The year takes its shape from the seasons of nature and the feasts and festivals of the Christian year. Each informs and illuminates the other in this loving celebration of nature's gifts and neighbourly friendship. Literature, poetry, spirituality and memory all merge to create an exquisite series of stories of our times. For all the changes in the contemporary countryside, timeless qualities remain and both are captured here with a poet's understanding and imagination.

This is an original, full length biography of Britain's first twentieth-century black feminist - Una Marson - poet, playwright, and social activist and BBC broadcaster. Una Marson is recognised today as the first major woman poet of the Caribbean and as a significant forerunner of contemporary black writers; her story throws light on the problems facing politicised black artists. In challenging definitions of 'race' and 'gender' in her political and creative work, she forged a valiant path for later black feminists. Her enormous social and cultural contributions to the Caribbean and Britain have, until now, remained hidden in archives and memoirs around the world. Based on extensive research and oral testimony, this biography embraces postcolonial realities and promise, and is a major contribution to British cultural history. -- .

Because Thomas Hardy is so closely associated with the rural Wessex of his novels, stories, and poems, it is easy to forget that he was, in his own words, half a Londoner. Focusing on the formative five years in his early twenties when Hardy lived in the city, but also on his subsequent movement back and forth between Dorset and the capital, Mark Ford shows that the Dorset-London axis is critical to an understanding of his identity as a man and his achievement as a writer. Thomas Hardy: Half a Londoner presents a detailed account of Hardy's London experiences, from his arrival as a shy, impressionable youth, to his embrace of radical views, to his lionization by upper-class hostesses eager to fete the creator of Tess. Drawing on Hardy's poems, letters, fiction, and autobiography, it offers a subtle, moving exploration of the author's complex relationship with the metropolis and those he met or observed there: publishers, fellow authors, street-walkers, benighted lovers, and the aristocratic women who adored his writing but spurned his romantic advances. The young Hardy's oscillations between the routines and concerns of Dorset's Higher Bockhampton and the excitements and dangers of London were crucial to his profound sense of being torn between mutually dependent but often mutually uncomprehending worlds. This fundamental self-division, Ford argues, can be traced not only in the poetry and fiction explicitly set in London but in novels as regionally circumscribed as Far from the Madding Crowd and Tess of the d'Urbervilles.

The Final Test - A Biography of James Ball Naylor, is about one of the most well known men in the country at the turn of the twentieth century, who has since faded into obscurity. A country doctor exceptionally gifted with natural ability, Naylor's passion for writing led to his greatest success as the author of a 1901 best seller. He wrote poetry, short stories, historical and other novels, and became well known as an entertainer and speaker on the Lyceum and Chautauqua Circuits, as well as a political force both as a candidate and a newspaper columnist. His contributions and accomplishment as an educator, writer, poet, public speaker, entertainer, public servant, and politician were numerous. His involvement in politics brought him more than passing friendships with local and national politicians, including Warren G. Harding, whom he knew from their earliest days in politics. This association led to Naylor's thirteen-year stint as a columnist for the Marion Star, but his staunch support of Harding in the face of the scandals after Harding's death affected Naylor's reputation as well. This is an inspiring story of a remarkable man with strong moral character and integrity who was dedicated to his family and to helping others in his profession as a physician. The Final Test A Biography of James Ball Naylor was a FINALIST in the Biography-Historical category in the 2011 National INDIE Excellence Awards.

This work is the first academic biography of North Carolina poet laureate James Larkin Pearson (1879-1981). Using material from Pearson's personal archive in Wilkes County, from the North Carolina Collection and the Southern Historical Collection at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, and from contemporary examinations of his life and work, this study offers deeply personal insights into his life and provides extensive examinations of his hopes, joys, fears, pains, and sorrows. The work also includes lengthy studies of his poetry and his journalistic efforts and examines their place within the larger cultural milieu. In the process, the book addresses two themes that become apparent in Pearson's life and work: his Tar Heel spirit and his individualism. He was a fighter who overcame poverty, a poor education, personal tragedies, and professional neglect to achieve great success. He also abided by his own set of religious, artistic, and political values regardless of the consequences. This work thus offers the first personal and professional examination of James Larkin Pearson, provides insights on North Carolina and its people, and examines the benefits and drawbacks of following one's own path.

Reinhardt owned""The Bodley Head from 1957 to 1987, and smaller publishers like The Nonesuch Press and Reinhardt Books. This account of his life contains stories about his authors, among them Graham Greene, G.B. Shaw, Charlie Chaplin and his actor friends, illuminating the trajectory of British publishing in the second half of the twentieth century.

The definitive biography of Frank O'Hara, one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century, the magnetic literary figure at the center of New York's cultural life during the 1950s and 1960s.

City Poet captures the excitement and promise of mid-twentieth-century New York in the years when it became the epicenter of the art world, and illuminates the poet and artist at its heart. Brad Gooch traces Frank O'Hara's life from his parochial Catholic childhood to World War II, through his years at Harvard and New York. He brilliantly portrays O'Hara in in his element, surrounded by a circle of writers and artists who would transform America's cultural landscape: Willem de Kooning, Franz Kline, Helen Frankenthaler, Jackson Pollock, Gregory Corso, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, LeRoi Jones, and John Ashbery.

Gooch brings into focus the artistry and influence of a life "of guts and wit and style and passion" (Luc Sante) that was tragically abbreviated in 1966 when O'Hara, just forty and at the height of his creativity, was hit and killed by a jeep on the beach at Fire Island--a death that marked the end of an exceptional career and a remarkable era.

City Poet is illustrated with 55 black and white photographs.

This book (hardcover) is part of the TREDITION CLASSICS. It contains classical literature works from over two thousand years. Most of these titles have been out of print and off the bookstore shelves for decades. The book series is intended to preserve the cultural legacy and to promote the timeless works of classical literature. Readers of a TREDITION CLASSICS book support the mission to save many of the amazing works of world literature from oblivion. With this series, tredition intends to make thousands of international literature classics available in printed format again - worldwide.

In 1914, H. Rider Haggardadventure novelist, diplomat, farmer, lawyer, and, above all, renowned author of such classic and influential bestsellers as King Solomon's Mines and Shereturned to South Africa, the country that had fired his literary imagination, for the first time in a quarter century.

Haggard, whose work is today considered a prototype of colonial literature, barely recognized the Africa of his youth. The discovery of gold, the destruction of the Zulu kingdom, and the aftermath of the Anglo-Boer war had all radically transformed the political, cultural, and often physical landscape.

No longer the diehard imperialist of his youth, when conquest and colonization were the order of the day, Haggard toured southern Africa extensively during this trip, acquiring an impression of black politics and even meeting the first president of the African National Congress, John Dube. This is the chronicle, in Haggard's own hand, of that journey.

A remarkable literary find, written by a man who helped shape Western perceptions of Africa, this hitherto unpublished manuscript presents a portrait both surprising and in some ways familiar of Africa and of a central figure in the literature of African colonialism.

After falling in love with and marrying a man two lifetimes older than her, Irving Layton's last wife shares the story of her life with the acclaimed poet. While a student at Dalhousie University, Anna Pottier attended a poetry reading featuring Irving Layton. Walking out of the auditorium that night, she knew two things: she wanted more than ever to be a writer, and she wanted to be with Layton. At the age of twenty-three she became Layton's fifth and final wife; she was forty-eight years his junior. She shared the entirety of his world and was intimately involved in the writing and publication of such books as The Gucci Bag, Fortunate Exile, and Waiting for the Messiah. She accompanied Layton on his last major overseas reading tour, broke bread with Pierre Trudeau and Leonard Cohen, met other luminaries, and watched Layton write his very last poem. But slowly, Layton was changing. In 1992, a doctor put names to these changes: Parkinson's disease and early-stage Alzheimer's. Life carried on, but once-easy things grew more difficult, and then the day came in 1995, after nearly fourteen years, when Pottier had nothing left to give. Good as Gone is a startling, at times searing, account of one of the most unusual love stories of the twentieth century.

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE FINALIST

'...And then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.' Harriet Tubman

Jesmyn Ward's acclaimed memoir shines a light on the community she comes from, in the small town of DeLisle, Mississippi, a place of quiet beauty and fierce attachment. Here, in the space of four years, she lost five young men dear to her, including her beloved brother - to accidents, murder and suicide. Their deaths were seemingly unconnected, yet their lives had been connected, by identity and place, and as Jesmyn dealt with these losses, she came to a staggering truth: These young men died because of who they were and the place they were from, because racism and economic struggle breed a certain kind of bad luck.

The agonising reality brought Jesmyn to write, at last, their true stories and her own.

Men We Reaped opens up a parallel universe, yet it points to problems whose roots are woven into the soil under all our feet. This indispensable American memoir is destined to become a classic.

Ever since the first edition of Thomas Ligotti's 'Songs of a Dead Dreamer' appeared in 1985, it was clear that here was an author of extraordinary brilliance and originality. In following years there has been a great deal of interest in the author and his works, although, until now, articles about him have mostly been scattered in obscure journals. Now, at last, here is a book about him, a symposium of explorations and examinations of the Ligottian universe by such leading critics as S.T. Joshi, Stefan Dzimianowicz, Robert M. Price. With a complete, up-to-date bibliography of Ligotti's work, two interviews with him, and even a fascinating essay by Ligotti himself.

Maurine Whipple, author f what some critics consider Mormonism'a greatest novel, The Giant Joshua, is an enigma. Her prize-winning novel has never been out of print, and its portrayal of the founding of St. George draws on her own family history to produce its unforgettable and candid portrait of plural marriage's challenges. Yet Maurine's life is full of contradictions and unanswered questions, Veda Tebbs Hale, a personal friend of the paradoxical novelist, answers these questions with sympathy and tact, nailing each insight down with thorough research in Whipple's vast but under-utilized collected papers.

Hero Martyr Poet
The inspiring story of a remarkable life cut short.

I don t think Hannah wanted to die for the sake of having her memory exalted in history or to prove herself equal to a romantic image she conceived for herself. Her purpose wasn t to die. She died for her life s purpose. U.S. Senator John McCain, in "Why Courage Matters"

Hannah Senesh, poet and Israel s national heroine, has come to be seen as a symbol of Jewish heroism. Safe in Palestine during World War II, she volunteered for a mission to help rescue fellow Jews in her native Hungary. She was captured by the Nazis, endured imprisonment and torture, and was finally executed at the age of twenty-three.

Like Anne Frank, she kept a diary from the time she was thirteen. This new edition brings together not only the widely read and cherished diary, but many of Hannah s poems and letters, memoirs written by Hannah s mother, accounts by parachutists who accompanied Hannah on her fateful mission, and insightful material not previously published in English.

Described by a fellow parachutist as a spiritual girl guided almost by mysticism, Hannah s life has something of value to teach everyone. Now the subject of a feature-length documentary, Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh, Hannah s words and actions will inspire people from each generation to follow their own inner voices, just as she followed hers.

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.

With more than two million copies in print, "Manchild in the Promised Land" is one of the most remarkable autobiographies of our time--the definitive account of African-American youth in Harlem of the 1940s and 1950s, and a seminal work of modern literature.
Published during a literary era marked by the ascendance of black writers such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Alex Haley, this thinly fictionalized account of Claude Brown's childhood as a hardened, streetwise criminal trying to survive the toughest streets of Harlem has been heralded as the definitive account of everyday life for the first generation of African Americans raised in the Northern ghettos of the 1940s and 1950s.
When the book was first published in 1965, it was praised for its realistic portrayal of Harlem--the children, young people, hardworking parents; the hustlers, drug dealers, prostitutes, and numbers runners; the police; the violence, sex, and humor.
The book continues to resonate generations later, not only because of its fierce and dignified anger, not only because the struggles of urban youth are as deeply felt today as they were in Brown's time, but also because of its inspiring message. Now with an introduction by Nathan McCall, here is the story about the one who "made it," the boy who kept landing on his feet and grew up to become a man.

A superb autobiography by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century, Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter offers an intimate picture of growing up in a bourgeois French family, rebelling as an adolescent against the conventional expectations of her class, and striking out on her own with an intellectual and existential ambition exceedingly rare in a young woman in the 1920s.She vividly evokes her friendships, love interests, mentors, and the early days of the most important relationship of her life, with fellow student Jean-Paul Sartre, against the backdrop of a turbulent political time.

The first modern study of Hartley Coleridge, showing that he deserves our attention not as the son of Samuel Taylor Coleridge, but as a literary presence in his own right.

Benjamin Zephaniah, who has travelled the world for his art and his humanitarianism, now tells the one story that encompasses it all: the story of his life. In the early 1980s when punks and Rastas were on the streets protesting about unemployment, homelessness and the National Front, Benjamin's poetry could be heard at demonstrations, outside police stations and on the dance floor. His mission was to take poetry everywhere, and to popularise it by reaching people who didn't read books. His poetry was political, musical, radical and relevant. By the early 1990s, Benjamin had performed on every continent in the world (a feat which he achieved in only one year) and he hasn't stopped performing and touring since. Nelson Mandela, after hearing Benjamin's tribute to him while he was in prison, requested an introduction to the poet that grew into a lifelong relationship, inspiring Benjamin's work with children in South Africa. Benjamin would also go on to be the first artist to record with The Wailers after the death of Bob Marley in a musical tribute to Nelson Mandela. The Life and Rhymes of Benjamin Zephaniah is a truly extraordinary life story which celebrates the power of poetry and the importance of pushing boundaries with the arts.