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."

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.

Each working day from January 29 to November 1, 1951, John Steinbeck warmed up to the work of writing East of Eden with a letter to the late Pascal Covici, his friend and editor at The Viking Press. It was his way, he said, of "getting my mental arm in shape to pitch a good game."

Steinbeck's letters were written on the left-hand pages of a notebook in which the facing pages would be filled with the test of East of Eden. They touched on many subjects—story arguments, trial flights of worknamship, concern for his sons.

Part autobiography, part writer's workshop, these letters offer an illuminating perspective on Steinbeck's creative process, and a fascinating glimpse of Steinbeck, the private man.

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 Drawing on his fraught relationships with publishers, friends and his first wife, as expressed in interviews, unpublished writings, letters and diaries, The Real Life of Anthony Burgess reveals both the professional writer and the private man as he has never been seen before.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.

"How often have I lain beneath rain on a strange roof, thinking of home," says Darl Bundren in William Faulkner's As I Lay Dying. How much Faulkner himself is speaking may be suggested by this moving collection of nearly 150 letters. Written during his twenties, these letters describe Faulkner's first encounters with the North (..".I made my first subway trip yesterday. The experience showed me that we are not descended from monkeys, as some say, but from lice."); his brief World War I military service, which grew in the retelling; the productive New Orleans months with Sherwood Anderson; and his first trip to Europe, with cold autumn days in Paris ("Good thing the Lord gave these folks wine--they rate a recompense of some kind for this climate.") Fascinating in themselves for their close observation of people and places, the letters also offer glimmers of The Sound and the Fury and other future works, as the young writer stores up characters, settings, and events that will re-emerge, transformed, int the great novels of his maturity. Never before published, these letters are from the Faulkner collection at the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at the University of Texas at Austin. "These letters, for years sequestered and unavailable, are among the most informative, touching, and eloquent William Faulkner ever wrote. No Faulkner specialist can be without this book; no Faulkner admirer should be without it." Joseph Blotner, author of Faulkner: A Biography"

"The Subaltern Ulysses " was first published in 1994. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.

How might an IRA bomb and James Joyce's "Ulysses" have anything in common? Could this masterpiece of modernism, written at the violent moment of Ireland's national emergence, actually be the first postcolonial novel? Exploring the relation of "Ulysses" to the colony in which it is set, and to the nation being born as the book was written, Enda Duffy uncovers a postcolonial modernism and in so doing traces another unsuspected strain within the one-time critical monolith. In the years between 1914 and 1921, as Joyce was composing his text, Ireland became the first colony of the British Empire to gain its independence in this century after a violent anticolonial war. Duffy juxtaposes "Ulysses" with documents and photographs from the archives of both empire and insurgency, as well as with recent postcolonial literary texts, to analyze the political unconscious of subversive strategies, twists on class and gender, that render patriarchal colonialist culture unfamiliar. "Ulysses," Duffy argues, is actually a guerrilla text, and here he shows how Joyce's novel pinpoints colonial regimes of surveillance, mocks imperial stereotypes of the "native," exposes nationalism and other chauvinistic ideologies of "imagined community" as throwbacks to the colonial ethos, and proposes versions of a postcolonial subject. A significant intervention in the massive "Joyce industry" founded on the rhetoric and aesthetics of high modernism, Duffy's insights show us not only "Ulysses," but also the origins of postcolonial textuality, in a startling new way.

Enda Duffy is assistant professor of English at the University of California at Santa Barbara.

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."

'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.

Known for his meaty seriocomic novels, Tom Robbins's shorter work has appeared in publications ranging from "Esquire" to "Harper's," from "Playboy" to the "New York Times." Collected here for the first time in paperback, the essays, articles, observations--and even some untypical country-music lyrics--offer a rare overview of the eclectic sensibility of an American original.
Whether rocking with the Doors, depoliticizing Picasso's "Guernica, " lamenting the angst-ridden state of contemporary literature, or drooling over tomato sandwiches and a species of womanhood he calls "the genius waitress," Tom Robbins's briefer writings exhibit the five traits that perhaps best characterize his novels: an imaginative wit, a cheerfully brash disregard for convention, a sweetly nasty eroticism, a mystical but keenly observant eye, and an irrepressible love of language. Embedded in this primarily journalistic compilation are brand-new short stories, a sheaf of largely unpublished poems, and an offbeat assessment of our divided nation. Wherever you open Wild Ducks Flying Backward," " you'll encounter the serious playfulness that percolates from the mind of a self-described "romantic Zen hedonist" and "stray dog in the banquet halls of culture."

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.

"A respected biographer and no stranger to his subject" (Newark Star-Ledger), Meyers delves into the complex life of the man whose visionary work gave us the great anti-utopias of modern literature. "The breadth of his research is impressive" (New York Times Book Review), drawing on a close study of the new edition of Orwell's Complete Works, personal interviews, and unpublished material in London's Orwell Archive.

Meyers's "briskly paced, absorbing narrative . . . offers keen insights" (Boston Sunday Globe) on Orwell's intellectual development, as well as his human failings -- his childhood insecurities, his political dilemmas, and his conflicted relationships with women. "Leagues in front of" Orwell's previous biographers, Meyers "convincingly demonstrates the essence of Orwell's] character" (Denver Colorado] Post), revealing a "much more helpful and believable portrait" (Paul Theroux).

When Calista Jacobs, whose young son Charlie already shows signs of his father's scientific brilliance, discovers that her husband has been murdered, she sets out to track down his killer in this novel of murder and Harvard University politics.

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.

Considering William Faulkner's representation of the structural paradoxes of labour dependency in the Southern economy, from the antebellum period through to the New Deal, this book seeks to link the occlusive stylistics of Faulkner's writing to a generative social trauma which constitutes its formal core. That trauma, Godden argues, is a labour trauma, centered on the debilitating discovery by the Southern owning class of its own production by those it subordinates. By way of close textual analysis and careful historical contextualization, Richard Godden produces a persuasive account of the ways in which Faulkner's work rests on deeply submerged anxieties about the legacy of violently coercive labour relations in the American South.

The twentieth-century novelist Neil M. Gunn is best remembered for his evocative accounts of Highland life as given in The Silver Darlings, Morning Tide and Highland River. In The Fabulous Matter of Fact, Richard Price goes beyond this starting point and provides the reader with both a comprehensive study of all Gunn's extant novels (including an early unpublished novel), and a detailed account of the literary context within which Gunn worked. Close textual criticism is enriched by references to Gunn's poetry, short stories, essays and letters, and many of his key sources and allusions are identified for the first time. Price explores Gunn's early literary relationship with the Celtic Twilight writers of the late nineteenth century, and his subsequent relation to the work of modernists such as Eliot and Proust, showing that Gunn was much more aware of literary movements than has been believed. Price also describes the historical context of the 1940s, focusing on Gunn's complex reaction to the war and his views on the nature of freedom, and he traces the extent, in Gunn's later novels, of his increasing interest in the limitations and loci of human compassion. Including useful plot summaries and a radical re-reading of the novels from the mid-1940s onwards, this is the most wide-ranging, approachable and informative guide to the work of Neil M. Gunn available.

This study considers Angela Carter's work in media, a critically neglected body of work comprising five radio plays, two film adaptions and a television documentary, as well as two unrealized screenplays, an operatic libretto and a stage play. Charlotte Crofts undertakes detailed textual analysis of unpublished work, including the poem Unicorn (1966) and The Holy Family Album (1991). She refers extensively to exclusive interviews with directors and producers with whom Carter collaborated. Included are the first publication of photographs from the set of The Magic Toyshop (1986), and excerpts from the script and storyboard of The Holy Family Album.