A GUARDIAN BEST BOOK OF THE 21ST CENTURY WINNER OF THE PRIX FEMINA ETRANGER 2020 Following on from the critically acclaimed Things I Don't Want to Know, discover the powerful second memoir in Deborah Levy's essential three-part 'Living Autobiography'. 'I can't think of any writer aside from Virginia Woolf who writes better about what it is to be a woman' Observer _________________________________ 'Life falls apart. We try to get a grip and hold it together. And then we realise we don't want to hold it together . . .' The final instalment in Deborah Levy's critically acclaimed 'Living Autobiography', Real Estate, is available now. _________________________________ 'I just haven't stopped reading it . . . it talks so beautifully about being a woman' Billie Piper on BBC Radio 4's Desert Island Discs 'It is the story of every woman throughout history who has expended her love and labour on making a home that turns out to serve the needs of everyone except herself. Wonderful' Guardian 'Wise, subtle and ironic, Levy's every sentence is a masterpiece of clarity and poise . . . a brilliant writer' Daily Telegraph 'A graceful and lyrical rumination on the questions, "What is a woman for? What should a woman be?"' Tatler 'Extraordinary and beautiful, suffused with wit and razor-sharp insights' Financial Times

Life and Letters of Toru Dutt (1921) is a biography of Toru Dutt. Comprising biographical sections by scholar Harihar Das, selections from her many letters, and commentary on her novels and translations, Life and Letters of Toru Dutt is an invaluable resource for information on a pioneering figure in Indian history and Bengali literature. Born in Calcutta to a family of Bengali Christians, Toru Dutt was raised at the crossroads of English and Indian cultures. In addition to her native Bengali, she became fluent in English, French, and Sanskrit as a young girl, eventually writing novels and poems in each language. Harihar Das' biography is an exhaustive record of her life from youth to young adulthood, granting particular attention to her travels in England and Europe, which Dutt herself describes in beautiful prose in letters to friends and family. Despite her limited body of work, Dutt's legacy as a groundbreaking writer remains firm in India and around the world. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Harihar Das and Toru Dutt's Life and Letters of Toru Dutt is a classic work of Bengali literature reimagined for modern readers.

"The Arms of the Infinite" takes the reader inside the minds of author Christopher Barker's parents, writer Elizabeth Smart ("By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept") and poet George Barker. From their first fateful meeting and subsequent elopement, Barker candidly reveals their obsessive, passionate, and volatile love affair.

He writes evocatively of his unconventional upbringing with his siblings in a shack in Ireland and, later, a rambling, falling-down house in Essex. Interesting and charismatic figures from the literary and art worlds are regular visitors, and the book is full of fascinating cameos and anecdotes.

World rights except United Kingdom.

At the heart of this 'Literary Life' are fresh interpretations of Keats's most loved poems, alongside other neglected but rich poems. The readings are placed in the contexts of his letters to family and friends, his medical training, radical politics of the time, his love for Fanny Brawne, his coterie of literary figures and his tragic early death.

Best known for his brief marriage to George Eliot, John Cross (1840 1924) compiled this three-volume 'autobiography' of 1885 from his late wife's journals and letters. Eliot was never married to her long-term partner G. H. Lewes, and she courted further scandal when she married Cross, twenty years her junior, in 1880. While these volumes offer a valuable insight into Eliot's private reflections, what is perhaps most telling is the material left out or rewritten in Cross' efforts to lend his wife's unconventional life some respectability, which he does at the expense of what one reviewer described as Eliot's 'salt and spice'. George Eliot's Life will be of particular interest to scholars of nineteenth-century biography and literature. Volume 1 covers Eliot's life from 1819 to 1857, beginning with a brief sketch of her childhood and continuing with her move to Coventry, then to London, and travels to Geneva.

Best known for his brief marriage to George Eliot, John Walter Cross (1840-1924) compiled this three-volume 'autobiography' of 1885 from his late wife's journals and letters. Eliot was never married to her long-term partner G. H. Lewes, and she courted further scandal when she married Cross, twenty years her junior, in the spring of 1880. While these volumes offer a valuable insight into Eliot's private reflections, what is perhaps most telling is the material left out or rewritten in Cross' efforts to lend his wife's unconventional life some respectability, which he does at the expense of what one reviewer described as Eliot's 'salt and spice'. George Eliot's Life will be of particular interest to scholars of nineteenth-century biography and literature. Volume 3 focuses on Eliot's final years, including her later literary success, travels in Spain, the death of G. H. Lewes, and her marriage to Cross.

First published in 1836, this lively two-volume autobiography of Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776-1847) reveals the background and mindset of this fascinating character. Best-known for helping to stimulate interest in bibliography and for his enthusiasm in promoting book collecting among the aristocracy, the English bibliographer adopts a conversational and anecdotal tone as he shares the details of his life and work with the reader. Volume 2 begins with Dibdin's experiences at Althorp, describing how the rich library there was thrown open to him. He then continues his detailed discussion of his publications, and focuses on his life in London, before the final chapter turns to private libraries and their importance in his life. Drawing upon letters and literature throughout, Dibdin recounts many entertaining tales, including an unfortunate encounter with a 'savage-hearted critic' at a dinner party, and introduces the influential characters he meets along the way.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2014 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR NONFICTION The definitive biography of America's most impassioned and lyrical twentieth-century playwright from acclaimed theatre critic John Lahr 'A masterpiece about a genius' Helen Mirren 'Riveting ... masterful' Sunday Times, Books of the Year On 31 March 1945, at The Playhouse Theatre on Forty-Eight Street the curtain rose on the opening night of The Glass Menagerie. Tennessee Williams, the show's thirty-four-year-old playwright, sat hunched in an aisle seat, looking, according to one paper, 'like a farm boy in his Sunday best'. The Broadway premiere, which had been heading for disaster, closed to an astonishing twenty-four curtain calls and became an instant sell-out. Beloved by an American public, Tennessee Williams's work - blood hot and personal - pioneered, as Arthur Miller declared, 'a revolution' in American theatre. Tracing Williams's turbulent moral and psychological shifts, acclaimed theatre critic John Lahr sheds new light on the man and his work, as well as the America his plays helped to define. Williams created characters so large that they have become part of American folklore: Blanche, Stanley, Big Daddy, Brick, Amanda and Laura transcend their stories, haunting us with their fierce, flawed lives. Similarly, Williams himself swung high and low in his single-minded pursuit of greatness. Lahr shows how Williams's late-blooming homosexual rebellion, his struggle against madness, his grief-struck relationships with his combustible father, prim and pious mother and 'mad' sister Rose, victim to one of the first lobotomies in America, became central themes in his drama. Including Williams's poems, stories, journals and private correspondence in his discussion of the work - posthumously Williams has been regarded as one of the best letter writers of his day - Lahr delivers an astoundingly sensitive and lively reassessment of one of America's greatest dramatists. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is the long-awaited, definitive life and a masterpiece of the biographer's art.

In the long run, we're all dead. But for some of the most influential figures in history, death marked the start of a new adventure. The famous deceased have been stolen, burned, sold, pickled, frozen, stuffed, impersonated and even filed away in a lawyer's office. Their fingers, teeth, toes, arms, legs, skulls, hearts, lungs and nether regions have embarked on voyages that criss-cross the globe and stretch the imagination. Counterfeiters tried to steal Lincoln's corpse. Einstein's brain went on a cross-country road trip. And after Lord Horatio Nelson perished at Trafalgar, his sailors submerged him in brandy - which they drank. From Mozart to Hitler, Rest in Pieces connects the lives of the famous dead to the hilarious and horrifying adventures of their corpses and traces the evolution of cultural attitudes towards death.

In 1911, the New York Times alerted its readers to the forthcoming 'authoritative' biography of Ruskin with the words 'out of a life's devotion to Ruskin and the Herculean task of editing the definitive Ruskin, Mr E. T. Cook is to give us a definitive Ruskin biography also. It will have the authority of a brilliant Oxford scholar, combined with the charm and lightness of a style which makes Mr Cook one of the first of English journalists'. Cook had been given complete access to Ruskin's diaries, notebooks and letters by his literary executors, and Ruskin's family and friends co-operated fully with him. His depth of knowledge of, and sympathy for, his subject make Cook's biography a vital tool for anyone wishing to understand Ruskin's extraordinary achievements in so many fields. Volume 1 covers the period to 1860, the year in which the final volume of Modern Painters was published.

In 1911, the New York Times alerted its readers to the forthcoming 'authoritative' biography of Ruskin with the words 'out of a life's devotion to Ruskin and the Herculean task of editing the definitive Ruskin, Mr E. T. Cook is to give us a definitive Ruskin biography also. It will have the authority of a brilliant Oxford scholar, combined with the charm and lightness of a style which makes Mr Cook one of the first of English journalists'. Cook had been given complete access to Ruskin's diaries, notebooks and letters by his literary executors, and Ruskin's family and friends co-operated fully with him. His depth of knowledge of, and sympathy for, his subject make Cook's biography a vital tool for anyone wishing to understand Ruskin's extraordinary achievements in so many fields. Volume 2 covers the period from 1860 to Ruskin's death in 1900, and includes an index to both volumes.

In 2005, Anne Rice startled her readers with her novel "Christ the Lord: Out of Egypt," and by revealing that, after years as an atheist, she had returned to her Catholic faith."
Christ the Lord: The Road to Cana" followed.
And now, in her powerful and haunting memoir, Rice tells the story of the spiritual transformation that produced a complete change in her literary goals.
She begins with her girlhood in New Orleans as the devout child in a deeply religious Irish Catholic family. She describes how, as she grew up, she lost her belief in God, but not her desire for a meaningful life.
She writes about her years in radical Berkeley, where her career as a novelist began with the publication of "Interview with the Vampire," soon to be followed by more novels about otherworldly beings, about the realms of good and evil, love and alienation, pageantry and ritual, each reflecting aspects of her often agonizing moral quest.
She writes about loss and tragedy (her mother's drinking; the death of her daughter and, later, her beloved husband, Stan Rice); about new joys; about the birth of her son, Christopher; about the family's return in 1988 to the city of New Orleans, the city that inspired so much of her work. She tells how after an adult lifetime of questioning, she experienced the intense conversion and consecration to Christ that lie behind her most recent novels.
For her readers old and new, this book explores her continuing interior pilgrimage.

"From the Hardcover edition."

First published in 1836, this lively two-volume autobiography of Thomas Frognall Dibdin (1776-1847) reveals the background and mindset of this fascinating character. Best-known for helping to stimulate interest in bibliography and for his enthusiasm in promoting book collecting among the aristocracy, the English bibliographer adopts a conversational and anecdotal tone as he shares the details of his life and work with the reader. Volume 1 begins with the history of his parents, who died when Dibdin was very young. Dibdin then describes his formative years at school and college and the beginning of his professional life, including being ordained as a priest, before moving on to discuss his publications in some detail. Drawing upon letters and literature throughout, Dibdin recounts many entertaining tales, including an unfortunate encounter with a 'savage-hearted critic' at a dinner party, and introduces the influential characters he meets along the way.

"Charlotte Perkins Gilman" offers the definitive account of this controversial writer and activist's long and eventful life. Charlotte Anna Perkins Stetson Gilman (1860-1935) launched her career as a lecturer, author, and reformer with the story for which she is best-known today, "The Yellow Wallpaper." She was hailed as the "brains" of the US women's movement, whose focus she sought to broaden from suffrage to economics. Her most influential sociological work criticized the competitive individualism of capitalists and Social Darwinists, and touted altruistic service as the prerequisite to both social progress and human evolution.
By 1900, Gilman had become an international celebrity, but had already faced a scandal over her divorce and "abandonment" of her child. As the years passed, her audience shrunk and grew more hostile, and she increasingly positioned herself in opposition to the society that in an earlier, more idealistic period she had seen as the better part of the self. In her final years, she unflinchingly faced breast cancer, her second husband's sudden death, and finally, her own carefully planned suicide-- she "preferred chloroform to cancer" and cared little for a single life when its usefulness was over.
"Charlotte Perkins Gilman" presents new insights into the life of a remarkable woman whose public solutions often belied her private anxieties. It aims to recapture the drama and complexity of Gilman's life while presenting a comprehensive scholarly portrait.

George Orwell left post-war London for Barnhill, a remote farmhouse on the Isle of Jura, to write what became Nineteen Eighty-Four. He was driven by a passionate desire to undermine the enemies of democracy and make plain the dangers of dictatorship, surveillance, doublethink and censorship. Typing away in his damp bedroom overlooking the garden he curated and the sea beyond, he invented Big Brother, Thought Police, Newspeak and Room 101 - and created a masterpiece. Barnhill tells the dramatic story of this crucial period of Orwell's life. Deeply researched, it reveals the private man behind the celebrated public figure - his turbulent love life, his devotion to his baby son and his declining health as he struggled to deliver his dystopian warning to the world.

In Education of a Felon, the reigning champion of prison novelists finally tells his own story. The son of an alcoholic stagehand father and a Busby Berkeley chorus girl, Bunker was--at seventeen--the youngest inmate ever in San Quentin. His hard-won experiences on L.A.'s meanest streets and in and out of prison gave him the material to write some of the grittiest and most affecting novels of our time.
From smoking a joint in the gas chamber to leaving fingerprints on a knife connected to a serial kiler, from Hollywood's steamy undersde to swimming in the Neptune pool at San Simeon, Bunker delivers a memoir as colorful as any of his novels and as compelling as the life he's lead.

"The Fall of a Sparrow" is the only full biography in English of the partisan, poet, and patriot Abba Kovner (1918-1987). An unsung and largely unknown hero of the Second World War and Israel's War of Independence, Kovner was born in Vilna, "the Jerusalem of Lithuania." Long before the rest of the world suspected, he was the first person to state that Hitler was planning to kill the Jews of Europe. Kovner and other defenders of the Vilna ghetto, only hours before its destruction, escaped to the forest to join the partisans fighting the Nazis. Returning after the Liberation to find Vilna empty of Jews, he immigrated to Israel, wehre he devised a fruitless plot to take revenge on the Germans. He then joined the Israeli army and served as the Givati Brigade's Information Officer, writing "Battle Notes," newsletters that inspired the troops defending Tel Aviv. After the war, Kovner settled on a kibbutz and dedicated his life to working the land, writing poetry, and raising a family. He was also the moving force behind such projects as the Diaspora Museum and the Institute for the Translation of Hebrew Literature. "The Fall of a Sparrow" is based on countless interviews with people who knew Kovner, and letters and archival material that have never been translated before.

Published posthumously in 1964, "A Moveable Feast" remains one of Ernest Hemingway's most enduring works. Since Hemingway's personal papers were released in 1979, scholars have examined the changes made to the text before publication. Now, this special restored edition presents the original manuscript as the author prepared it to be published.
Featuring a personal Foreword by Patrick Hemingway, Ernest's sole surviving son, and an Introduction by grandson of the author, Sean Hemingway, editor of this edition, the book also includes a number of unfinished, never-before-published Paris sketches revealing experiences that Hemingway had with his son, Jack, and his first wife Hadley. Also included are irreverent portraits of literary luminaries, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ford Maddox Ford, and insightful recollections of Hemingway's own early experiments with his craft.
Widely celebrated and debated by critics and readers everywhere, the restored edition of "A Moveable Feast "brilliantly evokes the exuberant mood of Paris after ?World War I and the unbridled creativity and unquenchable enthusiasm that Hemingway himself epitomized.

'I am sure the more fully she - Charlotte Brontë - the friend, the daughter, the sister, the wife, is known - the more highly she will be appreciated.' Mrs Gaskell was quite clear about her priorities when she began to set down the facts of a 'wild, sad life and the beautiful character that grew out of it'. The result was one of the greatest of all English biographies. The book itself was not to be without its stormy passage: Mrs Gaskell, as well she knew, ran up against Victorian shibboleths of propriety and sexual prudery. However, not even the amendments and cuts she was obliged to make in the second and third editions could destroy its overall unity or her psychologically convincing vision of the suffering, emotionally starved and tortured Charlotte Brontë whose life and pitiful death still grips and appalls us. The present text follows the controversial first edition throughout, while all the variations which appeared in the third edition have been recorded in notes and appendices.

Rudyard Kipling has been described as 'one of the few complete originals in English literature'. In his last work, Something of Myself, he reflects on his life and the basis of his art. Yet paradoxically this ostensibly autobiographical work (as an early critic pointed out) actually discloses very little of himself. Thomas Pinney's revealing edition now uncovers the extraordinary extent to which Kipling's account of his life fails to match the biographical facts, in a series of selections, omissions and distortions. Illustrated with Kipling's own satirical drawings from the manuscripts, and brought together with his other autobiographical writings (some previously unpublished), this fascinating book sheds new light on the intriguing relationship between Kipling's life and work.

Volume 4 of the letters of T. S. Eliot, which brings the poet, critic, editor and publisher into his forties, documents a period of anxious and fast-moving professional recovery and personal and spiritual consolidation. Following the withdrawal of financial support by his patron Lady Rothermere, Faber & Gwyer (subsequently Faber & Faber) takes over the responsibility for Eliot's literary periodical The Criterion. He supplements his income as a fledgling publisher, 'just as I did ten years ago, by reviewing, articles, prefaces, lectures, broadcasting talks, and anything that turns up.' His work as editor is internationalist above all else, and Eliot makes contact with a number of eminent and emergent writers and thinkers, as well as forging links with European reviews. Eliot's responsibilities during this period extend to caring for Vivien, who returns home after months in a French psychiatric hospital and whom he looks after with anxious fortitude; and the personal correspondence with his mother closes with her death in September 1929.

In this charming and thought-provoking 1926 volume, Arthur Gray, Master of Jesus College, Cambridge from 1912 to 1940, explored the possibility that William Shakespeare spent his formative years at Polesworth Hall in the Forest of Arden, perhaps serving as a page boy. The Forest of Arden once stretched from just north of Stratford-upon-Avon to Tamworth, and covered what is now Birmingham; Polesworth, near Tamworth, was the home of Sir Henry Goodere and the centre of the famed 'Polesworth Circle'. This splendid focus of creative and cultural activity would have offered the young William exposure to the finest minds, a wonderful education and valuable introductions. Sir Henry, who evidently knew John Shakespeare in Stratford, was certainly patron of many young writers and musicians, including the eminent Elizabethan poet, Michael Drayton. If Gray is correct, Drayton would have been a contemporary of Shakespeare's at Polesworth.

**Featured on BBC Radio 4's A Good Read** 'A profound meditation on language and loss and time, and on how we construct ourselves through stories. And it's painful. And it's beautiful. And I love it.' NATHAN FLIER Samantha Harvey's insomnia arrived, seemingly, from nowhere; for a year she has spent her nights chasing sleep that rarely comes. She's tried everything to appease it. Nothing is helping. What happens when one of the basic human needs goes unmet? For Samantha Harvey, extreme sleep deprivation resulted in a raw clarity about life itself. Original and profound, The Shapeless Unease is a startlingly insightful exploration of memory, writing and influence, death and grief, and the will to survive. 'A delight to read... ineffably rewarding' OBSERVER 'Easily one of the truest and best books I've read about what it's like to be alive now, in this country' MAX PORTER 'How can a book about a sensual deprivation be so sensuous and so full? ... it seemed to give my sleep resonance and poetry. What a beautiful book.' TESSA HADLEY

A wickedly funny memoir with echoes of David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs, "Beautiful People" (originally published in hardcover as "Nasty") is now a BBC comedy hit series from the producer of "Ab Fab" and "The Office."
Proclaimed "the most brilliant, brash thing in type" by Liz Smith, Simon Doonan's saucy prose has established him as an emerging star among literary humorists. In this break-through memoir, reminiscent of both Sedaris and Burroughs, he revisits the landscape of his youth, and displays the irresistible charm that earned him his dedicated audience.
Long before he became a celebrity in his own right--as the author of best-selling books, as the style arbiter of VH1 and "America's Top Model," and the marketing genius behind Barney's New York--Simon Doonan was a "scabby knee'd troll" in Reading, England. In "Beautiful People," Doonan returns to the working-class neighborhood of his youth, and chronicles the misadventures of the Doonan clan in all their wacky glory. Readers meet his mother Betty, whose gravity-defying, peroxide hairdo signified her natural glamour; his father Terry, an amateur vintner who turned parsnips into the legendary Chateau Doonan; his grandfather D.C., a hard-drinking betting man who plotted to win his fortune by turning Simon into a jockey; and his demented grandma Narg and schizophrenic Uncle Ken, both of whom lived upstairs.
Fearing he would fall victim to the insanity that runs in his family, or, worse, the banality of suburban life, Doonan decamps with his flamboyant best-friend Biddie to London, where they hope to find the Beautiful People, that elusive clan who luxuriate on floor pillows and amuse each other with bon mots. Throughout the memoir--in essays about family holidays, the tart who lived next door, his first job--Doonan continues his bumbling pursuit of the fabulous life, only to learn, in the end, that perhaps the Beautiful People were the ones he left behind.