In A House Unlocked, Whitbread Award- and Booker Prize-winning Penelope Lively takes us on a journey of her familial country house in England that her grandparents bought in 1923. As her narrative shifts from room to room, object to object, she paints a moving portrait of an era of rapid change -- and of the family that changed with the times. As she charts the course of the domestic tensions of class and community among her relatives, she brings to life the effects of the horrors of the Russian Revolution and the Holocaust through portraits of the refugees who came to live with them. A fascinating, intimate social history of its times, A House Unlocked is an eloquent meditation on place and time, memory and history, and above all a tribute to the meaning of home.

"Hayes leaves resonance cleaving the air." -NPR In these works based on his Bagley Wright lectures on the poet Etheridge Knight, Terrance Hayes offers not quite a biography but a compilation "as speculative, motley, and adrift as Knight himself." Personal yet investigative, poetic yet scholarly, this multi-genre collection of writings and drawings enacts one poet's search for another and in doing so constellates a powerful vision of black literature and art in America. The future Etheridge Knight biographer will simultaneously write an autobiography. Fathers who go missing and fathers who are distant will become the bones of the stories. There will be a fable about a giant who grew too tall to be kissed by his father. My father must have kissed me when I was boy. I can't really say. . . . By the time I was eleven or even ten years old I was as tall as him. I was six inches taller than him by the time I was fifteen. My biography about Knight would be about intimacy, heartache. Terrance Hayes is the author of How to Be Drawn, which received a 2016 NAACP Image Award for Poetry; Lighthead, which won the 2010 National Book Award for poetry; and three other award-winning poetry collections. He is the poetry editor at the New York Times Magazine and also teaches at the University y of Pittsburgh. American Sonnets for My Past and Future Assassin will also be forthcoming in 2018.

Selected as a Book of the Year in The Times Literary Supplement 'This lucid and riveting new biography at once rescuses Kierkegaard from the scholars and shows why he is such an intriguing and useful figure' Observer Soren Kierkegaard, one of the most passionate and challenging of modern philosophers, is now celebrated as the father of existentialism - yet his contemporaries described him as a philosopher of the heart. Over about a decade in the 1840s and 1850s, writings poured from his pen analysing love and suffering, courage and anxiety, religious longing and defiance, and forging a new philosophical style rooted in the inward drama of being human. As Christianity seemed to sleepwalk through a changing world, Kierkegaard dazzlingly revealed its spiritual power while exposing the poverty of official religion. His restless creativity was spurred on by his own failures: his relationship with the young woman whom he promised to marry, then left to devote himself to writing, haunted him throughout his life. Though tormented by the pressures of celebrity, he deliberately lived amidst the crowds in Copenhagen, known by everyone but, he felt, understood by no one. When he collapsed exhausted at the age of 42, he was still pursuing the question of existence: how to be a human being in this world? Clare Carlisle's innovative and moving biography writes Kierkegaard's remarkable life as far as possible from his own perspective, conveying what it was like to be this Socrates of Christendom - as he put it, living life forwards yet only understanding it backwards.

Take a firsthand journey into a time, society and world full of intrigue. In the tenth century, Japan stood physically and culturally isolated from the rest of the world. Sei Shonagon--a young courtesan of the Heian period--kept a diary, which provides a highly personal account of the intrigues, dalliances, quirks, and habits of Japan's late tenth-century elite. She was a contemporary and acquaintance of the well-known courtesan Murasaki Shikibu, author of the Japanese masterpiece The Tale of Genji. A perfect companion to that work, The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon brings an added dimension to Murasaki's timeless and seminal novel and further illuminates Japanese court life in all its ritualistic glory. Through his elegant and readable abridged translation, Arthur Waley perfectly conveys Sei Shonagon's girlish temperament and quirky personality. In a place and time where poetry was as important as knowledge and beauty was highly revered, Sei Shonagon's private writings offer a charming, intimate glimpse into a world of innocence and pale beauty. A new introduction by respected Japanese literary scholar Dennis Washburn provides historical insight into Japanese culture, Sei Shonagon's world, and Waley's translation.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year and a Washington Post Best Book of 2001, Mary Shelley has been called a harrowing life, wonderfully retold (The Washington Post). This splendid biography (The New Yorker) gracefully moves through the dramatic life of the woman behind history's most legendary monster. A daughter of Mary Wollstonecraft, author of the daring A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, and the radical philosopher William Godwin, Mary Shelley grew up amid the literary and political avant-garde of early-nineteenth-century London. She escaped to Europe at seventeen with the married poet Percy Bysshe Shelley, causing a great scandal. On a famous night of eerie thunderstorms, in a villa near Lord Byron's on Lake Geneva, they told ghost stories and tales of horror, giving birth to the idea of Frankenstein, a monster who has haunted imaginations for nearly two hundred years. The Mary we meet here, brilliantly brought to life by Seymour from previously unexplored sources, is brave, generous, and impetuous. Struck by tragedy, she lost three of her four children, and when she was only twenty-four, Shelley drowned off the coast of Italy. As Henry Carrigan of Library Journal said, this is one of the finest and most significant literary biographies of recent years. Miranda Seymour's biography of Mary Shelley provides a thoughtfully considered, lifelike portrait of a complex, often misunderstood character. -- Merle Rubin, Los Angeles Times [Miranda Seymour] has vivid narrative gifts and a perceptive understanding of the main personalities. -- Claude Rawson, The New York Times Book Review Mary Shelley is the most dazzling biography of a female writer to have come my way for a decade. -- Jackie Wullschlager, Financial Times

The novelist and short story writer Edward Upward (1903-2009) is famous for being the unknown member of the W. H. Auden circle, though was revered by his peers -- Auden, Day Lewis, Isherwood and Spender -- for his intellect, high literary gifts and unswerving political commitment. His lifelong friendship with Christopher Isherwood was forged at school and university, with each regarding the other as the first reader of his work. At Cambridge they invented the bizarre village of Mortmere, which with its combination of reality and fantasy had an important role in shaping the dominant British literary culture of the 1930s. Upward, immortalised as 'Allen Chalmers' in Isherwood's Lions and Shadows, was an early influence on W. H. Auden and author of the influential political novel Journey to the Border, published in 1938 by Leonard and Virginia Woolf. But his writing career faltered while he was devout member of the Communist Party. After leaving the party in 1948 he again wrote novels and short stories until shortly before his death at the age of 105. In this illuminating, meticulously researched biography Peter Stansky tells the fascinating story of Upward's conflict between art and life. At the same time he colourfully provides significant insight into English society during the twentieth century and explores the special nature of English radicalism.

The final legacy of the Nobel Prize-winning author of The Labyrinth of Solitude
Itinerary records the evolution of the political ideas of Octavio Paz, the great Mexican writer who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1990. It is an intellectual autobiography, in a sense, but also a sentimental and even passionate one. In his thoughts Paz realized the past was inseparable from the present. And so he tells the story of his journey through time, from youth to adulthood. It is not a straight line, nor is it a circle; it is instead a spiral that turns ceaselessly over, bringing into view a time seventy years in the past and the actions of today. It is the final work by a great thinker and a magnificent writer.

Provence: Its magnificent landscape has inspired artists and writers for centuries. In this stunning evocation of Provencal culture and history, the critically lauded novelist and essayist Nicholas Delbanco captures both the immediacy of this changing region and the time-honored traditions of its past. Born in England during the Second World War, raised in America, Delbanco spent many of the most important periods of his life in Provence. Ensconced in a farmhouse deep in the Alpes-Maritimes, writing books, he developed lasting friendships with his neighbors, including expatriate novelist James Baldwin. His narrative deals with the stages of age-from his first, carefree visits and an early love affair to his transformation into the "solid citizen" who imitates his parents while guiding his children through the streets. In 1987 Delbanco returned to Provence with his family, planning "a sentimental journey to our early haunts. It is to be, I tell myself, a chance to travel with our daughters before we drift apart, a chance to share our past with them before it proves irrecoverable." With the mind of a historian and the eye of an artist, Delbanco gracefully weaves strands of Provencal life into scenes from his own past and present. In the precise, mellifluous language that prompted the Chicago Tribune Book World to call him "as fine a pure prose stylist as any writer living," Delbanco provides a personal record of one of the world's most fertile regions. He writes of the landscape of Petrarch and Laura, Cezanne and van Gogh, the Marquis de Sade and Albert Camus ("who made his home in Lourmarin because of the size of the sky"); of Provence's thirty-two winds; and of aristocrat and peasant, cave and vineyard, restaurant and gallery, coal stoves and mimosa, cars and climbing roses, stone walls and bittersweet-describing a paradise still pure, but not immune to progress. This book will bear comparison to Hemingway's account of France; it, too, is a moveable feast.

Pablo Picasso and Gertrude Stein. Few can be said to have had as broad an impact on European art in the twentieth century as these two cultural giants. Pablo Picasso, a pioneering visual artist, created a prolific and widely influential body of work. Gertrude Stein, an intellectual tastemaker, hosted the leading salon for artists and writers between the wars in her Paris apartment, welcoming Henri Matisse, Ernest Hemingway, and Ezra Pound to weekly events at her home to discuss art and literature. It comes as no surprise, then, that Picasso and Stein were fast friends and frequent confidantes. Through Picasso and Stein's casual notes and reflective letters, this volume of correspondence between the two captures Paris both in the golden age of the early twentieth century and in one of its darkest hours, the Nazi occupation through mentions of dinner parties, lovers, work, and the crises of the two world wars. Illustrated with photographs and postcards, as well as drawings and paintings by Picasso, this collection captures an exhilarating period in European culture through the minds of two artistic greats.

The most famous memoir of its kind and a key text in the anti-slavery movement, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass tells the striking and emotionally charged story of one man's journey from slavery to freedom. Complete & Unabridged. Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library; a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or a treat for any book lover. This edition is introduced by Dr Lydia Plath. Born into a life of slavery in Maryland in 1818, Frederick Douglass spent his youth passed from master to master, from city to field, and subjected to unimaginable cruelty. Along this journey he sought knowledge, he learned to read and write, and he discovered that education was his key to salvation. Using everything he learned and fuelled by all he was forced to endure, Douglass managed to escape and then, eventually, to free himself from slavery. Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, a startlingly honest account of his struggle, played a fundamental role in the abolition of slavery, a movement that Douglass dedicated his life to.

Drawing upon his Welsh and Jewish heritage, Dannie Abse presents a rich autobiography that chronicles his life as both a doctor and an author. Humorous and poignant, this new edition not only includes the acclaimed first volume "A Poet in the Family," but also discusses the changes in the political and literary landscape over the last century. With a chapter featuring brand new material by the author, this must-read autobiography will entertain those interested in history, politics, and literature.

The most authoritative, comprehensive, perceptive biography of R. L. Stevenson to date, using for the first time his collected correspondence - which has been unavailable to all previous writers. The short life of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) was as adventurous as almost anything in his fiction: his travels, illness, struggles to become a writer, relationships with his volatile wife and step-family, friendships and quarrels have fascinated readers for over a century. In his time he was both engineer and aesthete, dutiful son and reckless lover, Scotsman and South Sea Islander, Covenanter and atheist. Stevenson's books, including 'Treasure Island', 'The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde' and 'Kidnapped', have achieved world fame; others - 'The Master of Ballantrae', 'A Child's Garden of Verses', 'Travels with a Donkey' - remain all-time favourites. His unique gift for storytelling and dramatic characterisation has meant that some of his characters live in the consciousness even of those who have never read his work: Long John Silver, with his wooden leg and his parrot, is more real to most people than any historical pirate, while 'Jekyll and Hyde' has become a universally recognised term for a split personality. No biography has yet done justice to the complex, brilliant and troubled man who was responsible for so many remarkable creations. His interest in psychology, genetics, technology and feminism anticipated the concerns of the next century, while his experiments in narrative technique inspired post-modern innovators such as Borges and Nabokov. Stevenson's recently collected correspondence shows him to have been the least 'Victorian' of Victorian writers, a man of humour, resilience and strongly unconventional views. With access to this and much previously unpublished material, Claire Harman, the acclaimed biographer of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Fanny Burney, has written the most authoritative, comprehensive and perceptive portrait of 'RLS' to date.

A New York Times Notable Book of the Year, Raymond Chandler is an uncensored look at the tortured man who wrote the classic mystery novels The Big Sleep and The Long Goodbye. Using recently uncovered archival materials including personal papers and correspondence, biographer Thomas Hiney vividly evokes Chandler's early years in Nebraska, his education in England and on the corrupt streets of Los Angeles, and his later years as a novelist and screenwriter in the heyday of the Hollywood studio system. Along the way, he provides illuminating insights into the writer's inspirations and work - as well as accounts of Chandler's battles with alcohol addiction and his friendships with Howard Hawks, Lucky Luciano, S. J. Perelman, and Alfred Hitchcock. This book is also the first to fully detail the significance and complexities of his thirty-year marriage to Cissy, a woman seventeen years his senior. Raymond Chandler is personal portrait of an author as extraordinary as the fiction he created - a body of work that has sold more than five million copies, been translated into twenty-five languages, and inspired countless imitators. A discerning portrait of the creator of Philip Marlowe, the archetypal American private eye. - Newsweek

More than a century after his death in 1881, Fyodor Dostoevsky continues to fascinate readers and reviewers. Countless studies of his writing have been published-more than a dozen in the past few years alone. In this important new work, Thomas Marullo provides a diary-portrait of Dostoevsky's early years drawn from the letters, memoirs, and criticism of the writer, as well as from the testimony and witness of family and friends, readers and reviewers, and observers and participants in his life. Marullo's exhaustive search of published materials on Dostoevsky sheds light on many unexplored corners of Dostoevsky's childhood, adolescence, and youth. Speakers of excerpts are given maximum freedom: Anything they said about the writer-the good and the bad, the truth and the lies-are included, with extensive footnotes providing correctives, counter-arguments, and other pertinent information. The first part of this volume, "All in the Family," focuses on Dostoevsky's early formation and schooling, i.e., his time in city and country, and his ties to his family, particularly his parents. The second section, "To Petersburg!," features Dostoevsky's early days in Russia's imperial city, his years at the Main Engineering Academy, and the death of his father. The third part, "Darkness before Dawn," deals with the writer's youthful struggles and strivings, culminating in the success of his work, Poor Folk. This clear and comprehensive portrait of one of the world's greatest writers will appeal to students, teachers, and scholars of Dostoevsky's early life, as well as general readers interested in Dostoevsky, literature, and history.

Tolstoy as Man and Artist with an Essay on Dostoevsky (1901) is a work of literary criticism by Dmitriy Merezhkovsky. Having turned from his work in poetry to a new, spiritually charged interest in fiction, Merezhkovsky sought to develop his theory of the Third Testament, an apocalyptic vision of Christianity's fulfillment in twentieth century humanity. In this collection of essays on Tolstoy and Dostoevsky, Merezhkovsky explores the spiritual dimensions of the written word by examining the interconnection of being and writing for two of Russian literature's most iconic writers. For Dmitriy Merezhkovsky, an author who always wrote with philosophical and spiritual purpose, the figure of the artist as a human being is a powerful tool for understanding the quality and focus of that artist's work. Leo Tolstoy, author of such classics as War and Peace and Anna Karenina, developed a reputation as an ascetic, deeply spiritual man who envisioned his art as an extension of his political and religious beliefs. Dostoevsky, while perhaps more interested in the psychological aspects of human life, pursued a similar path in such novels as The Brothers Karamazov and Crime and Punishment. In Merezhkovsky's view, these writers came to embody in their lives and works the particularly Russian conflict between truths both human and divine. Tolstoy as Man and Artist with an Essay on Dostoevsky is an invaluable text both for its analysis of its subjects and for its illumination of the philosophical concepts explored by Merezhkovsky throughout his storied career. With a beautifully designed cover and professionally typeset manuscript, this edition of Dmitriy Merezhkovsky's Tolstoy as Man and Artist with an Essay on Dostoevsky is a classic work of Russian literature reimagined for modern readers.

Rooted in myth, occult mysteries, and belief in magic, these stories are populated by a lively cast of sorcerers, fairies, ghosts, and nature spirits. The great Irish poet heard these enchanting, mystical tales from Irish peasants, and the stories' anthropologic significance is matched by their timeless entertainment value.

The life story of the Victorian novelist George Eliot is as dramatic and complex as her best plots. This new assessment of her life and work combines recent biographical research with penetrating literary criticism, resulting in revealing new interpretations of her literary work. * A fresh look at George Eliot's captivating life story * Includes original new analysis of her writing * Deploys the latest biographical research * Combines literary criticism with biographical narrative to offer a rounded perspective

Philip Callow's new biography of Russia's greatest dramatist and storyteller is a major achievement. By examining Chekhov's life within the context of the evolution of his art, Mr. Callow makes the reader acutely aware of the hidden ground from which Chekhov's work sprang and on which his divided life stood. Arthur Miller calls Chekhov "in nearly every way our contemporary." His irony is as modern as Beckett's; as a letter writer he is as natural and irresistible as D. H. Lawrence. In his personal life he is as understated as in his work. But the love theme that is central to his biography and his art is profoundly convincing and humane, but in his own life he holds back coldly and perhaps fearfully from real commitment. He constantly surprises us: a modest genius who finds the whole nature of fame unseemly; a man furious at injustice who is apolitical; a humorist in despair before the mediocrity, stupidity, and cruelty of the world; a generous spirit unable to stop working to improve the lot of others, incapable of turning anyone away, who remains stubbornly apart and hidden. Readers of Mr. Callow's Chekhov will find it a supremely satisfying biography, beautifully told.

William Golding was born in 1911 and educated at his local grammar school and Brasenose College, Oxford. He published a volume of poems in 1934 and during the war served in the Royal Navy. Afterwards he returned to being a schoolmaster in Salisbury. Lord of the Flies, his first novel, was an immediate success, and was followed by a series of remarkable novels, including The Inheritors, Pincher Martin and The Spire. He won the Booker Prize for Rites of Passage in 1980, was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1983, and was knighted in 1988. He died in 1993.

An in-depth look into the life of Romantic essayist Charles Lamb and the legacy of his work "[An] electrifying portrait of Charles Lamb."-New Yorker A pioneer of urban Romanticism, essayist Charles Lamb (1775-1834) found inspiration in London's markets, theaters, prostitutes, and bookshops. He prized the city's literary scene, too, where he was a star wit. He counted among his admirers Mary Shelley, William Wordsworth, and Samuel Taylor Coleridge. His friends valued in his conversation what distinguished his writing style: a highly original blend of irony, whimsy, and melancholy. Eric G. Wilson captures Lamb's strange charm in this meticulously researched and engagingly written biography. He demonstrates how Lamb's humor helped him cope with a life-defining tragedy: in a fit of madness, his sister Mary murdered their mother. Arranging to care for her himself, Lamb saved her from the gallows. Delightful when sane, Mary became Charles's muse, and she collaborated with him on children's books. In exploring Mary's presence in Charles's darkly comical essays, Wilson also shows how Lamb reverberates in today's experimental literature.

"I have been in Sorrow's kitchen and licked out all the pots. Then I have stood on the peaky mountain wrapped in rainbows with a harp and a sword in my hands."

First published in 1942 at the crest of her popularity, this is Zora Neale Hurston's unrestrained account of her rise from childhood poverty in the rural South to prominence among the leading artists and intellectuals of the Harlem Renaissance. Full of wit and wisdom, and audaciously spirited, "Dust Tracks on a Road" offers a rare, poignant glimpse of the life -- public and private -- of a premier African-American writer, artist, anthropologist and champion of the black heritage."Warm, witty, imaginative, and down-to-earth by turns, this is a rich and winning book by one of our genuine, Grade A, folk writers." "--The New Yorker"

Henri Charriere, called "Papillon," for the butterfly tattoo on his chest, was convicted in Paris in 1931 of a murder he did not commit. Sentenced to life imprisonment in the penal colony of French Guiana, he became obsessed with one goal: "escape." After planning and executing a series of treacherous yet failed attempts over many years, he was eventually sent to the notorious prison, Devil's Island, a place from which no one had ever escaped . . . until Papillon. His flight to freedom remains one of the most incredible feats of human cunning, will, and endurance ever undertaken.

Charriere's astonishing autobiography, "Papillon," was published in France to instant acclaim in 1968, more than twenty years after his final escape. Since then, it has become a treasured classic -- the gripping, shocking, ultimately uplifting odyssey of an innocent man who would not be defeated.