In The Torch in My Ear Elias Canetti, Nobel Prize winner, towering intellectual figure and polymath, gives us his second volume of autobiography. Using as a framework his admiration for his first great mentor, the Viennese writer Karl Kraus, and his passion for his first wife, Veza, Canetti seamlessly incorporates a profoundly perceptive portrait of Vienna and Berlin in the 1920s. Here are the voices of Brecht, Isaac Babel, George Grosz, and many others. This is autobiography redefining itself.

Bringing together insights from masculinity studies and age studies, this open access book focuses on the gendered and relational perspectives in cultural representations of Alzheimer's disease. Combining a comparative and interdisciplinary approach, the authors analyse the interrelations between masculinities and representations of dementia from a wide range of cultural contexts to explore it as an intensely gendered and cultural disease. They examine memoir, film, poetry and prose fiction, and look at work from a wide range of authors, including Anne Carson, Jonathan Franzen and Philip Roth, to provide new insights into established narratives of dementia and explore the complex ways that the disease resists representation and narration and questions traditional views of selfhood and human development. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC BY-NC-ND 4.0 licence on bloomsburycollections.com. Open access was funded by the ERA Gender-Net+ Project MASCAGE, the University of Graz (Center for Inter-American Studies) and the Government of Styria, Austria.

Howard Phillips Lovecraft had a short life, and he died of cancer in 1936 at the age of 46. But in that relatively short time he had a significant, varied and outstanding output, and although he was not a well-known writer during the time he lived, he has since been hailed as one of the great supernatural fiction writers. Although a huge influence on many writers since his death, and now someone with significant book sales every year, Lovecraft never managed to make a living from writing during his lifetime. Lovecraft spent much time battling various physical and mental issues, but he was able to form bonds and relationships with key people in his life, some of which influenced his thinking and his work. These included his mother, grandfather, aunt, wife and famous figures from the time including Harry Houdini and Robert E Howard; comments from many are included. Lovecraft's sensitivity comes through in his writing, and this book also contains numerous quotes from his famous fictional works. Samples from his poems, letters and other writings serve to paint a full portrait of this master of his chosen genre, horror, but who also contributed significantly to science fiction and fantasy; he truly possessed outstanding talent, as celebrated inside. SAMPLE QUOTE: 'The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents.' - Francis Wayland Thurston sets the scene for indescribable horror in The Call of Cthulhu, HP Lovecraft, 1926. SAMPLE FACT: HP Lovecraft's work was the inspiration behind Arkham Asylum (Batman), Black Sabbath's album Behind the Wall of Sleep and The Book of the Dead from the Evil Dead movies.

This volume is part of the Complete Works of Evelyn Waugh critical edition, which brings together all Waugh's published and previously unpublished writings for the first time with comprehensive introductions and annotation. The edition's General Editor is Alexander Waugh, Evelyn Waugh's grandson and editor of the twelve-volume Personal Writings sequence, which collates all Waugh's letters, diaries, and other personal writings in chronological order. Volume one of the series covers the years 1903-1921, ending with Waugh's departure from Lancing College, aged 18, with a scholarship to Hertford College, Oxford. For many years at Lancing Waugh kept a daily account of his life, and every diary entry is reprinted here along with the lively pen-and ink drawings that accompanied them and the letters he sent to his parents and friends. No other book presents such a rich anthology of writing by a school-boy, let alone one who would later turn into a major literary figure and novelist of genius.

This book, the first of two volumes anticipating the bicentenary of the birth of William Makepeace Thackeray in 1811, details not only the author's life, but also the cosmopolitan and literary worlds inhabited by his two daughters, Minny and Annie. When Thackeray died in 1863, the two sisters were forced to find their own way forward. Minny would marry Leslie Stephen, later father of Virginia Woolf, and die at only thirty-five; Annie, encouraged in early years by her father, would herself emerge as a successful novelist, though one always living, albeit willingly, within her father's shadow. Drawing continuously on the letters, diaries, journals and notebooks of the Thackerays and their circle, Aplin sheds light on this remarkable man's family, and the effect that his life, death and legacy had on those closest to him. The book will appeal not just to those interested in Thackeray and the Victorians, but also to readers of biography, womenis studies and memoirs, and to followers of Viriginia Woolf and Bloomsbury.

Samuel Clemens, the man known as Mark Twain, invented the American voice and became one of our greatest celebrities. His life mirrored his country's, as he grew from a Mississippi River boyhood in the days of the frontier, to a Wild-West journalist during the Gold Rush, to become the king of the eastern establishment and a global celebrity as America became an international power. Along the way, Mark Twain keenly observed the characters and voices that filled the growing country, and left us our first authentically American literature. Ron Powers's magnificent biography offers the definitive life of the founding father of our culture.

This ambitious book presents the first sustained analysis of the evolving representation of Cuthbert, the premier saint of northern England. The study spans both major and neglected texts across eight centuries, from his earliest depictions in anonymous and Bedan vitae, through twelfth-century ecclesiastical histories and miracle collections produced at Durham, to his late medieval appearances in Latin meditations, legendaries, and vernacular verse. Whitehead reveals the coherence of these texts as one tradition, exploring the way that ideologies and literary strategies persist across generations. An innovative addition to the literature of insular spirituality and hagiography, The Afterlife of St Cuthbert emphasises the related categories of place and asceticism. It charts Cuthbert's conceptual alignment with a range of institutional, masculine, northern, and national spaces, and examines the distinctive characteristics and changing value of his ascetic lifestyle and environment - frequently constituted as a nature sanctuary - interrogating its relation to his other jurisdictions.

'Life for De Quincey was either angels ascending on vaults of cloud or vagrants shivering on the city streets.' Thomas De Quincey - opium-eater, celebrity journalist, and professional doppelganger - is embedded in our culture. Modelling his character on Coleridge and his sensibility on Wordsworth, De Quincey took over the poet's former cottage in Grasmere and turned it into an opium den. Here, increasingly detached from the world, he nurtured his growing hatred of his former idols and his obsession with murder as one of the fine arts. De Quincey may never have felt the equal of the giants of the Romantic Literature he so worshipped but the writing style he pioneered - scripted and sculptured emotional memoir - was to inspire generations of writers: Dickens, Dostoevsky, Virginia Woolf. James Joyce knew whole pages of his work off by heart and he was arguably the father of what we now call psychogeography. This spectacular biography, the produce of meticulous scholarship and beautifully supple prose, tells the riches-to-rags story of a figure of dazzling complexity and dazzling originality, whose rackety life was lived on the run, and both brings De Quincey and his martyred but wild soul triumphantly to life and firmly establishes Frances Wilson in the front rank of contemporary biographers.

Wine and dine with Victorian London's literati in a heatwave in one of the first ever group biographies, introduced by Francesca Wade (author of Square Haunting). Though she loved the heat she could do nothing but lie on the sofa and drink lemonade and read Monte Cristo . 'One of the most illuminating and insufficiently praised books of the last 60 years.' Observer 'Never bettered.' Guardian 'Brilliant.' Julian Barnes 'Wholly original.' Craig Brown 'A pathfinder.' Richard Holmes 'Extraordinary.' Penelope Lively June 1846. As London swelters in a heatwave - sunstroke strikes, meat rots, ice is coveted - a glamorous coterie of writers and artists spend their summer wining, dining and opining. With the ringletted 'face of an Egyptian cat goddess', Elizabeth Barrett is courted by her secret fiance, the poet Robert Browning, who plots their elopement to Italy; Keats roams Hampstead Heath; Wordsworth visits the zoo; Dickens is intrigued by Tom Thumb; the Carlyles host parties for a visiting German novelist and suffer a marital crisis. But when the visionary painter Benjamin Robert Haydon commits suicide, they find their entwined lives spiralling around the tragedy . . . One of the first-ever group biographies, Alethea Hayter's glorious A Sultry Month is a lively mosaic of archival riches inspired by the collages of the Pop Artists. A groundbreaking feat of creative non-fiction in 1965, her portrait of Victorian London's literati is just as vivid, witty and enticing today. 'Elegant Hayter more or less invented the biographical form which is a close study of a brief period in the life of an individual or a group . . . A rigorous scholar [with] an artist's eye.' A. S. Byatt 'Hayter's clever, innovative book turned a searchlight on a time, a place, a circle of people; it has surely inspired the subsequent fashion for group biographies.' Penelope Lively 'Nothing I've ever read has flung me so immediately into those streets, that weather, that period. Hayter never forgets that people want stories, that lives are stories.' Margaret Forster 'Hayter could take a tiny chip of life [and] find within it the seeds of a whole existence.' Richard Holmes 'A pioneer . . . Beautifully written vignettes . . . Immaculate scholarship and intense readability.' Jonathan Bate 'Outstanding . . . A small masterpiece.' Anthony Burgess 'A brilliant recreation of London literary life in 1846, which is highly original in its form and narrative cross-cutting.' Julian Barnes

THE RADIO 4 BOOK OF THE WEEK 'Gobsmacking' The Times 'Luscious' Mail on Sunday 'Delectable . . . ravishing' Sunday Times 'A chocolate box full of delicious gothic delights - jump in' Lucy Worsley 'Stranger than fiction, as dark as any gothic drama . . . utterly gripping' Amanda Foreman 'Brings to life the colourful characters of the Georgian era's most notorious families with all the verve and skill of the era's finest novelists . . . A powdered and pomaded, sordid and silk-swathed adventure' Hallie Rubenhold Many know Lord Byron as leading poet of the Romantic movement. But few know the dynasty from which he emerged; infamous for its scandal and impropriety, with tales of elopement, murder, kidnaping, profligacy, doomed romance and adultery. A sumptuous story that begins in rural Nottinghamshire and plays out in the gentleman's clubs of Georgian London, amid tempests on far-flung seas, and in the glamour of pre-revolutionary France, The Fall of the House of Byron is the acclaimed account of intense family drama over three turbulent generations.

In the tradition of "The Glass Castle," two sisters confront schizophrenia in this poignant literary memoir about family and mental illness. Through stunning prose and original art, "The Memory Palace" captures the love between mother and daughter, the complex meaning of truth, and family's capacity for forgiveness.
"People have abandoned their loved ones for much less than you've been through," Mira Bartok is told at her mother's memorial service. It is a poignant observation about the relationship between Mira, her sister, and their mentally ill mother. Before she was struck with schizophrenia at the age of nineteen, beautiful piano protege Norma Herr had been the most vibrant personality in the room. She loved her daughters and did her best to raise them well, but as her mental state deteriorated, Norma spoke less about Chopin and more about Nazis and her fear that her daughters would be kidnapped, murdered, or raped.
When the girls left for college, the harassment escalated--Norma called them obsessively, appeared at their apartments or jobs, threatened to kill herself if they did not return home. After a traumatic encounter, Mira and her sister were left with no choice but to change their names and sever all contact with Norma in order to stay safe. But while Mira pursued her career as an artist--exploring the ancient romance of Florence, the eerie mysticism of northern Norway, and the raw desert of Israel--the haunting memories of her mother were never far away.
Then one day, a debilitating car accident changes Mira's life forever. Struggling to recover from a traumatic brain injury, she was confronted with a need to recontextualize her life--she had to relearn how to paint, read, and interact with the outside world. In her search for a way back to her lost self, Mira reached out to the homeless shelter where she believed her mother was living and discovered that Norma was dying.
Mira and her sister traveled to Cleveland, where they shared an extraordinary reconciliation with their mother that none of them had thought possible. At the hospital, Mira discovered a set of keys that opened a storage unit Norma had been keeping for seventeen years. Filled with family photos, childhood toys, and ephemera from Norma's life, the storage unit brought back a flood of previous memories that Mira had thought were lost to her forever.

Hunter S. Thompson is best remembered today as a caricature: drug-addled, sharp-witted, and passionate; played with bowlegged aplomb by Johnny Depp; memorialized as a Doonesbury character. In all this entertainment, the true figure of Thompson has unfortunately been forgotten. In this perceptive, dramatic book, Tim Denevi recounts the moment when Thompson found his calling. As the Kennedy assassination and the turmoil of the 60s paved the way for Richard Nixon, Thompson greeted him with two very powerful emotions: fear and loathing. In his fevered effort to take down what he saw as a rising dictator, Thompson made a kind of Faustian bargain, taking the drugs he needed to meet newspaper deadlines and pushing himself beyond his natural limits. For ten years, he cast aside his old ambitions, troubled his family, and likely hastened his own decline, along the way producing some of the best political writing in our history. This remarkable biography reclaims Hunter Thompson for the enigmatic true believer he was: not a punchline or a cartoon character, but a fierce, colorful opponent of fascism in a country that suddenly seemed all too willing to accept it.

'Sympathetic and wonderfully perceptive . . . a heartbreaking read' NICK COHEN, Critic 'Wise, witty and empathetic . . . outstanding' JIM CRACE 'A fascinating treatment of the age-old problem of writers and drink which displays the same subtle qualities as William Palmer's own undervalued novels' D. J. TAYLOR An 'enjoyable exploration of an enduringly fascinating subject . . . [Palmer] is above all a dispassionate critic, and is always attentive to, and unwaveringly perceptive about the art of his subjects as well as their relationship with alcohol . . . [his] treatment is even-handed and largely without judgement. He tries to understand, without either condoning or censuring, the impulses behind often reprehensible behaviour' SOUMYA BHATTACHARYA, New Statesman 'A vastly absorbing and entertaining study of this ever-interesting subject' ANDREW DAVIES, screenwriter and novelist 'In Love with Hell is a fascinating and beautifully written account of the lives of eleven British and American authors whose addiction to alcohol may have been a necessary adjunct to their writing but ruined their lives. Palmer's succinct biographies contain fine descriptions of the writers, their work and the times they lived in; and there are convincing insights into what led so many authors to take to drink.' PIERS PAUL READ Why do some writers destroy themselves by drinking alcohol? Before our health-conscious age it would be true to say that many writers drank what we now regard as excessive amounts. Graham Greene, for instance, drank on a daily basis quantities of spirits and wine and beer most doctors would consider as being dangerous to his health. But he was rarely out of control and lived with his considerable wits intact to the age of eighty-six. W. H. Auden drank the most of a bottle of spirits a day, but also worked hard and steadily every day until his death. Even T. S. Eliot, for all his pontifical demeanour, was extremely fond of gin and was once observed completely drunk on a London Tube station by a startled friend. These were not writers who are generally regarded as alcoholics. 'Alcoholic' is, in any case, a slippery word, as exemplified by Dylan Thomas's definition of an alcoholic as 'someone you dislike who drinks as much as you.' The word is still controversial and often misunderstood and misapplied. What acclaimed novelist and poet William Palmer's book is interested in is the effect that heavy drinking had on writers, how they lived with it and were sometimes destroyed by it, and how they described the whole private and social world of the drinker in their work. He looks at Patrick Hamilton ('the feverish magic that alcohol can work'); Jean Rhys ('As soon as I sober up I start again'); Charles Jackson ('Delirium is a disease of the night'); Malcolm Lowry ('I love hell. I can't wait to go back there'); Dylan Thomas ('A womb with a view'); John Cheever ('The singing of the bottles in the pantry'); Flann O'Brien ('A pint of plain is your only man'); Anthony Burgess ('Writing is an agony mitigated by drink'); Kingsley Amis ('Beer makes you drunk'); Richard Yates ('The road to Revolutionary Road'); and Elizabeth Bishop ('The writer's writer's writer').

"The most revealing and subjectively penetrating assessment of Baldwin's life yet published." -The New York Times Book Review. "The first Baldwin biography in which one can recognize the human features of this brilliant, troubled, principled, supremely courageous man." -Boston Globe James Baldwin was one of the great writers of the last century. In works that have become part of the American canon-Go Tell It on a Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Another Country, The Fire Next Time, and The Evidence of Things Not Seen-he explored issues of race and racism in America, class distinction, and sexual difference. A gay, African American writer who was born in Harlem, he found the freedom to express himself living in exile in Paris. When he returned to America to cover the Civil Rights movement, he became an activist and controversial spokesman for the movement, writing books that became bestsellers and made him a celebrity, landing him on the cover of Time. In this biography, David Leeming creates an intimate portrait of a complex, troubled, driven, and brilliant man. He plumbs every aspect of Baldwin's life: his relationships with the unknown and the famous, including painter Beauford Delaney, Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, and childhood friend Richard Avedon; his expatriate years in France and Turkey; his gift for compassion and love; the public pressures that overwhelmed his quest for happiness, and his passionate battle for black identity, racial justice, and to "end the racial nightmare and achieve our country."

This book tells the story of the various Allied operations and schemes instigated to keep Spain and Portugal out of WWII, which included the widespread bribery of high ranking Spanish officials and the duplicity of Admiral Wilhelm Canaris, head of the Abwehr. Ian Fleming and Alan Hillgarth were the architects of Operation Golden Eye, the sabotage and disruption scheme that would be put in place had Germany invaded Spain. Fleming visited the Iberian Peninsula and Tangiers several times during the war, arguably his greatest achievement in WWII and the closest he came to being a real secret agent. It was these visits which supplied much of the background material for his fiction - Fleming even called his home on Jamaica where he created 007 'Goldeneye'. The book begins with Hitler's dilemma about which way to move, and his meeting with Francisco Franco at Hendaye in October 1940, a major turning point in the war when an alliance between Germany and Spain seemed possible. Simmons explores the British reaction to this, with Operation Tracer being created by Admiral Godfrey, head of Naval Intelligence. This was a plan to leave a listening and observation post buried in the Rock of Gibraltar should it have fallen to the Germans. A chapter is also devoted to Portugal - the SIS and SOE operations there and the vital Wolfram wars. Operation Golden Eye was eventually put on standby in 1943 as the risk of the Nazis occupying Spain was much reduced. Simmons consulted Foreign Office, SOE, CIA and OKW files when writing this book.

One morning Mel Toews put on his coat and hat and walked out of town, prepared to die. A loving husband and father, faithful member of the Mennonite church, and immensely popular schoolteacher, he was a pillar of his close-knit community. Yet after a lifetime of struggle, he could no longer face the darkness of manic depression. With razor-sharp precision,Swing Low tells his story in his own voice, taking us deep inside the experience of despair. But it is also a funny, winsome evocation of country life: growing up on farm, courting a wife, becoming a teacher, and rearing a happy, strong family in the midst of private torment. A humane, inspiring story of a remarkable man, father, and teacher.

In this second collection of biographical accounts of Romantic writers, the characters of Keats, Coleridge and Scott are recalled by their contemporaries, offering insights into their lives and writings, as well as into the art of 19th-century biography.

With an introduction by Harriet McDougal, Origins of The Wheel of Time by Michael Livingston explores the inspirations behind the acclaimed series The Wheel of Time, including a biography of Robert Jordan for the first time. 'Jordan has come to dominate the world Tolkien began to reveal' - New York Times on The Wheel of Time series Explore never-before-seen insights into The Wheel of Time, including: - A brand-new, redrawn world map by Ellisa Mitchell using change requests discovered in Robert Jordan's unpublished notes - An alternate scene from an early draft of The Eye of the World This companion to the internationally bestselling series will delve into the creation of Robert Jordan's masterpiece, drawing from interviews and an unprecedented examination of his unpublished notes. Michael Livingston tells the behind-the-scenes story of who Jordan was (including a chapter that is the very first published biography of the author), how he worked, and why he holds such an important place in modern literature. The second part of the book is a glossary to the 'real world' in The Wheel of Time. King Arthur is in The Wheel of Time. Merlin, too. But so is Alexander the Great and the Apollo Space Program, the Norse gods and Napoleon's greatest defeat - and so much more. Origins of The Wheel of Time will provide exciting knowledge and insights to both new and longtime fans looking either to expand their understanding of the series or unearth the real-life influences that Jordan utilized in his world-building - all in one accessible text.

This volume considers two authors who represent different but complementary responses to social injustice and human degradation. The writings of Walter Rauschenbusch and Dorothy Day respond to an American situation that arose out of the industrial revolution and reflect especially-but not exclusively-urban life in the east coast of the United States during the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. Although these two authors differ greatly, they both reacted to the extreme social inequality and strife that occurred between 1890 and the beginning of World War II. They shared a total commitment to the cause of social justice, their Christian faith, and an active engagement in the quest for a just social order. But the different ways they reacted to the situation generated different spiritualities. Rauschenbusch was a pastor, writer, historian, and seminary professor. Day was a journalist who became an organizer. The strategic differences between them, however, grew out of a common sustained reaction against the massive deprivation that surrounded them. There is no spiritual rivalry here. They complement each other and reinforce the Christian humanitarian motivation that drives them. Their work brings the social dimension of Christian spirituality to the surface in a way that had not been emphasized in the same focused way before them. They are part of an awakening to the degree to which the social order lies in the hands of the people who support it. Both Rauschenbusch and Day are examples of an explicit recognition of the social dimension of Christian spirituality, and a radical acting out of that response in two distinctly different ways.