|
Books > Biography > Literary
![The Brontes (Paperback): Juliet Barker](//media.loot.co.za/images/x80/40072990817179215.jpg) |
The Brontes
(Paperback)
Juliet Barker
|
R777
R645
Discovery Miles 6 450
Save R132 (17%)
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
|
The story of the tragic Bronte family is familiar to everyone: we
all know about the half-mad, repressive father, the drunken,
drug-addled wastrel of a brother, wildly romantic Emily, unrequited
Anne, and poor Charlotte. Or do we? These stereotypes of the
popular imagination are precisely that - imaginary - created by
amateur biographers such as Mrs. Gaskell who were primarily
novelists and were attracted by the tale of an apparently doomed
family of genius. Juliet Barker''s landmark book is the first
definitive history of the Brontes. It demolishes the myths, yet
provides startling new information that is just as compelling - but
true. Based on first-hand research among all the Bronte
manuscripts, including contemporary historical documents never
before used by Bronte biographers, this book is both scholarly and
compulsively readable. The Brontes is a revolutionary picture of
the world''s favorite literary family.
A wry, unvarnished chronicle of a career in the rare book trade
during its last Golden Age When Gary Goodman wandered into a
run-down, used-book shop that was going out of business in East St.
Paul in 1982, he had no idea the visit would change his life. He
walked in as a psychiatric counselor and walked out as the store's
new owner. In The Last Bookseller Goodman describes his sometimes
desperate, sometimes hilarious career as a used and rare book
dealer in Minnesota-the early struggles, the travels to estate
sales and book fairs, the remarkable finds, and the bibliophiles,
forgers, book thieves, and book hoarders he met along the way. Here
we meet the infamous St. Paul Book Bandit, Stephen Blumberg, who
stole 24,000 rare books worth more than fifty million dollars; John
Jenkins, the Texas rare book dealer who (probably) was murdered
while standing in the middle of the Colorado River; and the
eccentric Melvin McCosh, who filled his dilapidated Lake Minnetonka
mansion with half a million books. In 1990, with a couple of
partners, Goodman opened St. Croix Antiquarian Books in Stillwater,
one of the Twin Cities region's most venerable bookshops until it
closed in 2017. This store became so successful and inspired so
many other booksellers to move to town that Richard Booth, founder
of the "book town" movement in Hay-on-Wye in Wales, declared
Stillwater the First Book Town in North America. The internet
changed the book business forever, and Goodman details how, after
2000, the internet made stores like his obsolete. In the 1990s, the
Twin Cities had nearly fifty secondhand bookshops; today, there are
fewer than ten. As both a memoir and a history of booksellers and
book scouts, criminals and collectors, The Last Bookseller offers
an ultimately poignant account of the used and rare book business
during its final Golden Age.
‘A most magnificent, beautifully written memoir’ - Nina Stibbe
'Deft, witty and profound . . . had me turning the pages all night' -
Jessie Burton
Jean Hannah Edelstein was looking for love on OKCupid the night she
lost her father. She had recently moved back to America to be closer to
her parents, leaving behind the good friends, bad dates and
questionable career moves that defined her twenties. But six weeks
after she arrived in New York, her father died of cancer – and six
months after that she learnt she had inherited the gene that determined
his fate.
Heartbreaking, hopeful and disarmingly funny, This Really Isn’t About
You is a book about finding your way in life, even when life has other
plans.
From the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Last Act of Love,
Cathy Rentzenbrink's Dear Reader is the ultimate love letter to
reading and to finding the comfort and joy in stories. 'Exquisite'
- Marian Keyes, author of Grown Ups 'A warm, unpretentious
manifesto for why books matter' - Sunday Express Growing up, Cathy
Rentzenbrink was rarely seen without her nose in a book and read in
secret long after lights out. When tragedy struck, it was books
that kept her afloat. Eventually they lit the way to a new path,
first as a bookseller and then as a writer. No matter what the
future holds, reading will always help. A moving, funny and joyous
exploration of how books can change the course of your life, packed
with recommendations from one reader to another.
The Haunted Reader & Sylvia Plath takes an unusual approach to
Sylvia Plath studies focusing on the readers of Sylvia Plath rather
than the historical figure herself. Working from the premise that
Plath is a highly visible cultural figure, this book explores why
her readers become so attached to her. Why does she have such a
large and devoted following? What is it about her that attracts
people, and once they are drawn in, how does this fandom manifest
itself? This book is based on primary research carried out by the
author who has collected stories and accounts from readers of Plath
and explores key areas such as the first encounter with Plath, ways
in which fans feel they 'double' with Plath, pilgrimages that they
make to places where she lived and worked, how they interact with
images of Plath and how they respond to objects owned by Plath.
This study is unique. There is currently no other book that deals
with this subject. As such, The Haunted Reader & Sylvia Plath
offers a fascinating and original approach not only to Plath
scholarship but to the increasing body of literature on fandom
studies.
Revisionary Narratives examines the historical and formal
evolutions of Moroccan women's auto/biography in the last four
decades, particularly its conflation with testimony and its
expansion beyond literary texts. The book analyzes life narratives
in Arabic, colloquial Moroccan Darija, French, and English in the
fields of prison narratives, visual arts, theater, and digital
media. The various case studies highlight narrative strategies
women use to relate their experiences of political violence,
migration, displacement, and globalization, while engaging
patriarchal and (neo)imperial norms and practices. Using a
transdisciplinary interpretative lens, the analyses focus on how
women authors, artists, and activists collapse the boundaries
between autobiography, biography, testimony, and sociopolitical
commentary to revise dominant conventions of authorship, transgress
oppressive definitions of gender roles and relations, and envision
change. Revisionary Narratives marks auto/biography and testimony
as a specific field of inquiry within the study of women's
postcolonial cultural productions in the Moroccan and, more
broadly, the Maghrebi and Middle Eastern contexts.
Agatha Christie's widower's recollections of his archaeological
triumphs and life with Agatha. In these informal, often witty and
always interesting memoirs, Sir Max Mallowan tells the story of his
life, from his boyhood at Lancing where he was a contemporary of
Evelyn Waugh, to the days when he was elected a Fellow of All Souls
and succeeded another eminent archaeologist, his friend Sir
Mortimer Wheeler, as a Trustee of the British Museum. The author
was initiated into field archaeology at Ur by Leonard Woolley in
1925, and it was Woolley who first introduced him to a visiting
novelist, Agatha Christie. After further excavations, Sir Max began
working independently in Assyria, to which he returned each year
until the outbreak of war. In 1939 he joined the Royal Air Force
and was involved in several eccentric exploits before volunteering
to go the Middle East where he filled various outlandish posts with
skill and aplomb. Throughout the pre-war years, the author was
accompanied on all his digs by Agatha Christie, who was not only a
delightful companion and organizer of creature comforts, but also
took an active part in the photography, recording and preservation
of the finds: some of the humorous odes she composed about her
colleagues are included in these pages. Following the account of
his wartime activities, Sir Max devotes four chapters to his wife's
achievements as a supreme craftsman in puzzling and holding under
her spell innumerable readers, audiences and film-goers throughout
the world. The climax of the memoirs is suitably concerned with the
author's triumphant discoveries at Nimrud or Calah, the ancient
capital of Assyria. Photographs of his most attractive finds are
included among the excellent illustrations to this book.
When Brian Doyle died of brain cancer at the age of sixty, he left
behind dozens of books -- fiction and nonfiction, as well as
hundreds of essays -- and a cult-like following who regarded his
writing on spirituality as one of the best-kept secrets of the 21st
century. Though Doyle occasionally wrote about Catholic
spirituality, his writing is more broadly about the religion of
everyday things. He writes with a delightful sense of wonder about
the holiness of small things, and about love in all its forms:
spiritual love, brotherly love, romantic love, friendly love, love
of nature, and even the love of a nine-foot sturgeon. At a time
when our world feels darker than ever, Doyle's essays are a balm
for the tired soul. He finds beauty in the quotidian: the awe of a
child the first time she hears a river, the whiskers a grieving
widow misses seeing in her sink every day -- but through his eyes,
nothing is ordinary. David James Duncan sums up Doyle's
sensibilities best in his introduction to the collection: "Brian
Doyle lived the pleasure of bearing daily witness to the glories
hidden in people, places and creatures of little or no size or
renown, and brought inimitably playful or soaring or aching or
heartfelt language to his tellings." In a time when wonder seems to
be in short supply, Your One Wild and Precious Life, Doyle and
Duncan invite readers to experience it in the most ordinary of
moments, and allow themselves joy in the smallest of things.
London in Charles Dickens's time was a city of great contrast. The
affluent and middle classes enjoyed a comfortable existence but for
the poor, life was cruel and harsh, the more so for girls and young
women. Many characters in Dickens's classic novels exemplify this:
Little Em'ly in David Copperfield is perhaps the best known.
Dickens was clearly troubled by what he saw and in autumn 1847
established Urania Cottage in Shepherd's Bush as a hostel for
destitute young women. The residents came from prisons, workhouses,
police courts and from the streets of London. They included
prostitutes, petty thieves and homeless teenagers. Urania Cottage
was financed by the millionairess Angela Burdett Coutts of the
banking family and details of the residents, its routines and its
dramas are brought to life in the treasure-trove of letters written
to her by Dickens. The aims of Urania Cottage were simple - to
rehabilitate the residents and prepare them for a normal life as
domestic servants in Britain's expanding colonies - Australia
chiefly but some went to Canada and South Africa.Charles Dickens
and the House of Fallen Women vividly portrays the lot of the poor
in mid-nineteenth century London and some of the people who were
moved to help. Jenny Hartley's meticulous research has revealed the
identities of many of the residents of Urania Cottage and how they
fared later in life. The book is at once moving and dramatic - life
at the cottage didn't always run smoothly - and shows that with
help, even the most deprived people can recover.
![Inadvertent (Paperback): Karl Ove Knausgaard](//media.loot.co.za/images/x80/143214641200179215.jpg) |
Inadvertent
(Paperback)
Karl Ove Knausgaard; Translated by Ingvild Burkey
1
|
R282
R231
Discovery Miles 2 310
Save R51 (18%)
|
Ships in 10 - 15 working days
|
|
The second book in the Why I Write series provides generous insight
into the creative process of the award-winning Norwegian novelist
Karl Ove Knausgaard "Why I Write" may prove to be the most
difficult question Karl Ove Knausgaard has struggled to answer yet
it is central to the project of one of the most influential writers
working today. To write, for the Norwegian artist, is to resist
easy thinking and preconceived notions that inhibit awareness of
our lives. Knausgaard writes to "erode [his] own notions about the
world. . . . It is one thing to know something, another to write
about it." The key to enhanced living is the ability to hit upon
something inadvertently, to regard it from a position of
defenselessness and unknowing. A deeply personal meditation,
Inadvertent is a cogent and accessible guide to the creative
process of one of our most prolific and ingenious artists.
Antonin Artaud's journey to Ireland in 1937 marked an
extraordinary--and apocalyptic--turning point in his life and
career. After publishing the manifesto The New Revelations of Being
about the "catastrophic immediate-future," Artaud abruptly left
Paris for Ireland, remaining there for six weeks without money.
Traveling first to the isolated island of Inishmore off Ireland's
western coast, then to Galway, and finally to Dublin, Artaud was
eventually arrested as an undesirable alien, beaten by the police,
and summarily deported back to France. On his return, he spent nine
years in asylums, remaining there through the entire span of World
War II. During his fateful journey, Artaud wrote letters to friends
in Paris which included several "magic spells," intended to curse
his enemies and protect his friends from the city's forthcoming
incineration and the Antichrist's appearance. (To Andre Breton, he
wrote: "It's the Unbelievable--yes, the Unbelievable--it's the
Unbelievable which is the truth.") This book collects all of
Artaud's surviving correspondence from his time in Ireland, as well
as photographs of the locations he traveled through. Featuring an
afterword and notes by the book's translator, Stephen Barber, this
edition marks the seventieth anniversary of Artaud's death.
When Robert Keable's First World War novel Simon Called Peter was
published, critics called it 'offensive', 'a libel' and reeking of
'drink and lust'. Scott Fitzgerald suggested it was 'utterly
immoral' and referenced it in The Great Gatsby. The novel became a
huge international best-seller, a Broadway play and the sequel made
into a Hollywood movie. And it made its author an international
celebrity. What critics did not know was that the novel, about a
military chaplain and a young woman having an affair during the
war, was autobiographical. Utterly Immoral tells the remarkable
true story of Robert Keable. He was an up-and-coming star of his
Church. Raised in Croydon by evangelical parents he became
increasingly high church while studying at Cambridge and, once
ordained, he travelled to Zanzibar as a missionary. Following the
outbreak of the First World War, he moved to Basutoland to work as
a parish priest. He travelled to France as chaplain to the black
labourers of the SANLC. It was during the war that he began to lose
his faith, dispirited by the appallingly treatment of his men, the
horrors of the war and the implications of his secret affair with
the nineteen-year-old lorry driver, Jolie Buck. Having written
Simon Called Peter he left the church, and his wife, and fled to
Tahiti to live in Paul Gauguin's house. He lived the celebrity life
in Tahiti, marrying a Tahitian princess, dubbed the 'Helen of Troy
of Tahiti'. The author, Robert Keable's grandson, has used letters,
books, articles, interviews and a trip to Tahiti to produce a
fascinating account of Robert Keable's life and the story of the
success of Simon Called Peter.
Called "a vivid picture of literary life along the Left Bank in the
late 1950s and early 1960s . . . [and] fun reading" by Library
Journal, The Beat Hotel is a delightful chronicle of a remarkable
moment in American literary history. From the Howl obscenity trial
to the invention of the cut-up technique, Barry Miles's
extraordinary narrative chronicles the feast of ideas that was
Paris, where the Beats took awestruck audiences with Duchamp and
Celine, and where some of their most important work came to
fruition -- Ginsberg's "Kaddish" and "To Aunt Rose"; Corso's The
Happy Birthday of Death; and Burroughs's Naked Lunch. Based on
firsthand accounts from diaries, letters, and many original
interviews, The Beat Hotel is an intimate look at a place that, the
San Francisco Chronicle has written, "gave the spirit of Dean
Moriarty and the genius of Genet and Duchamp a place to dream
together of new worlds over a glass of vin ordinaire".
During a 1960 interview, East German writer Christa Wolf was asked
a curious question: would she describe in detail what she did on
September 27th? Fascinated by considering the significance of a
single day over many years, Wolf began keeping a detailed diary of
September 27th, a practice which she carried on for more than fifty
years until her death in 2011. The first volume of these notes
covered 1960 through 2000 was published to great acclaim more than
a decade ago. Now translator Katy Derbyshire is bringing the
September 27th collection up to date with One Day a Year-a
collection of Wolf's notes from the last decade of her life. The
book is both a personal record and a unique document of our times.
With her characteristic precision and transparency, Wolf examines
the interplay of the private, subjective, and major contemporary
historical events. She writes about Germany after 9/11, about her
work on her last great book City of Angels, and also about her
exhausting confrontation with old age. One Day a Year is a
compelling and personal glimpse into the life of one of the world's
greatest writers.
The first comprehensive study of the lifework of Guo Moruo
(1892-1978) in English, this book explores the dynamics of
translation, revolution, and historical imagination in
twentieth-century Chinese culture. Guo was a romantic writer who
eventually became Mao Zedong's last poetic interlocutor; a Marxist
historian who evolved into the inaugural president of China's
Academy of Sciences; and a leftist politician who devoted almost
three decades to translating Goethe's Faust. His career, embedded
in China's revolutionary century, has generated more controversy
than admiration. Recent scholarship has scarcely treated his oeuvre
as a whole, much less touched upon his role as a translator.
Leaping between different genres of Guo's works, and engaging many
other writers' texts, The Translatability of Revolution confronts
two issues of revolutionary cultural politics: translation and
historical interpretation. Part 1 focuses on the translingual
making of China's revolutionary culture, especially Guo's
translation of Faust as a "development of Zeitgeist." Part 2 deals
with Guo's rewritings of antiquity in lyrical, dramatic, and
historiographical-paleographical forms, including his vernacular
translation of classical Chinese poetry. Interrogating the
relationship between translation and historical imagination-within
revolutionary cultural practice-this book finds a transcoding of
different historical conjunctures into "now-time," saturated with
possibilities and tensions.
Complete with fresh perspectives, and drawing on the latest
scholarship and biographical sources, The Life of D. H. Lawrence
spans the full range of his intellectual interests and creative
output to offer new insights into Lawrence s life, work, and
legacy. * Addresses his major works, but also lesser-known writings
in different genres and his late paintings, in order to reassess
the innovative, challenging, and subversive aspects of Lawrence s
personality and writing * Incorporates newly-discovered sources,
including correspondence, a manuscript written in 1923-4, new
evidence for important influences on his major novels and two
previously unpublished images of the author * Emphasizes Lawrence s
gregarious nature, his desire to collaborate with others, and his
adaptability to different social situations * Pays particular
attention to the many interactions with literary advisors, editors,
agents, publishers, and printers that were required for him to work
as a professional writer * Combines new material with astute
commentary to provide a nuanced understanding of one of the most
prolific and controversial authors of the twentieth century
In 1907, author, poet, essayist, and folk art historian Eliza
Calvert Hall (1856--1935) published Aunt Jane of Kentucky, a
collection of stories about rural life infused with the spirit and
gentle good humor of its elderly narrator, Aunt Jane. The book and
several sequels achieved wide popularity, reaching an estimated one
million readers in her lifetime, and placed Hall in the front ranks
of "local color" fiction writers of her time. Eliza Calvert Hall's
life and work unfolded during a time of restlessness and change for
American women. Born Eliza "Lida" Calvert in Bowling Green,
Kentucky, Hall experienced the upheaval of both the Civil War and
family scandal. Forced to help support her mother and four siblings
by teaching school, she became a published poet, adopting her
grandmother's name, Hall, as her pseudonym. At twenty-nine, she
married William A. Obenchain, and in the space of eight years gave
birth to four children. As Hall struggled to balance her writing
career with the duties of a nineteenth-century wife and mother,
suffragist Laura Clay was lobbying for every woman's right to vote.
Hall joined the battle, writing fearlessly in support of suffrage
and equality. While her passionate essays served as a direct appeal
for this cause, her creative writing also carried a feminist
spirit, celebrating the strength, humor, love, and art of the
common woman. In Eliza Calvert Hal: Kentucky Author and
Suffragistl, Lynn E. Niedermeier tells the story of this remarkable
Kentuckian for the first time. Hall's challenge was to balance the
artist's creative ambitions with the crusader's passion for
achieving the goal of political equality for American women. Her
successes did not stem from privilege or leisure; although she was
an acclaimed writer, Hall was an ordinary woman, a wife and mother
of moderate economic means. Through the power of her words, she
challenged others to match her courage, independence, intellectual
energy, and loyalty to her sex.
THE LIFE OF THE AUTHOR An expansive biography of John Milton,
including an assessment of his poetry and prose and an account of
the ways in which he has been presented over the past three and a
half centuries--written by a leading scholar in the field It is
hard to overstate the role that John Milton played in the
historical, political and literary controversies of seventeenth
century England; his writings and very life challenged the status
quo. Living through one of the most tumultuous periods in British
history, Milton was involved at every turn. Struggling to reconcile
his private beliefs with his involvement with a radical political
experiment, a republic which involved the killing of the monarch,
his star rose and fell several times during his life. Married three
times, struck blind at a cruelly early age, he was a famed
pamphleteer and political activist whose revolutionary political
credos placed him in mortal danger after the Restoration. Milton's
varied life makes for fascinating reading but it also produced some
of the most important poetry in the English language. Paradise
Lost, the only poem in English recognized as an epic, challenged
conventional thinking on widespread topics from religion and gender
equality to the fundamental question of why we behave as we do.
This fascinating new biography is divided into two parts. The first
separates the man from the myth, and elucidates the complicated
details of Milton's life from his early years as a literary artist
uncertain of his destiny, through his work as a propagandist for
the Cromwellian republic, to his rewriting of the Old Testament
story of the Fall as a poetic allegory of more recent history. The
second looks at how biographers and critics from the seventeenth
century to the present day have distorted and manipulated the
personality of Milton to suit their biases. Balancing accessibility
with academic rigor, this volume: Examines the significant aspects
of Milton's life and work, including his poetry and prose, his
government writings, his travels, and his final years Explores
Milton's Protestant and republican influences in Paradise Lost,
Paradise Regained, and his other literary works Highlights the
differences and similarities between Milton's poetry and political
prose Follows the history of biographical and critical
presentations of Milton from the seventeenth century onwards,
including his adoption as a hero of Romanticism and his survival in
the twentieth century as, allegedly, a sceptical humanist Addresses
modern critiques of Milton in Marxism, Feminism, and other branches
of Theory The Life of the Author: John Milton. Poet and
Revolutionary is essential reading for undergraduate and graduate
students, university lecturers, and academic researchers in
relevant fields, particularly seventeenth century poetry and
history, as well as literary biography and the history of
criticism.
The definitive biography of Soviet Jewish dissident writer Vasily
Grossman If Vasily Grossman's 1961 masterpiece, Life and Fate, had
been published during his lifetime, it would have reached the world
together with Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and before Solzhenitsyn's
Gulag. But Life and Fate was seized by the KGB. When it emerged
posthumously, decades later, it was recognized as the War and Peace
of the twentieth century. Always at the epicenter of events,
Grossman (1905-1964) was among the first to describe the Holocaust
and the Ukrainian famine. His 1944 article "The Hell of Treblinka"
became evidence at Nuremberg. Grossman's powerful anti-totalitarian
works liken the Nazis' crimes against humanity with those of
Stalin. His compassionate prose has the everlasting quality of
great art. Because Grossman's major works appeared after much delay
we are only now able to examine them properly. Alexandra Popoff's
authoritative biography illuminates Grossman's life and legacy.
'A searing, triumphant story. A testament to the tenacity of the
human spirit as well as a beautiful ode to an iconic figure'
IRENOSEN OKOJIE Letters to Gil is Malik Al Nasir's profound coming
of age memoir - the story of surviving physical and racial abuse
and discovering a new sense of self-worth under the wing of the
great artist, poet and civil rights activist Gil Scott-Heron. Born
in Liverpool, Malik was taken into care at the age of nine after
his seafaring father became paralysed. He would spend his
adolescence in a system that proved violent, neglectful,
exploitative, traumatising and mired in abuse. Aged eighteen, he
emerged semi-literate, penniless with no connections or sense of
where he was going - until a chance meeting with Gil Scott-Heron.
Letters to Gil will tell the story of Malik's empowerment and
awakening while mentored by Gil, from his introduction to the
legacy of Black history to the development of his voice through
poetry and music. Written with lyricism and power, it is a frank
and moving memoir, highlighting how institutional racism can
debilitate and disadvantage a child, as well as how mentoring,
creativity, self-expression and solidarity helped him to uncover
his potential.
Chloe has been very successful in building her audience, and they
have a personal investment in and connection to her work (sales,
and attention, for her previous books, far outstrip what you'd
expect from such small publishing houses) Chloe's engaging
frankness, her willingness to be openly muddled and messy, has
earned her visible celebrity fans with very real power to support
the work (including Cheryl Strayed, who she nannied for, and Lena
Dunham) These essays are explicitly personal, but their underlying
questions are relatable even if you have never been young and
aimless in Berlin, or a 20-year-old jewelry
saleswoman/scofflaw-they ask, to borrow from Heti, how should a
person be. How do you grow up? How do you manage desires versus
responsibilities? How do you know when you've gotten there? This is
our second Emily Books title, and they are Chloe are already raring
to go. Women was a selection for their book club, and that base
will also be activated to promote the book via social media and
events.
|
|