The son of one of the greatest writers of our time-Nobel Prize winner and internationally best-selling icon Gabriel Garcia Marquez-remembers his beloved father and mother in this tender memoir about love and loss. "I find myself remembering that my father used to say that everyone has three lives: the public, the private, and the secret." On a weekday morning in March 2014, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, one of the most acclaimed writers of the twentieth century, came down with a cold. In this intimate and honest account on grief and death, Rodrigo Garcia not only contemplates his father's mortality and remarkable humanity, but also his mother's tremendous charm and tenderness. Mercedes Barcha, Gabo's constant companion and creative muse, was one of the foremost influences on his life and art. A Farewell to Gabo and Mercedes is a revelatory portrait of a family coping with loss and a rich depiction of a son's love.

Recommended by the New York Times and NBC News, and called one of the Best Books of the Year by Buzzfeed! The New York Times directs readers to Retablos if you want to know "what's life really like on the Mexican border." "Solis grew up just a mile from the Rio Grande in El Paso, Texas, and he tells stories about his childhood and coming of age, including his parents migration to the United States from Mexico, his first encounter with racism and finding a Mexican migrant girl hiding in the cotton fields."-Concepcion de Leon, New York Times Seminal moments, rites of passage, crystalline vignettes-a memoir about growing up brown at the U.S./Mexico border. More praise for Octavio Solis's Retablos: "This is American and Mexican literature a stone's throw from the always hustling El Paso border."-Gary Soto, author of The Elements of San Joaquin "We inhabit a border world rich in characters, lush with details, playful and poignant, a border that refutes the stereotypes and divisions smaller minds create. Solis reminds us that sometimes the most profound truths are best told with crafted fictions--and he is a master at it."-Julia Alvarez, author of How the Garcia Girls Lost Their Accents " ... it's hard not to consider the border itself as a representation of a 'terrible rift,' a split between homes, communities, identities, generations. While reading this generous and eye-opening account, it's easy to see how, for the country at large, the rift has only deepened."-Arianna Rebolini, Buzzfeed Best Books of Fall 2018 "Landing somewhere between Neil Gaiman and Juan Rulfo, Solis secularizes the mythological by turning men and women into saintly figures-like their criada [maid], Consuelo, and a white priest who shows his family empathy-and monsters: border agents who take his friends away and school bullies."-Michael Adam Carroll, The Millions "There has never been a border book like Retablos, a collection of smoldering epiphanies suffering the baptizing waters of recall. . . ."-Roberto Ontiveros, San Antonio Current "The book is rendered in tight, stand-alone recollections rich with poetry and honesty. . . . If retablos are offerings, then Solis' book is a gift of memory, not always pleasant, but always true."-Beatriz Terrazas, Dallas Morning News "The experience of reading his tightly contained memories in succession is a bit like drawing old coins up from a wishing well. Filtered through veils of distance and time, these scenes and reflections are wonderful and weird flashes of childhood, adolescence and early adulthood in the life of this particular Mexican American boy."-- Sophie Haigney, San Francisco Chronicle "Octavio Solis' Retablos recounts a 'beautiful, messy' youth on the border. Though its title evokes Mexican folk art, Retablos is closer in effect to that of French pointillism. Its small dabs of vivid color produce a brilliant cumulative effect."-Steven G. Kellman, The Texas Observer "In this debut memoir, playwright Solis delivers top-notch vignettes of his youth with riveting imagery and empathy, recounting--and embellishing, he says--memories of growing up brown in El Paso, Tex. . . . These brilliantly told stories of missteps and redemption are a treat."--Publishers Weekly ". . .what struck me most about each chapter was Solis's ability to plant a specific image in your mind. With every retablo, you can see in ferocious detail exactly what the author wants you to see, like a special kind of telepathy. I found myself wanting to paint them."-Caitlyn Reynolds, The Los Angeles Review of Books "In all, a beautiful, evocative, and timely expression of border culture for every collection."--Sara Martinez, Booklist "In this coming-of-age memoir, a playwright illuminates the culture of the El Paso border as he perceived it when he was young. . . . An intriguing work that transcends category, drawing from facts but reading like fiction."--Kirkus Reviews

This volume considers two authors who represent different but complementary responses to social injustice and human degradation. The writings of Walter Rauschenbusch and Dorothy Day respond to an American situation that arose out of the industrial revolution and reflect especially-but not exclusively-urban life in the east coast of the United States during the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. Although these two authors differ greatly, they both reacted to the extreme social inequality and strife that occurred between 1890 and the beginning of World War II. They shared a total commitment to the cause of social justice, their Christian faith, and an active engagement in the quest for a just social order. But the different ways they reacted to the situation generated different spiritualities. Rauschenbusch was a pastor, writer, historian, and seminary professor. Day was a journalist who became an organizer. The strategic differences between them, however, grew out of a common sustained reaction against the massive deprivation that surrounded them. There is no spiritual rivalry here. They complement each other and reinforce the Christian humanitarian motivation that drives them. Their work brings the social dimension of Christian spirituality to the surface in a way that had not been emphasized in the same focused way before them. They are part of an awakening to the degree to which the social order lies in the hands of the people who support it. Both Rauschenbusch and Day are examples of an explicit recognition of the social dimension of Christian spirituality, and a radical acting out of that response in two distinctly different ways.

C. S. Lewis, based on the popularity of his books and essays, is one of the best communicators of the twentieth century. During his lifetime he was hailed for his talents as author, speaker, educator, and broadcaster; he continues to be a best-selling author more than a half-century after his death. C. S. Lewis and the Craft of Communication analyzes Lewis's communication skill. A comprehensive review of Lewis's work reveals five communication principles that explain his success as a communicator. Based on Lewis's own advice about communication in his books, essays, and letters, as well as his communication practice, being a skilled communicator is to be holistic, intentional, transpositional, evocative, and audience-centered. These five principles are memorably summarized by the acronym HI TEA. Dr. Steven Beebe, past president of the National Communication Association and an internationally-recognized communication author and educator, uses Lewis's own words to examine these five principles in a most engaging style.

An homage to the life of poet, writer, and teaching artist Judith Tannenbaum and her impact on incarcerated and marginalized students. The Book of Judith honors Judith Tannenbaum but also reflects, through both form and content, on the complexities of seeing both the parts and the whole. The book presents different aspects of Judith-poet, teaching artist, friend, mentor, colleague-through a collection of original poetry, prose, essay, illustration, and fiction from 33 contributors. In so doing, it echoes her own determination to perceive contradiction without judgment. For the next generation of teaching artists in Corrections and elsewhere, the book serves as an inspiration on the qualities needed to survive and thrive in a multi-faceted, ever-changing environment. The book is divided into four sections, separated by riveting black and white pencil drawings inspired by the lives of those serving life in prison without possibility of parole. In Unfinished Conversations, contributors share their bond with Judith Tannenbaum through prose and excerpts from letters both real and imagined. In the second section, After December, poets reflect on the life, artistry, and legacy of Judith. The third section, Looking and Listening, focuses on the truth-seeking qualities that Judith brought to her work. The fourth section, Legacy, features work from winners of an award and a fellowship bestowed in her name.

'A huge, fizzing omnium-gatherum of a book . . . marvellous' Daily Telegraph 'Witty, wise and elegant . . . a classic of history itself' The Spectator 'Grave and witty, suave yet pointed . . . full of energy' Hilary Mantel 'An enthralling investigation . . . consistently entertaining' The Times 'Epic . . . whatever Cohen writes about he writes about with brio' New Yorker Who writes the past? And how do the biases of storytellers - whether Julius Caesar, William Shakespeare or Simon Schama - influence our ideas about history today? Epic, authoritative and entertaining, Making History delves into the lives of those who have charted human history - professional historians, witnesses, novelists, journalists and propagandists - to discover the agendas that informed their world views, and which in so many ways have informed ours. From the origins of history-writing through to television and the digital age, Making History abounds in captivating figures brought to vivid life, from Thucydides and Tacitus to Voltaire and Gibbon, from Winston Churchill to Mary Beard. Rich in character, complex truths and surprising anecdotes, the result is a unique exploration of both the aims and craft of history-making that will lead us to think anew about our past and ourselves.

An extraordinary book about the imagination -- and the astonishing force of its creative power . . . for evil as well as good.
Captivated is a true story of genius and possession. The central character is the creator of Peter Pan, the novelist and playwright J.M. Barrie, a man tormented by inner demons since childhood.
Barrie developed a consuming interest in the family of George du Maurier, author of Trilby, a bestselling novel featuring his creation Svengali. Barrie made his move on the du Maurier family immediately after George's death, assuming George's mantel. Soon Barrie was "Uncle Jim" to George du Maurier's eight grandchildren, playing romping games of adventure and make-believe and inviting the children into the transcendental world of Neverland. Four of the boys (the "lost boys" of Peter Pan) and one of the girls (the imaginative tomboy Daphne) were captivated.
This fascinating book delves deep, makes links and yields up secrets. It tells how Barrie's victims -- whom he would have not grow up -- were lost to breakdown, suicide or early death. Daphne du Maurier, author of Rebecca emerges as the lost boys' companion and the enigmatic chronicler of their fate. Captivated is about writing and the world of the imagination: it is a singular example of art being used not only to imitate life, but darkly to transform it.

"From the Hardcover edition."

'If you want to read a book that moves you both at the level of sentence and the quality of language and with the emotional depth of its subject matter, then A Fortunate Woman is definitely the book you should be reading' Samanth Subramanian, Baillie Gifford Judge When Polly Morland is clearing out her mother's house she finds a book that will lead her to a remarkable figure living on her own doorstep: the country doctor who works in the same remote, wooded valley she has lived in for many years. This doctor is a rarity in contemporary medicine, she knows her patients inside out, and their stories are deeply entwined with her own. In A Fortunate Woman, with its beautiful photographs by Richard Baker, Polly Morland has written a profoundly moving love letter to a landscape, a community and, above all, to what it means to be a good doctor. 'Morland writes about nature and the changing landscape with such lyrical precision that her prose sometimes seems close to poetry' Christina Patterson, The Sunday Times 'Timely . . . compelling . . . a delicately drawn miniature' The Financial Times 'This book deepens our understanding of the life and thoughts of a modern doctor, and the modern NHS, and it expands movingly to chronicle a community and a landscape' Kathleen Jamie, The New Statesman

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

As one of the most enduringly popular and controversial novelists of the last century, the 70th anniversary of George Orwell's death in 2020 will certainly be marked by conferences, festivals and media events - but more significant than these acts of commemoration is his relevance today.

Despite the commonplace view that Animal Farm was aimed exclusively at Stalinist Russia, it was far more broadly focussed and the similarities between aspects of the novel and Trump's America are obvious. `Not only the parallels with the current President, but also by those who feel that his cult of personality is a mandate for collective nastiness. 'Doublethink' features in Nineteen Eighty Four and it is the forerunner to 'Fake News'.

Aside from Orwell's importance as a political theorist and novelist his life in its own right is a beguiling narrative. His family was caught between upper middle-class complacency and uncertainty, and Orwell's time at Prep School and as a scholarship boy at Eton caused him to despise the class system that spawned him despite finding himself unable to fully detach himself from it.

His life thereafter mirrored the history of his country; like many from his background he devoted himself to socialism as a salve to his conscience. He died at the point when Britain's status as an Imperial and world power had waned.

An interest in him endures, principally because it is difficult to differentiate between the man who recorded the terrible events of the depression and the Spanish Civil War as an observer and the fiction writer who used literature to predict grim possibilities and diagnose horribly endemic inclinations. No other British writer of the 20th century has blended ideas, political commentary and literary art in such a manner.

For an author whose work has been regarded as the most important in terms of the turbulent years of the mid-20th century and who eroded the boundaries between literature, journalism and political commentary, there have been relatively few attempts to present a vibrant portrait of the man behind the writings. Fifteen years (closer to eighteen when this book appears) is a long time for the absence of a life of one of one of the best-known authors of the twentieth century.

Uncovers the life of Jane Cumming, who scandalized her contemporaries with tales of sexual deviancy but also defied cultural norms, standing up to male authority figures and showing resilience. In 1810 Edinburgh, the orphaned Scottish-Indian schoolgirl Jane Cumming alleged that her two schoolmistresses were sexually intimate. The allegation spawned a defamation suit that pitted Jane's grandmother, a member of the Scottish landed gentry, against two young professional women who were romantic friends. During the trial, the boundary between passion and friendship among women was debated and Jane was viewed "orientally," as morally corrupt and hypersexual. Located at the intersection of race, sex, and class, the case has long been a lightning rod for scholars of cultural studies, women's and gender history, and, given Lillian Hellman's appropriation of Jane's story in her 1934 play The Children's Hour, theater history as well. Frances B. Singh's wide-ranging biography, however, takes a new, psychological approach, putting the notorious case in the context of a life that was marked by loss, separation, abandonment--and resilience. Grounded in archival and genealogical sources never before consulted, Singh's narrative reconstructs Cumming's life from its inauspicious beginnings in a Calcutta orphanage through her schooling in Elgin and Edinburgh, an abusive marriage, her adherence to the Free Church at the time of the Scottish Disruption, and her posthumous life in Hellman's Broadway play. Singh provides a detailed analysis not only of the case itself, but of how both Jane's and her teachers' lives were affected in the aftermath.

"The most revealing and subjectively penetrating assessment of Baldwin's life yet published." -The New York Times Book Review. "The first Baldwin biography in which one can recognize the human features of this brilliant, troubled, principled, supremely courageous man." -Boston Globe James Baldwin was one of the great writers of the last century. In works that have become part of the American canon-Go Tell It on a Mountain, Giovanni's Room, Another Country, The Fire Next Time, and The Evidence of Things Not Seen-he explored issues of race and racism in America, class distinction, and sexual difference. A gay, African American writer who was born in Harlem, he found the freedom to express himself living in exile in Paris. When he returned to America to cover the Civil Rights movement, he became an activist and controversial spokesman for the movement, writing books that became bestsellers and made him a celebrity, landing him on the cover of Time. In this biography, David Leeming creates an intimate portrait of a complex, troubled, driven, and brilliant man. He plumbs every aspect of Baldwin's life: his relationships with the unknown and the famous, including painter Beauford Delaney, Richard Wright, Lorraine Hansberry, Marlon Brando, Harry Belafonte, Lena Horne, and childhood friend Richard Avedon; his expatriate years in France and Turkey; his gift for compassion and love; the public pressures that overwhelmed his quest for happiness, and his passionate battle for black identity, racial justice, and to "end the racial nightmare and achieve our country."

This book links the concepts of patriotism, Christianity, and nationhood in the journalistic writings of G.K. Chesterton and emphasizes their roots within the English attachments that were central to his political and spiritual persona. It further connects Chesterton to the vibrant debate about English national identity in the early years of the twentieth century, which was instrumental in shaping not only his political convictions, but also his religious convictions. Christianity, Patriotism and Nationhood explores his changing conception of the English people from an early, menacing account of their revolutionary potential in the face of plutocracy to the more complex portraits he drew of their character on recognizing their political passivity after the First World War. As Chesterton was above all a journalist, the study considers some of the varied outlets in which he expressed his ideas as a distinctly Edwardian man of letters of a strongly patriotic persuasion. His connection with The Illustrated London News over more than three decades proved pivotal in strengthening his patriotism and discourse of nationhood vilified elsewhere, not least in advanced Liberal organs such asThe Nation. Julia Stapleton shows that he was increasingly distanced by fellow Liberals before 1918, on account of the priority he gave nationhood over the state, and patriotism over citizenship. But she argues that his English loyalties were the last echo of an aspect of Victorian Liberalism that had been progressively eroded by loss of confidence among elites in the democratic aptitude of the English people. Christianity, Patriotism and Nationhood emphasizes that Chesterton upheld a cultural rather than racial conception of national homogeneity, in keeping with the Victorian sources of his thought and the popular patriotism of Edwardian England. It argues that his anti-semitism was ancillary, rather than integral to his understanding of England, and that it was matched by a similar conception of the ant

Probably the greatest British novelist of his generation, Graham Greene's own story was as strange and compelling as those he told of Pinkie the Mobster, Harry Lime, or the Whisky Priest. A restless traveller, he was a witness to many of the key events of modern history - including the origins of the Vietnam War, the Mau Mau Rebellion, the betrayal of the double-agent Kim Philby, the rise of Fidel Castro, and the guerrilla wars of Central America. Traumatized as a boy and thought a Judas among his schoolmates, Greene tried Russian Roulette and attempted suicide. He suffered from bipolar illness, which caused havoc in his private life as his marriage failed, and one great love after another suffered shipwreck, until in his later years he found constancy in a decidedly unconventional relationship. Often called a Catholic novelist, his works came to explore the no man's land between belief and unbelief. A journalist, an MI6 officer, and an unfailing advocate for human rights, he sought out the inner narratives of war and politics in dozens of troubled places, and yet he distrusted nations and armies, believing that true loyalty was a matter between individuals. A work of wit, insight, and compassion, this new biography of Graham Greene, the first undertaken in a generation, responds to the many thousands of pages of lost letters that have recently come to light and to new memoirs by those who knew him best. It deals sensitively with questions of private life, sex, and mental illness; it gives a thorough accounting for the politics of the places he wrote about; it investigates his involvement with MI6 and the Cambridge five; above all, it follows the growth of a writer whose works changed the lives of millions.

Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume "Dostoevsky" is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language--and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank's monumental, 2500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed in this single, highly readable volume with a new preface by the author. Carefully preserving the original work's acclaimed narrative style and combination of biography, intellectual history, and literary criticism, "Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time" illuminates the writer's works--from his first novel "Poor Folk" to "Crime and Punishment" and "The Brothers Karamazov"--by setting them in their personal, historical, and above all ideological context. More than a biography in the usual sense, this is a cultural history of nineteenth-century Russia, providing both a rich picture of the world in which Dostoevsky lived and a major reinterpretation of his life and work.

The Byzantine emperor Leo VI (886-912), was not a general or even a soldier, like his predecessors, but a scholar, and it was the religious education he gained under the tutelage of the patriarch Photios that was to distinguish him as an unusual ruler. This book analyses Leo's literary output, focusing on his deployment of ideological principles and religious obligations to distinguish the characteristics of the Christian oikoumene from the Islamic caliphate, primarily in his military manual known as the Taktika. It also examines in depth his 113 legislative Novels, with particular attention to their theological prolegomena, showing how the emperor's religious sensibilities find expression in his reshaping of the legal code to bring it into closer accord with Byzantine canon law. Meredith L. D. Riedel argues that the impact of his religious faith transformed Byzantine cultural identity and influenced his successors, establishing the Macedonian dynasty as a 'golden age' in Byzantium.

With a style that combined biting sarcasm with the "language of the free lunch counter," Henry Louis Mencken shook politics and politicians for nearly half a century. Now, fifty years after Mencken's death, the Johns Hopkins University Press announces The Buncombe Collection, newly packaged editions of nine Mencken classics: Happy Days, Heathen Days, Newspaper Days, Prejudices, Treatise on the Gods, On Politics, Thirty-Five Years of Newspaper Work, Minority Report, and A Second Mencken Chrestomathy. In the second volume of his autobiography, Mencken recalls his years as a young reporter.

It is no surprise that one of Muriel Spark's most lively and entertaining works would be her own memoir, Curriculum Vitae. Born to a Scottish Jewish father and an English Presbyterian mother, Spark describes her childhood in 1930s Edinburgh in brief, dazzling anecdotes. In one she recalls a cherished schoolteacher, Christina Kay, who would later be used as the prototype for Miss Jean Brodie. Spark boldly details her disastrous first marriage to Sydney Oswald Spark (S.O.S.) - himself thirty-two, she just nineteen - whom she followed to Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) and left behind to return to England. In the midst of WWII, Spark took a bizarre position working in the disinformation campaign of the British Secret Service, eliciting information from German POWs to combat Nazi propaganda. She later moved to the Poetry Society of London, where she mingled with literati and other intellectuals, befriended by some (such as Graham Greene, an early supporter of her work) and sparring with others. We experience Spark's joy with the publication of her first novel, The Comforters, her trials with other writers' envy, and her emergence as the most brilliant femme fatale of 20th-century English literature.

Rimbaud was the original enfant terrible. A poetic genius, he destroyed all those who attempted to befriend him, most notoriously wrecking the marriage and sanity of the poet Verlaine. Having conquered the literary world of Paris, he abandoned France and in the dogdays of August 1880 he disembarked in Aden, on the coast of Yemen, a lean twenty-five-year-old Frenchman carrying only a brown suitcase fastened with four leather straps and a touch of fever. The subsequent period, the lost years , is the subject of this biographical quest.