While working on his second novel, John Sedgwick spiraled into a depression so profound that it very nearly resulted in suicide. An author acclaimed for his intimate literary excursions into the rarified, moneyed enclave of Brahmin Boston, he decided to search for the roots of his malaise in the history of his own storied family--one of America's oldest and most notable. Following a bloodline that travels from Theodore Sedgwick, compatriot of George Washington and John Adams, to Edie Sedgwick, Andy Warhol's tragic muse, John Sedgwick's very personal journey of self-discovery became something far greater: a spellbinding study of the evolution of an extraordinary American family.

First published in 1968. Richard Hengist Horne, virtually unknown today, was one of the more extraordinary figures of the nineteenth century literary scene. The author of an epic poem Orion was acclaimed a work of genius by almost every English critic. His voluminous literary output is for the most part forgotten, but his life and character, his widely romantic aspirations to be a Man of Genius, provide a fascinating tragi-comic study. As a background study to the literature and society of the time, Ann Blainey's book is packed with interest and anecdote, and as a study of a remarkable man it is consistently entertaining.

First Published in 1959, The Life of John Middleton Murry is the first biography of one of the most controversial figures in English letters. Many people know Middleton Murry in one or other of his capacities: as editor (of the avant-grade magazine Rhythm, while he was still an undergraduate, of The Athenaeum in its last, most brilliant phase, The Adelphi in the 1920s, Peace News in the '40s); as the foremost critique of his day; as author of some forty books on literary, religious and social questions; as the husband of Katherine Mansfield and intimate of D.H. Lawrence; as prophet, politician or farmer.... Few, even of his most vigorous champions or opponents, discerned the consistent purpose uniting all his multifarious activities. To trace that is the principal aim of this book. Believing that the duty of the 'official biographer' is rather to present than interpret, the author makes no attempt to evaluate Murry's theories objectively, confining himself to showing how intimately they grew out of his strange, tragic (and occasionally comic) experience. At the same time, he makes no secret of his own view of Murry's significance both as a thinker and as 'the representative figure of an age of breakneck social transition'. The Life of John Middleton Murry will be of interest to scholars and researchers of historical biographies, British history, and literature.

The first biography to examine Mailer's life as a twisted lens, offering a unique insight into the history of America from the end of World War II to the election of Barack Obama. Twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, firstly in 1969 for The Armies of the Night and again in 1980 for The Executioner's Song, Norman Mailer's life comes as close as is possible to being the Great American Novel: beyond reason, inexplicable, wonderfully grotesque and addictive. The Naked and the Dead was acclaimed not so much for its intrinsic qualities but rather because it launched a brutally realistic sub-genre of military fiction - Catch 22 and MASH would not exist without it. Richard Bradford combs through Mailer's personal letters - to lovers and editors - which appear to be a rehearsal for his career as a shifty literary narcissist, and which shape the characters of one of the most widely celebrated World War II novels. Bradford strikes again with a merciless biography in which diary entries, journal extracts and newspaper columns set the tone of this study of a controversial figure. From friendships with contemporaries such as James Baldwin, failed correspondences with Hemingway and the Kennedys, to terrible - but justified - criticism of his work by William Faulkner and Eleanor Roosevelt, this book gives a unique, snappy and convincing perspective of Mailer's ferocious personality and writings.

Over the last 200 years, the novels of Jane Austen have been loved and celebrated across a diverse international readership. As a result, there is a bottomless appetite for detail about the woman behind the writing. Jane Austen traces her life and times; her relationships with family and friends; the attitudes and customs of the time that shaped her and were in turn shaped by her work; and the places where she lived, worked and set her novels, from rural Hampshire to fashionable Bath Spa. Chapters on each of her novels run throughout the book and place them in the context of her life. For such a renowned novelist, there is remarkably little direct material available, but this volume draws on archives for a truly insightful view.

This is a personal history of the twentieth century as seen through the eyes of Edith Kurzweil, author, teacher, editor of Partisan Review, and a recent recipient of the National Medal of Humanities. The book opens with Kurzweil early adolescence in Vienna during the Nazi takeover. It ends with the author finding herself in the new century. In between, she kept moving on and interrogating the world around her. The reader follows Kurzweil on her perilous journey, at the age of fourteen, to Belgium, through France, Spain, and Portugal, alone with her younger brother. Her fantasies of reunion with her parents in New York kept her going but came to naught: she had not expected to fall from a wealthy childhood into the life of the working-class poor, as a millinery apprentice or a diamond cutter. Instead of entering college life, she eventually became a conventional American housewife. Unhappy and anxious, she anticipated the social changes in America, and returned to Europe with her second husband and her two children. She arrived at the beginning of the Italian miracle--its post-war revitalization. In Milan she met many Americans as an active member of its community and of the British-American club. After personal tragedy she returned to New York, and only then pursued her early intellectual ambitions. The author eventually became a professor of sociology and quickly climbed up the academic ladder. Just as she had been as a little girl, she still "wanted to know everything," beginning with her study of Italian entrepreneurs and going on to European history and French thought, to psychoanalysis and anti-Semitism. Her early writings prompted William Phillips, co-founder and editor of Partisan Review, to invite her into the elite circle of New York intellectuals. She worked alongside him, first as a reader, then as executive editor, and took over the editorship of the legendary journal during its final period. Kurzweil's journey was one of courage, and of emotional and intellectual growth. Full Circle will be of interest to intellectual and cultural historians, literary and Holocaust scholars, and American studies specialists.

In this final volume of Christopher Isherwood's diaries, the celebrated writer greets advancing age with poignant humor and an unquenchable appetite for the new. Isherwood deepens his study of Hinduism, writes his final books, and immerses himself in the vibrant creative scenes of the 1970s. With his long-term companion, Don Bachardy, Isherwood delves into the art worlds of Los Angeles, New York, and London, where he meets Rauschenberg, Ruscha, Warhol, and Hockney. Collaborating with Bachardy on scripts for Broadway and Hollywood, he encounters John Huston, Merchant and Ivory, John Travolta, David Bowie, Jon Voight, Armistead Maupin, Elton John, and Joan Didion. This volume is a densely populated human comedy, sketched with both ruthlessness and benevolence against the background of the Vietnam War, the energy crisis, and the Nixon, Carter, and Reagan White Houses. The final installment of Isherwood's masterwork reveals a man candidly fearful of his approaching death, and yet engaged in the vitality and energy of daily life.

An Amazon Best Non-Fiction Book of 2022 'Essential reading' - The Guardian 'Sharp and witty with moments of startling candour' - The i 'Makes a powerful case' - Rt Hon Lady Hale 'Revealing and beautifully written' - David Harewood ________ Before Jeffrey Boakye was a black teacher, he was a black student. Which means he has spent a lifetime navigating places of learning that are white by default. Since training to teach, he has often been the only black teacher at school. At times seen as a role model, at others a source of curiosity, Boakye's is a journey of exploration - from the outside looking in. In the groundbreaking I Heard What You Said, he recounts how it feels to be on the margins of the British education system. As a black, male teacher - an English teacher who has had to teach problematic texts - his very existence is a provocation to the status quo, giving him a unique perspective on the UK's classrooms. Through a series of eye-opening encounters based on the often challenging and sometimes outrageous things people have said to him or about him, Boakye reflects on what he has found out about the habits, presumptions, silences and distortions that black students and teachers experience, and which underpin British education. Thought-provoking, witty and completely unafraid, I Heard What You Said is a timely exploration of how we can dismantle racism in the classroom and do better by all our students. ________ 'Hugely important' - Baroness Lawrence 'Deeply compelling, intellectually rigorous and essential' - Nels Abbey 'Personal and political, profound and playful' - Darren Chetty 'Written with passion, fury, knowledge and, in spite of the painful subject, wit' - Patrice Lawrence

'I think the world should read it' LISA TADDEO, AUTHOR OF THREE WOMEN

A Guardian Book of the Year

After the unexpected death of her partner, Carolina Setterwall found herself bereft and rudderless at thirty-six, faced with the seemingly impossible task of raising her son alone.

In this remarkable Swedish memoir about grief and guilt, memory and intimacy, she explores the nature of bereavement itself - the difficulty of learning to live with the ones we love, and the trials of living without them.

'The most compelling book I've read in years' The Times

'It's impossible not to draw comparisons with Karl Ove Knausgaard. I absolutely loved it' Evening Standard

'Every spare, controlled sentence has the ring of truth. Gripping' Daily Mail

This collection places the fiction of Bram Stoker in relation to this life, career and status as a late Victorian. It centres on various aspects of his interests and career, such as politics, the legal system, his role as Irving's stage manager, and analyses his work in relation to these.

In his travel narrative Travels with a Donkey in the Cevennes (1879), Robert Louis Stevenson declares, "I travel not to go anywhere, but to go. I travel for travel's sake. The great affair is to move." Taking up the concepts of time, place, and memory, the contributors to this collection explore in what ways the dynamic view of life suggested by this quotation permeates Stevenson's work. The essays adopt a wide variety of critical approaches, including post-colonial theory, post-structuralism, new historicism, art history, and philosophy, making use of the vast array of literary materials that Stevenson left across a global journey that began in Scotland in 1850 and ended in Samoa in 1894. These range from travel journals, letters, and classic literary staples such as Treasure Island and The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, to rarely read masterpieces such as The Master of Ballantrae or The Ebb-Tide. While much recent scholarship on Stevenson foregrounds geography, the present volume also examines the theme of movement across memory, time, and generic boundaries. Taken together, the essays offer a view of Stevenson that demonstrates how the protean nature of his literary output reflects the radical developments in science, technology, and culture that characterized the age in which he lived.

PAPERBACK FOR SALE IN AFRICA ONLY First-hand accounts of how Ngugi's life and work have intersected, and the multiple forces that have converged to make him one of the greatest writers to come out of Africa in the twentieth century. This collection of essays reflects on the life and work of Ngugi wa Thiong'o, who celebrated his 80th birthday in 2018. Drawing from a wide range of contributors, including writers, critics, publishers and activists, the volume traces the emergence of Ngugi as a novelist in the early 1960s, his contribution to the African culture of letters at its moment of inception, and his global artistic life in the twenty-first century. Here we have both personal andcritical reflections on the different phases of the writer's life: there are poems from friends and admirers, commentaries from his co-workers in public theatre in Kenya in the 1970s and 1980s, and from his political associates in the fight for democracy, and contributions on his role as an intellectual of decolonization, as well as his experiences in the global art world. Included also are essays on Ngugi's role outside the academy, in the world of education, community theatre, and activism. In addition to tributes from other authors who were influenced by Ngugi, the collection contains hitherto unknown materials that are appearing in English for the first time. Both a celebration of the writer, and a rethinking of his legacy, this book brings together three generations of Ngugi readers. We have memories and recollections from the people he worked with closely in the 1960s, the students that he taught atthe University of Nairobi in the 1970s, his political associates during his exile in the 1980s, and the people who worked with him as he embarked on a new life and career in the United States in the 1990s. First-hand accounts reveal how Ngugi's life and work have intersected, and the multiple forces that have converged to make him one of the greatest writers to come out of Africa in the twentieth century. Simon Gikandi is Robert Schirmer Professor of English, Princeton University. He is President of the MLA and was editor of its journal PMLA, from 2011-2016. Ndirangu Wachanga is Professor of Media Studies and Information Science at the University of Wisconsin. He is also the authorized documentary biographer of Professors Ali A. Mazrui, Ngugi wa Thiong'o and Micere Mugo.

F.R. Leavis is a landmark figure in twentieth-century literary criticism and theory. His outspoken and confrontational work has often divided opinion and continues to generate interest as students and critics revisit his highly influential texts.

Looking closely at a representative selection of Leavis's work, Richard Storer outlines his thinking on key topics such as:

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• higher education.

Exploring the responses and engaging with the controversies generated by Leavis's work, this clear, authoritative guide highlights how Leavis remains of critical significance to twenty-first-century study of literature and culture.

Amanda Prowse has built a bestselling career on the lives of fictional women. Now she turns the pen on her own life. I guess the first question to ask is, what kind of woman am I? Well, you know those women who saunter into a room, immaculately coiffed and primped from head to toe? If you look behind her, you'll see me. From her childhood, where there was no blueprint for success, to building a career as a bestselling novelist against all odds, Amanda Prowse explores what it means to be a woman in a world where popularity, slimness, beauty and youth are currency-and how she overcame all of that to forge her own path to happiness. Sometimes heartbreaking, often hilarious and always entirely relatable, Prowse details her early struggles with self-esteem and how she coped with the frustrating expectations others had of how she should live. Most poignantly, she delves into her toxic relationship with food, the hardest addiction she has ever known, and how she journeyed out the other side. One of the most candid memoirs you're ever likely to read, Women Like Us provides welcome insight into how it is possible-against the odds-to overcome insecurity, body consciousness and the ubiquitous imposter syndrome to find happiness and success, from a woman who's done it all, and then some.

Winner of the 2012 Sarton Memoir Award
"Every few years, a memoir comes along that revitalizes the form...With generous, precise, and unsentimental prose, Monica Wood brilliantly achieves this . . . "When We Were the Kennedys" is a deeply moving gem "--Andre Dubus III, author of "House of Sand and Fog" and "Townie"
Mexico, Maine, 1963: The Wood family is much like its close, Catholic, immigrant neighbors, all dependent on the fathers' wages from the Oxford Paper Company. But when Dad suddenly dies on his way to work, Mum and the four deeply connected Wood girls are set adrift. "When We Were the Kennedys" is the story of how a family, a town, and then a nation mourns and finds the strength to move on.
"On her own terms, wry and empathetic, Wood locates the melodies in the aftershock of sudden loss."--"Boston Globe"
" A] marvel of storytelling, layered and rich. It is, by turns, a chronicle of the renowned paper mill that was both pride and poison to several generations of a town; a tribute to the ethnic stew of immigrant families that grew and prospered there; and an account of one family's grief, love, and resilience."--"Maine Sunday Telegram "

Drawing on twenty years of research, this is the definitive biography of Primo Levi. Over the last seventy years, Primo Levi (1919-87) has been recognized as the foremost literary witness of the extermination of the European Jews. In Primo Levi: An Identikit, a product of twenty years of research, Marco Belpoliti explores Levi's tormented life, his trajectory as a writer and intellectual, and, above all, his multifaceted and complex oeuvre. Organized in a mosaic format, this volume devotes a different chapter to each of Levi's books. In addition to tracing the history of each book's composition, publication, and literary influences, Belpoliti explores their contents across the many worlds of Primo Levi: from chemistry to anthropology, biology to ethology, space flights to linguistics. If This Is a Man, his initially rejected masterpiece, is also reread with a fresh perspective. We learn of dreams, animals, and travel; of literary writing, comedy, and tragedy; of shame, memory, and the relationship with other writers such as Franz Kafka and Georges Perec, Jean Amery and Varlam Shalamov. Fundamental themes such as Judaism, the camp, and testimony innervate the book, which is complemented by photographs and letters found by the author in hitherto unexplored archives. This will be the definitive book on Primo Levi, a treasure trove of stories and reflections that paint a rich, nuanced composite portrait of one of the twentieth century's most unique and urgent voices.

The first African to receive the Nobel Prize in Literature, as well as a political activist of prodigious energies, Wole Soyinka now follows his modern classic Ake: The Years of Childhood with an equally important chronicle of his turbulent life as an adult in (and in exile from) his beloved, beleaguered homeland.
In the tough, humane, and lyrical language that has typified his plays and novels, Soyinka captures the indomitable spirit of Nigeria itself by bringing to life the friends and family who bolstered and inspired him, and by describing the pioneering theater works that defied censure and tradition. Soyinka not only recounts his exile and the terrible reign of General Sani Abacha, but shares vivid memories and playful anecdotes-including his improbable friendship with a prominent Nigerian businessman and the time he smuggled a frozen wildcat into America so that his students could experience a proper Nigerian barbecue.
More than a major figure in the world of literature, Wole Soyinka is a courageous voice for human rights, democracy, and freedom. You Must Set Forth at Dawn is an intimate chronicle of his thrilling public life, a meditation on justice and tyranny, and a mesmerizing testament to a ravaged yet hopeful land.

"From the Hardcover edition."

New Directions is delighted to announce beautiful new editions of these three classic Sebald novels, including his two greatest works, The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. All three novels are distinguished by their translations, every line of which Sebald himself made pitch-perfect, slaving to carry into English all his essential elements: the shadows, the lambent fallings-back, nineteenth-century Germanic undertones, tragic elegiac notes, and his unique, quiet wit.

In their own time, Lewis Carroll, Robert Louis Stevenson and Algernon Charles Swinburne were highly successful writers. Part of the Lives of Victorian Literary Figures series, this three-volume facsimile edition draws together a range of biographical sources relating to these three celebrated Victorian authors. Diary extracts, letters, memoirs and other ephemeral material allows scholars to see these figures through the eyes of their contemporaries. These early accounts shed a different light on their personalities and reputations than more recent portrayals.

First Published in 2004. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

An incisive demonstration of how Orwell's body of work was defined by the four major conflicts that punctuated his life: World War I, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War. Few English writers wielded a pen so sharply as George Orwell, the quintessential political writer of the twentieth century. His literary output at once responded to and sought to influence the tumultuous times in which he lived-decades during which Europe and eventually the entire world would be torn apart by war, while ideologies like fascism, socialism, and communism changed the stakes of global politics. In this study, Stanford historian and lifelong Orwell scholar Peter Stansky incisively demonstrates how Orwell's body of work was defined by the four major conflicts that punctuated his life: World War I, the Spanish Civil War, World War II, and the Cold War. Young Orwell came of age against the backdrop of the First World War, and published his final book, Nineteen Eighty-Four, nearly half a century later, at the outset of the Cold War. The intervening three decades of Orwell's life were marked by radical shifts in his personal politics: briefly a staunch pacifist, he was finally a fully committed socialist following his involvement in the Spanish Civil War. But just before the outbreak of World War II, he had adopted a strong anti-pacifist position, stating that to be a pacifist was equivalent to being pro-Fascist. By carefully combing through Orwell's published works, notably "My Country Right or Left," The Lion and the Unicorn, Animal Farm, and his most dystopian and prescient novel Nineteen Eighty-Four, Stansky teases apart Orwell's often paradoxical views on patriotism and socialism. The Socialist Patriot is ultimately an attempt to reconcile the apparent contradictions between Orwell's commitment to socialist ideals and his sharp critique of totalitarianism by demonstrating the centrality of his wartime experiences, giving twenty-first century readers greater insight into the inner world of one of the most influential writers of the modern age.

** Chosen as a New Statesman, Financial Times, Observer and Sunday Times Book of the Year ** A riveting account of the making of T. S. Eliot's celebrated poem The Waste Land on its centenary. 'A rattling good story' Sunday Telegraph 'A work of art' Times Literary Supplement The Waste Land has been called the 'World's Greatest Poem'. It is said to describe the moral decay of a world after war, to find meaning in a meaningless era. It has been labelled the most truthful poem of its time; it has been branded a masterful fake. A century after its publication in 1922, T. S. Eliot's enigmatic masterpiece remains one of the most influential works ever written, and yet one of the most mysterious. In a remarkable feat of biography, Matthew Hollis reconstructs the intellectual creation of the poem and brings the material reality of its charged times vividly to life. Presenting a mosaic of historical fragments, diaries, dynamic literary criticism and illuminating new research, he reveals the cultural and personal trauma that forged The Waste Land through the lives of its protagonists - of Ezra Pound, who edited it; of Vivien Eliot, who sustained it; and of T. S. Eliot himself, whose private torment is woven into the seams of the work. The result is an unforgettable story of lives passing in opposing directions and the astounding literary legacy they would leave behind.