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.

Published in 1999. Lord Byron and Madam de Stael made a great impression on Europe in the throes of the Napoleonic Wars, through their personalities, the versions of themselves which they projected through their works, and their literary engagement with contemporary life. However, the strong links between them have never before been explored in detail. This pioneering study looks at their personal relations, from their verbal sparring in Regency society, through the friendship which developed in Switzerland after Byron left England in 1816, to Byron's tributes to Mme de Stael after her death. It concentrates on their literary links, both direct responses to each other's works, and the copious evidence of shared concerns. The study deals with their treatment of gender, their grappling with the possibilities for heroic endeavour, their engagement with the social and political situations of Britain, France and Italy, and their conceptions of the role of the writer. Although Byron will need no introduction, Mme de Stael's standing as a French romantic writer of the first rank is made plain by the strong impact of her writings on the English Poet.

Emile Zola was the leader of the literary movement known as 'naturalism' and is one of the great figures of the novel. In his monumental Les Rougon-Macquart (1871-93), he explored the social and cultural landscape of the late nineteenth century in ways that scandalized bourgeois society. Zola opened the novel up to a new realm of subjects, including the realities of working-class life, class relations, and questions of gender and sexuality, and his writing embodied a new freedom of expression, with his bold, outspoken voice often inviting controversy. In this Very Short Introduction, Brian Nelson examines Zola's major themes and narrative art. He illuminates the social and political contexts of Zola's work, and provides readings of five individual novels (The Belly of Paris, L'Assommoir, The Ladies' Paradise, Germinal, and Earth). Zola's naturalist theories, which attempted to align literature with science, helped to generate the stereotypical notion that his fiction was somehow nonfictional. Nelson, however, reveals how the most distinctive elements of Zola's writing go far beyond his theoretical naturalism, giving his novels their unique force. Throughout, he sets Zola's work in context, considering his relations with contemporary painters, his role in the Dreyfus Affair, and his eventual murder. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

Prior to the First World War T.E. Hulme was one of the most original and striking creative personalities in England, strongly admired by both Pound and Eliot. Yet he died in 1917, virtually unknown. A key figure in the genesis of Modernism, Hulme mixed among a great range of gifted artists and was never shy of courting controversy. Unusually among poets of his generation, he was convinced of the rightness of Britain's role in the war (and criticised Bertrand Russell for his pacifism.)

Robert Ferguson offers the first modern biography of Hulme, drawing upon access to Hulme's papers and later interviews with his associates.

'A humane, comprehensive biography... By the end, Ferguson's final judgment of his subject - 'the conservative character at its best' - seems justified.' Jeremy Noel-Todd, "Observer"

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

Here is the essential reference for fans of Elisabeth Ogilvie's books -- and a wonderful introduction to one of Maine's most prolific writers.

In this richly detailed biography Victoria Glendinning brings alive the great Anglo-Irish novelist (The Death of the Heart, The Heat of the Day) whose literary achievements were matched by her tremendous talent for living. Taking us from Elizabeth Bowen's ancestral home in Ireland to Oxford (where she met Yeats and Eliot), through her service as an air-raid warden in London during World War II, to her friendships with such luminaries as Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, Glendinning lifts the veil between Bowen's imaginative world and the complex emotional life that fired her novels. 'One of the best critical biographies to have come my way for some time... A beautifully composed portrait.' Sunday Telegraph 'It reads like a good novel.' Irish Times

In this, the companion volume to his earlier autobiographical Apostate (1926), Forrest Reid continues his 'chronicle of a prolonged personal adventure'. Private Road (first published in 1940) offers Reid's descriptions of his early writing efforts; a youthful correspondence with Henry James that began with promise yet ended disappointingly ('the Master was not pleased...'); his Cambridge encounters with such luminaries as Ronald Firbank and W.B. Yeats; the production and reception of his first published works; and his valued friendships with E.M. Forster and Walter de la Mare. The closing stages of the book reflect Reid's unique sense of the spiritual: a compelling meditation on our 'second life' in a place Reid calls 'dreamland', wherein a 'shadowy agent' conjures an atmosphere that can hold powerful inspirational properties for the artist. Faber Finds is devoted to restoring to readers a wealth of lost/neglected classics and authors of distinction. The range embraces fiction, non-fiction, the arts and children's books. For a full list of available titles visit faberfinds.co.uk. To join the dialogue with fellow book-lovers please see our blog faberfindsblog.co.uk. Normal 0 false false false /* Style Definitions */

Over the last seven years Etgar Keret has had plenty of reasons to worry. His son, Lev, was born in the middle of a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv. His father became ill. And he has been constantly tormented by nightmarish visions of the Iranian president Ahmadinejad, anti-Semitic remarks both real and imagined, and, perhaps most worrisome of all, a dogged telemarketer who seems likely to chase him to the grave. Emerging from these darkly absurd circumstances is a series of funny, tender ruminations on everything from his three-year-old son's impending military service to the terrorist mindset behind Angry Birds. Moving deftly between the personal and the political, the playful and the profound, The Seven Good Years takes a life-affirming look at the human need to find good in the least likely places, and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our capricious world.

Born in 1917 into an aristocratic Boston family Robert Lowell was not yet thirty when his first major collection of poems, "Lord Weary's Castle," won the Pulitzer Prize. With "Life Studies," his third book, he found the intense, highly personal voice that made him the foremost American poet of his generation. He held strong, complex and very public political views. His private life was turbulent, marred by manic depression and troubled marriages. But in this superb biography (first published in 1982) the poet Ian Hamilton illuminates both the life and the work of Lowell with sympathetic understanding and consummate narrative skill.

'Our one consolation for Ian Hamilton's early death is that his work seems to have lived on with undiminished force... The critical prose, in particular, still sets a standard that nobody else comes near.' Clive James

The first and collection of Virginia Woolf's most inspirational quotes. 'No need to hurry. No need to sparkle. No need to be anybody but oneself.' Over 100 words of wisdom from the inimitable Virginia Woolf on love, literature, feminism, food, work, ageing, authenticity, nature, truth, happiness and everything in between, carefully selected and curated from Woolf's timeless novels, essays and speeches. A celebration of one of the world's best loved writers and a true feminist icon, in a beautifully packaged, small-format gift book.

Richard Moore Rive (1930-1989) was a writer, scholar, literary critic and college teacher in Cape Town, South Africa. He is best known for his short stories written in the late 1950s and for his second novel, 'Buckingham Palace', District Six, in which he depicted the well-known cosmopolitan area of District Six, where he grew up. In this biography Shaun Viljoen, a former colleague of Rive's, creates the composite qualities of a man who was committed to the struggle against racial oppression and to the ideals of non-racialism but was also variously described as irascible, pompous and arrogant, with a 'cultivated urbanity'. Beneath these public personae lurked a constant and troubled awareness of his dark skin colour and guardedness about his homosexuality. Using his own and others' memories, and drawing on Rive's fiction, Viljoen brings the author to life with sensitivity and empathy. The biography follows Rive from his early years in the 1950s, writing for Drum magazine and spending time in the company of great anti-establishment writers such as Jack Cope, Ingrid Jonker, Jan Rabie, Marjorie Wallace, Es'kia Mphahlele and Nadine Gordimer, to his acceptance at Magdalene College, Oxford, where he completed his doctorate on Olive Schreiner, before returning to South Africa to resume his position as senior lecturer at Hewat College of Education. This biography will resurface Richard Rive the man and the writer, and invite us to think anew about how we read writers who lived and worked during the years of apartheid.

"'I had arrived at the Greek view of nature. In wood and river and plant and animal and bird and insect it had seemed to me there was a spirit which was the same as my spirit...'"

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Born in Belfast in 1875, Forrest Reid would earn a reputation as 'the first Ulster novelist of European stature.' He studied at Cambridge, but it was Belfast where Reid returned to make his home, and where his questing mind seemed to find all that it required of inspiration. As he writes in "Apostate" (1926), the first of two volumes of autobiography - "'The landscape was the landscape I loved best, a landscape proclaiming the vicinity of man, a landscape imbued with a human spirit that was yet somehow divine.'"

Longtime fans of Rich's writing will welcome this engaging and thoughtful biography of her life. There is also a wonderful section that includes many of Rich's essays and stories -- which were published in magazines but never appeared in book form -- as well as excerpts from her journal and letters.

A vivid and original account of one of Ireland's greatest poets by an acclaimed Irish historian and literary biographer The most important Irish poet of the postwar era, Seamus Heaney rose to prominence as his native Northern Ireland descended into sectarian violence. A national figure at a time when nationality was deeply contested, Heaney also won international acclaim, culminating in the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1995. In On Seamus Heaney, leading Irish historian and literary critic R. F. Foster gives an incisive and eloquent account of the poet and his work against the background of a changing Ireland. Drawing on unpublished drafts and correspondence, Foster provides illuminating and personal interpretations of Heaney's work. Though a deeply charismatic figure, Heaney refused to don the mantle of public spokesperson, and Foster identifies a deliberate evasiveness and creative ambiguity in his poetry. In this, and in Heaney's evocation of a disappearing rural Ireland haunted by political violence, Foster finds parallels with the other towering figure of Irish poetry, W. B. Yeats. Foster also discusses Heaney's cosmopolitanism, his support for dissident poets abroad, and his increasing focus in his later work on death and spiritual transcendence. Above all, Foster examines how Heaney created an extraordinary connection with an exceptionally wide readership, giving him an authority and power unique among contemporary writers. Combining a vivid account of Heaney's life and a compelling reading of his entire oeuvre, On Seamus Heaney extends our understanding of the man as it enriches our appreciation of his poetry.

'Will surely rank as one of the foremost literary biographies of our time.' John Carey, Sunday Times In his lifetime Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889) published just a single poem - only a few close friends were aware he wrote. Much of his work was burnt by fellow Jesuits on his death. And yet Hopkins is today a huge figure in English literature. Homosexual but terribly repressed, he channeled his emotions toward nature and God, with profound results. Princeton emeritus professor Martin, the only biographer to have unrestricted use of Hopkins' private papers, tells this extraordinary story from Hopkins' early life and studies at Oxford, through his tortuous conversion from Anglicanism to Catholicism, to his struggle in later years to retain his very sanity. 'In Martin, the unhappy and tormented genius has found the most sympathetic and intelligent interpreter... [The book] goes to the heart of Hopkins, and plants him firmly before us as a Victorian, and a great one.' Allan Massie, Sunday Telegraph 'Martin follows Hopkins through his toils with sympathy and a great unshowy command of the facts. In this magnificently solicitous biography he has re-established the contours of the story definitively and made the homosexual drama integral to the better-known drama of conversion and poetics.' Seamus Heaney, Independent on Sunday 'The triumph of this learned, scrupulously detailed and persuasive biography is that it brings the reader as near as it is perhaps possible to come to living Hopkins' life, to sensing the mysterious crushing pressures that were for him intimately bound up with the richness and complexity of his writing.' Hilary Spurling, Daily Telegraph

'Tennyson and Holman Hunt, Carlyles, Rossettis and any number of celebrated Trevelyans people these pages; and Mr Trevelyan's handling of their comings and goings is masterly.' Hilary Spurling

Pauline Trevelyan, friend and patroness of so many in the Pre-Raphaelite circle, played an important part in the lives of Ruskin and Swinburne in the 1850s and 1860s. Some mischievous biographers have even claimed that Swinburne fell in love with her.

For long she has been an intriguing, not to say mysterious, figure to those interested in the artistic and literary life of the period. She spotted Swinburne as a potential genius when he was still a schoolboy; as scandal enveloped him she did not flinch from speaking out frankly. The daughter of a poor and learned parson, she was married to Sir Walter Calverley Trevelyan, twenty years her senior, a strange, tall, taciturn landowner-cum-scientist, and her opposite in character. Herself an artist, writer and critic, she commissioned important works from Rossetti, Woolner and others. From her immense correspondence, scarcely examined before this book was published, we learn much more about John Ruskin.

Ruskin's marriage in particular has always attracted great attention. It was feared, however, that the secrets surrounding its breakdown would never be fully known. Then a candid letter from Ruskin to a friend was suddenly unearthed. This so excited historians that this new edition of A Pre-Raphaelite Circle was published to include the letter in full, with all its revelations, making this important book a crucial work of reference for those interested in Ruskin and the Pre-Raphaelites who surrounded Lady Trevelyan.

'An acute literary intelligence ... the reader comes to trust instinctively Angier's assessments.' New York Times Jean Rhys (1890-1979) had a long life of great difficulty. So inept was she in its management that her authority as the writer of five beautifully shaped and controlled novels appears mysterious: how could someone so bad at living be so good at writing about it? Carole Angier answers this question. Jean Rhys never denied that she used her own experience in her writings, but no one hitherto has understood so well the nature of, and reasons for, this use. On her way to understanding, Carole Angier discovered more about the life than seemed possible. Jean Rhys's childhood, her momentous first love affair, her three marriages, the disasters which befell her husbands, her drinking and its consequences: all are shown with unsparing clarity. Equally clearly, and more importantly, we see the dynamics of her personality as it underwent, and sometimes provoked, these experiences. Sometimes what is revealed is shocking; but Carole Angier's sympathy and compassion dispel dismay, and her brilliant demonstrations of how art was made of events and emotions restores admiration on foundations which are stronger than ever. Jean Rhys did not want anyone to write about her, but this first full biography put beyond question her standing as a great writer of our time, written with an intensity and clarity which mirrors her own. It is a work of exceptional intimacy, sensitivity and power. 'Remarkable, the definitive biography. It is deeply researched, subtle, sympathetic.' Claire Tomalin Independent on Sunday 'Mesmerising.' Washington Post

Modern biographies of William Shakespeare abound; however, close scrutiny of the surviving records clearly show that there is insufficient material for a cradle to grave account of his life, that most of what is written about him cannot be verified from primary sources, and that Shakespearean biography did not attain scholarly or academic respectability until long after Samuel Schoenbaum published William Shakespeare A Documentary Life in 1975. This study begins with a short survey of the history and practice of biography and then surveys the very limited biographical material for Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare gradually attained the status as a national hero during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, there were no serious attempts to reconstruct his life. Any attempt at an account of his life or personality amounts, however, merely to "biografiction". Modern biographers differ sharply on Shakespeare's apparent relationships with Southampton and with Jonson, which merely underlines the fact that the documentary record has to be greatly expanded through contextual description and speculation in order to appear like a Life of Shakespeare.

First published in 1957, this book explores what remained of Joyce's background, not only in Ireland but in those cities abroad where his books were written. With the co-operation of those who knew the author, including his brother, much new material was brought together to shed new light on Joyce's life, character and methods of writing. The author traces Joyce, and his writings, from his beginnings in Ireland, through Zurich, London and Paris, to his difficult final year at Vichy in 1940. Previously unpublished letters illustrate his relationships with important figures of the period like Ezra Pound, T.S. Eliot and H.G. Wells. This title will be of interest to student of literature.

"Inventing Edward Lear is an exceptional, valuable, original study, presenting new materials on aspects of Lear's life and work." -Jenny Uglow, author of Mr. Lear and The Lunar Men Edward Lear wrote some of the best-loved poems in English, including "The Owl and the Pussycat," but the father of nonsense was far more than a poet. He was a naturalist, a brilliant landscape painter, an experimental travel writer, and an accomplished composer. Sara Lodge presents the fullest account yet of Lear's passionate engagement in the intellectual, social, and cultural life of his times. Lear had a difficult start in life. He was epileptic, asthmatic, and depressive, but even as a child a consummate performer who projected himself into others' affections. He became, by John James Audubon's estimate, one of the greatest ornithological artists of the age. Queen Victoria-an admirer-chose him to be her painting teacher. He popularized the limerick, set Tennyson's verse to music, and opened fresh doors for children and adults to share fantasies of magical escape. Lodge draws on diaries, letters, and new archival sources to paint a vivid picture of Lear that explores his musical influences, his religious nonconformity, his relationship with the Pre-Raphaelite movement, and the connections between his scientific and artistic work. He invented himself as a character: awkward but funny, absurdly sympathetic. In Lodge's hands, Lear emerges as a dynamic and irreverent polymath whose conversation continues to draw us in. Inventing Edward Lear is an original and moving account of one of the most intriguing and creative of all Victorians.

NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE FINALIST

'...And then we heard the rain falling, and that was the drops of blood falling; and when we came to get the crops, it was dead men that we reaped.' Harriet Tubman

Jesmyn Ward's acclaimed memoir shines a light on the community she comes from, in the small town of DeLisle, Mississippi, a place of quiet beauty and fierce attachment. Here, in the space of four years, she lost five young men dear to her, including her beloved brother - to accidents, murder and suicide. Their deaths were seemingly unconnected, yet their lives had been connected, by identity and place, and as Jesmyn dealt with these losses, she came to a staggering truth: These young men died because of who they were and the place they were from, because racism and economic struggle breed a certain kind of bad luck.

The agonising reality brought Jesmyn to write, at last, their true stories and her own.

Men We Reaped opens up a parallel universe, yet it points to problems whose roots are woven into the soil under all our feet. This indispensable American memoir is destined to become a classic.

This, the second volume of Alan Ross's autobiography, deals with his postwar life as cricket correspondent, publisher, man of letters and racehorse owner. The narrative is richly peopled: Johnny Minton, Keith Vaughan, Agatha Christie, Gavin Maxwell, Wilfred Thesiger, Cyril Connolly, T. C. Worsley, William Plomer, Terence Rattigan, William Sansom are just some who are memorably characterized.

William Boyd has written of Alan Ross, 'He was the opposite of parochial, his interests were wide and not elitist, his enthusiasms were carefully hedonistic. He was a very fine writer of prose - his two volumes of memoirs are small classics - and his poetry is limpid and evocative.' As a beguiling bonus, each chapter of Coastwise Lights is eked out with a small and apt selection of his poems.

The first autobiographical volume, "Blindfold Games," is also available in Faber Finds as will be many other of his titles.

'A true celebration of friendship and talent as well as the sports - football, cricket, horse-racing - which have engaged him in the last four decades.' Philip Oakes, "New Statesman"

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'His obvious affection for the friends who flit through this beautifully written sketchbook is masked by a writer's curiosity and detached amusement.' Euan Cameron, "Independent"

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'A fascinating history of metropolitan literary life from the end of the war.' Chris Peachment, "The Times"