More than one year on the "New York Times" bestseller list! Richard Bach's timeless and uplifting classic of hope and love

"We're the bridge across forever, arching above the sea, adventuring for our pleasure, living mysteries for the fun of it, choosing disasters triumphs challenges impossible odds, testing ourselves over and again, learning love and love and love!"

"The opposite of loneliness, it's not togetherness. It is intimacy."

"Look in a mirror and one thing's sure: what we see is not who we are."

"Next to God, love is the word most mangled in every language. The highest form of regard between two people is friendship, and when love enters, friendship dies."

"There are no mistakes. The events we bring upon ourselves, no matter how unpleasant, are necessary in order to learn what we need to learn; whatever steps we take, they're necessary to reach the places we've chosen to go."

For a man who liked being called the American, Mark Twain spent a surprising amount of time outside the continental United States. Biographer Roy Morris, Jr., focuses on the dozen years Twain spent overseas and on the popular travel books-The Innocents Abroad, A Tramp Abroad, and Following the Equator-he wrote about his adventures. Unintimidated by Old World sophistication and unafraid to travel to less developed parts of the globe, Twain encouraged American readers to follow him around the world at the dawn of mass tourism, when advances in transportation made leisure travel possible for an emerging middle class. In so doing, he helped lead Americans into the twentieth century and guided them toward more cosmopolitan views. In his first book, The Innocents Abroad (1869), Twain introduced readers to the "American Vandal," a brash, unapologetic visitor to foreign lands, unimpressed with the local ambiance but eager to appropriate any souvenir that could be carried off. He adopted this persona throughout his career, even after he grew into an international celebrity who dined with the German Kaiser, traded quips with the king of England, gossiped with the Austrian emperor, and negotiated with the president of Transvaal for the release of war prisoners. American Vandal presents an unfamiliar Twain: not the bred-in-the-bone Midwesterner we associate with Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer but a global citizen whose exposure to other peoples and places influenced his evolving positions on race, war, and imperialism, as both he and America emerged on the world stage.

Phizzwhizzing new cover look and branding for the World's NUMBER ONE Storyteller!BOY, Roald Dahl's bestselling autobiography, is full of hilarious anecdotes about his childhood and school days, illustrated by Quentin Blake.As a boy, all sorts of unusual things happened to Roald Dahl. There was the time he and four school friends got their revenge on beastly Mrs Prachett in her sweet shop.There are stories of holidays in fishing boats, African adventures and the days of tasting chocolate for Cadbury's.You'll hear tales of horrible school bullies and the motor-car accident when Roald's nose was nearly sliced clean off . . .Roald Dahl vividly shares his memories; some are funny. Some are painful. Some are unpleasant. All are true.You can listen to all of Roald Dahl's stories on Puffin Audiobooks, read by some very famous voices, including Kate Winslet, David Walliams and Steven Fry - plus there are added squelchy sound effects from Pinewood Studios! Also look out for new Roald Dahl apps in the App store and Google Play- including the disgusting TWIT OR MISS! and HOUSE OF TWITS inspired by the revolting Twits.

Understands Nietzsche in the light of his activity as a creative writer from his juvenilia through the publication of The Birth of Tragedy, providing the first extensive study in English of his early literary works. The name Friedrich Nietzsche resonates around the world. Although known primarily as a philosopher, Nietzsche began his writing career while still a boy with literary texts: poetry, prose, and dramas. The present book is the first extensive study in English of these early literary works. It understands Nietzsche in the light of his activity as a creative writer from his juvenilia through his first two years as professor of classical philology at the University of Basel, that is, through the 1872 publication of his first major work, The Birth of Tragedy Out of the Spirit of Music. Knowledge of Nietzsche's early literary writings further underscores the value of The Birth of Tragedy as a work of world literature. The present study makes available almost all of Nietzsche's early poetry and extensive excerpts from his early prose works and dramas - much of it in English for the first time - along with commentary. A final, extensive chapter on The Birth of Tragedy treats it as the culmination of the early literary works. The book contains many new insights into Nietzsche and his work and essential source material for future research. All quotations from Nietzsche are given in both the original German and in English.

Since the beginning of his artistic career in 1959, Bahram Beyzaie's oeuvre has incorporated various aspects of Iranian, Euro-American, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian performance traditions and cinema. Beyzaie's work reformulates indigenous artistic and ritual forms and cultural narratives in plays and films whose emancipatory aesthetics have influenced several generations of writers, playwrights, and filmmakers. This book examines the origins and development of what the author identifies as Beyzaie's unique sense of creativity, using an interdisciplinary method of semiotic and cultural analysis to identify its manifestations in Beyzaie's films and plays of the 1960 and 1970s. It focusses on Beyzaie's early works, such as Downpour and Uncle Moustache, and how they engage with neglected aspects of Iranian culture to challenge mainstream approaches to writing and directing plays and films. In this way, the author argues, Beyzaie's work questions notions of being and belonging, by subverting exclusionist discourses on art, politics, society, culture, self and other, personal and collective identity, gender relations, intellectuals, heroes and villains, and children.

The great Romantic poet Lord Byron starved himself compulsively for most of his life. His behaviour mystified his friends and other witnesses, yet he never imagined he was ill. Instead, he rationalised his behaviour as a fight for spiritual freedom and made it the cornerstone of his heroic ideal, which was central to his work and to his life and his death. This fresh biographical study aims to explore neglected or misunderstood aspects of his private life to illuminate his writing, his affairs with women, his passion for Napoleon and his conflicted friendships with Coleridge and Shelley. This in turn leads to a new understanding of his masterpiece, Don Juan. 15 July 2019 marks the 200th anniversary of its first publication. Antony Peattie situates these patterns of behaviour in a vividly rendered contemporary world, culminating in Byron's last days in Greece, where he tried to starve himself into heroic leadership but damaged his constitution, resulting in his death at the age of thirty-six.

Homage to Catalonia remains one of the most famous accounts of the Spanish Civil War. With characteristic scrutiny, Orwell questions the actions and motives of all sides whilst retaining his firm beliefs in human courage and the need for radical social change.

Part of the Macmillan Collector’s Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is introduced by Helen Graham, a leading historian on the Spanish Civil War.

When George Orwell arrived in Spain in 1936, he signed up to fight with the Republican army against Fascism. Homage to Catalonia is his bracing personal account of his experiences in the Spanish Civil War. From the front line he describes, with brutal honesty, the frustrations and inefficiencies of battle; he is caught up in vicious street fighting in Barcelona and must flee for his life when Republican factions turn on each other.

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.

A SPECTATOR, NEW STATESMAN AND THE TIMES BOOK OF THE YEAR 'The best biography I have read in years' Philippe Sands 'Spectacular' Observer 'A remarkable portrait' Guardian W. G. Sebald was one of the most extraordinary and influential writers of the twentieth century. Through books including The Emigrants, Austerlitz and The Rings of Saturn, he pursued an original literary vision that combined fiction, history, autobiography and photography and addressed some of the most profound themes of contemporary literature: the burden of the Holocaust, memory, loss and exile. The first biography to explore his life and work, Speak, Silence pursues the true Sebald through the memories of those who knew him and through the work he left behind. This quest takes Carole Angier from Sebald's birth as a second-generation German at the end of the Second World War, through his rejection of the poisoned inheritance of the Third Reich, to his emigration to England, exploring the choice of isolation and exile that drove his work. It digs deep into a creative mind on the edge, finding profound empathy and paradoxical ruthlessness, saving humour, and an elusive mix of fact and fiction in his life as well as work. The result is a unique, ferociously original portrait.

Over more than four decades J.R.R. Tolkien's son and literary executor, Christopher Tolkien, published some twenty-four volumes of his father's work, much more than his father had succeeded in publishing during his own lifetime. Standing on the mountain of his son's colossal publishing effort and extraordinary scholarship, readers today are therefore able to survey and understand the vastness of the landscape of Tolkien's legendarium. This collection of essays by world-renowned scholars, together with family reminiscences, sheds new light on J.R.R. Tolkien's work, his son Christopher's unique gifts in communicating and interpreting that work and the debt owed to Christopher by the many Tolkien scholars who were privileged to work with him. What was Tolkien's intended ending for 'The Lord of the Rings'? Did it leave echoes in the stripped-down version that was actually published? What was the audience's response to the first ever adaptation of 'The Lord of the Rings' - a radio dramatization that has now been deleted forever from the BBC's archives? What was the significance of the extraordinary array of doorways which confronted the hobbits as they journeyed through Middle-earth? The book is illustrated with colour reproductions of J.R.R. Tolkien's manuscripts, maps, drawings and letters and, with the kind permission of his estate, photographs of Christopher Tolkien and extracts from his works, some of which have never been seen before, making this volume essential reading for Tolkien scholars, readers and fans.

'If you want to read a book that moves you both at the level of sentence and the quality of language and with the emotional depth of its subject matter, then A Fortunate Woman is definitely the book you should be reading' Samanth Subramanian, Baillie Gifford Judge When Polly Morland is clearing out her mother's house she finds a book that will lead her to a remarkable figure living on her own doorstep: the country doctor who works in the same remote, wooded valley she has lived in for many years. This doctor is a rarity in contemporary medicine, she knows her patients inside out, and their stories are deeply entwined with her own. In A Fortunate Woman, with its beautiful photographs by Richard Baker, Polly Morland has written a profoundly moving love letter to a landscape, a community and, above all, to what it means to be a good doctor. 'Morland writes about nature and the changing landscape with such lyrical precision that her prose sometimes seems close to poetry' Christina Patterson, The Sunday Times 'Timely . . . compelling . . . a delicately drawn miniature' The Financial Times 'This book deepens our understanding of the life and thoughts of a modern doctor, and the modern NHS, and it expands movingly to chronicle a community and a landscape' Kathleen Jamie, The New Statesman

'Dazzlingly and daringly written' Rachel Cooke, Observer W-3 is a small psychiatric ward in a large university hospital, a world of pills and passes dispensed by an all-powerful staff, a world of veteran patients with grab-bags of tricks, a world of dishevelled, moment-to-moment existence on the edge of permanence. Bette Howland was one of those patients. In 1968, Howland was thirty-one, a single mother of two young sons, struggling to support her family on the part-time salary of a librarian; and labouring day and night at her typewriter to be a writer. One afternoon, while staying at her friend Saul Bellow's apartment, she swallowed a bottle of pills. W-3 is a vivid - and often surprisingly funny - portrait of the extraordinary community of Ward 3 and a record of a defining moment in a writer's life. The book itself would be her salvation: she wrote herself out of the grave. Originally published in 1974 and rediscovered forty years later, this is the first edition of W-3 to be published in the UK. With an original introduction by Yiyun Li, author of Where Reasons End. 'W-3 is one hell of a debut' Lucy Scholes, Paris Review 'Howland is finally getting the recognition that she deserves' Sarah Hughes, iNews

Luis Rodriguez, author of the award-winning and bestselling classic memoir "Always Running," chronicles his harrowing journey from a drugged-out gang member to one of the most revered figures in Chicano literature.
Hundreds of thousands of readers came to know Luis J. Rodriguez through his fearless classic, "Always Running," which chronicled his early life as a young Chicano gang member surviving the dangerous streets of East Los Angeles. The long-awaited follow-up, "It Calls You Back" is the equally harrowing story of Rodriguez starting over, at age eighteen, after leaving gang life--the only life he really knew.
The book opens with Rodriguez's final stint in jail as a teenager and follows his struggle to kick heroin, renounce his former life, and search for meaningful work. He describes with heartbreaking honesty his challenges as a father, and his difficulty leaving his rages and addictions completely behind. Even as he breaks with "la vida loca" and begins to discover success as a writer and an activist, Rodriguez finds that his past--the crimes, the drugs, the things he'd seen and done--has a way of calling him back.
When his oldest son is sent to prison for attempted murder, Rodriguez is forced to confront his shortcomings as a father, and to acknowledge how and why his own history is repeating itself, right before his eyes.
Deeply insightful and beautifully written, "It Calls You Back" is an odyssey through love, addiction, revolutions, and healing.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice. A fierce memoir of a mother's murder, a daughter's coming-of-age in the wake of immense loss, and her mission to know the woman who gave her life. When Sarah Perry was twelve, she saw a partial eclipse; she took it as a good omen for her and her mother, Crystal. But that moment of darkness foreshadowed a much larger one: two days later, Crystal was murdered in their home in rural Maine. It took twelve years to find the killer. In that time, Sarah rebuilt her life amid abandonment, police interrogations, and the exacting toll of trauma. She dreamed of a trial, but when the day came, it brought no closure. It was not her mother's death she wanted to understand, but her life. She began her own investigation, one that drew her back to Maine, deep into the darkness of a small American town. &#8220Pull[ing] the reader swiftly along on parallel tracks of mystery and elegy" in After the Eclipse, &#8220Perry succeeds in restoring her mother's humanity and her own" (The New York Times Book Review).

The Jane Austen Treasury is a delightful collection of facts and insights into the life and times of the great novelist and the attitudes and customs that shaped both her and her work. Taking each of her novels in turn, and exploring both underlying themes and historical context, it reveals the complexities that underlie her simple and timeless romances. Featuring her views on love and marriage, women's rights and society's mores, this beautiful volume looks at the facts of Austen's life and times, as well as little known stories about her novels, including: the marriage proposal that Austen accepted, only to change her mind, the mock grown-up fiction she wrote as a child, her personal connections to the Napoleonic Wars, and how her love of puzzles and verbal games influenced her writings.

Charles M. Blow's mother was a fiercely driven woman with five sons, brass knuckles in her glove box, and a job plucking poultry at a factory near their town in segregated Louisiana, where slavery's legacy felt close. When her philandering husband finally pushed her over the edge, she fired a pistol at his fleeing back, missing every shot, thanks to "love that blurred her vision and bent the barrel." Charles was the baby of the family, fiercely attached to his "do-right" mother. Until one day that divided his life into Before and After - the day an older cousin took advantage of the young boy. The story of how Charles escaped that world to become one of America's most innovative and respected journalists is a searing, redemptive journey that works its way into the deepest chambers of the heart.

Now in paperback, a “refreshing. . . . accessible, engaging, and genuinely hilarious” (Buzzfeed) series of essays―part memoir, part manifesto―that explore coming-of-age and coming out as bisexual while moving toward embracing and celebrating sex without shame

As a boy, Zachary Zane sensed that all was not right when images of his therapist naked popped into his head. He sometimes imagined other people naked, too, and without an explanation why, a deep sense of shame pervaded these thoughts. Though his therapist assured him a little imagination was nothing to be ashamed of, over the years, society told him otherwise.

Boyslut is a memoir-manifesto in which Zane articulates that, even today, we live in a world that shames people for the sex that they have and the sexualities that they inhabit. Through the lens of his bisexuality and much self-described sluttiness, Zane breaks down exactly how this sexual shame negatively impacts the sex and relationships in our lives, and through personal experience, shares how we can unlearn the harmful, entrenched messages that society imparts to us.

From stories of play sessions with a neighbor at age six to the first explorations of Zane’s bisexuality in college, as well as sex-dungeon parties, orgies, and fun with butt plugs, Boyslutis reassuring and often painfully funny, and most potently, it is a testimony that we can all learn to live healthier lives unburdened by stigma.

A Bottle, a bag, a rock you feast from the womb to the tomb, in the belly of the Beast, the County Morgue and a Life of Crime As you S c r e a m for a Hit, One more time, A Bottomless pit trapped with scorn, a Dopefiend Dies but another one... was born...

The brief life and meteoric career of Sylvia Plath have been the subject of fascination since her suicide in 1963 at age thirty. This concise, well-researched biography recounts the facts of her troubled life based on the latest updated research. Biographer Connie Ann Kirk has consulted the Plath archives at Smith College and the University of Indiana--Bloomington, as well as Plath's unabridged journals published in 2000. She has also interviewed a Plath contemporary who knew her.
What emerges is a balanced portrait that takes a neutral stance between the divided factions in the blame game surrounding her suicide. Kirk describes the outrage directed against Plath's estranged husband, Ted Hughes. Many accused him, not only of causing her death because of his philandering, but also of heavy-handed editing of her posthumous work. But Kirk notes that others have attributed her tragic end mainly to deep-seated psychological factors over which she and those close to her had little control: her lifelong battle with depression; her difficult relationship with her parents, especially her father; and the pressures of balancing a literary career with the roles of wife and mother.
This excellent, very readable biography includes photographs, a timeline, a family tree, a list of books in Sylvia Plath's personal library, and a bibliography of works by and about her.

Michael Gorra asks provocative questions in this historic portrait of William Faulkner and his world. He explores whether William Faulkner should still be read in this new century and asks what his works tell us about the legacy of slavery and the American Civil War, the central quarrel in America's history. Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such iconic novels as Absalom, Absalom! and The Sound and the Fury, creating in Yoknapatawpha County the richest gallery of characters in American fiction, his achievements culminating in the 1949 Nobel Prize in Literature. But given his works' echo of "Lost Cause" romanticism, his depiction of black characters and black speech, and his rendering of race relations in a largely unreconstructed South, Faulkner demands a sobering reevaluation. Interweaving biography, absorbing literary criticism and rich travelogue, The Saddest Words recontextualises Faulkner, revealing a civil war within him, while examining the most plangent cultural issues facing American literature today.