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Books > Language & Literature > Biography & autobiography > Literary
This timely and expansive biography of Wole Soyinka, the Nigerian
writer, Nobel laureate, and social activist, shows how the author's
early years influence his life's work and how his writing, in turn,
informs his political engagement. Three sections spanning his life,
major texts, and place in history, connect Soyinka's legacy with
global issues beyond the borders of his own country, and indeed
beyond the African continent. Covering his encounters with the
widespread rise of kleptocratic rule and international corporate
corruption, his reflection on the human condition of the
North-South divide, and the consequences of postcolonialism, this
comprehensive biography locates Wole Soyinka as a global figure
whose life and works have made him a subject of conversation in the
public sphere, as well as one of Africa's most successful and
popular authors. Looking at the different forms of Soyinka's
work--plays, novels, and memoirs, among others--this volume argues
that Soyinka used writing to inform, mobilize, and sometimes incite
civil action, in a decades-long attempt at literary social
engineering.
A niece of Jane Austen and a novelist herself, Catherine Hubback
was fifty-two years old when she left England for America. She
travelled to California on the Transcontinental Railroad and
settled in Oakland, on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay. Her
son Edward shared her household and commuted by ferryboat to a
wheat brokerage in the City. In letters to her eldest son John and
his wife Mary in Liverpool, Catherine conveys her delight - and her
exasperation - at her new environment. She portrays her neighbours
with a novelist's wry wit and brings her English sensibility to
bear on gardening with unfamiliar plants and maintaining a proper
wardrobe in a dry climate. She writes vividly of her adventures as
she moves about a landscape recognizable to present-day residents,
at a time when boats rather than bridges spanned the bay, and hot
springs were the main attraction in the Napa Valley. In an
atmosphere of financial unrest, she writes freely of her anxieties,
while supplementing Edward's declining income by making lace and
teaching the craft to other women. She recalls her 'prosperous
days' in England, but finds pleasure in small things and assuredly
takes her place in a society marked by great disparities in wealth.
In addition to transcriptions of the letters, this highly readable
edition offers pertinent information on many of the people and
places mentioned, explanatory notes, and striking illustrations.
The introduction places the letters in context and tells the story
of Catherine Hubback, whose life evolved in ways unprecedented in
the Austen family.
Winner of the Anne M. Sperber Prize
A spirited and revealing memoir by the most celebrated editor of his time
After editing The Columbia Review, staging plays at Cambridge, and a stint in the greeting-card department of Macy's, Robert Gottlieb stumbled into a job at Simon and Schuster. By the time he left to run Alfred A. Knopf a dozen years later, he was the editor in chief, having discovered and edited Catch-22 and The American Way of Death, among other bestsellers. At Knopf, Gottlieb edited an astonishing list of authors, including Toni Morrison, John Cheever, Doris Lessing, John le Carre, Michael Crichton, Lauren Bacall, Katharine Graham, Robert Caro, Nora Ephron, and Bill Clinton--not to mention Bruno Bettelheim and Miss Piggy. In Avid Reader, Gottlieb writes with wit and candor about succeeding William Shawn as the editor of The New Yorker, and the challenges and satisfactions of running America's preeminent magazine. Sixty years after joining Simon and Schuster, Gottlieb is still at it--editing, anthologizing, and, to his surprise, writing.
But this account of a life founded upon reading is about more than the arc of a singular career--one that also includes a lifelong involvement with the world of dance. It's about transcendent friendships and collaborations, "elective affinities" and family, psychoanalysis and Bakelite purses, the alchemical relationship between writer and editor, the glory days of publishing, and--always--the sheer exhilaration of work.
"Generous and entertaining." -Publishers Weekly (starred review)
Finalist for the PEN/Diamonstein-Spielvogel Award for the Art of
the Essay * Nominated for "Best Memoir & Autobiography" by
Goodreads Choice Awards 2016 * Named a "Best Book of the Year" by
New York Post "You'll laugh, you'll cry, you'll want to read it
again." -TheSkimm "I'm mad Jennifer's Weiner's first book of essays
is as wonderful as her fiction. You will love this book and wish
she was your friend." -Mindy Kaling, author of Why Not Me?
"Fiercely funny, powerfully smart, and remarkably brave." -Cheryl
Strayed, author of Wild Jennifer Weiner is many things: a
bestselling author, a Twitter phenomenon, and an "unlikely feminist
enforcer" (The New Yorker). She's also a mom, a daughter, and a
sister, a clumsy yogini, and a reality-TV devotee. In this
"unflinching look at her own experiences" (Entertainment Weekly),
Jennifer fashions tales of modern-day womanhood as uproariously
funny and moving as the best of Nora Ephron and Tina Fey. No
subject is off-limits in these intimate and honest essays: sex,
weight, envy, money, her mother's coming out of the closet, her
estranged father's death. From lonely adolescence to hearing her
six-year-old daughter say the F word-fat-for the first time, Jen
dives into the heart of female experience, with the wit and candor
that have endeared her to readers all over the world.
For generations of children, including a young Oprah Winfrey,
opening a Lois Lenski book has meant opening a world. This was just
what the author wanted: to help children ""see beyond the rim of
their own world."" In Lois Lenski: Storycatcher, historian and
educator Bobbie Malone takes us into Lenski's own world to tell the
story of how a girl from a small Ohio town became a beloved
literary icon. Author and illustrator of the Newbery Award-winning
Strawberry Girl and numerous other tales of children from America's
diverse regions and cultures, Lenski spent five decades creating
stories for young readers. Lois Lenski: Storycatcher follows her
development as a writer and as an artist, and it traces the
evolution of her passionate belief in the power of empathy conveyed
in children's books. Understanding that youngsters responded
instinctively to narratives rich in reality, Lenski turned her
extensive study of hardworking families into books that accurately
and movingly depicted the lives of the children of sharecroppers,
coal miners, and migrant field workers. From Bayou Suzette to Blue
Ridge Billy, Corn-Farm Boy to Houseboat Girl, and Boom Town Boy to
Texas Tomboy, Lenski's books mirrored the cultural energy and
concerns of the time. This first full-length biography tells how
Lenski traveled throughout the country, gathering the stories that
brought to life in words and pictures whole worlds that had for so
long been invisible in children's literature. In the process, her
work became a source of delight, inspiration, and insight for
generations of readers.
Go further under the covers and stay in bed a little longer with
Marian Keyes in this winning follow-up to her smash essay
collection, Under the Duvet. Written in the witty, forthright style
that has earned her legions of devoted readers, "Cracks in My
Foundation" offers an even deeper and more candid look into this
beloved author's mind and heart, exploring such universal themes as
friends and family, home, glamour and beauty, children, travel, and
more. Marian's hilarious and thoughtful take on life makes her
readers feel they are reading a friend, not just an author.
Marian continues to entertain with her reports from the
trenches, and throws in some original short fiction as well.
Whether it's visiting Siberia, breaking it off with an old
hairdresser, shopping (of course!), turning "forty," living with
her beloved husband, Himself (a man beyond description), or musing
on the F word (feminism), Marian shares the joys, passions, and
sorrows of her world and helps us feel good about our own. So grab
a latte and a pillow and get ready to laugh your slippers off!
They ate garlic and didn't always bathe; they listened to Wagner
and worshiped Diaghilev; they sent their children to coeducational
schools, explored homosexuality and free love, vegetarianism and
Post-impressionism. They were often drunk and broke, sometimes
hungry, but they were of a rebellious spirit. Inhabiting the same
England with Philistines and Puritans, this parallel minority of
moral pioneers lived in a world of faulty fireplaces, bounced
checks, blocked drains, whooping cough, and incontinent cats.
They were the bohemians.
Virginia Nicholson -- the granddaughter of painter Vanessa Bell
and the great-niece of Virginia Woolf -- explores the subversive,
eccentric, and flamboyant artistic community of the early twentieth
century in this "wonderfully researched and colorful composite
portrait of an enigmatic world whose members, because they lived by
no rules, are difficult to characterize" (San Francisco
Chronicle).
In a lucid, brilliant work of nonfiction -- as close to an autobiography as his readers are likely to get -- Larry McMurtry has written a family portrait that also serves as a larger portrait of Texas itself, as it was and as it has become. Using as a springboard an essay by the German literary critic Walter Benjamin that he first read in Archer City's Dairy Queen, McMurtry examines the small-town way of life that big oil and big ranching have nearly destroyed. He praises the virtues of everything from a lime Dr. Pepper to the lost art of oral storytelling, and describes the brutal effect of the sheer vastness and emptiness of the Texas landscape on Texans, the decline of the cowboy, and the reality and the myth of the frontier. McMurtry writes frankly and with deep feeling about his own experiences as a writer, a parent, and a heart patient, and he deftly lays bare the raw material that helped shape his life's work: the creation of a vast, ambitious, fictional panorama of Texas in the past and the present. Throughout, McMurtry leaves his readers with constant reminders of his all-encompassing, boundless love of literature and books.
2022 Atlantean Award, Robert E. Howard Foundation You may not know
the name Robert E. Howard, but you probably know his work. His most
famous creation, Conan the Barbarian, is an icon of popular
culture. In hundreds of tales detailing the exploits of Conan, King
Kull, and others, Howard helped to invent the sword and sorcery
genre. Todd B. Vick delves into newly available archives and probes
Howard's relationships, particularly with schoolteacher Novalyne
Price, to bring a fresh, objective perspective to Howard's life.
Like his many characters, Howard was an enigma and an outsider. He
spent his formative years visiting the four corners of Texas,
experiences that left a mark on his stories. He was intensely
devoted to his mother, whom he nursed in her final days, and whose
impending death contributed to his suicide in 1936 when he was just
thirty years old. Renegades and Rogues is an unequivocal
journalistic account that situates Howard within the broader
context of pulp literature. More than a realistic fantasist, he
wrote westerns and horror stories as well, and engaged in avid
correspondence with H. P. Lovecraft and other pulp writers of his
day. Vick investigates Howard's twelve-year writing career,
analyzes the influences that underlay his celebrated characters,
and assesses the afterlife of Conan, the figure in whom Howard's
fervent imagination achieved its most durable expression.
In this inspirational and unflinchingly honest memoir, acclaimed
author Reyna Grande describes her childhood torn between the United
States and Mexico, and shines a light on the experiences, fears,
and hopes of those who choose to make the harrowing journey across
the border. Reyna Grande vividly brings to life her tumultuous
early years in this "compelling...unvarnished, resonant" (BookPage)
story of a childhood spent torn between two parents and two
countries. As her parents make the dangerous trek across the
Mexican border to "El Otro Lado" (The Other Side) in pursuit of the
American dream, Reyna and her siblings are forced into the already
overburdened household of their stern grandmother. When their
mother at last returns, Reyna prepares for her own journey to "El
Otro Lado" to live with the man who has haunted her imagination for
years, her long-absent father. Funny, heartbreaking, and lyrical,
The Distance Between Us poignantly captures the confusion and
contradictions of childhood, reminding us that the joys and sorrows
we experience are imprinted on the heart forever, calling out to us
of those places we first called home. Also available in Spanish as
La distancia entre nosotros.
The extraordinary untold story of Ernest Hemingway's dangerous
secret life in espionage A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - A finalist
for the William E. Colby Military Writers' Award "IMPORTANT" (Wall
Street Journal) - "FASCINATING" (New York Review of Books) -
"CAPTIVATING" (Missourian) A riveting international
cloak-and-dagger epic ranging from the Spanish Civil War to the
liberation of Western Europe, wartime China, the Red Scare of Cold
War America, and the Cuban Revolution, Writer, Sailor, Soldier, Spy
reveals for the first time Ernest Hemingway's secret adventures in
espionage and intelligence during the 1930s and 1940s (including
his role as a Soviet agent code-named "Argo"), a hidden chapter
that fueled both his art and his undoing. While he was the
historian at the esteemed CIA Museum, Nicholas Reynolds, a longtime
American intelligence officer, former U.S. Marine colonel, and
Oxford-trained historian, began to uncover clues suggesting Nobel
Prize-winning novelist Ernest Hemingway was deeply involved in
mid-twentieth-century spycraft -- a mysterious and shocking
relationship that was far more complex, sustained, and fraught with
risks than has ever been previously supposed. Now Reynolds's
meticulously researched and captivating narrative "looks among the
shadows and finds a Hemingway not seen before" (London Review of
Books), revealing for the first time the whole story of this hidden
side of Hemingway's life: his troubling recruitment by Soviet spies
to work with the NKVD, the forerunner to the KGB, followed in short
order by a complex set of secret relationships with American
agencies. Starting with Hemingway's sympathy to antifascist forces
during the 1930s, Reynolds illuminates Hemingway's immersion in the
life-and-death world of the revolutionary left, from his passionate
commitment to the Spanish Republic; his successful pursuit by
Soviet NKVD agents, who valued Hemingway's influence, access, and
mobility; his wartime meeting in East Asia with communist leader
Chou En-Lai, the future premier of the People's Republic of China;
and finally to his undercover involvement with Cuban rebels in the
late 1950s and his sympathy for Fidel Castro. Reynolds equally
explores Hemingway's participation in various roles as an agent for
the United States government, including hunting Nazi submarines
with ONI-supplied munitions in the Caribbean on his boat, Pilar;
his command of an informant ring in Cuba called the "Crook Factory"
that reported to the American embassy in Havana; and his
on-the-ground role in Europe, where he helped OSS gain key tactical
intelligence for the liberation of Paris and fought alongside the
U.S. infantry in the bloody endgame of World War II. As he examines
the links between Hemingway's work as an operative and as an
author, Reynolds reveals how Hemingway's secret adventures
influenced his literary output and contributed to the writer's
block and mental decline (including paranoia) that plagued him
during the postwar years -- a period marked by the Red Scare and
McCarthy hearings. Reynolds also illuminates how those same
experiences played a role in some of Hemingway's greatest works,
including For Whom the Bell Tolls and The Old Man and the Sea,
while also adding to the burden that he carried at the end of his
life and perhaps contributing to his suicide. A literary biography
with the soul of an espionage thriller, Writer, Sailor, Soldier,
Spy is an essential contribution to our understanding of the life,
work, and fate of one of America's most legendary authors.
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