'A brilliant, unlikely book' Spectator How can we celebrate, challenge and change our remarkable world? In 2012, the world arrived in London for the Olympics...and Ann Morgan went out to meet it. She read her way around all the globe's 196 independent countries (plus one extra), sampling one book from every nation. It wasn't easy. Many languages have next to nothing translated into English; there are tiny, tucked-away places where very little is written down; some governments don't like to let works of art escape their borders. Using Morgan's own quest as a starting point, Reading the World explores the vital questions of our time and how reading across borders might just help us answer them. 'Revelatory... While Morgan's research has a daunting range...there is a simple message: reading is a social activity, and we ought to share books across boundaries' Financial Times

1599 was an epochal year for Shakespeare and England

Shakespeare wrote four of his most famous plays: Henry the Fifth, Julius Caesar, As You Like It, and, most remarkably, Hamlet; Elizabethans sent off an army to crush an Irish rebellion, weathered an Armada threat from Spain, gambled on a fledgling East India Company, and waited to see who would succeed their aging and childless queen.

James Shapiro illuminates both Shakespeare's staggering achievement and what Elizabethans experienced in the course of 1599, bringing together the news and the intrigue of the times with a wonderful evocation of how Shakespeare worked as an actor, businessman, and playwright. The result is an exceptionally immediate and gripping account of an inspiring moment in history.

'I had only one eye, I was hungry and cold, yet I wanted to live... so that I could tell it all just as I've told you.' - From Zofia Nalkowska's Medallions (1947). Witness to two world wars and Poland's struggle for independence, Zofia Nalkowska's commitment to recording all is her gift to European literature. Her own story of love affairs, family loyalty and survival is remarkable in itself. Yet, her determination to record others' truth, however painful, ties her fate to a nation whose battle for identity is both brutal and romantic. Her most renowned work, Medallions, a collection of short stories, exposes and restores dignity to people reduced, through Nazi occupation, to burnt out ghettos and guillotined heads heaped 'like potatoes'. In contrast, as a keen and visionary observer of beauty, Nalkowska is innovative in exploring motherhood's psychological imprint and the blurred boundaries of male and female relationships. Drawing on her own background as a poet and Polish Studies graduate, Jenny's Robertson's literary biography celebrates the achievements of a pioneering writer whose love of life not only propelled her to fame, but gave her the courage to witness atrocity. In doing so, Nalkowska's life and writing reflect and inform Europe's cultural heritage.

A love letter from one of the world’s best living writers to one of its most cherished poets.

Clive James is a life-long admirer of the work of Philip Larkin. Somewhere Becoming Rain gathers all of James’s writing on this towering literary figure of the twentieth century, together with extra material now published for the first time.

The greatness of Larkin’s poetry continues to be obscured by the opprobrium attaching to his personal life and his private opinions. James writes about Larkin’s poems, his novels, his jazz and literary criticism; he also considers the two major biographies, Larkin’s letters and even his portrayal on stage in order to chart the extreme and, he argues, largely misguided equivocations about Larkin’s reputation in the years since his death.

Through this joyous and perceptive book, Larkin’s genius is delineated and celebrated. James argues that Larkin’s poems, adored by discriminating readers for over half a century, could only have been the product of his reticent, diffident, flawed, and all-too-human personality.

Erudite and entertaining in equal measure, Somewhere Becoming Rain is a love letter from one of the world’s best living writers to one of its most cherished poets.

'An unknown place.' This was what Michael Frayn's children called the shadowy landscape of the past from which their family had emerged. Shortlisted for the Costa Book Awards, My Father's Fortune sets out to rediscover that lost land before all trace of it finally disappears beyond recall. As Frayn tries to see it through the eyes of his parents and the others who shaped his life, he comes to realise how little he ever knew or understood about them. This is above all the story of his father, the quick-witted boy from a poor and struggling family, who overcame disadvantages and shouldered many burdens to make a go of his life; who found happiness, had it snatched away from him, and in the end, after many difficulties, perhaps found it again. Father and son were in some ways incredibly alike, in others ridiculously different; and the journey back down the corridors of time is sometimes comic, sometimes painful, as Michael Frayn comes to see how much he has inherited from his father and makes one or two surprising discoveries along the way. Michael Frayn is the celebrated author of fifteen plays including Noises Off, Copenhagen and Afterlife. His bestselling novels include Headlong, which was shortlisted for the Man Booker Prize, Spies, which won the Whitbread Best Novel Award and Skios, which was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize.

For nearly sixty years Somerset Maugham (1874-1965) was one of the most famous writers in the world. An enormously successful playwright and the author of over a hundred short stories and twenty-one novels - several of which are now established classics - Maugham expertly concealed a private life. Predominantly homosexual, and deeply in love with the charming but dissolute Gerald Haxton, he made a disastrous marriage to Syrie Wellcome which he would escape by travelling and writing extensively in the Far East. A talented linguist, during both world wars Maugham worked for British Intelligence. In between he moved in literary and theatrical circles in London, New York and Hollywood and entertained lavishly at his luxurious villa in the south of France. Outwardly his life was richly rewarding, but privately he suffered anguish from an unrequited love affair and a shocking final betrayal. Acclaimed biographer Selina Hastings has had access to Maugham's extensive private correspondence as well as to important family testimony, which sheds a fascinating new light on this complex and extraordinary man.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

The Life of William Shakespeare is a fascinating and wide-ranging exploration of Shakespeare's life and works focusing on oftern neglected literary and historical contexts: what Shakespeare read, who he worked with as an author and an actor, and how these various collaborations may have affected his writing. * Written by an eminent Shakespearean scholar and experienced theatre reviewer * Pays particular attention to Shakespeare's theatrical contemporaries and the ways in which they influenced his writing * Offers an intriguing account of the life and work of the great poet-dramatist structured around the idea of memory * Explores often neglected literary and historical contexts that illuminate Shakespeare's life and works

'Exquisite in its honesty and truth and resilience, and a necessary chronicle from one of the greatest writers of our time' Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Selected as a Book of the Year 2016 in the Guardian When Ngugi wa Thiong'o arrives at the prestigious Makerere University, it embodies all the potential and excitement of the early 1960s. Campus is a haven of opportunity for the brightest African students, a meeting place for thinkers and writers from all over the world, and its alumni are filling Africa's emerging political and cultural positions. Despite the challenges he faces as a young black man in a British colony, it is here that Ngugi begins to find his voice as a playwright, journalist and novelist, writing his first, pivotal works just as the countries of East Africa enter the final stages of their independence struggles.

This is a short, readable introduction to Oscar Wilde's life, work and afterlife. Oscar Wilde's reputation has shifted dramatically during the twentieth century from outcast in the wake of his trials for homosexual offences, to martyr to the gay cause in the 1980s and 90s, to important figure in the history of writing in English. Ruth Robbins introduces Wilde through a focus on his manipulations of genre and sets Wilde's life and work in its literary and cultural context, including the history of Victorian drama; the contexts of criticism in the period; poetry as post-romantic and pre-modernist mode of expression; the uses and subversions of fictional forms in his work; and his subversion of the autobiographical mode in his prison letter "De Profundis". This comprehensive and readable introduction offers readers and students a lively and informative guide to Wilde's significance in the context of his own time and his extensive afterlife in literature, criticism and popular culture. It offers concise, accessible introductions to major writers focusing equally on their life and works. Written in a lively style to appeal to both students and readers, books in the series are ideal guides to authors and their writing.

Mireille Gansel grew up in the traumatic aftermath of her family losing everything-including their native languages-to Nazi Germany. In the 1960s and 70s, she translated poets from East Berlin and Vietnam to help broadcast their defiance to the rest of the world. In this half memoire, half philosophical treatise Gansel's debut illustrates the estrangement every translator experiences for the privilege of moving between tongues, and muses on how translation becomes an exercise of empathy between those in exile.

FINALIST: 2022 PULITZER PRIZE IN BIOGRAPHY A NEW STATESMAN AND SPECTATOR BOOK OF THE YEAR 2021 'A revelation. Such a revolutionary literary discovery seems unlikely to be on offer again. It's that good' Sunday Times 'A masterpiece of literary biography. Zenith has produced a work in some ways as astonishing as those of Pessoa himself' John Gray, New Statesman For many thousands of readers Fernando Pessoa's The Book of Disquiet is almost a way of life. Ironic, haunting and melancholy, this completely unclassifiable work is the masterpiece of one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic writers. Richard Zenith's Pessoa at last allows us to understand this extraordinary figure. Some eighty-five years after his premature death in Lisbon, where he left over 25,000 manuscript sheets in a wooden trunk, Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) can now be celebrated as one of the great modern poets. Setting the story of his life against the nationalistic currents of European history, Zenith charts the heights of Pessoa's explosive imagination and literary genius. Much of Pessoa's charm and strangeness came from his writing under a variety of names that he used not only to conceal his identity but also to write in wildly varied styles with different imagined personalities. Zenith traces the back stories of virtually all of these invented others, called 'heteronyms', demonstrating how they were projections, spin-offs or metamorphoses of Pessoa himself. Zenith's monumental work confirms the power of Pessoa's words to speak prophetically to the disconnectedness of modern life. It is also a wonderful book about Lisbon, the city which Pessoa reinvented and through which his different selves wandered. 'Definitive and sublime' New York Times 'Completely superb and magisterial. Finally, this extraordinary poet gets the great biography he deserves. Unsurpassable' William Boyd

A voracious pack-rat, Mark Twain hoarded his readers' letters as did few of his contemporaries. Dear Mark Twain collects 200 of these letters written by a diverse cross-section of correspondents from around the world - children, farmers, schoolteachers, businessmen, preachers, railroad clerks, inmates of mental institutions, con artists, and even a former president. It is a unique and groundbreaking book - the first published collection of reader letters to any writer of Mark Twain's time. Its contents afford a rare and exhilarating glimpse into the sensibilities of nineteenth-century people while revealing the impact Samuel L. Clemens had on his readers. Clemens' own and often startling comments and replies are also included. R. Kent Rasmussen's extensive research provides fascinating profiles of the correspondents, whose personal stories are often as interesting as their letters. Ranging from gushing fan appreciations and requests for help and advice to suggestions for writing projects and stinging criticisms, the letters are filled with perceptive insights, pathos, and unintentional but often riotous humor. Many are deeply moving, more than a few are hilarious, some may be shocking, but none are dull.

This new biography of famed American novelist Philip Roth offers a full account of his development as a writer. Philip Roth was much more than a Jewish writer from Newark, as this new biography reveals. His life encompassed writing some of the most original novels in American literature, publishing censored writers from Eastern Europe, surviving less than satisfactory marriages, and developing friendships with a number of the most important writers of his time from Primo Levi and Milan Kundera to Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow and Edna O'Brien. The winner of a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and the Man Booker International Prize, Roth maintained a remarkable productivity throughout a career that spanned almost fifty years, creating 31 works. But beneath the success was illness, angst, and anxiety often masked from his readers. This biography, drawing on archives, interviews and his books, delves into the shaded world of Philip Roth to identify the ghosts, the character, and even identity of the man.

This book is a volume in the Penn Press Anniversary Collection. To mark its 125th anniversary in 2015, the University of Pennsylvania Press rereleased more than 1,100 titles from Penn Press's distinguished backlist from 1899-1999 that had fallen out of print. Spanning an entire century, the Anniversary Collection offers peer-reviewed scholarship in a wide range of subject areas.

Stephen Whicher's Freedom and Fate begins with a tribute to Ralph Rusk's monumental biography The Life of Ralph Waldo Emerson, acknowledging its supremacy as a factual telling of Emerson's life that cannot be surpassed. Whicher's book aims to be a complement to the painstakingly researched outer life of Emerson by focusing on the great sage's inner life-not just his intellectual biography but the very nature of his thinking. Whicher stresses the life of "spectator-ship" that the young Emerson, perpetually ill as he turned out to be, was condemned to. His writings, especially his private thoughts recorded in his journals, document the ebb and flow of his spirit, alternatively listless and resolute.

December 1862 drove the United States towards a breaking point. The Battle of Fredericksburg shattered Union forces and Northern confidence. As Abraham Lincoln's government threatened to fracture, this critical moment also tested five extraordinary individuals whose lives reflect the soul of a nation. The changes they underwent led to profound repercussions in the country's law, literature, politics and popular mythology. Taken together, their stories offer a striking restatement of what it means to be American. Guided by patriotism, driven by desire, all five moved towards singular destinies. A young Harvard intellectual steeped in courageous ideals, Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr confronted grave challenges to his concept of duty. The one-eyed army chaplain Arthur Fuller pitted his frail body against the evils of slavery. Walt Whitman-a gay Brooklyn poet condemned by the guardians of propriety; and Louisa May Alcott-a struggling writer, seeking an authentic voice and her father's admiration-tended soldiers' wracked bodies as nurses. On the other side of the national schism, John Pelham, a West Point cadet from Alabama, achieved a unique excellence in artillery tactics as he served a doomed and misbegotten cause. A Worse Place Than Hell brings together the prodigious forces of war with the intimacy of individual lives. Matteson interweaves the historic and the personal in a work as beautiful as it is powerful.

In the 1890s Oscar Wilde enjoyed one of the most high-profile reputations in Britain; yet, virtually overnight, he was plunged into disgrace and ruin. What were the reasons for this extraordinary reversal of fortune? Ashley Robins explores Wilde's motivation in prosecuting the Marquess of Queensberry, and elaborates on the precarious legal situation that effectively quashed any prospect of a withdrawal from the lawsuit without dire consequences. He examines the medical and psychiatric aspects of Wilde's two-year imprisonment and reveals -- for the first time and based on the original Home Office records -- the machinations among prison officials and doctors to cover up Wilde's state of health. Wilde's medical history is presented with an expert evaluation of his terminal illness, including a resolution of the syphilis controversy. Robins details Wilde's tangled matrimonial affairs during his imprisonment and goes on to disclose the manoeuvres adopted by friends to secure his early release, citing hitherto unpublished letters to show that bribery of prison personnel was seriously contemplated. The issue of homosexuality is discussed not only in relation to Oscar Wilde but from the broader historical, legal and biological perspective. The author portrays Wilde's character and behaviour through the images he projected onto society, by the strong but mixed public reaction to him, and by the quality of his interpersonal relationships with his wife, family and close friends. Finally, Wilde's personality is assessed using internationally accepted diagnostic criteria; and, in an unusual and innovative experiment, a group of Wildean scholars completed a psychological questionnaire as if they were doing so for Oscar Wilde himself. Drawing on these findings and on his own extensive psychiatric experience, Ashley Robins concludes that Wilde had a disorder of personality that culminated in the final and tragic phase of his life.

'The Tongue Set Free is so beautifully written. It begins wtih an extraordinary image, Canetti's earliest memory. He comes out of a room. A man makes him stick out his tongue; if he talks he will cut it off. Years later Canetti realises that this was his nursemaid's lover, frightening him into silence about their rendezvous. The idea of speaking as the entry into forbidden grown-up life dominates this book. When he is seven his father dies. He is propelled from childhood into adulthood, from his father to his mother, through language. In an extraordinary, cruel episode his mother forces him to learn perfect adult German in three months, to replace her husband as quickly as possible. His tongue is set free: he has won his mother, against brothers , against all lovers. It is the most intense Oedipal relationhsip I have ever seen described and Canetti describes it brilliantly. But it's all extraordinary, and all masterfully written. There are wonderful descriptions of Canetti's first oriental, medieval home in pre-World War l Bulgaria: of his later homes in Manchester, in Vienna, in Switzerland. There are unforgettable portraits. The values of Auto da Fe are given a human history and a human face' New Statesman

This is a new release of the original 1949 edition.

Gregory Sumner guides readers through a biography of 15 of Kurt Vonnegut's best known works, giving them a poignant portrait of Vonnegut and his resistance to celebrating the traditional values associated with the American dream - grandiose ambition, unbridled material success and individualism.