This volume examines the ways in which multilingual women authors incorporate several languages into their life writing. It compares the work of six contemporary authors who write predominantly in French. It analyses the narrative strategies they develop to incorporate more than one language into their life writing: French and English, French and Creole, or French and German, for example. The book demonstrates how women writers transform languages to invent new linguistic formations and how they create new formulations of subjectivity within their self-narrative. It intervenes in current debates over global literature, national literatures and translingual and transnational writing, which constitute major areas of research in literary and cultural studies. It also contributes to debates in linguistics through its theoretical framework of translanguaging. It argues that multilingual authors create new paradigms for life writing and that they question our understanding of categories such as "French literature."

This book presents translations of two celebrated works by Georgy Ivanov. Disintegration of the Atom (1938) is a prose poem depicting Russian emigre despair on the eve of WWII-a cri de coeur that challenges prevailing concepts of time and space, ending in erotically charged wretchedness. Petersburg Winters (1928/1952) is a portrait of Petersburg swept up in the artistic ferment of late Imperial and Revolutionary Russia. The spirit of the city is conveyed through a series of vignettes of Ivanov's contemporaries, including Blok, Akhmatova, Esenin, and Mandelstam.

This book, first published in 1984, was the first full biography of Solzhenitsyn. Starting with his childhood, it covers every period of his life in considerable detail, showing how Solzhenitsyn's development paralleled and mirrored the development of Soviet society: ambitious and idealistic in the twenties and thirties, preoccupied with the struggle for survival in the forties, hopeful in the fifties and sixties and disillusioned in the seventies. Solzhenitsyn's life thus serves as a paradigm for the history of twentieth-century Communism and for the intelligentsia's attitudes to Communism. At the same time, this book relates Solzhenitsyn's life to his works, all of which contain a large element of autobiography.

This book, first published in 1950, is a balanced examination of Chekhov's life and work, a critical analysis of his stories and plays set against the background of his life the Russia of the day. Using Chekhov's works, biographical details, and, more importantly, his many thousands of letters, this book presents a comprehensive critical study of the writer and the man.

This book, first published in 1961, traces the lives and works of six outstanding Russian authors, each of whom is interesting and important in himself, as well as for his contribution to Russian letters. As personalities they are extremely varied, and also as artists, so much so that each of them might be studied as the centre of a distinct school of writing. Taken as a group they are a microcosm of Russian literature in the twentieth century, an age of rapid and extreme change.

This book, first published in 1978, demonstrates how Dostoyevsky's novels grew directly out of the pressures of their creator's tormented experience and personality. Ronald Hingley draws upon important fresh source material, which includes the definitive Soviet edition of Dostoyevsky's works with drafts and variants, Soviet research on the circumstances of his father's death, and a newly deciphered section of the diary of his second wife, Anna. Hingley considers with his analysis all Dostoyevsky's works, the ideas they contain, their varying artistic success, and their contemporary critical reception. He convincingly present's Dostoyevsky's genius at its most powerful when most on the attack.

This biographical study, first published in 1985, draws on extensive newly available material and illuminates the life and work of a man who lived through one of the most turbulent periods of Russian history to produce some of his country's greatest poetry and its most significant modern novel.

This book, first published in 1979, provides a systematic anatomy of Russia's modern authors in the context of their society at the time. Post-revolutionary Russian literature has made a profound impact on the West while still maintaining its traditional role as a vehicle for political struggle at home. Professor Hingley places their lives and work firmly in the setting of the USSR's social and political structure.

This book, first published in 1977, begins with a close look at the lives of nineteenth century Russian writers, and at the problems of their profession. It then examines their environment in its broader aspects, the Russian empire being considered from the point of view of geography, ethnography, economics, and the impact of individual Tsars on writers and society. A discussion of the main social 'estates' follows, and concluding is an analysis in their literary context of the activities of the competing forces of cohesion and disruption in imperial society: the civil service, law courts, police, army, schools, universities, press, censorship, revolutionaries and agitators. This book makes possible a fuller understanding of the works of Pushkin, Dostoyevsky, Chekhov and the other great Russian writers.

Published for the first time as Ernest Hemingway intended, one of the great writer's most beloved and enduring works: his classic memoir of Paris in the 1920s.
Published posthumously in 1964, "A Moveable Feast" remains one of Ernest Hemingway's most beloved works. Since Hemingway's personal papers were released in 1979, scholars have examined and debated the changes made to the text before publication. Now, this spe- cial restored edition presents the original manuscript as the author intended it to be published.
Featuring a personal Foreword by Patrick Hemingway, Ernest's sole surviving son, and an Introduction by the editor and grandson of the author, Sean Hemingway, this new edi- tion also includes a number of unfinished, never-before-pub- lished Paris sketches revealing experiences that Hemingway had with his son, Jack, and his first wife Hadley. Also included are irreverent portraits of other literary luminaries, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ford Maddox Ford, and insightful recollections of Hemingway's own early experiments with his craft.
Sure to excite critics and readers alike, the restored edition of "A Moveable Feast" brilliantly evokes the exuberant mood of Paris after World War I and the unbridled creativity and unquenchable enthusiasm that Hemingway himself epitomized.

The first study of life narratives produced for, about, and written by children, this book examines the recent popularity of children's biographies and how they engage with the biggest issues of our time: environmental change, health crises, education, and children's personal and political development. Beginning with a literary-historical overview, Children and Biography proceeds to examine 21st-century examples and trends such as illustrated texts including Women in Science, the Fantastically Great Women Who... books, Rebel Dogs, Goodnight Stories for Rebel Girls, Kids Who Did, My Beautiful Birds and The Journey. The book also considers archives of children's writings and drawings, in particular the testimonies of child asylum seekers, children's biographical art, and 'Lockdown diaries' produced during the Covid-19 pandemic. By analyzing these works alongside empirical studies into how such material is received by child readers, and how texts generated by children are perceived both by them and their parents, this book provides new knowledge on how biographies for children are produced and read. Comprehensive and original, Children and Biography, presents an ethical methodological framework for scholarly practice when reading, witnessing and interpreting children's life narratives. The book offers a mandate for future researchers: to place children's voices and writing at the centre of inquiries in ways that facilitate genuine agency for child authors.

In 1988 Hugo Williams began to pen his 'Freelance' column for the Times Literary Supplement: a window that allowed him to exhibit the full panoply of his gifts as travel writer, literary portraitist, working poet, and all-round chronicler of the curious existence of the contemporary writer. Freelancing is a collection of these TLS columns that finds Williams variously in Sarajevo, Central America, Jerusalem, Skyros, Portugal and Norwich. In the course of events he sees his Selected Poems published, his mother dies, his wife inherits a chateau and he crashes his motorbike. He reads and teaches, as most poets do, but also strolls through Paris dressed as Marlene Dietrich, encounters some of the great and good, and explores his personal history. His account of these adventures, reflections and discoveries is elegantly turned, frequently hilarious, and at times surprisingly poignant.

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.

Paul Leautaud was both one of the oddest characters in French literature and, as a staff member of the review Mercure de France, at the centre of Parisian literary life for over half a century. First published in 1974, this book represents the first full length biography of Leautaud in any language. The author recreates the world of a man who, once regarded as a mere eccentric, is now recognised as a significant figure in contemporary literature. It traces Leautaud's intimate friendships with many famous writers of the time and gives a lively panorama of the French literary scene and its vivid characters.

Ceremonies of Bravery is a study of the friendship between the prolific writer Oscar Wilde and Carlos Blacker. The two men met in the 1880s, the period when Wilde was judged by many to be 'at his best', and Blacker went on to become a trustee of Wilde's marriage settlement. Wilde declared Blacker 'the truest of friends and the most sympathetic of companions', and diaries and letters show that the men were close confidantes for almost two decades, a period during which both endured personal crises and disgrace. However, the relationship came to an abrupt end in June 1898. Carlos Blacker recorded prophetically in his diary, 'After lunch just before dinner letter from Oscar which put an end to our friendship forever'.
Robert Maguire draws on Blacker's diaries to paint a rich portrait of Wilde's dear friend in their shared social milieu, providing an account that adds much to the already vivid picture of Wilde's life. He devotes the first half of the book to the formative years of the friendship, showing the two men attempting to support each other in disgrace, with personal crises unfolding in parallel in their lives. Maguire then turns his attention to the men's reunion in Paris in March 1898, some three years after Wilde's arrest. Here, the Dreyfus Affair was at its peak, and Wilde and Blacker found themselves with very different perspectives. Maguire weaves together court records, letters, and diaries to propose a new account of the way in which Dreyfusard Blacker, working on a secret plan to establish Dreyfus's innocence, drew his old friend Oscar Wilde into his confidence. Wilde, on the other hand, was developing increasing interest in and sympathy for the real traitor Esterhazy, and it is most likely that this led him to betray Blacker's confidence, ending the friendship between the two men.
The obscurity surrounding Carlos Blacker's role in the Dreyfus affair, as well as the attendant circumstances of his painful breakup with Oscar Wilde, was mainly due to Blacker's own rigidly maintained silence to the time of his death in 1928. The full story did not come to light until the transcription beginning in 1989 of Blacker's diaries. Using these diaries, alongside other archival sources, Ceremonies of Bravery provides new insight into a special relationship while also offering a unique perspective on the Dreyfus Affair.

"The Arms of the Infinite" takes the reader inside the minds of author Christopher Barker's parents, writer Elizabeth Smart ("By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept") and poet George Barker. From their first fateful meeting and subsequent elopement, Barker candidly reveals their obsessive, passionate, and volatile love affair.

He writes evocatively of his unconventional upbringing with his siblings in a shack in Ireland and, later, a rambling, falling-down house in Essex. Interesting and charismatic figures from the literary and art worlds are regular visitors, and the book is full of fascinating cameos and anecdotes.

World rights except United Kingdom.

Donald Hall's invaluable record of the making of a poet begins with his childhood in Depression-era suburban Connecticut, where as the doted-upon son of dramatically thwarted parents he first realized poetry was 'secret, dangerous, wicked, and delicious'. Hall eloquently writes of the poetry and books that moved and formed him as a child and young man, and of adolescent efforts at poetry writing - an endeavor he wryly describes as more hormonal than artistic. His painful, formative days at Exeter are followed by a poetic self-liberation of sorts at Harvard and in the post-war university scene at Oxford. After a failed first marriage Hall meets and marries Jane Kenyon, and the two poets return to Eagle Pond. Fittingly, the family home that loomed large in Hall's childhood is where he grows old, and at eighty learns finally 'to live in the moment - as you have been told to do all your life'. "Unpacking the Boxes" is a revelatory and tremendously poignant memoir of one man's life in poetry.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that Jane Austen never goes out of style.

Jane Austen's much-loved novels vividly describe 19th-century society. But they are also timeless classics that continue to enjoy wild popularity 200 years after the author's death. Her delightfully quotable observations on love, men and women, society and class remain as relevant as they ever were. Packed full of intelligent insights, witty asides and wry observations, alongside fascinating facts about Austen's remarkable life, this Little Book showcases some of the best lines ever crafted in the English language.

This is the first book-length study of the work of contemporary writer Bernard Kops. Born on November 28, 1926 to Dutch-Jewish immigrants, Bernard Kops became famous after the production of his play The Hamlet of Stepney Green: A Sad Comedy with Some Songs in 1958. This play, like much of his work, focuses on the conflicts between young and old. Identified as an "angry young man," Kops, like his contemporaries John Osborne, Shelagh Delaney, and Harold Pinter, belonged to the so-called new wave of British drama that emerged in the mid-1950s. Kops went on to create important documentaries about the Blitz and living in London during the early 1940s. He has written two autobiographies, over ten novels, many journalistic pieces, and more than forty plays for TV, stage, and radio. A prolific poet, Kops has authored a long pamphlet poem and eight poetry collections. Now in his mid-80s, the prolific and versatile Kops still produces, his creativity undimmed by age.

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.

Bohemian, egoist and prophet of sensualism, Henry Miller remains to many writers and readers a literary lion. Born in Brooklyn in 1891, son of a tailor of German extraction, Miller would embrace a freewheeling existence that carried him through umpteen jobs and sexual encounters, providing rich source material for the novels he would write. Greenwich Village and Paris in the 1920s offered rich pickings, as did Miller's ten-year affair with Anais Nin. But he was 69 before "Tropic of Cancer" was legally published in the US and made him famous, almost 30 years from its composition and long after his peers had devoured it in contraband French editions.

Robert Ferguson reveals Miller as a amalgam of vulnerability and insouciance, who endured thirty years of official opprobrium but won the respect of Orwell, T.S. Eliot and Lawrence Durrell, and readers by the thousand.

'This impressive biography is] good, dirty fun.' "Observer"

'Engaging and perceptive.' "Economist"

'Lively and entertaining.' J.G. Ballard