Do we remember only the stories we can live with?

The ones that make us look good in the rearview mirror? In "The Night of the Gun," David Carr redefines memoir with the revelatory story of his years as an addict and chronicles his journey from crack-house regular to regular columnist for "The New York Times." Built on sixty videotaped interviews, legal and medical records, and three years of reporting, "The Night of the Gun" is a ferocious tale that uses the tools of journalism to fact-check the past. Carr's investigation of his own history reveals that his odyssey through addiction, recovery, cancer, and life as a single parent was far more harrowing -- and, in the end, more miraculous -- than he allowed himself to remember. Over the course of the book, he digs his way through a past that continues to evolve as he reports it.

That long-ago night he was so out of his mind that his best friend had to pull a gun on him to make him go away? A visit to the friend twenty years later reveals that Carr was pointing the gun.

His lucrative side business as a cocaine dealer? Not all that lucrative, as it turned out, and filled with peril.

His belief that after his twins were born, he quickly sobered up to become a parent? Nice story, if he could prove it.

The notion that he was an easy choice as a custodial parent once he finally was sober? His lawyer pulls out the old file and gently explains it was a little more complicated than that.

In one sense, the story of "The Night of the Gun" is a common one -- a white-boy misdemeanant lands in a ditch and is restored to sanity through the love of his family, a God of his understanding, and a support group that will go unnamed. But when the whole truth is told, it does not end there. After fourteen years -- or was it thirteen? -- Carr tried an experiment in social drinking. Double jeopardy turned out to be a game he did not play well. As a reporter and columnist at the nation's best newspaper, he prospered, but gained no more adeptness at mood-altering substances. He set out to become a nice suburban alcoholic and succeeded all too well, including two more arrests, one that included a night in jail wearing a tuxedo.

Ferocious and eloquent, courageous and bitingly funny, "The Night of the Gun" unravels the ways memory helps us not only create our lives, but survive them.

Carol Loeb Shloss creates a compelling portrait of a complex relationship of a daughter and her literary-giant father: Ezra Pound and Mary de Rachewiltz, Pound's child by his long-time mistress, the violinist Olga Rudge. Brought into the world in secret and hidden in the Italian Alps at birth, Mary was raised by German peasant farmers, had Italian identity papers, a German-speaking upbringing, Austrian loyalties common to the area and, perforce, a fascist education. For years, de Rachewiltz had no idea that Pound and Rudge, the benefactors who would sporadically appear, were her father and mother. Gradually the truth of her parentage was revealed, and with it the knowledge that Dorothy Shakespear, and not Olga, was Pound's actual wife. Dorothy, in turn, kept her own secrets: while Pound signed the birth certificate of her son, Omar, and claimed legal paternity, he was not the boy's biological father. Two lies, established at the birth of these children, created a dynamic antagonism that lasted for generations. Pound maneuvered through it until he was arrested for treason after World War II and shipped back from Italy to the United States, where he was institutionalized rather than imprisoned. As an adult, de Rachewiltz took on the task of claiming a contested heritage and securing her father's literary legacy in the face of a legal system that failed to recognize her legitimacy. Born on different continents, separated by nationality, related by natural birth, and torn apart by conflict between Italy and America, Mary and Ezra Pound found a way to live out their deep and abiding love for one another. Let the Wind Speak is both a history of modern writers who were forced to negotiate allegiances to one another and to their adopted countries in a time of mortal conflict, and the story of Mary de Rachewiltz's navigation through issues of personal identity amid the shifting politics of western nations in peace and war. It is a masterful biography that asks us to consider cultures of secrecy, frayed allegiances, and the boundaries that define nations, families, and politics.

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.

Charming, witty and profound, this stylish 50th anniversary hardback edition of A LIFE IN LETTERS is the perfect addition to any Wodehouse-lover's bookcase.

The definitive edition of P.G. Wodehouse's collected letters, edited with commentary by Oxford academic Sophie Ratcliffe.

One of the funniest and most admired writers of the twentieth century, P. G. Wodehouse always shied away from the idea of a biography. A quiet, retiring man, he expressed himself through the written word. His letters - collected and expertly edited here - provide an illuminating biographical accompaniment to legendary comic creations such as Jeeves, Bertie Wooster, Psmith and the Empress of Blandings.

Drawing on previously unpublished sources, these letters give an unrivalled insight into Wodehouse, covering his schooldays at Dulwich College, the family's financial reverses which saw his hopes of university dashed, life in New York working in musical comedy with Jerome Kern and George and Ira Gershwin, the years of fame as a novelist, and the unhappy episode in 1940 where he was interned by the Germans and later erroneously accused of broadcasting pro-Nazi propaganda.

The definitive history of the flamboyant life of Ian Fleming and his most famous creation, James Bond. This new biography of Ian Fleming presents a fresh and illuminating portrayal of the iconic creator of James Bond. Oliver Buckton provides the first in-depth exploration of the entire process of Ian Fleming's writing-from initial conception, through composition, to his involvement in the innovative publication methods of his books. He also investigates the vital impact of Fleming's work in naval intelligence during World War Two on his later writings, especially the wartime operations he planned and executed and how they drove the plots of the James Bond novels. Buckton considers the vital role of wartime deception, disinformation, and propaganda in shaping Fleming's later techniques and imaginative creations. Offering a radically new view of Fleming's relationships with women, Buckton traces the role of strong, independent, and intelligent women such as Maud Russell, Phyllis Bottome, and his wife, Ann, on Fleming's portrayal of female characters. The book concludes with a thorough analysis of the James Bond films from Eon productions, and their influence in promoting, while also distorting, the public's recognition of Fleming's writing.

One of the world's greatest writers, John Updike chronicled America for more than five decades. This book examines the essence of Updike's writing, propelling our understanding of his award-winning fiction, prose, and poetry. Widely considered "America's Man of Letters," John Updike is a prolific novelist and critic with an unprecedented range of work across more than 50 years. No author has ever written from the variety of vantages or spanned topics like Updike did. Despite being widely recognized as one of the nation's literary greats, scholars have largely ignored Updike's vast catalog of work outside the Rabbit tetralogy. This work provides the first detailed examination of Updike's body of criticism, poetry, and journalism, and shows how that work played a central role in transforming his novels. The book disputes the common misperception of Updike as merely a chronicler of suburban, middle-class America by focusing on his novels and stories that explore the wider world, from the groundbreaking The Coup (1978) to Terrorist (2006). Popular culture scholar Bob Batchelor asks readers to reassess Updike's career by tracing his transformation over half a century of writing.

"Recounted with the storytelling elan of a master raconteur - by turns dramatic and funny, charming, tart and melancholy." -Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times The New York Times bestselling memoir from John le Carre, the legendary author of A Legacy of Spies. From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, le Carre has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his first memoir, le Carre is as funny as he is incisive, reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels. Whether he's writing about the parrot at a Beirut hotel that could perfectly mimic machine gun fire or the opening bars of Beethoven's Fifth; visiting Rwanda's museums of the unburied dead in the aftermath of the genocide; celebrating New Year's Eve 1982 with Yasser Arafat and his high command; interviewing a German woman terrorist in her desert prison in the Negev; listening to the wisdoms of the great physicist, dissident, and Nobel Prize winner Andrei Sakharov; meeting with two former heads of the KGB; watching Alec Guinness prepare for his role as George Smiley in the legendary BBC TV adaptations of Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy and Smiley's People; or describing the female aid worker who inspired the main character in The Constant Gardener, le Carre endows each happening with vividness and humor, now making us laugh out loud, now inviting us to think anew about events and people we believed we understood. Best of all, le Carre gives us a glimpse of a writer's journey over more than six decades, and his own hunt for the human spark that has given so much life and heart to his fictional characters.

**LONGLISTED FOR THE BAILLIE GIFFORD PRIZE FOR NON-FICTION 2021** **SHORTLISTED FOR THE DUFF COOPER PRIZE 2021** **SHORTLISTED FOR THE JAMES TAIT BLACK PRIZE** **FINALIST FOR THE 2022 PLUTARCH AWARD** D. H. Lawrence is no longer censored, but he is still on trial - and we are still unsure what the verdict should be. Delving into the memoirs of those who both loved and hated him most, Burning Man follows Lawrence from the peninsular underworld of Cornwall in 1915 to post-war Italy to the mountains of New Mexico, and traces the author's footsteps through the pages of his lesser known work. Wilson presents a complex, courageous and often comic fugitive, careering around a world in the grip of apocalypse, in search of utopia; and, in bringing the true Lawrence into sharp focus, shows how he speaks to us now more than ever. 'A work of art in its own right' OBSERVER 'Utterly enthralling' GEOFF DYER 'Brilliantly unconventional' RICHARD HOLMES 'A red-hot, propulsive book' THE TIMES

The controversial American poet Amy Lowell (1874-1925), a founding member of the Imagist group that included D. H. Lawrence and H. D., excelled as the impresario for the "new poetry" that became news across the U. S. in the years after World War I. Maligned by T. S. Eliot as the "demon saleswoman" of poetry, and ridiculed by Ezra Pound, Lowell has been treated by previous biographers as an obese, sex-starved, inferior poet who smoked cigars and made a spectacle of herself, canvassing the country on lecture tours that drew crowds in the hundreds for her electrifying performances. In fact, Lowell wrote some of the finest love lyrics of the 20th century and led a full and loving life with her constant companion, the retired actress Ada Russell. She was awarded the Pulitzer Prize posthumously in 1926. This provocative new biography, the first in forty years, restores Amy Lowell to her full humanity in an era that, at last, is beginning to appreciate the contributions of gays and lesbians to American's cultural heritage. Drawing on newly discovered letters and papers, Rollyson's biography finally gives this vibrant poet her due.

Of Joseph Conrad, H.L. Mencken has written: 'There was something almost suggesting the vastness of a natural phenomenon. He transcended all the rules. There have been perhaps, greater novelists, but I believe that he was incomparably the greatest artist whoever wrote a novel.' Originally published in 1957, the year of the centenary of Conrad's birth, and although he was firmly established among the world's great literary figures, little was known about him generally, beyond the fact that he was himself once a sailor, and that the language he handled with such mastery was not the one to which he was born. This was described as the definitive biography, written by one of Conrad's closest friends, to whom the novelist willed his personal papers. It took many years to prepare and the author travelled extensively in the lands that Conrad knew and wrote about. He writes with clarity, compassion and understanding of Conrad's childhood in Russia (where the father was exiled for Polish nationalist activities); of how the youth of fifteen, who had never seen the sea before, became a sailor; of how at twenty-nine he became a British subject and master of his own ship; of how in 1894 he became a novelist almost by accident, rose rapidly to literary fame, found new friends and established himself in literary history. This is a record of the strangest and most enigmatic of lives, fascinating and authoritative at the same time.

Over the course of his long career, Nathaniel Tarn has been a poet, anthropologist, and book editor, while his travels have taken him into every continent. Born in France, raised in England, and earning a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, he knew Andre Breton, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Margot Fonteyn, Charles Olson, Claude Levi-Strauss, and many more of the twentieth century's major artists and intellectuals. In Atlantis, an Autoanthropology he writes that he has "never (yet) been able to experience the sensation of being only one person." Throughout this literary memoir and autoethnography, Tarn captures this multiplicity and reaches for the uncertainties of a life lived in a dizzying array of times, cultures, and environments. Drawing on his practice as an anthropologist, he takes himself as a subject of study, examining the shape of a life devoted to the study of the whole of human culture. Atlantis, an Autoanthropology prompts us to consider our own multiple selves and the mysteries contained within.

"One is not born a woman, but becomes one", Simone de Beauvoir A symbol of liberated womanhood, Simone de Beauvoir's unconventional relationships inspired and scandalised her generation. A philosopher, writer, and feminist icon, she won prestigious literary prizes and transformed the way we think about gender with The Second Sex. But despite her successes, she wondered if she had sold herself short. Her liaison with Jean-Paul Sartre has been billed as one of the most legendary love affairs of the twentieth century. But for Beauvoir it came at a cost: for decades she was dismissed as an unoriginal thinker who 'applied' Sartre's ideas. In recent years new material has come to light revealing the ingenuity of Beauvoir's own philosophy and the importance of other lovers in her life. This ground-breaking biography draws on never-before-published diaries and letters to tell the fascinating story of how Simone de Beauvoir became herself.

Male literary friendships are the stuff of legend, but what about the friendships of women writers? A Secret Sisterhood, drawing on letters and diaries, some never published before, brings to light a wealth of surprising female collaborations: the friendship between Jane Austen and one of the family servants, amateur playwright Anne Sharp; the daring feminist author Mary Taylor, who shaped the work of Charlotte Bronte; the transatlantic friendship of the seemingly aloof George Eliot and the ebullient Harriet Beecher Stowe; and Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield, most often portrayed as bitter foes, but who, in fact, enjoyed a complex friendship. They were sometimes scandalous and volatile, sometimes supportive and inspiring, but always--until now--tantalizingly consigned to the shadows.

The goddaughter of Igor Stravinsky and a graduate of Hollywood High, Eve Babitz posed in 1963, at age twenty, playing chess with the French artist Marcel Duchamp. She was naked; he was not. The photograph made her an instant icon of art and sex. Babitz spent the rest of the decade rocking and rolling on the Sunset Strip, honing her notoriety. There were the album covers she designed: for Buffalo Springfield and the Byrds, to name but a few. There were the men she seduced: Jim Morrison, Ed Ruscha, Harrison Ford, to name but a very few. Then, at nearly thirty, her It girl days numbered, Babitz was discovered-as a writer-by Joan Didion. She would go on to produce seven books, usually billed as novels or short story collections, always autobiographies and confessionals. Under-known and under-read during her career, she's since experienced a breakthrough. Now in her mid-seventies, she's on the cusp of literary stardom and recognition as an essential-as the essential-LA writer. Her prose achieves that American ideal: art that stays loose, maintains its cool, and is so simply enjoyable as to be mistaken for simple entertainment. What Hollywood's Eve has going for it on every page is its subject's utter refusal to be dull... It sends you racing to read the work of Eve Babitz." The New York Times "Read Lili Anolik's book in the same spirit you'd read a new Eve Babitz, if there was one: for the gossip and for the writing. Both are extraordinary." Jonathan Lethem "There's no better way to look at Hollywood in that magic decade, the 1970s, than through Eve Babitz's eyes. Eve knew everyone, slept with everyone, used, amused, and abused everyone. And then there's Eve herself: a cult figure turned into a legend in Anolik's electrifying book. This is a portrait as mysterious, maddening-and seductive-as its subject." -Peter Biskind, author of Easy Riders, Raging Bulls For Babitz, life was slow days, fast company until a freak fire turned her into a recluse, living in a condo in West Hollywood, where author Lili Anolik tracked her down in 2012. Hollywood's Eve, equal parts biography and detective story "brings a ludicrously glamorous scene back to life, adding a few shadows along the way" (Vogue) and "sends you racing to read the work of Eve Babitz" (The New York Times).

Josep Pla is Catalonia's foremost twentieth-century prose writer. He witnessed and wrote about some of the twentieth-century's most notable events including the Spanish Civil War and the foundation of the state of Israel. Due to a lack of translations of his work he is only now being discovered by the international audience and will soon join the ranks of major realist writers in world literature. In Josep Pla, Joan Ramon Resina teases out the writer's deep-seated intellectual concerns and challenges the assumption of Pla as an anti-intellectual. Resina condenses Pla's forty-seven volumes of work, including travel books, narrative fiction, and history, into eleven thematic units: including time, memory, perception, life, religion, metaphysics, utopia, and self-delusion. Resina acutely explores the writer's authorial gaze and invites the reader to see the world through the eyes of one of the most underappreciated observers and writers of the twentieth-century.

Why are Emily Dickinson and Henry James drawn habitually to dashes? What makes James Baldwin such a fan of commas, which William Carlos Williams tends to ignore? And why do that odd couple, the novelist Virginia Woolf and the short story specialist Andre Dubus II, both embrace semicolons, while E. E. Cummings and Nikki Giovanni forego punctuation entirely? More generally, what effect do such nonverbal marks (or their absence) have on an author's encompassing vision? The first book on modern literature to compare writers' punctuation, and to show how fully typographical marks alter our sense of authorial style, Mark My Words offers new ways of reading some of our most important and beloved writers as well as suggesting a fresh perspective on literary style itself.

This book provides a comprehensive examination of the socio-cultural and political context of modern China in terms of its interaction with America and the West, focusing on the influence of the well-known Chinese writer and intellectual Lin Yutang (1895-1976). Offering a unique study of the life and works of Lin Yutang, it highlights his intellectual legacy in modern China and considers how his cross-cultural life and ideas embodied the modern Chinese cultural experience. It notably focuses on Lin's reputation as an outspoken critic of the infringement of human rights during the rise of the Communist regime in China, but also on his rediscovery of Chinese cultural resources. At a time when China's cultural contributions are increasingly relevant worldwide, this book contributes to ongoing critical reflections of Chinese modernity, particularly in terms of its intellectual legacies, but also to a renewed understanding of the cross-cultural interactions between China and America and a re-opening the dialogue and search for a new cultural understanding.

Margaret Mitchell was as complex and compelling as her legendary heroine, Scarlett O'Hara, and her story is as dramatic as anything out of her own imagination-indeed, it is the basis for the legend she created. Gone With the Wind took the American reading public by storm and went on to become the most popular motion picture of all time. It was a phenomenon whose success has never been equaled-and it shattered Margaret Mitchell's private life. In this commemorative reprint of Road to Tara, Anne Edwards tells the real story of Margaret Mitchell and the extraordinary novel that has become part of our heritage.

Originally published in English in 1951, this biography of one of Germany's foremost mystical poets dis-proves many of the myths surrounding Rainer Maria Rilke and examines his life and work from social, historical and psychological perspectives, while all the time referencing Rilke's works to his complex personality. The legacy of his work on younger generations is also examined. All German prose quotations have been translated into English for this edition, existing translations used for the German poetry.

Neil Gaiman (b. 1960) currently reigns in the literary world as one of the most critically decorated and popular authors of the last fifty years. Perhaps best known as the writer of the Harvey, Eisner, and World Fantasy Award-winning DC/Vertigo series, The Sandman, Gaiman quickly became equally renowned in literary circles for works such as Neverwhere, Coraline, and American Gods, as well as the Newbery and Carnegie Medal-winning The Graveyard Book. For adults, for children, for the comics reader to the viewer of the BBC's Doctor Who, Gaiman's writing has crossed the borders of virtually all media and every language, making him a celebrity on a worldwide scale. The interviews presented here span the length of his career, beginning with his first formal interview by the BBC at the age of seven and ending with a new, unpublished interview held in 2017. They cover topics as wide and varied as a young Gaiman's thoughts on Scientology and managing anger, learning the comics trade from Alan Moore, and being on the clock virtually 24/7. What emerges is a complicated picture of a man who seems fully assembled from the start of his career, but only came to feel comfortable in his own skin and voice far later in life. The man who brought Morpheus from the folds of his imagination into the world shares his dreams and aspirations from different points in his life, including informing readers where he plans to take them next.

First published in 1943, this classic memoir by well-known Filipino poet Carlos Bulosan describes his boyhood in the Philippines, his voyage to America, and his years of hardship and despair as an itinerant laborer following the harvest trail in the rural West.

"America came to him in a public ward in the Los Angeles County Hospital while around him men died gasping for their last bit of air, and he learned that while America could be cruel it could also be immeasurably kind. . . . For Carlos Bulosan no lifetime could be long enough in which to explain to America that no man could destroy his faith in it again. He wanted to contribute something toward the final fulfillment of America. So he wrote this book that holds the bitterness of his own blood." - Carlos P. Romulo, "New York Times"

"The premier text of the Filipino-American experience." - Greg Castilla

Great blue herons, yellow birches, damselflies, and beavers are among the talismans by which Bill Roorbach uncovers a natural universe along the stream that runs by his house in Farmington, Maine. Populated by an oddball cast of characters to whom Roorbach ("The Professor") and his family might always be considered outsiders, this book chronicles one man's determined effort-occasionally with hilarious results-to follow his stream to its elusive source. Acclaimed essayist and award-winning fiction writer Bill Roorbach uses his singular literary gifts to inspire us to laugh, love, and experience the wonder of living side by side with the natural world.