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.

A vivid and original account of one of Ireland's greatest poets by an acclaimed Irish historian and literary biographer The most important Irish poet of the postwar era, Seamus Heaney rose to prominence as his native Northern Ireland descended into sectarian violence. A national figure at a time when nationality was deeply contested, Heaney also won international acclaim, culminating in the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. In On Seamus Heaney, leading Irish historian and literary critic R. F. Foster gives an incisive and eloquent account of the poet and his work against the background of a changing Ireland. Drawing on unpublished drafts and correspondence, Foster provides illuminating and personal interpretations of Heaney's work. Though a deeply charismatic figure, Heaney refused to don the mantle of public spokesperson, and Foster identifies a deliberate evasiveness and creative ambiguity in his poetry. In this, and in Heaney's evocation of a disappearing rural Ireland haunted by political violence, Foster finds parallels with the other towering figure of Irish poetry, W. B. Yeats. Foster also discusses Heaney's cosmopolitanism, his support for dissident poets abroad, and his increasing focus in his later work on death and spiritual transcendence. Above all, Foster examines how Heaney created an extraordinary connection with an exceptionally wide readership, giving him an authority and power unique among contemporary writers. Combining a vivid account of Heaney's life and a compelling reading of his entire oeuvre, On Seamus Heaney extends our understanding of the man as it enriches our appreciation of his poetry.

Henry Crabb Robinson (1775-1867) earned his place in literary history as a perceptive diarist from 1811 onwards. Drawing substantially on hitherto unpublished manuscript sources, this book discusses his formal and informal engagement with a wide variety of English and European literature prior to this point. Robinson emerges as a pioneering literary critic whose unique philosophical erudition underpinned his activity as a cross-cultural disseminator of literature during the early Romantic period. A Dissenter barred from the English universities, Robinson educated himself thoroughly during his teenage years and began to publish in radical journals. Godwin's philosophy subsequently inspired his first theory of literature. When in Germany from 1800 to 1805, he became the leading British scholar of Kant, whose philosophy informed his discussions of Goethe, Schiller, Lessing, and August Wilhelm Schlegel. After his return to London, Robinson aided Hazlitt's understanding of Kant and, thus, Hazlitt's early career as a writer. His distinctive comparative criticism further enabled him to draw compelling parallels between Wordsworth, Blake, and Herder, and to discern 'moral excellence' in Christian Leberecht Heyne's Amathonte. This also prompted Robinson's transmission of Friedrich Schlegel and Jean Paul in 1811, as well as a profound exchange of ideas with Coleridge. In this new study, Philipp Hunnekuhl finds that Robinson's ingenious adaptation of Kantian aesthetic autonomy into a revolutionary theory of literature's moral relevance anticipated the current 'ethical turn' in literary studies.

California and the Melancholic American Identity in Joan Didion's Novels: Exiled from Eden focuses on the concept of Californian identity in the fiction of Joan Didion. This identity is understood as melancholic, in the sense that the critics following the tradition of both Sigmund Freud and Walter Benjamin use the word. The book traces the progress of the way Californian identity is portrayed in Joan Didion's novels, starting with the first two in which California plays the central role, Run River and Play It As It Lays, through A Book of Common Prayer to Democracy and The Last Thing He Wanted, where California functions only as a distant point of reference, receding to the background of Didion's interests. Curiously enough, Didion presents Californian history as a history of white settlement, disregarding whole chapters of the history of the region in which the Californios and Native Americans, among other groups, played a crucial role: it is this reticence that the monograph sees as the main problem of Didion's fiction and presents it as the silent center of gravity in Didion's oeuvre. The monograph proposes to see the melancholy expressed by Didion's fiction organized into four losses: of Nature, History, Ethics, and Language; around which the main analytical chapters are constructed. What remains unrepresented and silenced comes back to haunt Didion's fiction, and it results in a melancholic portrayal of California and its identity - which is the central theme this monograph addresses.

What does it mean to create, not in "a room of one's own" but in a domestic space? Do children and genius rule each other out? In The Baby on the Fire Escape, award-winning biographer Julie Phillips traverses the shifting terrain where motherhood and creativity converge. With fierce empathy and vivid prose, Phillips evokes the intimate struggles of brilliant artists and writers, including Doris Lessing, who had to choose between her motherhood and herself; Ursula K. Le Guin, who found productive stability in family life; Audre Lorde, whose queer, polyamorous union allowed her to raise children on her own terms and Alice Neel, who once, to finish a painting, was said to have left her baby on the fire escape of her New York apartment. A meditation on maternal identity and artistic greatness, The Baby on the Fire Escape illuminates some of the most pressing conflicts in contemporary women's lives.

"You don't have to be Irish to cherish this literary gift-just being human and curious and from a family will suffice." -Malachy McCourt, New York Times bestselling author of A Monk Swimming In the tradition of Frank McCourt's Angela's Ashes and Alice Taylor's To School Through the Fields, Tom Phelan's We Were Rich and We Didn't Know It is a heartfelt and masterfully written memoir of growing up in Ireland in the 1940s. Tom Phelan, who was born and raised in County Laois in the Irish midlands, spent his formative years working with his wise and demanding father as he sought to wrest a livelihood from a farm that was often wet, muddy, and back-breaking. It was a time before rural electrification, the telephone, and indoor plumbing; a time when the main modes of travel were bicycle and animal cart; a time when small farmers struggled to survive and turkey eggs were hatched in the kitchen cupboard; a time when the Church exerted enormous control over Ireland. We Were Rich and We Didn't Know It recounts Tom's upbringing in an isolated, rural community from the day he was delivered by the local midwife. With tears and laughter, it speaks to the strength of the human spirit in the face of life's adversities.

Winner of the National Jewish Book AwardInternational Bestseller " An] ingenious work that circles around the rise of a state, the tragic destiny of a mother, a boy's creation of a new self." -- "The New Yorker" A family saga and a magical self-portrait of a writer who witnessed the birth of a nation and lived through its turbulent history. "A Tale of Love and Darkness" is the story of a boy who grows up in war-torn Jerusalem, in a small apartment crowded with books in twelve languages and relatives speaking nearly as many. The story of an adolescent whose life has been changed forever by his mother's suicide. The story of a man who leaves the constraints of his family and community to join a kibbutz, change his name, marry, have children. The story of a writer who becomes an active participant in the political life of his nation. "One of the most enchanting and deeply satisfying books that I have read in many years." -- "New Republic"

A revealing and witty new examination of how Agatha Christie became the world's most successful and popular female playwright, including details of never-before-published scripts and stories. Agatha Christie is revered worldwide for her books and her many film and TV adaptations. Less well-known today is her extraordinary repertoire of stage plays that firmly established her as the most successful female dramatist of all time. Now Julius Green raises the curtain on Agatha Christie's towering contribution to popular theatre, from her first serious attempts at playwriting - in a very different style to the whodunits for which she became famous - to her record-breaking achievements in the West End and her conquest of Broadway. Astonishing revelations about this often disregarded side of her life are illustrated with extracts from hitherto unknown plays, deleted scenes from her theatrical classics, and unpublished private letters, including her extensive correspondence with the legendary 'Mousetrap Man', theatrical impresario Sir Peter Saunders. Meticulously researched and full of groundbreaking discoveries, this book adds a fascinating new layer to Agatha Christie's remarkable story.

Racine the practising dramatist had been in some danger of being crowded out from the numerous books on his psychology and style. In this critical study of the man and his work, first published in 1951 and this slightly revised edition originally in 1973, Dr Brereton's guiding principle has been to make the factual basis as accurate as it can be in the light of modern research. The result is the portrait of a sensitive and attractive figure which is none the worse for being shorn of certain legends.

Published in 1990: This book tells the life story of Dante, the poet and his work.

A Sunday Times Book of the Year Shortlisted for The Pol Roger Duff Cooper Prize 'This magnificent, highly readable double biography...brings these two driven, complicated women vividly to life' The Financial Times 'A gripping saga of a double-biography' Daily Mail 'A masterful portrait' The Times 'Vastly enjoyable' Literary Review 'Deeply absorbing and meticulously researched' The Oldie In 1815, the clever, courted and cherished Annabella Milbanke married the notorious and brilliant Lord Byron. Just one year later, she fled, taking with her their baby daughter, the future Ada Lovelace. Byron himself escaped into exile and died as a revolutionary hero in 1824, aged 36. The one thing he had asked his wife to do was to make sure that their daughter never became a poet. Ada didn't. Brought up by a mother who became one of the most progressive reformers of Victorian England, Byron's little girl was introduced to mathematics as a means of calming her wild spirits. Educated by some of the most learned minds in England, she combined that scholarly discipline with a rebellious heart and a visionary imagination. As a child invalid, Ada dreamed of building a steam-driven flying horse. As an exuberant and boldly unconventional young woman, she amplified her explanations of Charles Babbage's unbuilt calculating engine to predict, as nobody would do for another century, the dawn today of our modern computer age. When Ada died - like her father, she was only 36 - great things seemed still to lie ahead for her as a passionate astronomer. Even while mired in debt from gambling and crippled by cancer, she was frenetically employing Faraday's experiments with light refraction to explore the analysis of distant stars. Drawing on fascinating new material, Seymour reveals the ways in which Byron, long after his death, continued to shape the lives and reputations both of his wife and his daughter. During her life, Lady Byron was praised as a paragon of virtue; within ten years of her death, she was vilified as a disgrace to her sex. Well over a hundred years later, Annabella Milbanke is still perceived as a prudish wife and cruelly controlling mother. But her hidden devotion to Byron and her tender ambitions for his mercurial, brilliant daughter reveal a deeply complex but unsuspectedly sympathetic personality. Miranda Seymour has written a masterful portrait of two remarkable women, revealing how two turbulent lives were often governed and always haunted by the dangerously enchanting, quicksilver spirit of that extraordinary father whom Ada never knew.

'Killing It combines three popular, profound topics: where our food comes from, how to achieve purpose in life and how to find lasting love' - Sunday Times

After a career spent writing about food, Camas Davis came to a realization: she had never forced herself to grapple with how it actually got to her plate. Out of love with her life and with the world she found herself in, she knew she had to make a change.

And so she set off for France. There, in the rolling countryside of Gascony, she would learn the art of butchery, and with it the art of eating and drinking well. Surrounded by farmers, producers, cooks and food-lovers, eating some of the world's least processed and most lovingly made food, Camas discovered the very authenticity she'd longed for in her old life. She just needed to return to America, and bring what she'd learnt back with her . . .

Killing It is the story of one woman's quest to understand what it means to be human and what it means to be animal too.

Vernon Lee was the pen name of Violet Paget (1856-1935) - a prolific author best known for her supernatural fiction and her radical polemics. She was also an active letter writer whose correspondents include many well-known figures in fin de siecle intellectual circles across Europe. However, until now no attempt has been made to make these letters widely available in their complete form. This multi-volume scholarly edition presents a comprehensive selection of her English, French, Italian, and German correspondence - compiled from more than 30 archives worldwide - that reflect her wide variety of interests and occupations as a Woman of Letters and contributor to scholarship and political activism. Letters written in a language other than English have been expertly translated by scholars Sophie Geoffroy (from the French), Crystal Hall (from the Italian), and Christa Zorn (from the German). The edition focuses on those letters concerning the writing, ideas and aesthetics that influenced Lee's articles, books and stories. Full transcriptions of some 500 letters, covering the years 1856-1935, are arranged in chronological order along with newly written introductions that explain their context and identifies the recipients, friends and colleagues mentioned. Since scholarship on Lee's critical and creative output is still in the beginning stages, these letters will serve a purpose to students and researchers in a number of academic fields. In this second volume, covering the years 1885-1889, the 421 assembled letters follow Violet Paget-Vernon Lee in her early thirties. Recovering from the stinging reception of her first novel and from Annie Meyer's death, she turns to essay writing on aesthetics and ethics and ghost stories. After Mary Robinson's engagement to marry French orientalist Prof. Darmesteter, she travels to Spain, Gibraltar and Tangiers and briefly falls under the spell of the Orient. She also takes a liking to Scotland, and many of her close friends are Scottish --Alice Callander, Lady "Archie" (Janey Sevilla Archibald Campbell)-and so is her future partner Clementina Anstruther-Thomson. The letters reflect the expansion of her subject matter from cultural studies, art history and aesthetic philosophy. Her charity work in hospitals in Florence and her readings in Political Economy lead her thinking towards social reform and political issues. Her brother's mental illness and her own breakdown bring about an awareness of body and mind balance and a taste for outdoor pursuits (mountaineering; bicycling; horse riding; swimming) and for experimental psychology (rotating mirrors; hypnosis) and therapies (hydrotherapy). The Pagets move away from the city center of Florence into the Villa Il Palmerino, then in the countryside, where both Eugene and Vernon recover. Correspondents include Lee's parents, Matilda and Henry Ferguson Paget; her step-brother poet Eugene Lee-Hamilton; English poetess Mary Robinson; English poet Robert Browning; British novelist and journalist Ellen Mary Abdy-Williams; British social reform activist and editor Percy William Bunting; Irish journalist and activist Frances Power Cobbe; Irish scholar and novelist Bella Duffy; British eugenicist Karl Pearson; British publisher William Blackwood; Scottish writer Robert Louis Stevenson; American novelist Henry James; American connoisseur and arts patron Isabella Stuart Gardner; French translator and critic Marie-Therese Blanc ("Th. Bentzon"); Lady Louisa Wolseley; Irish historian and activist Alice Stopford-Green; Italian Countess Angelica (Pasolini) Rasponi; Italian poet, writer and critic Enrico Nencioni; Italian novelist, essayist and critic Mario Pratesi; Italian editor and man of letters Francesco Protonotari; Italian painter Telemaco Signorini.

Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677) was one of the most important philosophers of all time; he was also one of the most radical and controversial. The story of Spinoza's life takes the reader into the heart of Jewish Amsterdam in the seventeenth century and, with Spinoza's exile from Judaism, into the midst of the tumultuous political, social, intellectual, and religious world of the young Dutch Republic. This new edition of Steven Nadler's biography, winner of the Koret Jewish Book Award for biography and translated into a dozen languages, is enhanced by exciting new archival discoveries about his family background, his youth, and the various philosophical, political, and religious contexts of his life and works. There is more detail about his family's business and communal activities, about his relationships with friends and correspondents, and about the development of his writings, which were so scandalous to his contemporaries.

The National Book Award-winner Patti Smith updates her treasure box of a childhood memoir about "clear unspeakable joy" and "just the wish to know" with a radiant new afterword, written during the pandemic and reflecting on current times. This expanded paperback edition also includes new photographs by the author. A great book about becoming an artist, Woolgathering tells of a child finding herself as she learns the noble vocation of woolgathering, "a worthy calling that seemed a good job for me." She discovers-often at night, often in nature-the pleasures of rescuing "a fleeting thought." Woolgathering calls up our own memories, as the child "glimpses and gleans, piecing together a crazy quilt of truths." Smith shares the fierce, vital pleasures of stargazing and wandering. Her new Afterword, penned during the quarantine, opens new horizons in "the scarcely charted landscape of memory governed by clouds." Woolgathering celebrates the sacred nature of creation in Smith's singular language, acclaimed as "glorious" (NPR), "spellbinding" (Booklist), "rare and ferocious" (Salon), and "shockingly beautiful" (New York Magazine).

The definitive and revealing biography of the author of The Secret Garden. Frances Hodgson Burnett's favourite theme in her fiction was the reversal of fortune, and she herself knew extremes of poverty and wealth. Born in Manchester in 1849, she emigrated with her family to Tennessee because of the financial problems caused by the cotton famine. From a young age she published her stories to help the family make ends meet. Only after she married did she publish Little Lord Fauntleroy that shot her into literary stardom. On the surface, Frances' life was extremely successful: hosting regular literary salons in her home and travelling frequently between properties in the UK and America. But behind the colourful personal and social life, she was a complex and contradictory character. She lost both parents by her twenty-first birthday, Henry James called her "the most heavenly of women" although avoided her; prominent people admired her and there were many friendships as well as an ill-advised marriage to a much younger man that ended in heartache. Her success was punctuated by periods of depression, in one instance brought on by the tragic loss of her eldest son to consumption. Ann Thwaite creates a sympathetic but balanced and eye-opening biography of the woman who has enchanted numerous generations of children.

Of Joseph Conrad, H.L. Mencken has written: 'There was something almost suggesting the vastness of a natural phenomenon. He transcended all the rules. There have been perhaps, greater novelists, but I believe that he was incomparably the greatest artist whoever wrote a novel.' Originally published in 1957, the year of the centenary of Conrad's birth, and although he was firmly established among the world's great literary figures, little was known about him generally, beyond the fact that he was himself once a sailor, and that the language he handled with such mastery was not the one to which he was born. This was described as the definitive biography, written by one of Conrad's closest friends, to whom the novelist willed his personal papers. It took many years to prepare and the author travelled extensively in the lands that Conrad knew and wrote about. He writes with clarity, compassion and understanding of Conrad's childhood in Russia (where the father was exiled for Polish nationalist activities); of how the youth of fifteen, who had never seen the sea before, became a sailor; of how at twenty-nine he became a British subject and master of his own ship; of how in 1894 he became a novelist almost by accident, rose rapidly to literary fame, found new friends and established himself in literary history. This is a record of the strangest and most enigmatic of lives, fascinating and authoritative at the same time.

J. R. R. Tolkien: The Mind Behind the Rings, you'll get a never-before-seen look at the man, the artist, and the believer behind some of the world's most beloved stories. Join bestselling author Mark Horne as he explores lasting impact of the kind of creative freedom that can only come from faith and struggle. Raised in South Africa and Great Britain, young Tolkien led a life filled with uncertainty, instability, and loss. As he grew older, however, the faith that his mother instilled in him continued as an intrinsic contribution to his creative imagination and his everyday life. J. R. R. Tolkien explores: The literary giant's childhood, coming-of-age stories, and the countless hurdles he faced What inspired and influenced The Lord of the Rings and The Hobbit Tolkien's service in the war The ways that Tolkien's faith influenced his work Previously published as a volume in the Christian Encounters series, this renewed edition of J. R. R. Tolkien now includes updated information about TV series and films inspired by Tolkien's literary creations as well as a discussion guide designed to keep the conversation going.

INTRODUCED BY LISSA EVANS 'I envy anyone yet to discover the joy of Monica Dickens. She's beady eyed, big hearted and blissfully funny' Nina Stibbe 'One Pair of Feet is not just a spirited and entertaining account of the training of a hospital nurse in wartime but a fascinating glimpse into a time and a culture so recent and yet so utterly changed' Marina Lewycka As the effects of the war raging in Europe begins to be felt at home in London, Monica Dickens decides to do her bit and to pursue a new career, and so enrols as a student nurse at a hospital in rural Hertfordshire. By nature clever and spirited, she struggles to submit to the iron rule of the Matron and Sisters, and is alternately infuriated and charmed by her patients. That's not to mention the mountains of menial work that are a trainee's lot. But there are friends among the staff and patients, night-time escapades to dances with dashing army men, and her secret writing project to keep her going. 'Monica's naked curiosity and general bolshiness are easy to identify with, and as a narrator she always tells us what we're longing to know - it's like listening to a friend's anecdote, and egging them on' LISSA EVANS If you enjoyed One Pair of Feet, you will love the novel that followed it. My Turn to Make the Tea, Monica Dickens's lively and entertaining novel about life as a cub reporter on a regional newspaper, is also published as a Virago Modern Classic.

The biographer Winifred Gerin (1901-81), who wrote the lives of all four Bronte siblings, stumbled on her literary vocation on a visit to Haworth, after a difficult decade following the death of her first husband. On the same visit she met her second husband, a Bronte enthusiast twenty years her junior. Together they turned their backs on London to live within sight of the Parsonage, Gerin believing that full understanding of the Brontes required total immersion in their environment. Gerin's childhood and youth, like the Brontes', was characterised by a cultured home and intense imaginative life shared with her sister and two brothers, and by family tragedies (the loss of two siblings in early life). Strong cultural influences formed the children's imagination: polyglot parents, French history, the Crystal Palace, Old Vic productions. Winifred's years at Newnham College, Cambridge were enlivened by eccentric characters such as the legendary lecturer Quiller-Couch (Q'), Lytton Strachey's sister Pernel and Bloomsbury's favourite philosopher, G.E. Moore. Her happy life in Paris with her Belgian cellist husband, Eugene Gerin, was brought to an abrupt end by the Second World War, in which the couple had many adventures: fleeing occupied Belgium, saving Jews in Nice in Vichy France, escaping through Spain and Portugal to England, where they did secret war work for Political Intelligence near Bletchley. After Eugene's death in 1945 Winifred coped with bereavement through poetry and playwriting until discovering her true literary metier on the trip to Haworth. She also wrote about Elizabeth Gaskell, Anne Thackeray Ritchie and Fanny Burney. The book is based on her letters and on her unpublished memoir.

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.