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Books > Biography > Literary
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.
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"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.
The daughter of an aristocratic family, a wife, a devoted mother
and a lover of women, Sappho was one of the greatest writers of her
own or any age. Although most people have heard of Sappho, the
story of her lost poems and the lives of ancient women they
celebrate has never been told for a general audience. Philip
Freeman paints a vivid picture of Sappho's world. He delves into
religious rites, customs, the role of women in the family, medical
knowledge and the experience of motherhood at the time. Through
this contextual knowledge, a picture of Sappho's life emerges.
Freeman uses his vast historical research, in conjunction with
Sappho's poems and other Greek works of fiction, to bring us the
closest we can come to knowing the biographical details of this
most famous woman poet.
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