At the helm of America's most influential literary magazine for more than half a century, Harold Ross introduced the country to a host of exciting talent, including Robert Benchley, Alexander Woolcott, Ogden Nash, Peter Arno, Charles Addams, and Dorothy Parker.  But no one could have written about this irascible, eccentric genius more affectionately or more critically than James Thurber -- an American icon in his own right -- whose portrait of Ross captures not only a complex literary giant but a historic friendship and a glorious era as well.  "If you get Ross down on paper," warned Wolcott Gibbs to Thurber," nobody will ever believe it."  But readers of this unforgettable memoir will find that they do.

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Perchance, fair lady, dost thou think me unduly vexed by the sorrowful state of thine quarters? These foul specks, the evidence of life itself, have sullied not only thine shag-tempered matt but also thine character. Be ye mad, woman?

In Naked, David Sedaris's message alternately rendered in Fakespeare, Italian, Spanish, and pidgin Greek is the same: pay attention to me.

Whether he's taking to the road with a thieving quadriplegic, sorting out the fancy from the extra-fancy in a bleak fruit-packing factory, or celebrating Christmas in the company of a recently paroled prostitute, this collection of memoirs creates a wickedly incisive portrait of an all-too-familiar world. It takes Sedaris from his humiliating bout with obsessive behavior in A Plague of Tics to the title story, where he is finally forced to face his naked self in the mirrored sunglasses of a lunatic. At this soulful and moving moment, he picks potato chip crumbs from his pubic hair and wonders what it all means.

This remarkable journey into his own life follows a path of self-effacement and a lifelong search for identity, leaving him both under suspicion and overdressed.

Maurice O'Sullivan was born on the Great Blasket in 1904, and 'Twenty Years A-Growing' tells the story of his youth and of a way of life which belonged to the Middle Ages. He wrote for his own pleasure and for the entertainment of his friends, without any thought of a wider public; his style is derived from folk-tales which he heard from his grandfather and sharpened by his own lively imagination. The Blasket Islands are three miles off Irelands Dingle Peninsula. Until their evacuation just after the Second World War, the lives of the 150 or so Blasket Islanders had remained unchanged for centuries. A rich oral tradition of story-telling, poetry, and folktales kept alive the legends and history of the islands, and has made their literature famous throughout the world. The 7 Blasket Island books published by OUP contain memoirs and reminiscences from within this literary tradition, evoking a way of life which has now vanished.

An entertaining, impassioned polemic on the retreat of reason in the late 20th century. An intellectual call to arms, Francis Wheen's Sunday Times bestseller is one of 2004's most talked about books. In 1979 two events occurred that would shape the next twenty-five years. In Britain, an era of weary consensualist politics was displaced by the arrival of Margaret Thatcher, whose ambition was to reassert 'Victorian values'. In Iran, the fundamentalist cleric Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini set out to restore a regime that had last existed almost 1,300 years ago. Between them they succeeded in bringing the twentieth century to a premature close. By 1989, Francis Fukuyama was declaring that we had now reached the End of History. What colonised the space recently vacated by notions of history, progress and reason? Cults, quackery, gurus, irrational panics, moral confusion and an epidemic of mumbo-jumbo. Modernity was challenged by a gruesome alliance of pre-modernists and post-modernists, medieval theocrats and New Age mystics. It was as if the Enlightenment had never happened. Francis Wheen, winner of the George Orwell prize, evokes the key personalities of the post-political era - including Princess Diana and Deepak Chopra, Osama Bin-Laden and Nancy Reagan's astrologer - while charting the extraordinary rise in superstition, relativism and emotional hysteria over the past quarter of a century. From UFO scares to dotcom mania, his hilarious and gloriously impassioned polemic describes a period in the world's history when everything began to stop making sense.

J.G.Ballard is the author of the novels Crash, Empire of the Sun and Rushing to Paradise. Throughout his career he has also been a regular contributor to magazines and newspapers. This book collects together pieces of his journalism, grouped under themes including science and film.

Bertrand Russell was a towering intellectual figure of the twentieth century. In his nineties, he dictated more than twelve letters a day. This acclaimed second volume of his letters provides a unique insight into Russell and covers most of his adult life. Russell was a philosophical genius but also an impassioned campaigner for peace and social reform and these letters reveal the astonishing range of his correspondence. There are intense personal letters to his lovers Ottoline Morrell and Colette O'Niel, as well as letters to Niels Bohr, Jean-Paul Sartre, Einstein and Lyndon Johnson, which provide a unique insight into Russell's views on education, war and the Russian Revolution. Invaluable for anyone interested in Russell, these letters also present a fascinating picture of Twentieth century history.

Pauline Smith's many admirers will welcome this new volume which contains writings which are out of print, have never before been published, or have not appeared in book form. This collection of largely unknown material spans the full range of her creative life from the early 'Platkops' stories to her last uncompleted work. What gives this wide diversity of pieces coherence and added interest is their marked autobiographical bent.

First published more than three decades ago, this reissue of Rachel Carson's award-winning classic brings her unique vision to a new generation of readers. Stunning new photographs by Nick Kelsh beautifully complement Carson's intimate account of adventures with her young nephew, Roger, as they enjoy walks along the rocky coast of Maine and through dense forests and open fields, observing wildlife, strange plants, moonlight and storm clouds, and listening to the "living music" of insects in the underbrush.

"If a child is to keep alive his inborn sense of wonder." Writes Carson, "he needs the companionship of at least one adult who can share it, rediscovering with him the joy, excitement and mystery of the world we live in." The Sense of Wonder is a refreshing antidote to indifference and a guide to capturing the simple power of discovery that Carson views as essential to life.

In her insightful new introduction, Linda Lear remembers Rachel Carson's groundbreaking achievements in the context of the legendary environmentalist's personal commitment to introducing young and old to the miracles of nature.

Kelsh's lush photographs inspire sensual, tactile reactions: masses of leaves floating in a puddle are just waiting to be scooped up and examined more closely. An image of a narrow path through the trees evokes the earthy scent of the woods after a summer rain. Close-ups of mosses and miniature lichen fantasy-lands will spark innocent'as well as more jaded'imaginations. Like a curious child studying things underfoot and within reach, Kelsh's camera is drawn to patterns in nature that too often elude hurried adults'a stand of beech trees in the springtime, patches of melting snow and the ripples from a pebble tossed into a slow-moving stream.

The Sense of Wonder is a timeless volume that will be passed on from children to grandchildren, as treasured as the memory of an early-morning walk when the song of a whippoorwill was heard as if for the first time.

This treasury of selected passages from the writings and addresses of perhaps the most impressive leader of the Catholic Church the world has ever known offers, as its editor suggests, "a harvest from the mind and heart of Pope Wojtyla." And so here is a chance for the modern reader, engaged in various daily tasks, to spend a few moments with the Pope each day of the liturgical year, contemplating his reflections on the mystery and the example of Christ; and on the church, man, the family, the lives of the saints, the meaning of holidays, and the place of faith in daily life.

His personal concerns as expressed in these passages include such topics as "Sharing with Others," "To Be in Peace," "Consumer Society," "Family Prayer," and "The Great Divine Trial," about the meaning of his near-assassination. Through these pages of calm reflection each day of the year, all will find a moment of peaceful repose from the occupations of life.

This collection of essays assesses the evolving fields of psychiatry and psychoanalysis. The topics covered in this updated and expanded edition include the use of Prozac, the nature of white racism, William Styron's Darkness Visible and van Gogh's fever of genius.

New York journalist Pete Hamill is among the last of a dying breed: the old-school generalist who writes about anything and everything, guided only by passionate and boundless curiosity. In this collection of his finest writings since 1970, Hamill tackles such diverse subjects as what television and crack have in common, how Mike Tyson spent his time in prison, and what it's like to realize you're middle-aged -- not to mention Octavio Paz, Brooklyn's Seventh Avenue, Frank Sinatra, American immigration policy, Northern Ireland, and Madonna. Piecework is Hamill at his very best.

A collection of personal essays on topics as diverse as the nature of allergies, a meditation on bats, and the significance of 1974, from a writer with a uniquely acute, subtle, and sophisticated voice.

Acclaimed personal writing from one of our most out-spoken essayists, on disability, on family, on being an impolite woman, and on the opporunities and "gifts" of a difficult life.

Saul Bellow's fiction, honored by a Nobel Prize and a Pulitzer, among other awards, has made him a literary giant. Now the man himself and a lifetime of his insightful views on a range of topics spring off the page in this, his first nonfiction collection, which encompasses articles, lectures, essays, travel pieces, and an "Autobiography of Ideas." It All Adds Up is a fascinating journey through literary America over the last forty years, guided by one of the "most gifted chroniclers in the Western World" (The London Times).

The work deals with issues of performance, gender ambiguity, and marginality. It is concerned with the boundaries of language and the possibilities of cross-dressing poetry as commercials, diary, tabloids, gossip, confessions, videos, autobiography, musicals, and manifesto. Characters turn into other characters. Clowns, buffoons, shepherds, lead soldiers, magicians, madmen, witches, fortune-tellers, and artists perform their fantasies in the city streets. An antinovel within the book satirizes the writer's role in the modern age and calls for a revolution of poetry. New York City becomes the site of liberation for its marginal citizens, as the narrator is led through a seeming phantasmagoria of internal and external trials in order to experience the center - of political power, of meaning, of feeling, and of personal identity.

"[Eptein's readers] will find, in A Line Out for a Walk, every gratification to which he has accustomed them."—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World

"Mr Epstein is a winsome confidant. Not because his confessions are sensational, far from it. . . . On getting old. On slightness of stature. On becoming a windbag. . . . Money worries. Envy. And, in an essay with paralyzing comic impact, 'You Probably Don't Know Me,' Mr. Epstein has written about his modest lust for fame. Such moral intimations provide a charm and resonance. . . . More than just humorous, the Epstein sensibility is trustable: honest, open, human."—D. Keith Mano, New York Times Book Review

"[His] way with the familiar essay—that flexible, forgiving genre in which anything goes except charmlessness and anonymity—has much in common with that of Messrs. Beerbohm, Liebling, and Mencken. Each piece is exquisitely sustained, moving from point to point with the relaxed economy of a pro."—Wall Street Journal

"A writer at the top of his powers in these serious, funny, pleasantly unpredictable musings."—Publishers Weekly

In the pantheon of great sports literature, not a few poets have tried their hand at paying tribute to their love affair with the game—Walt Whitman, Marianne Moore, and William Carlos Williams among them. This elegant volume collects Donald Hall’s prose about sports, concentrating on baseball but extending to basketball, football and Ping-Pong. The essays are a wonderful mixture of reminiscence and observation, of baseball and of fathers and sons, of how a game binds people together and bridges generations.

You’ve Always Been Wrong is a collection of prose and poetic works by the French writer René Daumal (1908–1944). A fitful interloper among the Surrealists, Daumal rejected all forms of dogmatic thought, whether religious, philosophical, aesthetic, or political. Much like the Surrealists (and French theorists of more recent decades), Daumal saw in the strict forms and certainties of traditional metaphysics a type of thought that enslaves people even as it pretends to liberate them. These “cadavers of thought,� Daumal wrote with youthful bravado, “must be met with storms of doubt, blasphemes, and kerosene for the temples.�  Daumal tied Surrealism with mystical traditions. A devoted student of Eastern religions, philosophy, and literature, he combined his skepticism about Western metaphysics with a mystic’s effort to maintain intense wakefulness to the present moment and to the irreducible particularity of all objects and experience. Such wakefulness, according to Daumal, leads inevitably to an overwhelming (and redemptive) “vision of the absurd.� Daumal’s important place in French culture of the late 1920s and 1930s has been assured by both his writings and his role as cofounder of the avant-garde journal Le Grand Jeu. Written between 1928 and 1930, You’ve Always Been Wrong reveals Daumal’s thought as it was coalescing around the rejection of Western metaphysics and the countervailing allure of Eastern mysticism. Thomas Vosteen’s nuanced translation provides English-language readers with a provocative introduction to this iconoclastic author.

This edition of Granta has articles by Martha Gellhorn, Eleanor Roosevelt, Oliver Sacks, Harold Pinter, Samuel Beckett, Raymond Chandler and Patrick Leigh Fermor. There are examples of letters to Chinese dissidents, letters to pop stars, hate letters, publishers' rejection letters to Elliot, Philip Larkin and Wittgenstein and Mandela's prison letters.