Oscar Wilde's reputation has shifted dramatically during the twentieth century from outcast in the wake of his trials for homosexual offences, to martyr to the gay cause in the 1980s and 90s, to important figure in the history of writing in English. Ruth Robbins introduces Wilde through a focus on his manipulations of genre and sets Wilde's life and work in its literary and cultural context, including the history of Victorian drama; the contexts of criticism in the period; poetry as post-romantic and pre-modernist mode of expression; the uses and subversions of fictional forms in his work; and his subversion of the autobiographical mode in his prison letter De Profundis. This comprehensive and readable introduction offers readers and students a lively and informative guide to Wilde's significance in the context of his own time and his extensive afterlife in literature, criticism and popular culture.

After the Reformation the successful painter Paul Lautensack (1477/78-1558) dedicated himself to spreading revelations on the nature of God. Lautensack was besides Durer the only German artist who wrote against the iconoclasts, and he believed that he as a painter could explain the images of Revelation better than theologians like Luther. He presented his insights in hundreds of highly sophisticated diagrams that display a wide range of material accessible to an urban craftsman, from the vernacular Bible to calendar illustrations. This study is the first monograph on this extraordinary man, it presents a corpus of his surviving works, analyzes his peculiar theology of the image and locates the elements of his diagrams in the visual world of the Reformation period.

Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) was an English writer, physician, and philosopher whose work has inspired everyone from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf to Stephen Jay Gould. In an intellectual adventure like Sarah Bakewell's book about Montaigne, How to Live, Hugh Aldersey-Williams sets off not just to tell the story of Browne's life but to champion his skeptical nature and inquiring mind. Mixing botany, etymology, medicine, and literary history, Aldersey-Williams journeys in his hero's footsteps to introduce us to witches, zealots, natural wonders, and fabulous creatures of Browne's time and ours. We meet Browne the master prose stylist, responsible for introducing hundreds of words into English, including electricity, hallucination, and suicide. Aldersey-Williams reveals how Browne's preoccupations-how to disabuse the credulous of their foolish beliefs, what to make of order in nature, how to unite science and religion-are relevant today. In Search of Sir Thomas Browne is more than just a biography-it is a cabinet of wonders and an argument that Browne, standing at the very gates of modern science, remains an inquiring mind for our own time. As Stephen Greenblatt has written, Browne is "unnervingly one of our most adventurous contemporaries."

Delve into the fascinating life of Ray Bradbury, one of the most prolific writers of our time, spokesperson for the Space Age, and idea man for Disney. Author of more than forty-five books and nearly five hundred short stories, Bradbury has entertained generations of readers worldwide with imaginative stories, poetry, TV shows and movies.

In "Ray Bradbury-Uncensored " author and journalist Gene Beley examines the life of this literary King Kong of writers. A plethora of interesting insights and milestones from Bradbury's life includes:

• Advice to writers
• Non-edited speeches from the 1960s
• Views on architecture, religion, and space
• CBS television plagiarism court battles
• Sparring with movie producer John Huston over the Moby Dick screenplay
• How and where he got his ideas for his classic books and short stories. Beley offers an intriguing look at one of the world's greatest, iconoclastic minds, revealing why Bradbury has inspired many other creative people to practice his "optimal optimism."

As a single mother of two young children, Charlotte set out to build a new life. She leaves her entire family behind in Virginia for the opportunities Ohio offered to her and her family. With just a high school education, no money, and completely alone, she redefined herself into a woman destine for success. building new friendships, and raising two children, Charlotte blended herself into small town life amongst the corn and soy fields of Centerburg, Ohio. Her two sons, Trent and David, were given a life better than the one she had as a child. She had done what every mother dreamed of doing for her two boys. tragedy entered her home. Cancer took from her what had taken years to build. Not only did the disease destroy her, it destroyed the lives of her two teenage sons. They would be the ones who would feel the full hurt of a broken home. of those left behind to put the pieces back together. Death was just the beginning of many pains Charlotte's sons would endure before rebuilding their own lives.

How could William Shaksper of Stratford, who was illiterate, be the author of plays that have dazzled the world for centuries? Answer: he wasn't. His authorship is a remarkably successful hoax.

It was not until 1920 that J. Thomas Looney plucked Edward de Vere out of historical obscurity and introduced him as the real Shakespeare. In the next fifty years, powerful articles and books validated his authorship claim but much of this evidence has been neglected.

The first five volumes of this book series salvage this early research which makes Edward de Vere by far the likeliest candidate for being the great playwright, William Shakespeare.

In Volume One, you'll learn:

● Why Shakespeare's breadth of knowledge and intimate familiarity with England's Royal Court exclude Shaksper of Stratford as the true Bard;
● Why Francis Bacon is an unlikely Shakespeare authorship candidate;
● Why Edward de Vere fulfills all criteria to be the great playwright;
● And much more

Stop blindly accepting what the textbooks say. Take a logical, analytical approach to one of history's most important questions. Start Building the Case for Edward de Vere as Shakespeare with Volume 1: The Great Shakespeare Hoax.

Profiles of and reading lists for 100 of today's most popular nonfiction authors have been gathered together in this single source, which covers representatives from all major nonfiction genres-true adventure, true crime, travel and environmental narrative, science, history, life stories, and investigative writing. While focusing on such contemporary authors as Sebastian Junger, Frances Mayes, Joan Didion, Bill Bryson, and Anne Lamott, a few classics whose works are still in print and widely read (e.g., Truman Capote, M.F.K. Fisher, and Carl Sagan) are also included. In addition to information about the personal and writing lives of this fascinating and diverse group, users will find a complete list of their published works. Black and white author photos accompany many of the profiles.

A searingly honest, funny and moving family memoir in which David Baddiel exposes his mother’s idiosyncratic sex life, and his father’s dementia, to the same affectionate scrutiny.

On the surface, David Baddiel’s childhood was fairly standard: a lower-middle-class Jewish family living in an ordinary house in Dollis Hill, north-west London. But David came to realise that his mother was in fact not ordinary at all. Having escaped extermination by fleeing Nazi Germany as a child, she was desperate to make her life count, which took the form of a passionate, decades-long affair with a golfing memorabilia salesman. David’s detailing of the affair – including a hilarious focus on how his mother turned their household over to golf memorabilia, and an eye-popping cache of her erotic writings – leads to the inescapable conclusion that Sarah Baddiel was a cross between Jack Niklaus and Erica Jong.

Meanwhile, as Baddiel investigates his family’s past, his father’s memories are fading; dementia is making him moodier and more disinhibited, with an even greater penchant for obscenity. As with his mother’s affair, there is both comedy and poignancy to be found: laughter is a constant presence, capable of transforming the darkest of experiences into something redemptive.

My Family: The Memoir is David Baddiel’s candid examination of his childhood, family and memory offering a twisted love letter to his parents.

Jonathan Ball, the founder of Jonathan Ball Publishers, died on 3 April 2021 after a short illness. This collection of essays, commissioned in tribute to him, is edited by Michele Magwood.

Jonathan Ball left a deep impression on many different people in different ways. The forty or so essays reflect the many facets of Jonathan. The chapter headings would read husband, father, businessman, friend, brother, colleague. But it is in the subheads that we begin to understand the shape of him: publisher extraordinaire, history expert, gourmand, liberal thinker, suitor, philosemite and so on.

It cannot be exaggerated how deep an imprint Jonathan has left on the political and cultural life of South Africa, too. The shelves of Jonathan Ball Publishers are weighted with serious history and biographies of eminent figures, with books that other publishers didn’t have the boldness, the sheer guts, to take on. But there are many smaller, more finespun stories that tell us too who we are as a people and as a nation.

The early years of poet P.J. Kavanagh's life - which took him from a Butlin's Holiday Camp to Switzerland and Paris, to a battlefield in Korea, to Oxford and Barcelona, and finally to Java - made little sense to him, until 'something extraordinary happened': his meeting with Sally, 'the perfect stranger'. This tender, funny and quite unsentimental record of the uniqueness of human love is as much a celebration of joy - despite its abrupt and shocking conclusion - as it is a poet's tribute of thanks.

Letters written 1979-1986. Biographical information and stories. Henry Miller wrote to Mrabet: "The fact that you can not read has perhaps made you a better writer than most who do read." Paul Bowles said: "I've been corresponding with Irving Stettner for several years. Everyone tells me he is a delightful man. Mrabet does write him letters. I don't "ghostwrite" them; I merely translate them as he dictates." Irving Stettner, prose writer, poet and watercolorist; friend of Henry Miller; published Stroker magazine for 30 years.

Samuel Pepys began his celebrated diary in 1660, at the age of 26, as a young and ambitious secretary. Due to his support of the king's restoration, he soon found himself in an influential position in the Royal Navy's administration. He was to keep the diary for nearly ten years, until his eye sight failed, and in it he would record many of the great events of the age, such as the outbreak of plague and the Great Fire of London, as well as many smaller, domestic and personal happenings. Although written in shorthand and principally for his own personal remembrance and pleasure, it is clear at times that Pepys had one eye on posterity. It is a large work, conveniently divided into one volume per year; here is the first, based on the first complete edition, that of Henry B. Wheatley, originally published in 1893.

‘Waking, I cry “Oh, is this your – buried treasure? The light in the heart.”’

In these exquisite stories from the genius of English modernism, everyday objects acquire profound significance: a lump of buried green glass leads to a lifetime of obsession; a mark on the wall prompts a questioning of reality itself; a pale-yellow silk dress provokes a painful self-reckoning. Beautiful, strange and pioneering, each piece is a small precious stone to be held to the light and savoured.

From the celebrated author of Square Haunting comes a biography as unconventional and surprising as the life it tells.

'Think of the Bible and Homer, think of Shakespeare and think of me,' wrote Gertrude Stein in 1936. Admirers called her a genius, sceptics a charlatan: she remains one of the most confounding - and contested - writers of the twentieth century.

In this literary detective story, Francesca Wade delves into the creation of the Stein myth. We see her posing for Picasso's portrait; at the centre of Bohemian Parisian life hosting the likes of Matisse and Hemingway; racing through the French countryside with her enigmatic companion Alice B. Toklas; dazzling American crowds on her sell-out tour for her sensational Autobiography - a veritable celebrity.

Yet Stein hoped to be remembered not for her personality but for her work. From her deathbed, she charged her partner with securing her place in literary history. How would her legend shift once it was Toklas's turn to tell the stories - especially when uncomfortable aspects of their past emerged from the archive? Using astonishing never-before-seen material, Wade uncovers the origins of Stein's radical writing, and reveals new depths to the storied relationship which made it possible.

This is Gertrude Stein as she was when nobody was watching: captivating, complex and human.

Alex la Guma was a major twentieth century South African novelist. His first novel, A Walk in the Night, in 1966 brought him instant recognition as a pioneering writer on the African continent. Its ‘startling realism and accurate imagery’ drew high praise from his contemporaries. Wole Soyinka, later awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature, and Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o . The critic and writer, Lewis Nkosi, likewise, compared La Guma’s intense and sombre vision of the individual in society to that of Dostoevsky. La Guma was also an important political figure. As leader of the South African Coloured People’s Organisation and a communist, he was charged with treason, banned, house arrested and eventually forced into exile. At the time of his death in 1985 he was serving as chief representative of the African National Congress in the Caribbean.

Published on the centenary of Alex La Guma’s birth on 20 February 1925, The Early Writings of Alex La Guma contains a selection of his early work as a journalist and short story writer, before he became a published novelist and was forced into exile. It provides unique cameos of South African life and politics during a turbulent time in the country’s history – the late 1950s and early 1960s, the years around Sharpeville – at the same time giving us insight into the making of a novelist. The ‘hidden’ world of Alex La Guma – material, social, emotional, political and intellectual – at a time when he was developing into a serious writer, is revealed. Many of the themes in his fiction are first encountered and developed in these early newspaper articles, providing useful material for literary scholars seeking to understand the progression of his work.

A reviewer wrote that this book, like Alex La Guma’s novels, captures not only the misery of poverty and oppression in South Africa, but also the rich song of everyday life beneath the surface. It reads easily as fiction and adds significantly to our understanding of popular culture in Cape Town, as well as to the social and political history of the city. When asked what one of his novels was about, La Guma – born and bred in District 6 – replied, ‘Ag, just about the folks back home’. La Guma peels off, as if with a scalpel, the glossy covers of the Cape’s tourist-brochure ‘liberalism’ to reveal the hard realities faced by the majority of its (non-) citizens: This is District Six talking. It is unmistakable – terse, racy, humorous, as convincing as truth.’

La Guma’s insider accounts of contemporary politics also help with the recovery of important aspects of the history of the South African liberation movement.

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.

"His Story: Mustafa Kemal and Turkish Revolution" gives specific information on the life of Mustafa Kemal Ataturk, founder of Republic of Turkey and vertiginous aspects of Turkish Revolution.

Passages from Mustafa Kemal's life, the basic characteristics of the democratic-national leadership which was commanding the Freedom War can also be found within the pages. Freedom War, forming of a new Republic which has become a model for the III. World and İslamic countries are also being discussed.

Founding a republic also means founding a nation in westerner words. What were the principles of the new republic, the aims of the revolutions, resistance of the opponents and the results... The meaning and aspects of 6 Arrows which represent the heart of Kemalism... "His Story" will not just give you information about Turkish Modernization practice, it will also change your opinions on the dilemma called West versus East forever.

H.G. Wells was one of the most prolific writers in the English language. He published over one hundred books, yet he is recognized by only two or three of his popular novels including "The Time Machine" and "War of the Worlds." Why has such a well known and widely read author from the nineteenth century almost disappeared from the bookshelves of the twenty-first century? "H.G. Wells at the End of His Tether" attempts to answer this question and others by examining his work from a nineteenth century perspective. Wells was a controversial figure. He was an avid socialist and a self-proclaimed prophet. He hated the Church and the Monarchy and spent much of his life promoting utopian ideals, world government and other radical concepts that are politically incorrect today. As he watched the First World War tear Europe asunder he wrote "The War to End War" and created a new label for that infamous conflict. He was a highly vocal anti-war journalist and often frustrated by how little impact he was making on the world. When the Second World War descended on Europe he became despondent as he approached the end of his political and literary tether.