'The moment I got my job at Virago in 1978 I knew it would be a long time before I would leave. I certainly wouldn't have had the brazen hope then-only twenty-five and very recently new to Britain-that I would ever become the Publisher, but I did know that I had found my home: where books, ideas, politics, imagination, feminism, and business was the air we breathed . . .' A Bite of the Apple is part-memoir, part history of Virago, and part thoughts on over forty years of feminist publishing. This is the story of how the authors and staff who, driven by passion, conviction and excitement, have made Virago Press one of the most important and influential English-language publishers in the world. Lennie Goodings has been with the iconic press founded by Carmen Callil almost since the start. First a publicist and then for over twenty years, publisher and editor, she has worked with extraordinary authors: Margaret Atwood, Marilynne Robinson, Sarah Waters, Linda Grant, Natasha Walter, Naomi Wolf and Maya Angelou among many others. Virago has been a life-changer for Lennie Goodings - but certainly not only for her. Following the chronology of the press and the enormous breadth of the Virago titles published over these years, she sets her story in the context of feminism, and segues into thoughts on editing, post-feminism, reading, breaking boundaries, and the Virago Modern Classics. Virago lives within the tension between idealism and pragmatism; between sisterhood and celebrity; between watching feminism wax and wane at the same time as knowing so many of the battles are still to be won. This book is about how it felt to be there. A Bite of the Apple is a celebration of writing, of publishing, and of reading.

'Life was a wordless battle of wits between us, with her keeping a sharp look-out for signs of neglect, and me trying to disguise my slovenliness by subterfuge. I became an adept at sweeping dust under the bed, and always used the same few pieces of silver' Unimpressed by the world of debutante balls, Monica Dickens shocked her family by getting a job. With no experience whatsoever, she gained employment as a cook-general. Monica's cooking and cleaning skills left much to be desired, and her first few positions were short lived, but soon she started to hold her own. Monica discovered the pleasure of daily banter with the milkman and grocer's boy and the joy of doing an honest day's work, all the while keeping a wry eye on the childish pique of her employers. One Pair of Hands is a fascinating and thoroughly entertaining memoir of life upstairs and downstairs in the early 1930s.

Anne Bronte, the youngest and most enigmatic of the Bronte sisters, remains a best-selling author nearly two centuries after her death. The brilliance of her two novels - Agnes Grey and The Tenant of Wildfell Hall - and her poetry belies the quiet, yet courageous girl who often lived in the shadows of her more celebrated sisters. Yet her writing was the most revolutionary of all the Brontes, pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable. This revealing new biography opens Anne's most private life to a new audience and shows the true nature of her relationships with her siblings, in particular with her sister Charlotte.

John Buchan's name is known across the world for The Thirty-Nine Steps. In the past one hundred years the classic thriller has never been out of print and has inspired numerous adaptations for film, television, radio and stage, beginning with the celebrated version by Alfred Hitchcock.

Yet there was vastly more to 'JB'. He wrote more than a hundred books – fiction and non-fiction – and a thousand articles for newspapers and magazines. He was a scholar, antiquarian, barrister, colonial administrator, journal editor, literary critic, publisher, war correspondent, director of wartime propaganda, member of parliament and imperial proconsul – given a state funeral when he died, a deeply admired and loved Governor-General of Canada.

His teenage years in Glasgow's Gorbals, where his father was the Free Church minister, contributed to his ease with shepherds and ambassadors, fur-trappers and prime ministers. His improbable marriage to a member of the aristocratic Grosvenor family means that this account of his life contains, at its heart, an enduring love story.

Ursula Buchan, his granddaughter, has drawn on recently discovered family documents to write this comprehensive and illuminating biography. With perception, style, wit and a penetratingly clear eye, she brings vividly to life this remarkable man and his times.

The remarkable transformation of Orwell from journeyman writer to towering icon Is George Orwell the most influential writer who ever lived? Yes, according to John Rodden's provocative book about the transformation of a man into a myth. Rodden does not argue that Orwell was the most distinguished man of letters of the last century, nor even the leading novelist of his generation, let alone the greatest imaginative writer of English prose fiction. Yet his influence since his death at midcentury is incomparable. No other writer has aroused so much controversy or contributed so many incessantly quoted words and phrases to our cultural lexicon, from "Big Brother" and "doublethink" to "thoughtcrime" and "Newspeak." Becoming George Orwell is a pathbreaking tour de force that charts the astonishing passage of a litterateur into a legend. Rodden presents the author of Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four in a new light, exploring how the man and writer Orwell, born Eric Arthur Blair, came to be overshadowed by the spectral figure associated with nightmare visions of our possible futures. Rodden opens with a discussion of the life and letters, chronicling Orwell's eccentricities and emotional struggles, followed by an assessment of his chief literary achievements. The second half of the book examines the legend and legacy of Orwell, whom Rodden calls "England's Prose Laureate," looking at everything from cyberwarfare to "fake news." The closing chapters address both Orwell's enduring relevance to burning contemporary issues and the multiple ironies of his popular reputation, showing how he and his work have become confused with the very dreads and diseases that he fought against throughout his life.

Canadian literary theorist Northrop Frye reshaped literary studies with his 1957 book, Anatomy of Criticism. During his long career, Frye earned widespread recognition and honors for his contributions to cultural and social critique. This biographical and bibliographic guide to Frye and his work includes a chronology, a catalog of primary and secondary materials, a list of conferences devoted to him, annotations in books in his personal library, his honorary degrees, dissertations under his direction, the application of his criticism in other disciplines, and his role in the Bodley Club as an Oxford student. Explorations of books and journals dedicated to his work and of the volumes in his Collected Works complete this exhaustive compilation on one of the most influential literary critics of the 20th century.

'Fascinating ... compelling ... very funny' Sunday Times 'A defiant call to arms ... affecting ... lingers long in the memory after its final page' Morning Star 'A skilful act of literary witness, sharp, moving and funny' Joanne Limburg 'Christoph Keller ... ranks among the great Swiss writers' Neue Zurcher Zeitung Most stories of disability follow a familiar pattern: Life Before Accident. Life After Accident. For Christoph Keller, it was different: his childhood diagnosis with a form of Spinal Muscular Atrophy only revealed what had been with him since birth. SMA III, the 'kindest one', allows those who have it to live a long life, and it progresses slowly. There is no cure. By the age of 25, he had to use a wheelchair some of the time. 'There were two of me: Walking Me. Rolling Me.' By 32, he could still walk into a restaurant with a cane or on somebody's arm. At 45, 'Rolling Me' took over altogether. Intimate, absurdist and winningly frank, Every Cripple a Superhero is at once a memoir of life with a progressive disorder, and a profound exploration of the challenges of loving, being loved, and living a public life - navigating restaurants, aeroplanes, museums and artists' retreats - in a world not designed for you. Threaded throughout are Keller's own photographs of the unexpected beauty found in puddle-filled 'curb cuts', the pavement ramps that, left to disintegrate, form part of the urban obstacle course. Those puddles become portals into a different, truer city; and, as they do, so this book - told with humour and immense grace - begins to uncover a truer world: one where the 'normal' is not normal, where disability is far more widespread than we might think, and where there always exist, just alongside our own, the lives of everyday superheroes.

Angry in Piraeus is the story of the creation of a translator, as Maureen Freely explores what it was in her childhood that led her to become a traveler across the spaces that exist between countries, languages, and forms. She offers rich descriptions of her itinerant upbringing in America, Turkey, and Greece, vividly evoking what it means to be constantly commuting between worlds - geographical, conceptual, linguistic, and literary - in search of a home, or a self, that is proving elusive. She tells of her transition from novelist to translator - and, specifically, translator of Nobel Prize - winner Orhan Pamuk - and of how eventually she found it necessary to give up translating Pamuk in order to return to her own fictional worlds. As in the entire Cahiers series, the author's words are complemented by beautiful artworks, in this case delicate collages created by Japanese artist Rie Iwatake that journey through their own in - between spaces in a captivating play of analogies and metaphors. The resulting book is an unforgettable meditation on translation, writing, and life itself.

In this second edition of William Wordsworth: A Life, Stephen Gill draws on knowledge of the poet's creative practices and his reputation and influence in his life-time and beyond. Refusing to treat the poet's later years as of little interest, this biography presents a narrative of the whole of Wordsworth's long life-1770 to 1850-tracing the development from the adventurous youth who alone of the great Romantic poets saw life in revolutionary France to the old man who became Queen Victoria's Poet Laureate. The various phases of Wordsworth's life are explored with a not uncritical sympathy; the narrative brings out the courage he and his wife and family were called upon to show as they crafted the life they wanted to lead. While the emphasis is on Wordsworth the writer, the personal relationships that nourished his creativity are fully treated, as are the historical circumstances that affected the production of his poetry. Wordsworth, it is widely believed, valued poetic spontaneity. He did, but he also took pains over every detail of the process of publication. The foundation of this second edition of the biography remains, as it was of the first, a conviction that Wordsworth's poetry, which has given pleasure and comfort to generations of readers in the past, will continue to do so in the years to come.

Jonathan Swift and Philosophy is the first book to analyse and interpret Swift's writing from a philosophical angle. By placing key texts of Swift in their philosophical and cultural contexts and providing background to their history of ideas, it demonstrates how well informed Swift's criticism of the politics, philosophy, and science of his age actually was. Moreover, it also sets straight preconceptions about Swift as ignorant about the scientific developments of his time. The authors offer insights into, and interpretations of, Swift's political philosophy, ethics, and his philosophy of science and demonstrate how versatile a writer and thinker Swift actually was. This book will be of interest to scholars of philosophy, history of ideas, and 18th century literature and culture.

'I seem to have banged on this year rather more than usual. I make no apology for that, nor am I nervous that it will it make a jot of difference. I shall still be thought to be kindly, cosy and essentially harmless. I am in the pigeon-hole marked 'no threat' and did I stab Judi Dench with a pitchfork I should still be a teddy bear.' Alan Bennett's third collection of prose Keeping On Keeping On follows in the footsteps of the phenomenally successful Writing Home and Untold Stories, each published ten years apart. This latest collection contains Bennett's peerless diaries 2005 to 2015, reflecting on a decade that saw four premieres at the National Theatre (The Habit of Art, People, Hymn and Cocktail Sticks), a West End double-bill transfer, and the films of The History Boys and The Lady in the Van. There's a provocative sermon on private education given before the University at King's College Chapel, Cambridge, and 'Baffled at a Bookcase' offers a passionate defence of the public library. The book includes Denmark Hill, a darkly comic radio play set in suburban south London, as well as Bennett's reflections on a quarter of a century's collaboration with Nicholas Hytner. This is an engaging, humane, sharp, funny and unforgettable record of life according to the inimitable Alan Bennett.

A Thickness of Particulars: The Poetry of Anthony Hecht is the first book-length study of one of the great formal poets of the later twentieth century (1923-2004). Making use of Hecht's correspondence, which the author edited, it situates Hecht's writings in the context of pre- and post-World-War II verse, including poetry written by W. H. Auden, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, James Merrill, and Richard Wilbur. In nine chapters, the book ranges over Hecht's full career, with special emphasis placed on the effects of the war on his memory; Hecht participated in the final push by the Allied troops in Europe and was involved in the liberation of the Flossenburg Concentration Camp. The study explores the important place Venice and Italy occupied in his imagination as well as the significance of the visual and dramatic arts and music more generally. Chapters are devoted to analyzing celebrated individual poems, such as "The Book of Yolek" and "The Venetian Vespers" ; the making of particular volumes, as in the case of the Pulitzer-Prize-winning "The Hard Hours"; the poet's mid-career turn toward writing dramatic monologues and longer narrative poems ("Green, An Epistle," "The Grapes," and "See Naples and Die") and ekphrases; the inspiring use he made of Shakespeare, especially in "A Love for Four Voices," his delightful riff on "A Midsummer Night's Dream"; and his collaboration with the artist Leonard Baskin in the "Presumptions of Death" series from "Flight Among the Tombs." The book seeks to unfold the itinerary of a highly civilized mind brooding, with wit, over the dark landscape of the later twentieth century in poems of unrivalled beauty.

PEN/ Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography Longlist O, The Oprah Magazine "Best Books of Summer" selection "Magnetic nonfiction." --O, The Oprah Magazine "Remarkable insight ...[a] unique meditation/investigation...Jerome Charyn the unpredictable, elusive, and enigmatic is a natural match for Emily Dickinson, the quintessence of these." --Joyce Carol Oates, author of Wild Nights! and The Lost Landscape We think we know Emily Dickinson: the Belle of Amherst, virginal, reclusive, and possibly mad. But in A Loaded Gun, Jerome Charyn introduces us to a different Emily Dickinson: the fierce, brilliant, and sexually charged poet who wrote: My Life had stood--a Loaded Gun-- ...Though I than He-- may longer live He longer must--than I-- For I have but the power to kill, Without--the power to die-- Through interviews with contemporary scholars, close readings of Dickinson's correspondence and handwritten manuscripts, and a suggestive, newly discovered photograph that is purported to show Dickinson with her lover, Charyn's literary sleuthing reveals the great poet in ways that have only been hinted at previously: as a woman who was deeply philosophical, intensely engaged with the world, attracted to members of both sexes, and able to write poetry that disturbs and delights us today. Jerome Charyn is the author of, most recently, Bitter Bronx: Thirteen Stories, I Am Abraham: A Novel of Lincoln and the Civil War, and The Secret Life of Emily Dickinson: A Novel. He lives in New York.

This critical analysis of twelve of the plays of James Bridie (1885-1951) illustrates that throughout Bridie's work there exists a philosophical continuity which can be traced through three stages of moral awareness and which when recognized goes far in defining Bridie's genius. Bridie, as the study attempts to show, was essentially a moralist, and his plays are in a special sense morality plays; thus his original use of religious myth is explored, particularly his use of the myth of the fall from innocence. Bridie's first play, The Switchback uses the myth of Adam's temptation and fall to tell the story of a Scottish physician's struggle to meet both self and social responsibilities. Four other plays, Tobias and the Angel, The Girl Who Did Not Want to Go to Kuala Lampur, Marriage Is No Joke, and The Black Eye, again deal with the Fall, this time with innocent Adams who remain oblivious of the demons tempting them to leave their particular Garden of Eden. The discussion of Tobias also introduces Bridie's use of the Prodigal Son story. The disillusionment of experienced Adams is studied in the late plays; the disillusioned Adam of the last Play, The Baikie Charivari, seems to be a modern-day Pontius Pilate. Aside from exploring the mythical content of the plays, Helen L. Luyben defends Bridie as a craftsman against accusations that he was a bungler. She maintains that the structure of the plays is not diffuse but carefully plotted, as is apparent in the conscious use of myth (supported by a metaphysical use of language) and in the common structural techniques found throughout the plays. As Bridie's morality goes beyond the limits of logic, so his structure disregards the limitations of realistic drama, demanding dramatic forms-farce and fantasy-which will encompass the illogical and portray a higher reality than the realistic form. Thus his language operates both on a literal and poetic plane. Finally, Bridie's moral affinity with Shaw and Ibsen is explored, not with the intention of tracing literal borrowing, but to clarify Bridie's philosophical and dramatic intention.

Few of the many romantic figures of the nineties have weathered the changing schools of literary taste as well as Ernest Dowson, in whose verse there is found a timeless, ingratiating charm and enduring interest. This biography is only incidentally a critical appraisal of Dowson's achievements but attempts to give a more completely rounded picture of the man than we have had before it. The book is based on a great deal of new material, which clears up many misinterpretations of Dowson's personality. This consists of unpublished letters from various sources, including twelve from Oscar Wilde that have not been printed before and detailed information gleaned by the author in interviews and in correspondence with persons who knew the poet intimately. To modern readers versed in psychological explanations of behavior, Dowson's story unwinds in a foredoomed pattern: the talented child of neurotic parents, the maladjusted boy at Oxford, the discontented young man in London, his curious infatuation for the child Adelaide, the brief association with prominent literary leaders in the Rhymers' Club and on the short-lived Savoy, and then his mother's suicide, his homelessness, poverty, aimless wandering abroad, the escape in drinking, finally death. Yet with it all, the insatiable urge to weave out his dreams in facile words which now form a unique and permanent contribution to English poetry. From this book Dowson emerges as a tragically interesting figure. The biography gives as much of his story as probably will ever be known, and as such takes an important place among the lives of English poets.

Poet and anti-apartheid activist Dennis Brutus recorded a series of tapes in the 1970s which have been edited and annotated by Bernth Lindfors to give valuable insights into Brutus's life and works. Dennis Brutus (1924-2009) is known internationally as a South African poet, anti-apartheid activist and campaigner for human rights and the release of political prisoners. His literary works include Sirens Knuckles Boots (1963), Letters to Martha, and Other Poems from a South African Prison (1968), A Simple Lust (1973), and Stubborn Hope (1978). When Dennis Brutus was a Visiting Professor at The University of Texas at Austin in 1974-75, he recorded on tape a series of reflections on his life and career. In addition, he frequently responded to questions about his poetry and political activities put to him by students and faculty in formal and informal interviews that were also captured on tape. Transcripts of a selection of these tapes, as well as reprints of two interviews recorded earlier, are reproduced here in order to put on record fragments of the autobiography of a remarkable man who lived in extraordinary times and managed to leave his mark on the land and literature of South Africa. Brutus was an effective anti-apartheid campaigner who succeeded in getting South Africa excluded from the Olympics. His opposition to racial discrimination in sports led to his arrest, banning, and imprisonment on Robben Island. Upon release, he left South Africa and lived most of the rest of his life in exile, where he continued his political work and simultaneously earned an international reputation as a poet who often sang of his love for his country. The tapes are edited by Bernth Lindfors who has added an Introduction and a transcript of a 1970 interview as well as other transcripts of lectures and discussions. Bernth Lindfors is Professor Emeritus of English and African Literatures, The University of Texas at Austin, and founding editor of Research in AfricanLiteratures. He has written and edited numerous books on African literature, including Folklore in Nigerian Literature (1973), Popular Literatures in Africa (1991), Africans on Stage (1999), Early Soyinka (2008), and Early Achebe (2009).

This novel by Maylis Besserie, the first of her Irish trilogy, shows us Samuel Beckett at the end of his life in 1989, living in Le Tiers-Temps retirement home. It is as if Beckett has come to live in one of his own stage productions, peopled with strange, unhinged individuals, waiting for the end of days. Yell, Sam, If You Still Can is filled with voices. From diary notes to clinical reports to daily menus, cool medical voices provide a counterpoint to Beckett himself, who reflects on his increasingly fragile existence. He remains playful, rueful, and aware of the dramatic irony that has brought him to live in the room next door to Winnie, surrounded by grotesques like Hamm or Lucky, abandoned by his wife Suzanne who died before him. Besserie delights in Beckett's bilingualism and plays back and forth between the francophone and anglophone properties of language, summoning James Joyce as Beckett reminisces about evenings the two spent together singing, talking and drinking. Largely written in the library of the Centre Culturel Irlandais, Besserie has kept the hum of Irish voices throughout this work. Yell, Sam, If You Still Can won the "Goncourt du premier roman", the prestigious French literary prize for first time novelists, just before the country went into lockdown. Besserie is now planning a further two novels that will explore the links between Ireland and France and is touted as the new star of the French literary world. Financial Times Book of the Year 2022

Jeannette Walls grew up with parents whose ideals and stubborn nonconformity were both their curse and their salvation. Rex and Rose Mary Walls had four children. In the beginning, they lived like nomads, moving among Southwest desert towns, camping in the mountains. Rex was a charismatic, brilliant man who, when sober, captured his children's imagination, teaching them physics, geology, and above all, how to embrace life fearlessly. Rose Mary, who painted and wrote and couldn't stand the responsibility of providing for her family, called herself an "excitement addict." Cooking a meal that would be consumed in fifteen minutes had no appeal when she could make a painting that might last forever.

Later, when the money ran out, or the romance of the wandering life faded, the Walls retreated to the dismal West Virginia mining town -- and the family -- Rex Walls had done everything he could to escape. He drank. He stole the grocery money and disappeared for days. As the dysfunction of the family escalated, Jeannette and her brother and sisters had to fend for themselves, supporting one another as they weathered their parents' betrayals and, finally, found the resources and will to leave home.

What is so astonishing about Jeannette Walls is not just that she had the guts and tenacity and intelligence to get out, but that she describes her parents with such deep affection and generosity. Hers is a story of triumph against all odds, but also a tender, moving tale of unconditional love in a family that despite its profound flaws gave her the fiery determination to carve out a successful life on her own terms.

For two decades, Jeannette Walls hid her roots. Now she tells her own story. A regular contributor to MSNBC.com, she lives in New York and Long Island and is married to the writer John Taylor.