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Books > Language & Literature > Biography & autobiography > Literary
THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER WINNER OF THE ONDAATJE PRIZE 'The best book I read last year by a mile. . . so beautifully written that anyone would be hooked' Laura Hackett, Sunday Times, Best Summer Books 'Wonderfully funny and poignant. . . a tale of family secrets and political awakening amid a crumbling regime' Luke Harding, Observer 'We never lose our inner freedom; the freedom to do what is right' Lea Ypi grew up in one of the most isolated countries on earth, a place where communist ideals had officially replaced religion. Albania, the last Stalinist outpost in Europe, was almost impossible to visit, almost impossible to leave. It was a place of queuing and scarcity, of political executions and secret police. To Lea, it was home. People were equal, neighbours helped each other, and children were expected to build a better world. There was community and hope. Then, in December 1990, everything changed. The statues of Stalin and Hoxha were toppled. Almost overnight, people could vote freely, wear what they liked and worship as they wished. There was no longer anything to fear from prying ears. But factories shut, jobs disappeared and thousands fled to Italy on crowded ships, only to be sent back. Predatory pyramid schemes eventually bankrupted the country, leading to violent conflict. As one generation's aspirations became another's disillusionment, and as her own family's secrets were revealed, Lea found herself questioning what freedom really meant. Free is an engrossing memoir of coming of age amid political upheaval. With acute insight and wit, Lea Ypi traces the limits of progress and the burden of the past, illuminating the spaces between ideals and reality, and the hopes and fears of people pulled up by the sweep of history. THE SUNDAY TIMES MEMOIR OF THE YEAR WINNER OF THE SLIGHTLY FOXED BEST FIRST BIOGRAPHY PRIZE SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD SHORTLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION SHORTLISTED FOR THE GORDON BURN PRIZE CHOSEN AS A BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE GUARDIAN, FINANCIAL TIMES, SUNDAY TIMES, TLS, DAILY MAIL, NEW STATESMAN AND SPECTATOR
Sharatchandra Chattopadhyay has been the most popular writer of novels and short stories in his native Bengaland in India at large. Despite this, he remains unrecognized in the English speaking world. Narasingha P. Sil fills this void by presenting a historical critical assessment of his upbringing and the experiences that influenced his masterful and magnificent work. The Life of Sharatchandra Chattopadhyay rescues the authentic man, a caste-conscious and patriarchal Brahmin of colonial Bengal, from the cuckoo land of gratuitous praise and panegyric showered on the Aparajeya Kathasilpi, the "invincible" wordsmith. The author exposes Sharatchandra's innate conservative worldview and his romantic platonic concept of human sexuality that inform all his love stories. In many respects Sharatchandra resembles his formidable European forbear, Jean Jacques Rousseau of Enlightenment France. The concluding chapter of Sil's biographical study introduces this pioneering comparison between the two men-a veritable tour de force.
At age nineteen, Natasha Trethewey had her world turned upside down when her former stepfather shot and killed her mother. Heartbreakingly clear-eyed and tender, Memorial Drive is a daughter's act of love - and an unflinching excavation of the wounds that never heal. For as Trethewey tells her story, and reclaims her mother's, she lays bare the indelible scars of slavery and racism on the soul of a troubled nation.
This intimate portrayal of the friendship between two icons of twentieth-century poetry, Czeslaw Milosz and Joseph Brodsky, highlights the parallel lives of the poets as exiles living in America and Nobel Prize laureates in literature. To create this truly original work, Irena Grudzinska Gross draws from poems, essays, letters, interviews, speeches, lectures, and her own personal memories as a confidant of both Milosz and Brodsky. The dual portrait of these poets and the elucidation of their attitudes toward religion, history, memory, and language throw a new light on the upheavals of the twentieth-century. Gross also incorporates notes on both poets' relationships to other key literary figures, such as W. H. Auden, Susan Sontag, Seamus Heaney, Mark Strand, Robert Haas, and Derek Walcott.
'...a beautiful wrought study that belongs in every good library'. Publishers' Weekly '...remains a major contribution to Hardy studies' - Charles Osborne, Sunday Telegraph Originally published in 1971 and now for the first time reprinted, Thomas Hardy: His Career as a Novelist has long been recognized as a major - and exceptionally well-written - work of Hardy criticism that also set new standards for Hardy scholarship. A recent survey refers to it as 'one of the most permanently useful' of Hardy studies, characterized by an 'admirably clear, unpretentious style'. Although the central chapters are predominantly critical, offering independent readings of each of the novels (including those customarily considered 'minor'), those readings are developed within the context of available knowledge of Hardy's personal and intellectual backgrounds, his friendships and family relationships, and his evolution as a professional writer. Extensive use is made of Hardy's own manuscripts, notebooks, nd letters and of the correspondence and reminiscences of those who knew him, and in a new preface Michael Millgate speaks of having sought to resolve 'the standard work/life dichotomy' by pursuing 'the unitary conception of a career'.
From 1893-1895 George Griffith was the most famous science fiction writer in England. His books entranced the readers of the 19th century with tales of Martians, submarines, immortality, rogue comets and even spaceships whizzing around the solar system. He invented the Countdown in 1897 and his son would become the co-inventor of the jet engine. Griffith's name became synonymous with high adventure and so in the Spring of 1894 he was recruited to follow in the mythical footsteps of Jules Verne's Phileas Fogg. In just 65 days Griffith travelled through 24 time zones and established a new world record. Now for the first time in over 100 years his story can be retold along with a lengthy biography of his many literary achievements by noted Space writer and editor, Robert Godwin. It includes a special Introduction by John Griffith, grandson of George Griffith.
A niece of Jane Austen and a novelist herself, Catherine Hubback was fifty-two years old when she left England for America. She travelled to California on the Transcontinental Railroad and settled in Oakland, on the eastern shore of San Francisco Bay. Her son Edward shared her household and commuted by ferryboat to a wheat brokerage in the City. In letters to her eldest son John and his wife Mary in Liverpool, Catherine conveys her delight - and her exasperation - at her new environment. She portrays her neighbours with a novelist's wry wit and brings her English sensibility to bear on gardening with unfamiliar plants and maintaining a proper wardrobe in a dry climate. She writes vividly of her adventures as she moves about a landscape recognizable to present-day residents, at a time when boats rather than bridges spanned the bay, and hot springs were the main attraction in the Napa Valley. In an atmosphere of financial unrest, she writes freely of her anxieties, while supplementing Edward's declining income by making lace and teaching the craft to other women. She recalls her 'prosperous days' in England, but finds pleasure in small things and assuredly takes her place in a society marked by great disparities in wealth. In addition to transcriptions of the letters, this highly readable edition offers pertinent information on many of the people and places mentioned, explanatory notes, and striking illustrations. The introduction places the letters in context and tells the story of Catherine Hubback, whose life evolved in ways unprecedented in the Austen family.
The Whitbread Prize-winning biography of Vita Sackville-West. Vita Sackville-West was a vital, gifted and complex woman. A dedicated writer, she made her mark as poet, novelist, biographer, travel writer, journalist and broadcaster. She was also one of the most influential English gardeners of the century, creating with her husband the famous gardens at Sissinghurst. In her Whitbread Prize-winning biography, Glendinning documents Vita's extraordinary life, focusing on her relationships with Violet Trefusis, Virginia Woolf, her husband, and her two sons together with her unpublicised love affairs. Vita was determined to be more than just a married woman and mother; her passionate, secretive character, and the strains, mistakes and achievements of her remarkable life makes this an absorbing and disturbing book.
The Ven Archdeacon Professor Emeritus Peter Tshobisa Mtuze is a poet, priest and academic. He has worked as an interpreter in the law courts of the old South Africa, as a radio announcer, a salesperson for a publishing company, a civil servant in the homeland government structures, a lecturer at UNISA, and as Editor in Chief of the Greater Dictionary of isiXhosa at Fort Hare. He then joined Rhodes University as Professor and Head of the isiXhosa Department, and he also served there as Deputy Campus Director and Deputy Registrar. From 1966 to date, he has published more than 30 books in many genres – novels, short stories, essays, drama, poetry, autobiography, and cultural and theological publications. Some of these works received awards and accolades from various institutions, and one of his novels is on the list of literary classics. Many of the titles are available in Braille and as audio recordings. Mtuze translated former President Nelson Mandela’s monumental autobiography Long Walk to Freedom into isiXhosa as Indlela ende eya enkululekweni. From a poverty-stricken farm background, he fought his way up to become one of the most accomplished academics, with a PhD from the University of Cape Town, a DTh from UNISA and a DLitt (Honoris Causa) from Rhodes University. Mtuze’s autobiography will serve as an inspiration to one and all.
David Gilmour's biography of Giuseppe di Lampedusa unearths the life story of the creator of "The Leopard", one of the great novels of the twentieth century. A book whose imagery, once tasted, haunts the reader forever. "The Leopard" describes the golden era of the nineteenth-century Sicily in all its sensual, fading, aristocratic glory. But beneath the surface lurk Sicily's millenial contagions - corruption, brutality and inequality. Who wrote this masterpiece, this work of art? the answer is as unlikely as one might hope. This is a fascinating meditation on what it is that makes a writer.
"As gripping and twisted as a James Ellroy novel." - Ian Rankin "A masterpiece of literary biography." - David Peace The first critical biography of a titan of American crime fiction. Love Me Fierce In Danger is the story of James Ellroy, one of the most provocative and singular figures in American literature. The so-called "Demon Dog of Crime Fiction," Ellroy enjoys a celebrity status and notoriety that few authors can match. However, traumas from the past have shadowed his literary success. When Ellroy was ten years old, his mother was brutally murdered. The crime went unsolved, and her death marked the start of a long and turbulent road for Ellroy that has included struggles with alcoholism, drug addiction, homelessness, and jail time. In tracing his life and career, Steven Powell reveals how Ellroy's upbringing in LA, always on the periphery of Hollywood, had a profound and dark influence on his work as a novelist. Using new sources, Powell also uncovers Ellroy's family secrets, including the mysterious first marriage of his mother Jean Ellroy, eighteen years before her murder. At its heart, Love Me Fierce in Danger is the story of how Ellroy overcame his demons to become the bestselling and celebrated author of such classics as The Black Dahlia and LA Confidential. Informed by interviews with friends, family, peers, and literary and Hollywood collaborators, as well as extensive conversations with Ellroy himself, Love Me Fierce In Danger pulls back the curtain on an enigmatic figure who has courted acclaim and controversy with equal zealotry.
This literary biography study offers a comprehensive account of Emily Dickinson's life, as a poet as well as a daughter of a prominent Amherst, Massachusetts, family. For many years accompanied by her large dog, she well knew the worlds of nature and natural beauties. For many more years, she chronicled her life - especially her life of the imagination - in hundreds of letters, as well as the nearly 1,800 poems that have been found. Such rich material informs this book's narrative, building a picture of a woman loyal to her parents and her myriad of friends, as well as siblings, niece and nephews, and her sister-in-law Susan Gilbert Dickinson, her constant muse. Never content with passive acceptance, or a live that conformed to the dutiful unmarried daughter's role, Dickinson the poet worked all her mature life to bring her art to its consistently firm - and always brilliant - greatness.
Shortlisted for the 2022 Plutarch Award A Washington Post 2021 Non-Fiction Book of the Year New York Times Review of Books Editors' Choice Non-Fiction Title Longlisted for the 2022 PEN / Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography A Sunday Times Best Paperback of 2022 'Brilliant, heart-stopping ... reads like a thriller, a memoir and a provocative piece of literary fiction all at the same time ... magical and compelling' Washington Post 'How do I love thee? Let me count the ways,' Elizabeth Barrett Browning famously wrote, shortly before defying her family by running away to Italy with Robert Browning. But behind the romance of her extraordinary life stands a thoroughly modern figure, who remains an electrifying study in self-invention. Elizabeth was born in 1806, a time when women could neither attend university nor vote, and yet she achieved lasting literary fame. She remains Britain's greatest woman poet, whose work has inspired writers from Emily Dickinson to George Eliot and Virginia Woolf. This vividly written biography, the first full study for over thirty years, incorporates recent archival discoveries to reveal the woman herself: a literary giant and a high-profile activist for the abolition of slavery who believed herself to be of mixed heritage; and a writer who defied chronic illness and long-term disability to change the course of cultural history. It holds up a mirror to the woman, her art - and the art of biography itself.
The incredible story behind the founder of Noble & Noble and cofounder of Barnes & Noble comes to life in this compelling biography of G. Clifford Noble. From his humble beginnings as a poor country boy to the co-owner of what would someday become the most prestigious book store chain in the country, The Noble Legacy celebrates the life of a true American icon. Already a budding entrepreneur at age twelve, Noble grew up in Massachusetts in the aftermath of the Civil War. Dedicated to his religious faith and driven to succeed, he graduated from Harvard with distinction and moved to New York City in the fall of 1886. His first job as a clerk at a small wholesale and retail bookstore ignited his passion for bookselling. Noble's amazing business sense propelled him to continued success, culminating in the establishment of two premier book companies, Barnes & Noble and Noble & Noble. Noble's granddaughter, Betty Noble Turner, pens a touching tribute to her grandfather and artfully captures his legacy. She also offers a historical dissertation on the origin and challenges of Noble's two companies, as well as a loving life story about the man himself.
The first non-fiction book from the author of international bestselling novels The Tattooist of Auschwitz and Cilka's Journey. In Stories Of Hope, Heather Morris will explore the art of listening - a skill she employed when she first met Lale Sokolov, the Tattooist of Auschwitz. It was her ability to listen that led Lale to entrust Heather with his story, which she told as the novel The Tattooist Of Auschwitz. Now she shares her story of how she learned to listen. Heather grew up on a farm in rural New Zealand. On her way back across the paddocks from school, she would visit her great-grandfather and listen to his experiences of war - stories he told only Heather. From a very young age, she learned that people would share their most sacred and intimate stories with her, if she stopped and listened to them. Stories Of Hope will examine and explore Heather's journey, in the form of a series of tales of the remarkable people she has met, the extraordinary stories they have shared with her, and the lessons they hold for us all.
From her childhood in Whitby to her long old age in Cambridge, the
life of Margaret Storm Jameson (1891-1986), novelist,
autobiographer, and political activist, spanned almost the whole of
the twentieth century. A self-styled Little Englander by nature,
and European by nurture, equally at home, or out of place, in the
North Yorkshire moors and seascape of her birth, metropolitan
London, rural France, and the capitals of Central Europe, she wrote
of country, cities and the exile from both with equal knowledge and
sympathy. Out of the changing landscapes of her present, she
fashioned her vision of the future. The title of her autobiography,
Journey from the North, is a simultaneous evocation and erasure of
nostalgia for lost commonality, and in her long life as writer and
activist, President of wartime PEN (the association of Poets,
Essayist, Novelists) committed to the values of freedom and social
justice, she fought to reconcile the conflicting forms of emergent
modernity. Her own journey is the generic experience of
twentieth-century Britain, and the England she urges on her
contemporaries is one that shares the life and mind of Europe. The
present book traces the history of that shared experience. It
recovers, through her writing, the aspirations and the
disappointments of the generation of socialists that was Class
1914. The soldiers returning from the front in 1918, to
unemployment and the General Strike of 1926, fight in 1940
alongside Frenchmen, and against Germans, who are victims of the
same system: class conflict, nationalist rivalries, imperialist
ambition, all for Jameson have the same defining economic horizon.
At the end of the odyssey the stark alternatives take shape:
Washington or Moscow, the madness of American capitalism, or the
oppression of Stalinist Communism.
In the tradition of "The Glass Castle," two sisters confront
schizophrenia in this poignant literary memoir about family and
mental illness. Through stunning prose and original art, "The
Memory Palace" captures the love between mother and daughter, the
complex meaning of truth, and family's capacity for forgiveness.
Ernest Hemingway nearly defined machismo for many American men of the twentieth century. Yet, in recent years critics have discerned an "androgynous" sexuality beneath the surface stoicism of Hemingway's heroes. This study breaks new ground by examining the profoundly submissive and masochistic posture toward women exhibited by many of Hemingway's heroes, from Jake Barnes in "The Sun Also Rises "to David Bourne in "The Garden of Eden," The discussion draws on the ideas of authors as diverse as Sacher-Masoch, Freud, Deleuze, and others, and reveals that despite Hemingway's rugged and hypermasculine image, a "masochistic aesthetic" informs many of the texts. This accessible treatment of a complex subject will appeal to readers with an interest in Hemingway, gender issues, and American literature.
Revisionary Narratives examines the historical and formal evolutions of Moroccan women's auto/biography in the last four decades, particularly its conflation with testimony and its expansion beyond literary texts. The book analyzes life narratives in Arabic, colloquial Moroccan Darija, French, and English in the fields of prison narratives, visual arts, theater, and digital media. The various case studies highlight narrative strategies women use to relate their experiences of political violence, migration, displacement, and globalization, while engaging patriarchal and (neo)imperial norms and practices. Using a transdisciplinary interpretative lens, the analyses focus on how women authors, artists, and activists collapse the boundaries between autobiography, biography, testimony, and sociopolitical commentary to revise dominant conventions of authorship, transgress oppressive definitions of gender roles and relations, and envision change. Revisionary Narratives marks auto/biography and testimony as a specific field of inquiry within the study of women's postcolonial cultural productions in the Moroccan and, more broadly, the Maghrebi and Middle Eastern contexts.
Now in paperback, a beautifully illustrated account of of Tove Jansson's life and art The definitive biography of one of the most unique and beloved children's authors of the 20th century, the creator of the Moomins. Tove Jansson (1914-2001) led a long, colourful and productive life, impacting significantly the political, social and cultural history of 20th-century Finland. And while millions of children have grown up with Little My, Snufkin, Moomintroll and the many creatures of Moominvalley, the life of Jansson - daughter, friend and companion - is more touching still. This book weaves together the myriad qualities of a painter, author, illustrator, scriptwriter and lyricist from fraught beginnings through fame, war and heartbreak and ultimately to a peaceful end. Dr Tuula Karjalainen is a Finnish art historian and non-fiction writer who has previously worked as a director of the Helsinki Art Museum and the Museum of Contemporary Art Kiasma in Helsinki. As the author of Tove Jansson's biography, Karjalainen has become an expert not only on Jansson's writing and art but also on her decades of personal correspondence and journals.
One of our most formidable literary critics explores how nine women artists flourished creatively in their final acts. In 2008, academic and scholar Susan Gubar was told by a trusted oncologist that she had only a few years left to live. Though she outlived that dire prognosis, this brush with mortality refocused her attention on the boons of a longevity she did not expect to experience. She began to think: In the last years of our lives, can we shape and change our creative capabilities? The resulting volume, Grand Finales, answers this question with a resounding yes. Despite the losses generally associated with aging, quite a few writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, and dancers have managed to extend and repurpose their creative energies. Gubar spotlights very creative old ladies: writers, painters, sculptors, musicians, and dancers from the past and in our times. Each of Grand Finales’ nine riveting chapters features women artists―George Eliot, Colette, Georgia O’Keeffe, Isak Dinesen, Marianne Moore, Louise Bourgeois, Mary Lou Williams, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Katherine Dunham―who transformed the last stage of existence into a rousing conclusion. Gubar draws on their late lives and works to suggest that seniority can become a time of reinvention and renewal. With pizzazz, bravado, and geezer machismo, she counters the discrediting of elderly women and clarifies the environments, relationships, activities, and attitudes that sponsor a creative old age. |
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