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.

This is the first book-length biography of Andrés Bello, the nineteenth-century Latin American intellectual, to appear in English. Bello was also a poet, a literary critic, and an influential statesman whose contributions to nation-building and Spanish American identity are widely recognized across the region. This work provides a comprehensive interpretation of Bello's work, gives an account of Bello's life based on new information from archives in four countries, and sheds new light on this critical period in Latin American history.

A friendship struck in 1942 would last for forty-one years through critical acclaim and rejection, commercial success and failure, manic highs, bouts of depression, and serious and not-so-serious liaisons. Tennessee Williams's and James Laughlin's letters provide a window into the literary history of the mid-twentieth century.

John Buchan's name is known across the world for The Thirty-Nine Steps. In the past one hundred years the classic thriller has never been out of print and has inspired numerous adaptations for film, television, radio and stage, beginning with the celebrated version by Alfred Hitchcock.

Yet there was vastly more to 'JB'. He wrote more than a hundred books – fiction and non-fiction – and a thousand articles for newspapers and magazines. He was a scholar, antiquarian, barrister, colonial administrator, journal editor, literary critic, publisher, war correspondent, director of wartime propaganda, member of parliament and imperial proconsul – given a state funeral when he died, a deeply admired and loved Governor-General of Canada.

His teenage years in Glasgow's Gorbals, where his father was the Free Church minister, contributed to his ease with shepherds and ambassadors, fur-trappers and prime ministers. His improbable marriage to a member of the aristocratic Grosvenor family means that this account of his life contains, at its heart, an enduring love story.

Ursula Buchan, his granddaughter, has drawn on recently discovered family documents to write this comprehensive and illuminating biography. With perception, style, wit and a penetratingly clear eye, she brings vividly to life this remarkable man and his times.

This is not a book about Laurie Lee, still less a biography. It is about the spirit of the man and the spirit of a place. A Thousand Laurie Lees is a poetic reassessment of the Slad Valley, a memoir from a different age rooted in the same idyllic landscape that inspired Cider with Rosie. A year after Lee's death in 1997, a handful of locals dressed up as him for an epic, drunken cycle ride right through the heart of Laurie Lee country. They called it The Night of a Thousand Laurie Lees and stopped off at all the pubs on the way, signing books, singing and carousing. Taking this as a starting point, poet Adam Horovitz reaches back through myth, memory and literature to explore Laurie Lee's impact on the Slad Valley and its people. Lyrically evoking his own childhood there sixty years after Lee, he explores the connections between family, the valley and learning to write, and examines what has changed since Lee's day and what remains the same.

'A magnificent, beautifully written memoir. Unsentimental but heartbreaking, the voice - true and clear. Brilliant.' Nina Stibbe In 2014 I moved back to the United States after living abroad for fourteen years, my whole adult life, because my father was dying from cancer. Six weeks after I arrived in New York City, my father died. Six months after that I learned that I had inherited the gene that would cause me cancer too. When Jean Hannah Edelstein's world overturned she was forced to confront some of the big questions in life: How do we cope with grief? How does living change when we realize we're not invincible? Does knowing our likely fate make it harder or easier to face the future? How do you motivate yourself to go on your OkCupid date when you're struggling with your own mortality? Written in her inimitable, wry and insightful voice, Jean Hannah Edelstein's memoir is by turns heart-breaking, hopeful and yet also disarmingly funny. This Really Isn't About You is a book about finding your way in life. Which is to say, it's a book about discovering you are not really in control of that at all.

Racine the practising dramatist had been in some danger of being crowded out from the numerous books on his psychology and style. In this critical study of the man and his work, first published in 1951 and this slightly revised edition originally in 1973, Dr Brereton's guiding principle has been to make the factual basis as accurate as it can be in the light of modern research. The result is the portrait of a sensitive and attractive figure which is none the worse for being shorn of certain legends.

Betty Bard MacDonald (1907-1958), the best-selling author of The Egg and I and the classic Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle children's books, burst onto the literary scene shortly after the end of World War II. Readers embraced her memoir of her years as a young bride operating a chicken ranch on Washington's Olympic Peninsula, and The Egg and I sold its first million copies in less than a year. The public was drawn to MacDonald's vivacity, her offbeat humor, and her irreverent take on life. In 1947, the book was made into a movie starring Fred MacMurray and Claudette Colbert, and spawned a series of films featuring MacDonald's Ma and Pa Kettle characters. MacDonald followed up the success of The Egg and I with the creation of Mrs. Piggle-Wiggle, a magical woman who cures children of their bad habits, and with three additional memoirs: The Plague and I (chronicling her time in a tuberculosis sanitarium just outside Seattle), Anybody Can Do Anything (recounting her madcap attempts to find work during the Great Depression), and Onions in the Stew (about her life raising two teenage daughters on Vashon Island). Author Paula Becker was granted full access to Betty MacDonald's archives, including materials never before seen by any researcher. Looking for Betty MacDonald, a biography of this endearing Northwest storyteller, reveals the story behind the memoirs and the difference between the real Betty MacDonald and her literary persona. Watch the book trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_Lr6iVK4zWk

From Leonardo Da Vinci to Oliver Sacks: the first history of the western polymath, from the Renaissance to the present "An absorbing group portrait and intellectual history."-Kirkus Reviews "An admirable mixture of industry and erudition."-Robert Wilson, Wall Street Journal From Leonardo Da Vinci to John Dee and Comenius, from George Eliot to Oliver Sacks and Susan Sontag, polymaths have moved the frontiers of knowledge in countless ways. But history can be unkind to scholars with such encyclopedic interests. All too often these individuals are remembered for just one part of their valuable achievements. In this engaging, erudite account, renowned cultural historian Peter Burke argues for a more rounded view. Identifying 500 western polymaths, Burke explores their wide-ranging successes and shows how their rise matched a rapid growth of knowledge in the age of the invention of printing, the discovery of the New World and the Scientific Revolution. It is only more recently that the further acceleration of knowledge has led to increased specialization and to an environment that is less supportive of wide-ranging scholars and scientists. Spanning the Renaissance to the present day, Burke changes our understanding of this remarkable intellectual species.

From the acclaimed author of Foreskin's Lament, a memoir of the author's attempt to escape the biblical story he'd been raised on and his struggle to construct a new story for himself and his family.

Shalom Auslander was raised like a veal in a dysfunctional family in the Orthodox community of Monsey, New York: the son of an alcoholic father; a guilt-wielding mother; and a violent, overbearing God. Now, as he reaches middle age, Auslander begins to suspect that what plagues him is something worse, something he can't so easily escape: a story. The story. One indelibly implanted in him at an early age, a story that told him he is fallen, broken, shameful, disgusting, a story we have all been told for thousands of years, and continue to be told by the religious and secular alike, a story called "Feh."

Yiddish for "Yuck."

FEH follows Auslander's midlife journey to rewrite that story, a journey that involves Phillip Seymour Hoffman, a Pulitzer-winning poet, Job, Arthur Schopenhauer, GHB, Wolf Blitzer, Yuval Noah Harari, and a pastor named Steve in a now-defunct church in Los Angeles.

Can he move from feh to merely meh? Can he even dream of moving beyond that? Auslander's recounting of his attempt to exorcize the story he was raised with-before he implants it onto his children and/or possibly poisons the relationship of the one woman who loves him-isn't sacred. It is more-than-occasionally profane. And like all his work, it is also relentlessly funny, subversively heartfelt, and fearlessly provocative.

'An exuberant, breathless sprint through London in the Fifties, Sixties and Seventies. It's bright, boisterous and extremely funny' Tatler

If Fielding's Tom Jones were alive in postwar England he might be Clancy Sigal, the American author of this restlessly curious memoir. Honest and devious, faithful and lustful, a mass of plucky contradictions, Clancy first arrived in London in 1957. He was broke, homeless and, according to his FBI file, a dangerous 'subversive'. Over the next three decades, Clancy was to wander the soot-stained streets of London, devouring as much as life could offer him.

From the birth of the CND and his affair with Lessing, to therapy with R. D. Laing and wondering whether the entire world was on acid, Clancy details it all to illuminating effect. Underneath all of these encounters is the character of Clancy himself: funny, hapless, warm-hearted and a self-professed 'crazy American'. Call it luck, charm or sheer lack of good sense, he escaped with a cracking good story.

Rough Draft: The Modernist Diaries of Emily Holmes Coleman, 1929-1937 is an edited selection, published here for the first time, of the diaries kept by American poet and novelist Coleman during her years as an expatriate in the modernist hubs of France and England. During her time abroad, Coleman developed as a surrealist writer, publishing a novel, The Shutter of Snow, and poems in little magazines like transition. She also began her life s work, her diary, which was sustained for over four decades. This portion of the diary is set against the cultural, social, and political milieu of the early twentieth century in the throes of industrialization, commercialization, and modernization. It showcases Coleman s often larger-than-life, intense personality as she interacted with a multitude of literary, artistic, and intellectual figures of the period like Djuna Barnes, Peggy Guggenheim, Antonia White, John Holms, George Barker, Edwin Muir, Cyril Connolly, Arthur Waley, Humphrey Jennings, Dylan Thomas, and T.S. Eliot. The book offers Coleman s lively, raw, and often iconoclastic account of her complex social network. The personal and professional encouragements, jealousies, and ambitions of her friends unfolded within a world of limitless sexual longing, supplies of alcohol, and aesthetic discussions. The diary documents the disparate ways Coleman celebrated, just as she consistently struggled to reconcile, her multiple identities as an artistic, intellectual, maternal, sexual, and spiritual woman. Rough Draft contributes to the growing modernist canon of life writings of both female and male participants whose autobiographies, memoirs, and diaries offer diverse accounts of the period, like Ernest Hemingway s A Moveable Feast, Gertrude Stein s The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas, Sylvia Beach s Shakespeare and Company, and Robert McAlmon and Kay Boyle s Being Geniuses Together.

For the past four years Jane Miller, author of Crazy Age: Thoughts on Being Old, has been writing a column for an American magazine called In These Times. Her beautifully observed pieces about life, politics and Britain open a window to her American readers of a world very different from their own. 'Her erudition is both dazzling and lightly borne, the personal often illuminating the political . . . Miller's is a welcome, necessary voice - readable, informative and entertaining' Times Literary Supplement Jane Miller, author of the acclaimed Crazy Age, has for the past few years been writing a column for an American magazine based in Chicago called In These Times. Now, these beautifully observed pieces about life, politics and Britain, which opened a window for Americans on a world rather different from their own, are collected and published for the first time for her British readers. 'Miller is a fantastic companion' Viv Groskop, Telegraph

** Chosen as a New Statesman, Financial Times, Observer and Sunday Times Book of the Year ** A riveting account of the making of T. S. Eliot's celebrated poem The Waste Land on its centenary. 'A rattling good story' Sunday Telegraph 'A work of art' Times Literary Supplement The Waste Land has been called the 'World's Greatest Poem'. It is said to describe the moral decay of a world after war, to find meaning in a meaningless era. It has been labelled the most truthful poem of its time; it has been branded a masterful fake. A century after its publication in 1922, T. S. Eliot's enigmatic masterpiece remains one of the most influential works ever written, and yet one of the most mysterious. In a remarkable feat of biography, Matthew Hollis reconstructs the intellectual creation of the poem and brings the material reality of its charged times vividly to life. Presenting a mosaic of historical fragments, diaries, dynamic literary criticism and illuminating new research, he reveals the cultural and personal trauma that forged The Waste Land through the lives of its protagonists - of Ezra Pound, who edited it; of Vivien Eliot, who sustained it; and of T. S. Eliot himself, whose private torment is woven into the seams of the work. The result is an unforgettable story of lives passing in opposing directions and the astounding literary legacy they would leave behind.

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).

Autofiction: A Female Francophone Aesthetic of Exile explores the multiple aspects of exile, displacement, mobility, and identity as expressed in contemporary autofictional work written in French by women writers from across the francophone world. Drawing on postcolonial theory, gender theory, and autobiographical theory, the book analyses narratives of exile by six authors who are shaped by their multiple locales of attachment: Kim Lefevre (Vietnam/France), Gisele Pineau (Guadeloupe/mainland France), Nina Bouraoui (Algeria/France), Michele Rakotoson (Madagascar/France), Veronique Tadjo (Cote d'Ivoire/France), and Abla Farhoud (Lebanon/Quebec). In this way, the book argues that the French colonial past continues to mould female articulations of mobility and identity in the postcolonial present. Responding to gaps in the critical discourse of exile, namely gender, this book brings genre in both its forms - gender and literary genre - to bear on narratives of exile, arguing that the reconceptualization of categories of mobility occurs specifically in women's autofictional writing. The six authors complicate discussions of exile as they are highly mobile, hybrid subjects. This rootless existence, however, often renders them alienated and 'out of place'. While ensuring not to trivialize the very real difficulties faced by those whose exile is not a matter of choice, the book argues that the six authors experience their hybridity as both a literal and a metaphorical exile, a source of both creativity and trauma.

Forrest J Ackerman (1916-2008) was an author, archivist, agent, actor, promoter, and editor of the iconic fan magazine Famous Monsters of Filmland; a founder of science fiction fandom; and one of the world's foremost collectors of sci-fi, horror and fantasy films, literature, and memorabilia. This biography begins with a foreword by Joe Moe, Ackerman's caregiver and close friend since 1982. It documents Ackerman's lifelong dedication to his work in both literature and film; his interests, travels, relationships and associations with famous personalities; and his lasting impact on popular culture. Primary research material includes letters given by Ackerman to the author during their long friendship, and numerous reminiscences from Ackerman's friends, fans and colleagues.

Ten Days in a Mad-House (1887) is a book by American investigative journalist Nellie Bly. For her first assignment for Joseph Pulitzer's famed New York World newspaper, Bly went undercover as a patient at a notorious insane asylum on Blackwell's Island. Spending ten days there, she recorded the abuses and neglect she witnessed, turning her research into a sensational two-part story for the New York World later published as Ten Days in a Mad-House. Checking into a New York boardinghouse under a false identity, Bly began acting in a disturbed, unsettling manner, prompting the police to be summoned. In a courtroom the next morning, she claimed to be suffering from amnesia, leading to her diagnosis as insane from several doctors. Sent to the Women's Lunatic Asylum, Bly spent ten days witnessing and experiencing rampant abuse and neglect. There, she noticed that many of the patients, who were constantly beaten and belittled by violent nurses and staff members, seemed perfectly sane or showed signs of having their conditions severely worsened during their time at the asylum. Served spoiled food, forced to live in squalor, and given ice-cold baths by unsympathetic attendants, the patients she met during her stay seemed as though abandoned by a city that had sent them there for the supposed purpose of healing. Showcasing her skill as a reporter and true pioneer of investigative journalism, Bly published her story to a captivated and inspired audience, setting in motion a process of reform that would change the city's approach to its asylums for the better. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Nellie Bly's Ten Days in a Mad-House is a classic work of American investigative journalism reimagined for modern readers.

Inspired by a vivid dream, Stephenie Meyer, a stay-at-home mom, wrote a manuscript that started a worldwide sensation that has yet to abate. In 2005 her debut novel, Twilight, crashed onto the shore of teen literature like a literary tsunami. Four books later, she had become the top-selling author in the world. When the final book in the Twilight series, Breaking Dawn, was released in 2008, more than a million copies were sold on the first day alone. The popular culture phenomenon of Stephenie Meyer and her writing is much more than the sum total of her weeks on the bestseller list, however. Stephenie Meyer: In the Twilight looks at the life and work of this author, beginning with her childhood and covering her teen years and life before stardom. This volume also profiles Meyer's world since becoming a cultural icon. In addition to discussing Meyer's writing style, the chapters also explore each of her books, with a final chapter focusing on her presence in social media and public events. As young and old continue to devour her every word, this volume puts into perspective the work and impact that Meyer has around the world. Stephenie Meyer: In the Twilight will be of interest to teachers and librarians, as well as to middle and high school students-not to mention adults-who are interested in learning more about their favorite author.

Letty's mother was intelligent, down-to-earth, outspoken and clear-headed-a loving mother to her five children and a hardworking, successful schoolteacher. However, after her mother suffered several small, debilitating strokes, Letty, a senior citizen, found herself in the position of having to parent her own mother. But in the midst of the heartache, frustrations, misunderstandings and emotional exhaustion, Letty began to recognize and accept the challenge of her new role. Instead of just heartaches, she discovered the blessings of her unchartered role-reversal, including a new understanding of herself and her world as well as the opportunity for self-growth. In touching diary entries chronicling her experience intertwined with accounts of her mother's life from the 1930s through the present day, Heartaches and Blessings while Parenting My Mom is an engaging, humorous tribute that provides support, empowerment and encouragement to adult caretakers.

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.