897, Jack London's stories, originally published in three volumes between 1900 and 1902, bring to life the harrowing hardships of life in the lawless wilderness.

Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Dos Passos, and their Lost Generation confrères are memorably brought to life in Cowley’s classic memoir.

WINNER OF THE PORTICO PRIZE 2006 Anthony Burgess has always attracted acclaim and notoriety in roughly equal measure. He is admired for his literary novels, but known to a wider audience as the author of the ultra-violent shocker, A Clockwork Orange. Burgess was a brilliant polymath, a composer, and a man for whom chaos and creativity, fact and fiction, existed in a complex and unique balance. Drawing on his fraught relationships with publishers, friends and his first wife, as expressed in interviews, unpublished writings, letters and diaries, The Real Life of Anthony Burgess reveals both the professional writer and the private man as he has never been seen before. 'The Real Life of Anthony Burgess is the biography all Burgess fans have been waiting for and which the great man himself richly deserves: revelatory, scrupulous, sincere and fascinating' William Boyd, Books of the Year Guardian 'Biswell's absorbing new life . . . is a work of scholarship, understanding and sympathetic portraiture' Observer 'He has shed great light on a writer, his personality and his work. This is a biography of the highest class' Herald 'As the first Burgess biography of any consequence it is long overdue' Sunday Telegraph The Real Life of Anthony Burgess was shortlisted for the inaugural Glen Dimplex New Writers' Award.

Originally subtitled "An Adventurous Education, 1935-1946," Vanity of Duluoz is a key volume in Jack Kerouac's lifework, the series of autobiographical novels he referred to as The Legend of Duluoz. With the same tender humor and intoxicating wordplay he brought to his masterpieces On the Road and The Dharma Bums, Kerouac takes his alter ego from the football fields of small-town New England to the playing fields and classrooms of Horace Mann and Columbia, out to sea on a merchant freighter plying the sub-infested waters of the North Atlantic during World War II, and back to New York, where his friends are the writers who would one day become known as the Beat generation and where he published his first novel.

Written in 1967 from the vantage point ot the psychedelic sixties, Vanity of Duluoz gives a fascinating portrait of the young Kerouac, dedicated and disciplined in his determination from an early age to be an important American writer.

Much good criticism of Mrquez came in the wake of One Hundred Years of Solitude and the perception of his fiction has been dominated by that novel. It seemed the implicit goal to which the earlier fiction has been striving. By concentrating on the later novels, including The General in his Labyrinth, this study brings out the internal dialogue between the novels so that One Hundred Years of Solitude then stands out, like Don Quixote in Cervantes' oeuvre, as untypical yet more deeply representative. Behind the popular impact of its 'magical realism' lies Mrquez' abiding meditation on the nature of fictional and historical truth.