In the autumn of 1873, Wilkie Collins followed the example of fellow literary celebrities Dickens and Thackeray, and began a six-month reading tour of America. Hanes places this tour within the American lyceum movement of the later nineteenth century. Through close examination of personal letters, news accounts and newspaper reviews, she builds a picture of the relationship between Collins and the American reading public.

"Shakespeare: A Life in Art" brings together in a single volume Fraser's previously published two-volume biography ("Young Shakespeare," 1988, and" Shakespeare: The Later Years," 1992). This volume includes a new introduction, which looks back on the author's lifelong commitment to Shakespeare's work and seeks to find the pattern in his carpet.

Fraser's approach places Shakespeare's work first but shows how the life and art interpenetrate, like "the yolk and white of one shell." What Shakespeare was doing in Stratford and London underlies what he was writing, or more exactly, the two flow together. Most of the book is devoted to Shakespeare the man and artist, but it simultaneously throws light on his literary and personal relations with contemporaries such as Jonson, Marlowe, and others known as the University Wits. His experience as an actor and man of theater is absorbingly recounted here, as well as his relations to well-born patrons like the Earl of Southampton and Henry Carey, Lord Hunsdon (England's Lord Chamberlain). In 1603 when James I ascended the throne, the Chamberlain's Men became the King's Men, passing under the sovereign's protection. How Shakespeare responded to his ambiguous role--he was both servant to the great and their remorseless critic--is another of Fraser's subjects. In short, Fraser's principal purpose is to advance our understanding of Shakespeare, at the same time throwing light on the work of the man who of all modern, and perhaps ancient poets had the "largest and most comprehensive soul." John Dryden, Shakespeare's first great critic, said that, and Fraser tries to estimate what he meant.

In Facts and Fiction, Michael Holroyd reflects on the eccentricities of the art of writing about others. With characteristic playfulness and guilefulness, he considers the ways in which lives can be written about, with all the subtle differences of design and intention that this entails.

From Rudyard Kipling to forgetfulness, the glories of Mary Norton's Borrowers books to fellow biographers like Richard Holmes and Alexander Masters, Holroyd tackles an eclectic range of topics with wit, warmth and humour.

This is a unique insight into the mind of a master.

Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume "Dostoevsky" is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language--and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank's monumental, 2500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed in this single, highly readable volume with a new preface by the author. Carefully preserving the original work's acclaimed narrative style and combination of biography, intellectual history, and literary criticism, "Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time" illuminates the writer's works--from his first novel "Poor Folk" to "Crime and Punishment" and "The Brothers Karamazov"--by setting them in their personal, historical, and above all ideological context. More than a biography in the usual sense, this is a cultural history of nineteenth-century Russia, providing both a rich picture of the world in which Dostoevsky lived and a major reinterpretation of his life and work.

Nathanael West was a comic artist whose insight into the brutalities and absurdities of modern life proved prophetic. He is famous for two masterpieces, " Miss Lonelyhearts "and the most penetrating novel ever written about Hollywood, "The Day of the Locust." Eileen McKenney, accidental muse and literary heroine, fled Cleveland in search of romance and adventure, inspiring her sister's humorous stories, "My Sister Eileen," which led to stage, film, and television adaptations.
Until their tragic deaths in 1940, husband and wife were intimate with many of the literary, theatrical, and movie notables of the era, and in this dual biography, they provide a one-of-a-kind lens into a world that continues to capture artists' imaginations. With trenchant insight and erudite charm, acclaimed biographer Marion Meade restores the star-crossed lovers to their rightful places in the rich cultural tapestry of interwar America and paints a lively tableau of one of the country's most engrossing eras.

Sir John Hill (1714--1775) was one of Georgian England's most vilified men despite having contributed prolifically to its medicine, science and literature. Born into a humble Northamptonshire family, the son of an impecunious God-faring Anglican minister, he started out as an apothecary, went on to collect natural objects for the great Whig lords and became a botanist of distinction. But his scandalous behavior prevented his election to the Royal Society and entry to all other professions for which he was qualified. Today, we can understand his actions as the result of a personality disorder; then he was understood entirely in moral terms. When he saw the dye cast he turned to journalism and publication, and strove maniacally to succeed without patronage. As a writer he was also cut down in ferocious 'paper wars'. Yet by the time he died, he had been knighted by the Swedish monarch and become a household name among scientists and writers throughout Britain and Europe. His life was a series of paradoxes without coherence, perhaps because he was above all a provocateur.In time he would also become a filter for the century in which he lived: its personalities--great and small--as well as the broad canvas of its culture, and for this reason any biography necessarily stretches beyond the man himself to those whose profiles he also illuminates.

Best known for his novel ""Trout Fishing in America"", American writer, Richard Gary Brautigan (1935-1984) published eleven novels, ten poetry collections, and two story collections, as well as five volumes of collected work, several nonfiction essays, and a record album of spoken voice recordings. Brautigan's idiosyncratic style and humor caused him to be identified with the counterculture movement of the 1960s. The authors of many of these 32 essays knew Brautigan, personally and professionally; others came to know and respect him through a cultivated connection with his writings. The essays - many of which are new, others of which were published in obscure journals - combine personal remembrance of the man and critical appraisal of his still-controversial works. The book includes previously unpublished photographs and artworks.

'A marvel of clarity, fluency, and (Morris's favourite word in her final days) kindness.' The Sunday Times 'A measured and elegant biography that Morris aficionados will find fascinating.' The Times The first full account of a truly remarkable life. When Jan Morris passed away in 2020, she was considered one of Britain's best-loved writers. The author of Venice, Pax Britannica, Conundrum, and more than fifty other books, her work was known for its observational genius, lyricism, and humour, and had earned her a passionate readership around the world. Morris's life was no less fascinating than her oeuvre. Born in 1926, she spent her childhood amidst Oxford's Gothic beauty and later participated in military service in Italy and the Middle East, before embarking on a career as an internationally feted foreign correspondent. From being the only journalist to join the first ascent of Mount Everest in 1953 to covering the trial of Adolf Eichmann, Morris's reportage spanned many of the twentieth century's defining moments. However, public success masked a private dilemma that was only resolved when she transitioned genders in the late sixties, becoming renowned as a transgender pioneer. She went on to live happily with her wife Elizabeth in Wales for another five decades, and never stopped writing and publishing. Here, for the first time, the many strands of Morris's rich and at times paradoxical life are brought together. Based on a wealth of interviews, archival material, and hitherto unpublished documents, Jan Morris: life from both sides portrays a person of extraordinary talent, curiosity, and joie de vivre.

A critical reading of Jean Genet's last 18 years, through his politics, writings and personal experience.

'A deeply felt, and genuinely touching, book' Esme Weijun Wang, author of The Collected Schizophrenias 'Spellbinding and propulsive' Leni Zeumas, author of Red Clocks 'The Crying Book is a rigorous and urgent work but it reads like an intimate gift' Kaveh Akbar, author of Calling a Wolf a Wolf A DAZZLING MEDITATION ON TEARS In this symphonic work of non-fiction, Heather Christle explores the most human of behaviours: crying. What are tears made of? Why do people cry? And why is this common, crucial act so rarely discussed? Christle unpacks the biological reasons for tears and investigates the influence of crying on art, politics, feminism, race and culture, all while opening up the intimate story of her own tears - from the suicide of her close friend to her family's history of depression, to her pregnancies, both planned and unplanned. In these pages, we meet a feminist artist who designs a gun that shoots frozen tears. A moth that takes sustenance from feeding on the tears shed by other animals. And beautifully impractical devices for dealing with grief such as the 'lachrymatory', an ancient receptacle into which it was hoped 'a mourner could let fall her hot tears'. While Christle enchants us with poetic snippets on these subjects, a powerful investigation begins to accrue, examining how the history of tears is tied up with racist violence, with the stigma of mental illness, and with the ways in which glib contemporary images of motherhood fail to reckon with how rich and complicated is actually is. Brilliant, witty and achingly honest, Christle's book creates a mosaic of science, history, culture and personal experience to find new ways of understanding life and loss. The Crying Book is a deeply intimate tribute to the fascinating strangeness of tears - and the unexpected resilience of joy. Honest, intelligent, rapturous and surprising, The Crying Book is a poignant, personal tribute to the astonishing strangeness of tears and the startling resilience of joy.

This biography came into being after extensive research in Moscow, Berlin, Paris, New York, and Los Angeles. The author is the first to analyze Eisenstein's diaries and correspondence' materials that were inaccessible in the past. Eisenstein's relations with Freemasons, Rosicrucians and Stalin, with rivals and admirers, with psychoanalysts who treated him are no longer faded out. Was Eisenstein homosexual? A Stalinist? A conformist? A dissident? He left no clear answers for his biographers. Oksana Bulgakowa's study of Eisenstein's life tries to uncover these themes in his films and drawings, between the lines of his diaries and letters, in his drafts to screenplays, projects, and research. Late in life Eisenstein viewed this research as his only possible means of salvation from the compromises he had consciously made with himself and his creativity. Oksana Bulgakowa (b. 1954) graduated from the Moscow Film Institute VGIK in 1977. In the same year she moved to Berlin/GDR and received her doctoral degree from Humboldt University in 1982. She works as an author, editor, translator, and filmmaker. Since 1998 she has been a visiting professor at Stanford University, USA. For further information go to www.PotemkinPress.com]

Poet and Journalist, Max Eastman is perhaps the most famous example of an American intellectual who during his life moved across the entire political spectrum. This reexamination of his career and his place in history reveals the dynamics behind his several careers and political transformations, offering new insight into one of the most influential writers of this century. It is a model biography of a key intellectual of the twentieth century. It is also both a perspective social history of his times and a study in the history of ideas. The book will find a welcome place in history, literature, and political science courses, as well as in personal libraries.

In 1903, after a fire completely destroyed her family home in Norfolk, UK, the 27- year-old Constance helped her mother redesign their house and recreate the garden. It was an experience from which she never looked back, going on to become an internationally recognised garden expert and connoisseur. A rich woman herself, she was attracted to the most spectacular and extravagant gardens in the world. From Shalimar Bagh, Lahore, to Nishat Bagh, Srinagar, to La Granja near Madrid, Constance earned her reputation studying Mughal and Moorish gardens as well as those in Great Britain, France, Italy and northern Europe. Between 1910 and 1955 she wrote about them, painted and photographed them and lectured on them. She produced two successful illustrated books, and numerous articles for magazines, including Country Life, Vogue, The Burlington Magazine, Harpers Bazaar, and The Times. When she died in 1966, she left paintings, photographs, diaries, press cuttings and scrapbooks to her grandchildren. It is upon this fascinating and hitherto unseen archive of memorabilia that Constance Villiers Stuart: In Pursuit of Paradise is based.

Pronounced guilty of libel and sentenced to a year in prison, novelist Émile Zola went on the run.

Zola's crime had been to defend a wrongly convicted man, in what became known as the Dreyfus Affair. Fleeing the French state with just hours to spare he ended up living in the suburbs of south London unable to speak a word of English. Michael Rosen brings to life the sleepy world of late Victorian suburbia, Zola's turbulent politics and his tangled private life. Desperate to write a novel, he was also trying to balance the extremely delicate matter of the two women in his life - one the mother of his children, the other his wife.

The Disappearance of Émile Zola is the incredible true story of a writer's personal bravery in the face of the greatest political scandal of the age.

Upon publication, "Don't Panic" quickly established itself as the definitive companion to "Adams" and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". This edition comes up-to-date, covering the movie, "And Another Thing" by Eoin Colfer and the build up to the 30th anniversary of the first novel. Acclaimed author Neil Gaiman celebrates the life and work of Douglas Adams who, in a field in Innsbruck in 1971, had an idea that became "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". The radio series that started it all, the five - soon to be six - book 'trilogy', the TV series, almost-film and actual film, and everything in between.

Alive with adventure, rich with exotic detail, the voice of Rudyard Kipling carried readers to faraway locations and brought new, exciting scenes to their doorsteps. Born and raised in India, Kipling became the voice of the eastern British Empire, and his writing extensively covered Central Asia. Early in his career, Kipling drew inspiration not from travels of his own, but from working with far-flung correspondents at the Civil and Military Gazette in Lahore, Pakistan, where he served as assistant editor. One of his chief correspondents was Dr. Charles Owen, a close friend of his father's who served a tour of duty with the Afghan Boundary Commission between 1884 and 1886 addressing the border dispute between Great Britain and Russia. This historical biography provides a new perspective on Kipling's days as an employee of the Civil and Military Gazette. Information garnered from newly uncovered letters and diaries of Dr. Owen (acquired by the National Army Museum in 1998) gives personal insight into Kipling's life as well as firsthand perceptions of the Boundary Commission's work. In addition, appendices provide a wealth of information regarding articles by Kipling, articles attributed to Kipling or his supervisor Wheeler, Kipling's translations of Russian dispatches, and Boundary Commission reports.

Academic - Scholarly - Defoe Studies - Political History - Eighteenth-Century History; In this new book, Furbank and Owens attempt to disentangle the story of Daniel Defoe's political career, as journalist, polemicist, political theorist and secret agent. They argue that this remarkable career calls for a good deal of rethinking, not least because biography and bibliography are here inextricably intertwined. The book challenges the current account of Defoe's political career - rather drastically in some cases. It argues, for example, that Defoe's cherished story of his intimacy with King William - a staple of all previous Defoe biographies - was most probably an (immensely bold) fiction, a view which, if correct, entails considerable revision of his personality and career. Likewise, it offers a new interpretation of the famous series of letters Defoe wrote in 1718 to his Government paymaster, the Whig Undersecretary of State Charles de la Faye,

This is the story of John McGahern's childhood, his mother's death, his father's anger and violence, and how, through his discovery of books, his dream of becoming a writer began. At the heart of Memoir is a son's unembarrassed tribute to his mother. His memory of walks with her through the narrow lanes to the country schools where she taught and his happiness as she named for him the wild flowers on the bank remained conscious and unconscious presences for the rest of his life. A classic family story, told with exceptional restraint and tenderness, Memoir cannot fail to move all those who read it.

?Who knows what evil lurks in the hearts of men? . . . The Shadow knows!? And who knew The Shadow better than his creator, Walter B. Gibson. Relatively few people have heard of Gibson, but many more are familiar with The Shadow having heard the program on the Blue Coal Radio Program in the 1930s and read the Street & Smith Shadow novels. Walter B. Gibson's life and career come out from behind The Shadow in this biography. It covers his youth in Philadelphia, his development as a writer and magician, his wives, including the third, (Litzka, who was a harpist and magician in her own right), his time living in Maine and upstate New York, and his later years and death. In addition to being credited with creating The Shadow (he used the pseudonym Maxwell Grant), Gibson wrote 187 books, contributed 668 articles to periodicals, created 283 stories for The Shadow Magazine, wrote 48 separate syndicated feature columns, reported the adventures of The Shadow and Blackstone the magician in 394 comic books and newspaper strips, and helped develop 147 radio scripts and many other works under numerous pseudonyms. Gibson has invented many widely used magic tricks and traveled with and befriended Harry Houdini, Howard Thurston, Harry Blackstone, Sr., and Joseph Dunninger.

"Invaluable."--Eric J. Sundquist in The New York Times Book Review