Sarah Robinson Scott was a writer, translator and social reformer. While Scott's legacy presents her as a committed Anglican philanthropist, the letters she wrote reveal her to have been a witty, even savage, commentator on eighteenth-century life.This is the first edition of Scott's letters to be published and presents all extant copies.

Upon publication, "Don't Panic" quickly established itself as the definitive companion to "Adams" and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". This edition comes up-to-date, covering the movie, "And Another Thing" by Eoin Colfer and the build up to the 30th anniversary of the first novel. Acclaimed author Neil Gaiman celebrates the life and work of Douglas Adams who, in a field in Innsbruck in 1971, had an idea that became "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". The radio series that started it all, the five - soon to be six - book 'trilogy', the TV series, almost-film and actual film, and everything in between.

A superbly crafted study of Hunter S. Thompson's literary formation, achievement, and continuing relevance. Savage Journey is a "supremely crafted" study of Hunter S. Thompson's literary formation and achievement. Focusing on Thompson's influences, development, and unique model of authorship, Savage Journey argues that his literary formation was largely a San Francisco story. During the 1960s, Thompson rode with the Hell's Angels, explored the San Francisco counterculture, and met talented editors who shared his dissatisfaction with mainstream journalism. Peter Richardson traces Thompson's transition during this time from New Journalist to cofounder of Gonzo journalism. He also endorses Thompson's later claim that he was one of the best writers using the English language as both a musical instrument and a political weapon. Although Thompson's political commentary was often hyperbolic, Richardson shows that much of it was also prophetic. Fifty years after the publication of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and more than a decade after his death, Thompson's celebrity continues to obscure his literary achievement. This book refocuses our understanding of that achievement by mapping Thompson's influences, probing the development of his signature style, and tracing the reception of his major works. It concludes that Thompson was not only a gifted journalist, satirist, and media critic, but also the most distinctive American voice in the second half of the twentieth century.

'The master storyteller of our times' Hillary Rodham Clinton 'The whole story of his truly astonishing life' Bob Woodward 'The book was damn near addictive. I loved it' Ron Howard 'At times his poignant narrative will bring you to tears' Patricia Cornwell 'A compelling account of the life events that shaped an extraordinary man' Nicholas Sparks 'So much content and inspiration from one of the world's most successful authors' Sir David Jason 'This is a poignant, funny and inspiring account of a phenomenally successful career from a master storyteller' Jake Humphrey ______________________________ HIS BEST STORIES ARE THE STORIES OF HIS LIFE * His father grew up in a New York poorhouse called the 'Pogie'. * He worked at a psychiatric hospital where he met the singer James Taylor and the poet Robert Lowell. Both were patients. * He was at Woodstock and was also an usher at the Fillmore East. * He was CEO of advertising agency J. Walter Thompson North America when he was thirty-seven. He wrote the ad jingle, 'I'm a Toys 'R' Us Kid'. * He once watched Norman Mailer and James Baldwin square off to fight. * He's played golf with three US presidents and has nine holes-in-one. * Dolly Parton sang Happy Birthday to him over the phone. She calls him Jimmy James. James says, 'I always wanted to write the kind of novel that is read and re-read so many times the binding breaks, and the book literally falls apart, pages scattered in the wind. I'm still working on that one.' ______________________________ More praise for The Stories of My Life 'A masterpiece of storytelling! Funny, poignant, brutally honest' Admiral Willam H. McRaven 'Will delight fans, and even non-fans, of America's storied storyteller' Ben Bradlee Jr. 'James Patterson makes his own life as addictively enjoyable as his novels' Nadine Dorries 'Jim Patterson's life is a thriller itself . . . This book is a pure joy to read' Stephen A. Schwarzman 'Always entertaining . . . You will enjoy the read' Phil Knight 'James Patterson's first rule of storytelling is "be there". And that's the genius of his autobiography' Mike Lupica 'Anyone who has ever started a James Patterson thriller knows how damned difficult it is to put down. And the same is true of this vivid, invigorating memoir' Daily Mail

This is a double biography of Letitia Elizabeth Landon, best-selling Regency poet known to her contemporaries as 'the female Byron', and her husband George Maclean, British administrator on the Gold Coast, known as the Father of Modern Ghana. L.E.L.'s reading public adored her writing and poetry and made her the best-selling female author of her time. As an early media celebrity her life was the subject of society gossip, so her sudden death in Africa shocked the nation (a 'melancholy catastrophe' ran one headline) and led to rumours of suicide or murder. Her husband's name was henceforth blackened by London society, which unwittingly superimposed the plots of L.E.L.'s fictions upon the circumstances of her death. Despite the fact that Maclean cleared 200 miles of Western African coast of British slave trading, made peace with the warlike Asante, instituted a judicial system still in use in many African democracies, and encouraged successful and fair trading, the scandal unjustly ruined his career. According to the inquest L.E.L.''s death was caused by her improper use of a prescribed medicine, but the rumour mongers discounted the difficult circumstances of life on the Gold Coast in the mid 1800s, and hinted that "Mrs Maclean, only recently married, owed her death to the revengeful passions of the natives, who poisoned the wife in order to have vengeance on the husband". Among those who enjoyed her work or recognised her influence were Mary Shelley, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Christina Rossetti and her brother, Dante Gabriel. It might be said that, to reflect fully the aesthetics of early nineteenth-century poetry, one has to consider, together, the works of William Wordsworth, Felicia Hemans, and Letitia Elizabeth Landon.

In postwar rural England, Hilary Mantel grew up convinced that the most improbable of accomplishments, including "chivalry, horsemanship, and swordplay," were within her grasp. Once married, however, she acquired a persistent pain that led to destructive drugs and patronizing psychiatry, ending in an ineffective but irrevocable surgery. There would be no children; in herself she found instead one novel, and then another.

Sarah Robinson Scott (1721-1795) was a writer, translator and social reformer, and younger sister of Elizabeth Robinson Montagu (1718-1800), the famous Bluestocking patron. While Scott's legacy presents her as a committed Anglican philanthropist, the letters she wrote to her sister reveal her to have been a witty, even savage, commentator on 18th-century life. While Scott's letters provide us with a window on to her own experiences and expectations, they must also be interpreted within 18th-century context. This is the first edition of Scott's letters to be published and presents all extant copies.

A Sunday Times Book of The Year A Mail on Sunday Book of The Year An Independent Book of The Year A The Times Book of The Year During the US book tour for his memoir, Hitch-22, Christopher Hitchens collapsed in his New York hotel room to excoriating pain in his chest and thorax. As he would later write in the first of a series of deeply moving Vanity Fair pieces, he was being deported 'from the country of the well across the stark frontier that marks off the land of malady.' Over the next year he underwent the brutal gamut of modern cancer treatment, enduring catastrophic levels of suffering and eventually losing the ability to speak. Mortality is the most meditative collection of writing Hitchens has ever produced; at once an unsparingly honest account of the ravages of his disease, an examination of cancer etiquette, and the coda to a lifetime of fierce debate and peerless prose. In this eloquent confrontation with mortality, Hitchens returns a human face to a disease that has become a contemporary cipher of suffering.

Celebrating Fifty Years of Picador Books 'I was born in 1939. The other big event of that year was the outbreak of the Second World War, but for the moment, that did not affect me.' Collected here in this brand new edition are the first three volumes of Clive James's million-copy selling autobiographical series: Unreliable Memoirs, Falling Towards England, and May Week Was In June. In typically hilarious and self-effacing style, James proves a hugely entertaining and erudite guide to his own remarkable life, with these volumes detailing James's childhood adventures in the suburbs of post-war Sydney, his excited arrival in London as a young man and aspiring poet, and the life at Cambridge University that led to him falling in love (often) and getting married (once). The Complete Unreliable Memoirs: Volume One is an introduction to one the most beloved and acclaimed series of memoirs of all time, from a true national treasure. Other Clive James books available as part of the Picador Collection include The Complete Unreliable Memoirs:Volume Two and Cultural Amnesia.

In an "eye-opening memoir" (People) "as beautiful as it is discomfiting" (The New Yorker), award-winning writer Apricot Irving untangles her youth on a missionary compound in Haiti.Apricot Irving grew up as a missionary's daughter in Haiti. Her father was an agronomist, a man who hiked alone into the deforested hills to preach the gospel of trees. Her mother and sisters spent their days in the confines of the hospital compound they called home. As a child, this felt like paradise to Irving; as a teenager, it became a prison. Outside of the walls of the missionary enclave, Haiti was a tumult of bugle-call bus horns and bicycles that jangled over hard-packed dirt, road blocks and burning tires triggered by political upheaval, the clatter of rain across tin roofs, and the swell of voices running ahead of the storm. Poignant and explosive, Irving weaves a portrait of a missionary family that is unflinchingly honest: her father's unswerving commitment to his mission, her mother's misgivings about his loyalty, the brutal history of colonization. Drawing from research, interviews, and journals--her parents' as well as her own--this memoir in many voices evokes a fractured family finding their way to kindness through honesty. Told against the backdrop of Haiti's long history of intervention, it grapples with the complicated legacy of those who wish to improve the world, while bearing witness to the defiant beauty of an undefeated country. A lyrical meditation on trees and why they matter, loss and privilege, love and failure. The Gospel of Trees is a "lush, emotional debut...A beautiful memoir that shows how a family altered by its own ambitious philanthropy might ultimately find hope in their faith and love for each other, and for Haiti." (Publishers Weekly, starred review).

Janet Morgan's definitive and authorised biography of Agatha Christie, with a new retrospective foreword by the author. Agatha Christie (1890-1976), the world's bestselling author, is a public institution. Her creations, Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, have become fiction's most legendary sleuths and her ingenuity has captured the imagination of generations of readers. But although she lived to a great age and was prolific, she remained elusively shy and determinedly private. Given sole access to family papers and other protected material, Janet Morgan's definitive biography unravels Agatha Christie's life, work and relationships, creating a revealing and faithfully honest portrait. The book has delighted readers of Christie's detective stories for more than 30 years with its clear view of her career and personality, and this edition includes a new foreword by the author reflecting on the longevity of Agatha Christie's extraordinary success and popularity.

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.

Konstantin Batyushkov was one of the great poets of the Golden Age of Russian literature in the early nineteenth century. His verses, famous for their musicality, earned him the admiration of Aleksandr Pushkin and generations of Russian poets to come. In Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry, Peter France interweaves Batyushkov's life and writings, presenting masterful new translations of his work with the compelling story of Batyushkov's career as a soldier, diplomat, and poet and his tragic decline into mental illness at the age of thirty-four. Little known among non-Russian readers, Batyushkov left a varied body of writing, both in verse and in prose, as well as memorable letters to friends. France nests a substantial selection of his sprightly epistles on love, friendship, and social life, his often tragic elegies, and extracts from his essays and letters within episodes of his remarkable life-particularly appropriate for a poet whose motto was "write as you live, and live as you write." Batyushkov's writing reflects the transition from the urbane sociability of the Enlightenment to the rebellious sensibility of Pushkin and Lermontov; it spans the Napoleonic Wars and the rapid social and literary change from Catherine the Great to Nicholas I. Presenting Batyushkov's poetry of feeling and wit alongside his troubled life, Writings from the Golden Age of Russian Poetry makes his verse accessible to English-speaking readers in a necessary exploration of this transitional moment for Russian literature.

In a lyrical love letter to guide dogs everywhere, a blind poet shares his delightful story of how a guide dog changed his life and helped him discover a newfound appreciation for travel and independence. Stephen Kuusisto was born legally blind--but he was also raised in the 1950s and taught to deny his blindness in order to pass as sighted. Stephen attended public school, rode a bike, and read books pressed right up against his nose. As an adult, he coped with his limited vision by becoming a professor in a small college town, memorizing routes for all of the places he needed to be. Then, at the age of thirty-eight, he was laid off. With no other job opportunities in his vicinity, he would have to travel to find work. This is how he found himself at Guiding Eyes, paired with a Labrador named Corky. In this vivid and lyrical memoir, Stephen Kuusisto recounts how an incredible partnership with a guide dog changed his life and the heart-stopping, wondrous adventure that began for him in midlife. Profound and deeply moving, this is a spiritual journey, the story of discovering that life with a guide dog is both a method and a state of mind.

As a young woman growing up in a small, religious community, Regan Penaluna daydreamed about the big questions: Who are we and what is this strange world we find ourselves in? In college she discovered philosophy and fell in love with its rationality, its abstractions, its beauty.

What Penaluna didn't realize was that philosophy - at least the canon that's taught in Western universities, as well as the culture that surrounds it - would slowly grind her down through its devaluation of women and their minds. Women were nowhere in her curriculum, and feminist philosophy was dismissed as marginal, unserious.

Until Penaluna came across the work of a seventeenth-century woman named Damaris Cudworth Masham. Reading Masham's work was like reaching through time: writing three hundred years ago, Masham was speaking directly to her about knowledge and God, but also the condition of women. Her work eventually led Penaluna to other remarkable women philosophers of the era: Mary Astell, Catharine Cockburn and Mary Wollstonecraft.

Together these women rekindled Penaluna's love of philosophy and taught her how to live a truly philosophical life. She combines memoir with biography to tell the stories of these four women, weaving throughout an alternative history of philosophy as well as her own search for beauty and truth. Formally inventive and keenly intelligent, How to Think Like a Woman is a moving meditation on what philosophy could look like if women were treated equally.

Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume "Dostoevsky" is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language--and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank's monumental, 2500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed in this single, highly readable volume with a new preface by the author. Carefully preserving the original work's acclaimed narrative style and combination of biography, intellectual history, and literary criticism, "Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time" illuminates the writer's works--from his first novel "Poor Folk" to "Crime and Punishment" and "The Brothers Karamazov"--by setting them in their personal, historical, and above all ideological context. More than a biography in the usual sense, this is a cultural history of nineteenth-century Russia, providing both a rich picture of the world in which Dostoevsky lived and a major reinterpretation of his life and work.

I lived the same life as everyone else, the life of ordinary people, the masses. Sitting in a prison cell in the autumn of 1944, the German author Hans Fallada sums up his life under the National Socialist dictatorship, the time of inward emigration . Under conditions of close confinement, in constant fear of discovery, he writes himself free from the nightmare of the Nazi years. He records his thoughts about spying and denunciation, about the threat to his livelihood and his literary work and about the fate of many friends and contemporaries. The confessional mode did not come naturally to Fallada, but in the mental and emotional distress of 1944, self-reflection became a survival strategy. Fallada s frank and sometimes provocative memoirs were thought for many years to have been lost. They are published here for the first time.

By the time of his death, Herve Guibert had become a singular literary voice on the impact of AIDS in France. He was prolific. His oeuvre contained some twenty novels, including To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life and The Compassion Protocol. He was thirty-six years old. In Cytomegalovirus, Guibert offers an autobiographical narrative of the everyday moments of his hospitalization because of complications of AIDS. Cytomegalovirus is spare, biting, and anguished. Guibert writes through the minutiae of living and of death-as a quality of invention, of melancholy, of small victories in the face of greater threats-at the moment when his sight (and life) is eclipsed. This new edition includes an Introduction and Afterword contextualizing Guibert's work within the history of the AIDS pandemic, its relevance in the contemporary moment, and the importance of understanding the quotidian aspects of terminal illness.

*Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2020*

*Winner of non-fiction book of the year at the Irish Book Awards*

'Utterly magnificent. Raw, thought-provoking and galvanising; this is a book every woman should read.' –Eimear McBride, author of A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing.

I have come to think of all the metal in my body as artificial stars, glistening beneath the skin, a constellation of old and new metal. A map, a tracing of connections and a guide to looking at things from different angles.

How do you tell the story of a life in a body, as it goes through sickness, health, motherhood? How do you tell that story when you are not just a woman but a woman in Ireland? In the powerful and daring essays in Constellations Sinéad Gleeson does that very thing. All of life is within these pages, from birth to first love, pregnancy to motherhood, terrifying sickness, old age and loss to death itself. Throughout this wide-ranging collection she also turns her restless eye outwards delving into work, art and our very ways of seeing. In the tradition of some of our finest life writers, and yet still in her own spirited, generous voice, Sinéad takes us on a journey that is both uniquely personal and yet universal in its resonance. Here is the fierce joy and pain of being alive.

R. P. Blackmur was an American critic and poet, as well as a professor of English literature and creative writing at Princeton University. At the time of his death, he had completed five books and a number of plays and short stories. His poetry mattered most to him and some of it is permanent work. He devoted much of his life to a biography of Henry Adams, someone he saw in himself. In his lifetime, he received his share of adulation, but he was not successful in the way that success is commonly measured.

In this work, Russell Fraser follows the course of Blackmur's self-declared failed genius. He tells the story of his precocious youth in Cambridge; his eclectic education; his years of poverty and renown as a poet, novelist, freelance music critic, and essayist; his obsessive marriage to artist Helen Dickson; his entangled friendships with T. S. Eliot, Delmore Schwartz, Allen Tate, and John Berryman; and his passion for rural Maine on the Tidal Water. He discusses Blackmur's crucial role in the literary magazines of the twenties and thirties; his unique influence as instructor of creative writing; the emotional and professional price he paid for a doubtful security at Princeton University; and the torment of wavering between intellectual inertia and prolific inspiration.

With empathy and insight, Fraser shows how the trajectory of Blackmur's career parallels the movements in the American literary scene; the experiments in poetry and fiction; the development of the New Criticism; the writer's conflict between order and anarchy, taxonomy and the full response; and the emergence of the critic as artist. A biography, intellectual history, and literary criticism, "A Mingled Yarn" unravels Blackmur's complex character and celebrates his great achievement.

One of the most famous poets in the history of Turkish literature, Yunus Emre (d. 1320) is well-known as a Sufi saint-poet who has exerted a great influence in both the East and the West. This book is an analysis on Emre's ardent, deceptively simple, yet powerful expressions of love, the musicality of the verse, and the daring and sometimes even daunting imagery. UNESCO celebrated 1991 as the year of Yunus Emre.

Described by Philip Pullman as 'the most important British writer of fantasy since Tolkein', Alan Garner has been enrapturing readers with works like The Weirdstone of Brisingamen, The Owl Service, Red Shift and The Stone Book Quartet for more than half a century. Now, a group of the writers and artists he has inspired over the years have come together to celebrate his life and work in First Light. This anthology includes original contributions from David Almond, Margaret Atwood, John Burnside, Susan Cooper, Helen Dunmore, Stephen Fry, Neil Gaiman, Elizabeth Garner, Paul Kingsnorth, Katherine Langrish, Helen Macdonald, Robert Macfarlane, Gregory Maguire, Neel Mukherjee, Philip Pullman, Ali Smith, Elizabeth Wein, Michael Wood and many, many more. Whether a literary essay, a personal response to Garner's writing or a story about the man himself, each piece is a tribute to his remarkable impact. Edited by the acclaimed journalist and novelist Erica Wagner, First Light will touch the heart of anyone who grew up reading Alan Garner.

'Riveting, tragic tale' New Yorker 'Anna Pasternak has produced an irresistible account of joy, suffering and passion' Financial Times The heartbreaking story of the passionate love affair between Boris Pasternak and Olga Ivinskaya - the tragic true story that inspired Doctor Zhivago. 'Doctor Zhivago' has sold in its millions yet the true love story that inspired it has never been fully explored. Pasternak would often say 'Lara exists, go and meet her', directing his visitors to the love of his life and literary muse, Olga Ivinskaya. They met in 1946 at the literary journal where she worked. Their relationship would last for the remainder of their lives. Olga paid an enormous price for loving 'her Boria'. She became a pawn in a highly political game and was imprisoned twice in Siberian labour camps because of her association with him and his controversial work. Her story is one of unimaginable courage, loyalty, suffering, tragedy, drama and loss. Drawing on both archival and family sources, Anna Pasternak's book reveals for the first time the critical role played by Olga in Boris's life and argues that without Olga it is likely that Doctor Zhivago would never have been completed or published. Anna Pasternak is a writer and member of the famous Pasternak family. She is the great-granddaughter of Leonid Pasternak, the impressionist painter and Nobel Prize winning novelist Boris Pasternak was her great-uncle. She is the author of three previous books.