Although his hilariously entertaining stories have touched the hearts of generations of children, there was much more to beloved author Roald Dahl than met the eye. His fascinating life began in Norway in 1916, and he became a highly rebellious teenager who delighted in defying authority before joining the RAF as a fighter pilot. But after his plane crashed in the African desert he was left with agonising injuries and unable to fly. He was dispatched to New York where, as a dashing young air attache, he enraptured societies greatest beauties and became friends with President Roosevelt. Roald soon found himself entangled with a highly complex network of British undercover operations. Eventually he grew tired of the secrecy of spying and retreated to the English countryside. He married twice and had five children, but his life was also affected by serious illness, tragedy and loss. He wrote a number of stories for adults, many of which were televised as the hugely popular Tales of the Unexpected, but it was as a children's author that he found greatest fame and satisfaction, saying "I have a passion for teaching kids to become readers...Books shouldn't be daunting, they should be funny, exciting and wonderful." From 1945 until his death in 1990, he lived in Buckinghamshire, where he wrote his most celebrated children's books including Matilda, Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Fantastic Mr Fox.

A critical reading of Jean Genet's last 18 years, through his politics, writings and personal experience.

Anne of Green Gables is a worldwide phenomenon that has sold over fifty million copies and inspired numerous films, plays, musicals, and television series. It has turned Prince Edward Island into a multimillion-dollar tourist destination visited by hundreds of thousands of people each year. In The Landscapes of Anne of Green Gables, Catherine Reid reveals how Lucy Maud Montgomery's deep connection to the landscape inspired her to write Anne of Green Gables. From the Lake of Shining Waters and the Haunted Wood to Lover's Lane, readers will be immersed in the real places immortalised in the novel. Using Montgomery's journals, archives, and scrapbooks, Reid explores the many similarities between Montgomery and her unforgettable heroine, Anne Shirley. The lush package includes Montgomery's hand-colorised photographs, the illustrations originally used in Anne of Green Gables, and contemporary and historical photography.

Soon after its publication on 30 September 1868, Little Women became an enormous international bestseller. When Anne Boyd Rioux read it in her twenties, it had a powerful effect on her and through teaching it, she has seen its effect on many others. In Meg, Jo, Beth, Amy, she recounts Louisa May Alcott's inspiration for the book and examines why this tale set in the American Civil War has resonated through time. Alcott's novel has moved generations of women, amongst them writers such as Simone de Beauvoir, J.K. Rowling, Cynthia Ozick and Ursula K. Le Guin. Rioux sees the novel's beating heart in its portrayal of family resilience and its look at the struggles of girls growing into women. In gauging its current status, she shows why it remains a book with such power that people carry its characters and spirit throughout their lives.

The critically acclaimed biography of a man respected for his fierce commitment to truth and honesty, and his passionate belief in the avant-garde. In his heyday, during the 1960s and early 1970s, B. S. Johnson was one of the best-known young novelists in Britain. A passionate advocate for the avant-garde in both literature and film, he became famous -- not to say notorious -- both for his forthright views on the future of the novel and for his idiosyncratic ways of putting them into practice. But in November 1973 Johnson's lifelong depression got the better of him, and he was found dead at his north London home. He had taken his own life at the age of forty. Jonathan Coe's long-awaited biography is based upon unique access to the vast collection of papers Johnson left behind after his death, and upon dozens of interviews with those who knew him best. As unconventional in form as one of its subject's own novels, it paints a remarkable picture -- sometimes hilarious, often overwhelmingly sad -- of a tortured personality; a man whose writing tragically failed to keep at bay the demons that pursued him.

A brilliant personal history from the award-winning author of 'The Corrections'. Jonathan Franzen, bestselling author of 'Freedom' and the highly acclaimed 'The Corrections', arrived late, and last, in a family of boys in Webster Groves, Missouri. 'The Discomfort Zone' is his intimate memoir of his growth from a 'small and fundamentally ridiculous person,' through an adolescence both excruciating and strangely happy, into an adult with embarrassing and unexpected passions. It's also a portrait of a middle-class family weathering the turbulence of the 1970s, and a vivid personal insight into the decades in which America took an angry turn away from its mid-century ideals. He tells of the effects of Kafka's fiction on Franzen's protracted quest to lose his virginity, the elaborate pranks that he and his friends orchestrated from the roof of his high school, his self-inflicted travails in selling his mother's house after her death, the web of connections between his all-consuming marriage, the problem of global warming, and the life lessons to be learned in watching birds. Sparkling, daring and arrestingly honest, 'The Discomfort Zone' is warmed by the same combination of comic scrutiny and unqualified affection that characterize Franzen's fiction. It narrates the formation of a unique mind and heart in the crucible of an everyday American family.

'I went & sat with W & walked backwards & forwards in the Orchard till dinner time - he read me his poem. I broiled Beefsteaks.' Dorothy Wordsworth's journals are a unique record of her life with her brother William, at the time when he was at the height of his poetic powers. Invaluable for the insight they give into the daily life of the poet and his friendship with Coleridge, they are also remarkable for their spontaneity and immediacy, and for the vivid descriptions of people, places, and incidents that inspired some of Wordsworth's best-loved poems. The Grasmere Journal was begun at Dove Cottage in May 1800 and kept for three years. Dorothy notes the walks and the weather, the friends, country neighbours and beggars on the roads; she sets down accounts of the garden, of Wordsworth's marriage, their concern for Coleridge, the composition of poetry. The earlier Alfoxden Journal was written during 1797-8, when the Wordsworths lived near Coleridge in Somerset .Not intended for publication, but to 'give Wm Pleasure by it', both journals have a quality recognized by Wordsworth when he wrote of Dorothy that 'she gave me eyes, she gave me ears'. This edition brings the reader closer to the hurried flow of Dorothy's writing and includes rich explanatory notes about the places and people described in the journals. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Jose Marti (1853-1895) was the founding hero of Cuban independence. In all of modern Latin American history, arguably only the "Great Liberator" Simon Bolivar rivals Marti in stature and legacy. Beyond his accomplishments as a revolutionary and political thinker, Marti was a giant of Latin American letters, whose poetry, essays, and journalism still rank among the most important works of the region. Today he is revered by both the Castro regime and the Cuban exile community, whose shared veneration of the "apostle" of freedom has led to his virtual apotheosis as a national saint. In Jose Marti: A Revolutionary Life, Alfred J. Lopez presents the definitive biography of the Cuban patriot and martyr. Writing from a nonpartisan perspective and drawing on years of research using original Cuban and U.S. sources, including materials never before used in a Marti biography, Lopez strips away generations of mythmaking and portrays Marti as Cuba's greatest founding father and one of Latin America's literary and political giants, without suppressing his public missteps and personal flaws. In a lively account that engrosses like a novel, Lopez traces the full arc of Marti's eventful life, from his childhood and adolescence in Cuba, to his first exile and subsequent life in Spain, Mexico City, and Guatemala, through his mature revolutionary period in New York City and much-mythologized death in Cuba on the battlefield at Dos Rios. The first major biography of Marti in over half a century and the first ever in English, Jose Marti is the most substantial examination of Marti's life and work ever published.

Aristocrat, literary celebrity, 'Rose Queen', devoted wife, lesbian, recluse, iconoclast - Vita Sackville-West was many things, but she was never straightforward. Her life is re-told here in a dazzling new biography. Vita Sackville-West was a woman who defied categorisation. She was the dispossessed girl whose lonely childhood at Knole inspired enduring feats of imagination, the celebrated author and poet, the adored and affectionate wife whose marriage included passionate homosexual affairs (most famously with Virginia Woolf ), and the recluse who found in nature and her garden at Sissinghurst Castle solace from the contradictions of her extraordinary life. In this dazzling new biography, Matthew Dennison traces these complexities, depicting a prolific, radical, sensitive and uncompromising figure in all her depth.

"Everyone is female, and everyone hates it." So begins Andrea Long Chu's genre-defying investigation into sex and lies, desperate artists and reckless politics, the smothering embrace of gender and the punishing force of desire. Drawing inspiration from a forgotten play by Valerie Solanas-the woman who wrote the SCUM Manifesto and shot Andy Warhol-Chu aims her searing wit and surgical intuition at targets ranging from performance art to psychoanalysis, incels to porn, and even feminists like herself. Each step of the way she defends the indefensible claim that femaleness is less a biological state of women and more a fatal existential condition that afflicts the entire human race-men, women, and everyone else. Or maybe she's just projecting. A thrilling new voice who has been credited with launching the "second wave" of trans studies, Chu shows readers how to write for your life, baring herself with a morbid sense of humor and a mordant kind of hope.

Originally published in 1994. The Romance of Real Life aims to reconstruct historically the life and writings of Charles Brockden Brown in terms of their cultural connection. Watts examines in detail Brown's early and later writings. By looking at these often-neglected works more closely, he offers a new perspective on the well-known novels from the late 1790s. Watts's synthetic look at genre as well as chronology reveals broader connections between Brown's literature and American society and culture in the decades of the early republic. Furthermore, Watts situates Brown's writings in terms of the interplay of text, context, and the self, with each factor recognized as mutually shaping the others. The Romance of Real Life incorporates sensitivity to the "social history of ideas," in which both the form and content of language remain rooted in the material experience of real life.

The Jameses are perhaps the most extraordinary and distinguished family in American intellectual life. Henry's novels, celebrated as among the finest in the language, and William's groundbreaking philosophical and psychological works, have won these brothers a permanent place at the center of the nation's cultural firmament. Less well known is their enigmatic younger sister, Alice. As Jean Strouse's generous, probing, and deeply imaginative biography shows, however, Alice James was a fascinating and exceptional figure in her own right. Tortured throughout her short life by an array of nervous disorders, constrained by social convention from achieving the worldly success she so desired, Alice nevertheless emerges from this remarkable book as a personality every bit as peculiar and engaging as her two famous brothers. "The moral and philosophical questions that Henry wrote up as fiction and William as science," writes Strouse, "Alice simply lived." With a psychological penetration and high eloquence that are altogether Jamesian, Strouse traces the formation of a unique identity, from Alice's unconventional peripatetic childhood in continental Europe through her years of spinsterhood in the United States and later England. It was there that she began to keep her celebrated diary, full of fitting social observation and unblinking self-analysis. "I consider myself one of the most potent creations of my time," she wrote to William, with characteristic tartness, towards the end of her life, "and though I may not have a group of Harvard students sitting at my feet drinking in psychic truth, I shall not tremble, I assure you, at
the last trump."

Until now it has been impossible to read the full story of the relationship between Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre. Their dramatic rupture at the height of the Cold War, like that conflict itself, demanded those caught in its wake to take sides rather than to appreciate its tragic complexity. Now, using newly available sources, Ronald Aronson offers the first book-length account of the twentieth century's most famous friendship and its end.
Albert Camus and Jean-Paul Sartre first met in 1943, during the German occupation of France. The two became fast friends. Intellectual as well as political allies, they grew famous overnight after Paris was liberated. As playwrights, novelists, philosophers, journalists, and editors, the two seemed to be everywhere and in command of every medium in post-war France. East-West tensions would put a strain on their friendship, however, as they evolved in opposing directions and began to disagree over philosophy, the responsibilities of intellectuals, and what sorts of political changes were necessary or possible.
As Camus, then Sartre adopted the mantle of public spokesperson for his side, a historic showdown seemed inevitable. Sartre embraced violence as a path to change and Camus sharply opposed it, leading to a bitter and very public falling out in 1952. They never spoke again, although they continued to disagree, in code, until Camus's death in 1960.
In a remarkably nuanced and balanced account, Aronson chronicles this riveting story while demonstrating how Camus and Sartre developed first in connection with and then against each other, each keeping the other in his sights long after their break. Combining biography and intellectualhistory, philosophical and political passion, "Camus and Sartre" will fascinate anyone interested in these great writers or the world-historical issues that tore them apart.

'If a thing loves, it is infinite' William Blake A short, impassioned argument for why the visionary artist William Blake is important in the twenty-first century The visionary poet and painter William Blake is a constant presence throughout contemporary culture - from videogames to novels, from sporting events to political rallies and from horror films to designer fashion. Although he died nearly 200 years ago, something about his work continues to haunt the twenty-first century. What is it about Blake that has so endured? In this illuminating essay, John Higgs takes us on a whirlwind tour to prove that far from being the mere New Age counterculture figure that many assume him to be, Blake is now more relevant than ever.

#4 on The New York Times' list of The 50 Best Memoirs of the Past 50 Years The New York Times bestselling, hilarious tale of a hardscrabble Texas childhood that Oprah.com calls the best memoir of a generation--now with a foreword by Lena Dunham in celebration of its twentieth anniversary "Wickedly funny and always movingly illuminating, thanks to kick-ass storytelling and a poet's ear." --Oprah.com The Liars' Club took the world by storm and raised the art of the memoir to an entirely new level, bringing about a dramatic revival of the form. Karr's comic childhood in an east Texas oil town brings us characters as darkly hilarious as any of J. D. Salinger's--a hard-drinking daddy, a sister who can talk down the sheriff at age twelve, and an oft-married mother whose accumulated secrets threaten to destroy them all. This unsentimental and profoundly moving account of an apocalyptic childhood is as "funny, lively, and un-put-downable" (USA Today) today as it ever was. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,500 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

Who is Theophrastus, and why should we care? Once, he was the equal of Plato and Aristotle. Together he and Aristotle invented science. Alone he invented Botany. The character of the Wife of Bath is his invention, the Canterbury Tales as a whole, perhaps, the product of his inspiration. When Linnaeus was developing our modern system of plant taxonomy, it was Theophrastus' work on plants that he used as a basis. So how could one man do so much and still sink almost without a trace? This is the story of a journey to find him and bring him back from oblivion. Looking for Theophrastus, in all the places he must have walked and lived, it tells how he and Aristotle, his friend and tutor, broke with the philosophical conventions of the Academy and left on their own adventure; of how together they invented what we now take for granted as the Natural Sciences; how, not content with that, they made the great experiment of applying philosophy directly to the practicalities of government through the tutoring of Alexander the Great; how they were disappointed and how, in the end, they returned to Athens and founded the famous Lyceum. Against the dramatic context of his time - the end of democracy in Athens and the rise of Alexander the Great; the great battles and vast territorial expansion that followed; the flowering of the philosophy schools on which so much of our culture and thinking is founded - and on, following his cultural legacy through to the modern day, it explores how we perceive, understand and, most importantly, how we relate to the world around us, questioning what we lose from our way of living when we forget those ancients who first taught us how to see.

"That rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf," Clarice Lispector is one of the most popular but least understood of Latin American writers, and now in Why this World, after years of research on three continents, drawing on previously unknown manuscripts and dozens of interviews, Benjamin Moser demonstrates how Lispector's development as a writer was directly connected to the story of her turbulent life. Born in the nightmarish landscape of post-World War I Ukraine, Clarice became, virtually from adolescence, a person whose beauty, genius, and eccentricity intrigued Brazil. Why This World tells how this precocious girl, through long exile abroad and difficult personal struggles, matured into a great writer, and asserts, for the first time, the deep roots in the Jewish mystical tradition that make her the true heir to Kafka as well as the unlikely author of "perhaps the greatest spiritual autobiography of the twentieth century." From Chechelnik to Recife, from Naples and Bern to Washington and Rio de Janeiro, Why This World strips away the mythology surrounding this extraordinary figure and shows how Clarice Lispector transformed one woman's struggles into a universally resonant art. Benjamin Moser is the New Books columnist of Harper's Magazine. He was born in Houston in 1976 and currently lives in the Netherlands. He is a contributor to the The New York Review of Books, and he has written for Conde Nast Traveler and Newsweek, as well as many other publications.

A memoir about home and belonging, from the author of I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS 'A brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a truly phenomenal woman' BARACK OBAMA Maya Angelou's five volumes of autobiography, beginning with I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS, are a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary writer. Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty. As a black woman she has known discrimination and extreme poverty, but also hope, joy, achievement and celebration. In the fifth volume, Maya Angelou emigrates to Ghana only to discover that 'you can't go home again' but she comes to a new awareness of love and friendship, civil rights and slavery - and the myth of mother Africa. 'She moved through the world with unshakeable calm, confidence and a fierce grace . . . She will always be the rainbow in my clouds' OPRAH WINFREY 'She was important in so many ways. She launched African American women writing in the United States. She was generous to a fault. She had nineteen talents - used ten. And was a real original. There is no duplicate' TONI MORRISON

Hanna's Story is an evocation of the life and times of the author's paternal grandmother, Johanna Loughnane. It opens a window onto a way of life that has now all but disappeared in Ireland, together with the religious certainties that circumscribed it. Widowed at thirty five she was left alone to manage the farm in Tipperary and raise her ten children during the troubled years of Ireland's fight for Independence. It is a life that vividly illustrates the social and political circumstances of the period, throwing light on the impact of those turbulent years on a farming family directly involved in the Irish War of Independence. Personal loss, the challenges of farming life and raising a large family amid huge social and political turmoil are all filtered through the experience of this resilient woman.

The Diary of Anne Frank is a seminal piece of twentieth century literature. It recounts the tragic and moving story of a young Jewish teenager faced with the horrors of Nazism. In it, Anne establishes a bond with her readers that transcends both time and space, making them her friends and confidants. Readers feel a connection with each dream she had, each fear she endured, and each struggle she confronted. Her diary ended, but her story did not. The Lost Diary of Anne Frank is an historical fiction that picks up where her original journal left off, taking the reader on a journey through the tragic final months of her life, faithfully adhering to her own, very personal, diary format in the process. In The Lost Diary of Anne Frank, Anne receives mysterious help from many quarters. A strange lady on the other side of the fence haunts her dreams. Her sister falls in love with a guard. Her mom, once vilified, becomes a hero. Anne struggles with the existence of God and His presence or absence in all of her ordeals. She contrasts the depravity of man with what she sees as mankind's evident virtues. Her longing to experience sensual pleasures is numbed by forced over-exposure. She finds that in the Nazi efforts to extinguish the humanity of their victims, a chorus of unity evolves among the captives. Anne's vaulted dreams for fame and notice are ultimately traded in for the true longings of life, love, and peace. The Lost Diary of Anne Frank imagines her story to the chilling end.

Jane Austen is the world's bestselling novelist. Two hundred years after her death we seem to have a never-ending appetite for the swooning of SENSE AND SENSIBILITY and the smouldering passion of PRIDE AND PREJUDICE, resulting in a near constant supply of film adaptations and spin-off books. The fan market for Austen - the Austenites - is huge and international. This book, previously published as THE JANE AUSTEN MISCELLANY and republished in an attractive new gift edition, reveals the real Jane: bitchy, gossipy and badly behaved at times, as well as showing the side we all love: the writer, sister and true romantic.