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Books > Language & Literature > Biography & autobiography > Literary
Maurice Sendak (1928-2012) stands out as one of the most respected,
influential authors of the twentieth century. Though primarily
known as a children's book writer and illustrator, he did not limit
himself to these areas. He saw himself first and foremost as an
artist. In this collection of interviews - the first of its kind -
Sendak presents himself as a writer, illustrator, set designer, and
librettist. From his early work with Randall Jarrell and Ruth
Krauss through his later work with Tony Kushner and Spike Jonze,
Sendak worked as a collaborator with a passion for the arts. The
interviews here, many of which are hard to find or previously
unpublished, span from 1966 through 2011. They show not only
Sendak's shifting artistic interests, but also changes in how he
understood himself and his craft. What emerges is a portrait of an
author and an artist who was alternately solemn and playful,
congenial and irascible, sophisticated and populist. The man who
showed millions of children and adults alike what's cooking in the
night kitchen and where the wild things are, Sendak remains an
American original who redefined the picture book and changed
children's literature - and its readers - forever.
This is the first book to focus primarily on George Orwell's ideas
about free speech and related matters - freedom of the press, the
writer's freedom of expression, honesty and truthfulness - and, in
particular, the ways in which they are linked to his political
vision of socialism. Orwell is today claimed by the Left and Right,
by neo-conservatives and neo-socialists. How is that possible? Part
of the answer, as Glenn Burgess reveals, is that Orwell was an odd
sort of socialist. The development of Orwell's socialism was, from
the start, conditioned by his individualist and liberal
commitments. The hopes he attached to socialism were for a fairer,
more equal world that would permit human freedom and individuality
to flourish, completing, not destroying, the work of liberalism.
Freedom of thought was a central part of this, and its defence and
use were essential parts of the struggle to ensure that socialism
developed in a liberal, humane form that did not follow the
totalitarian path of Soviet communism. Written in celebration of
Orwell's dictum, 'We hold that the most perverse human being is
more interesting than the most orthodox gramophone record,' George
Orwell's Perverse Humanity is a portrait of Orwell that captures
these themes and provides a new understanding of him as a political
thinker and activist. Based on archival research and new materials
that affirm his work as an activist for freedom, it also uncovers a
socialist ideology that has been obscured in just the way that the
author feared it would be - associated in many people's minds with
totalitarian unfreedom.
Probably the greatest British novelist of his generation, Graham
Greene's own story was as strange and compelling as those he told
of Pinkie the Mobster, Harry Lime, or the Whisky Priest. A restless
traveller, he was a witness to many of the key events of modern
history - including the origins of the Vietnam War, the Mau Mau
Rebellion, the betrayal of the double-agent Kim Philby, the rise of
Fidel Castro, and the guerrilla wars of Central America.
Traumatized as a boy and thought a Judas among his schoolmates,
Greene tried Russian Roulette and attempted suicide. He suffered
from bipolar illness, which caused havoc in his private life as his
marriage failed, and one great love after another suffered
shipwreck, until in his later years he found constancy in a
decidedly unconventional relationship. Often called a Catholic
novelist, his works came to explore the no man's land between
belief and unbelief. A journalist, an MI6 officer, and an unfailing
advocate for human rights, he sought out the inner narratives of
war and politics in dozens of troubled places, and yet he
distrusted nations and armies, believing that true loyalty was a
matter between individuals. A work of wit, insight, and compassion,
this new biography of Graham Greene, the first undertaken in a
generation, responds to the many thousands of pages of lost letters
that have recently come to light and to new memoirs by those who
knew him best. It deals sensitively with questions of private life,
sex, and mental illness; it gives a thorough accounting for the
politics of the places he wrote about; it investigates his
involvement with MI6 and the Cambridge five; above all, it follows
the growth of a writer whose works changed the lives of millions.
Bram Stoker, despite having a name nearly as famous as Count
Dracula, has remained an enigma. David J. Skal, in a psychological
and cultural portrait, exhumes the inner world and strange genius
of the writer who conjured an undying cultural icon. Stoker was
inexplicably paralysed as a boy and his story unfolds against a
backdrop of Victorian medical mysteries and horrors: fever, opium
abuse, bloodletting, quack cures and the obsession with "bad blood"
that inform every page of Dracula. Stoker's ambiguous sexuality is
explored through his acquaintance with Oscar Wilde, who emerges as
Stoker's repressed shadow self-a doppelganger worthy of a Gothic
novel. The psychosexual dimensions of Stoker's correspondence with
Walt Whitman, his punishing work ethic and his adoration of the
actor Henry Irving are examined in scholarly detail.
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.
In this vividly rendered and empathetic biography of two of the
greatest poets of the 20th century-Sylvia Plath and Anne
Sexton-"the friendship and rivalry that the pair shared-not to
mention the titular cocktails at a Boston hotel-is explored in
fascinating detail" (Town & Country). Introduced at a poetry
workshop in Boston University, Sylvia Plath and Anne Sexton formed
a friendship that would soon evolve into a fierce rivalry, colored
by jealousy and respect in equal terms. In the years that followed,
these two women would not only become iconic figures in literature,
but also lead curiously parallel lives haunted by mental illness,
suicide attempts, self-doubt, and difficult personal relationships.
With weekly martini meetings at the Ritz to discuss everything from
sex to suicide, theirs was a relationship as complex and subversive
as their poetry. Based on in-depth research and unprecedented
archival access, Three-Martini Afternoons at the Ritz will leave
you "hungering for more of what these two literary comets burned
with: the power of a little poetry. Deliriously fast-paced and
erudite, this is highly recommended" (Library Journal, starred
review).
Intensely private, possibly saintly, but perhaps misanthropic,
Samuel Beckett was the most legendary and enigmatic of writers.
Anthony Cronin's biography is a revelation of this mythical figure
as fully human and fallible, while confirming his enormous stature
both as a man and a writer. Cronin explores how the sporty
schoolboy of solid Protestant bourgeois stock became a prizewinning
student at Trinity, flirted with scholarship, and, in Paris, found
himself at the center of its literary avant-garde as an intimate
friend of James Joyce. But he was a young man who struggled with
complexities in his own nature as well as with problems of literary
expression. In the small provincial city of Kassel, Germany, the
cosmopolitan Beckett experienced a faltering entanglement with his
cousin--one of the first in a series of problematic encounters with
women. The war years, which he spent as a member of the Resistance
and a refugee in the South of France, brought Beckett the
self-probings and discoveries that led to the great works. Then,
with his sudden and astonishing fame, the balloons of myth began to
inflate and a stereotype was born--frozen in exile and enigma,
solemnity and sanctity. Anthony Cronin bursts these balloons to see
more clearly what lies behind. Without moralizing or
psychologizing, without pretensions or piety, he uncovers the real
Beckett, the way the life was lived, the way the art was made.
This is an essential early Johnson biography, recovered from
obscurity and reissued in celebration of the tercentenary of
Johnson's birth. This is the first and only scholarly edition of
Sir John Hawkins' Life of Samuel Johnson, LL.D., a work that has
not been widely available in complete form for more than two
hundred years. Published in 1787, some four years before James
Boswell's biography of Johnson, ""Hawkins' Life"" complements,
clarifies, and often corrects numerous aspects of Boswell's Life.
Samuel Johnson (1709-84) is the most significant English writer of
the second half of the eighteenth century; indeed, this period is
widely known as the Age of Johnson. Hawkins was Johnson's friend
and legal adviser and the chief executor of his will. He knew
Johnson longer and in many respects better than other biographers,
including Boswell, who made unacknowledged use of Hawkins' Life and
helped orchestrate the critical attacks that consigned the book to
obscurity. Sir John Hawkins had special insight into Johnson's
mental states at various points in his life, his early days in
London, his association with the ""Gentleman's Magazine"", and his
political views and writings. Hawkins' use of historical and
cultural details, an uncommon literary device at the time, produced
one of the earliest 'life and times' biographies in our language. O
M Brack, Jr.'s introduction covers the history of the composition,
publication, and reception of the Life and provides a context in
which it should be read. Annotations address historical, literary,
and linguistic uncertainties, and a full textual apparatus
documents how Brack arrived at this definitive text of Hawkins'
Life.
A Welsh poet recalls the celebration of Christmas in Wales and the feelings it evoked in him as a child.
The fifth and final volume of the Collected Letters of Katherine
Mansfield covers the almost thirteen months during which her
attention at first was firmly set on a last chance medical cure,
then finally on something very different--if death came to seem
inevitable, how should one behave in the time that remained, so one
could truly say one lived?
Mansfield's biographers, like her friends, have wondered at the
seemingly extraordinary decision to ditch conventional medicine,
for the bizarre choice of Gurdjieff's Institute for the Harmonious
Development of Man at Fontainebleau. These letters show the clarity
of mind and will that led to that decision, the courage and
distress in making it, and the gaiety even once it was made. She
went against what her education, her husband, and most of her
friends would regard as reasonable, as she opted to spend her last
months with Russian emigres and a strange assortment of Gurdjieff
disciples (which she was not). But Fontainebleau give her the space
and the incentive to shake free from the intellectualism that she
thought the malaise of her time, as she worked at kitchen chores,
took in the details of farm life, tried to learn Russian, and
attempted to reach total honesty with herself. "If I were allowed
one simple cry to God," she wrote in one of her last letters, "that
cry would be I want to be REAL."
Originally published in 1962, Virginia Woolf, provides a commentary
on the literary work of Virginia Woolf - examining not only her the
novels, but also the considerable body of criticism surrounding her
work. Along with the essential biographical details of Woolf, the
books recreates the atmosphere of 'the Bloomsbury Group' and gives
us a valuable insight into a very rich period of English
literature, involving such figures as Leslie Stephen, Leonard
Woolf, Clive Bell, Desmond MacCarthy, Christopher Isherwood, David
Garnett and others. The book provides a comprehensive account of
Virginia Woolf's body of work and will be of interest to academics
and students alike.
Originally published in 1990, Women of Bloomsbury takes a fresh
look at the lives of Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa Bell, and
Dora Carrington. Connected by more than bonds of friendship and
artistic endeavour, the three women faced similar struggles.
Juxtaposing their personal lives and their work, Mary Ann Caws
shows us with feeling and clarity the pain women suffer in being
artists and in finding - or creating - their sense of self. Relying
on unpublished letters and diaries, as well as familiar texts, Caws
give us a portrait of the female self in the act of creation.
Didion chronicles the experience of losing her husband, the writer
John Gregory Dunne, to a massive coronary, just weeks after the two
of them watched as their only daughter was put into an induced coma
to save her life. With honesty and passion, Didion explores this
intensely personal yet universal experience.
Percy Shelley (1792-1822) was one of the major English Romantic
poets. This biography of emphasises the political, revolutionary
side of his dramatic life. Shelley has long been revered for his
poems To A Skylark and The Mask of Anarchy, but this was not always
the case. During his short and tragic life he was regarded with
loathing as an immoral atheist and his work received damning
reviews as a result. His was a story of extremes - his radical
ideas were unusual as he was the son of a wealthy landowner and set
to become a Whig MP. Today, a focus on his belief in sexual freedom
and vegetarianism often eclipses his informed internationalist and
revolutionary politics. Admired by Oscar Wilde, Thomas Hardy, W. B.
Yeats and Karl Marx, Shelley's legacy remains with us today - his
words have been used by popular movements from the Chartists and
the Suffragettes to Tiananmen Square, the Poll Tax protesters and
modern Greek solidarity movements.
In 1930 Danish artist Einar Wegener underwent a series of surgeries
to live as Lili Ilse Elvenes (more commonly known as Lili Elbe).
Her life story, Fra Mand til Kvinde (From Man to Woman), published
in Copenhagen in 1931, is the first popular full-length
(auto)biographical narrative of a subject who undergoes genital
transformation surgery (Genitalumwandlung). In Man Into Woman: A
Comparative Scholarly Edition, Pamela L. Caughie and Sabine Meyer
present the full text of the 1933 American edition of Elbe's work
with comprehensive notes on textual and paratextual variants across
the four published editions in three languages. This edition also
includes a substantial scholarly introduction which situates the
historical and intellectual context of Elbe's work, as well as new
essays on the work by leading scholars in transgender studies and
modernist literature, and critical coverage of the 2015 biopic, The
Danish Girl. This print edition has a digital companion: the Lili
Elbe Digital Archive (www.lilielbe.org). Launched on July 6, 2019,
to commemorate the 100th anniversary of the founding of Magnus
Hirschfeld's Institute for Sexual Science (Institut fur
Sexualwissenschaft) where Lili Elbe was initially examined, the
Lili Elbe Digital Archive hosts the German typescript and all four
editions of this narrative published in Danish, German, and English
between 1931 and 1933, with English translations of the Danish
edition and the typescript. Many letters from archives and
contemporaneous articles noted in this print edition may be found
in the digital archive.
In this final volume of Christopher Isherwood's diaries, the
celebrated writer greets advancing age with poignant humor and an
unquenchable appetite for the new. Isherwood deepens his study of
Hinduism, writes his final books, and immerses himself in the
vibrant creative scenes of the 1970s. With his long-term companion,
Don Bachardy, Isherwood delves into the art worlds of Los Angeles,
New York, and London, where he meets Rauschenberg, Ruscha, Warhol,
and Hockney. Collaborating with Bachardy on scripts for Broadway
and Hollywood, he encounters John Huston, Merchant and Ivory, John
Travolta, David Bowie, Jon Voight, Armistead Maupin, Elton John,
and Joan Didion. This volume is a densely populated human comedy,
sketched with both ruthlessness and benevolence against the
background of the Vietnam War, the energy crisis, and the Nixon,
Carter, and Reagan White Houses. The final installment of
Isherwood's masterwork reveals a man candidly fearful of his
approaching death, and yet engaged in the vitality and energy of
daily life.
Because Japan , is a truly unabashed account of the less publicised
side of life in Tokyo for a 'foreigner'. The book offers a witty,
vivid and honest insight into the daily life of a British Expat
over the course of two years. The author narrates stories taken
from his "Journal of Firsts" which depict many new events including
his first struggle, first mental challenge, and first exciting
moment he faced living in this strange and fascinating new world.
Through the use of newly learned Japanese phrases whilst travelling
the country, themes of soul-searching, overcoming mental health
obstacles, sexual orientation, racial discrimination, and culture
shock are explored with honesty and candour. With the addition of a
train-based mini series of hilarious encounters, Because Japan
offers a behind the scenes insight into the 'real' Japan.
Edmund Curll was a notorious figure among the publishers of the
early eighteenth century: for his boldness, his lack of scruple,
his publication of work without author's consent, and his taste for
erotic and scandalous publications. He was in legal trouble on
several occasions for piracy and copyright infringement,
unauthorized publication of the works of peers, and for seditious,
blasphemous, and obscene publications. He stood in the pillory in
1728 for seditious libel. Above all, he was the constant target of
the greatest poet and satirist of his age, Alexander Pope, whose
work he pirated whenever he could and who responded with direct
physical revenge (an emetic slipped into a drink) and persistent
malign caricature. The war between Pope and Curll typifies some of
the main cultural battles being waged between creativity and
business. The story has normally been told from the poet's point of
view, though more recently Curll has been celebrated as a kind of
literary freedom-fighter; this book, the first full biography of
Curll since Ralph Straus's The Unspeakable Curll (1927), seeks to
give a balanced and thoroughly-researched account of Curll's career
in publishing between 1706 and 1747, untangling the mistakes and
misrepresentations that have accrued over the years and restoring a
clear sense of perspective to Curll's dealings in the literary
marketplace. It examines the full range of Curll's output,
including his notable antiquarian series, and uses extensive
archive material to detail Curll's legal and other troubles. For
the first time, what is known about this strange, interesting, and
awkward figure is authoritatively told.
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