A beautiful new edition of Laurie Lee's celebrated autobiographical trilogy: Cider with Rosie, As I Walked Out One Midsummer Morning and A Moment of War 'I was set down from the carrier's cart at the age of three; and there with a sense of bewilderment and terror my life in the village began.' 'This trilogy is a sequence of early recollections, beginning with the dazzling lights and sounds of my first footings on earth in a steep Cotswold valley some three miles long. For nineteen years this was the limit of my world, then one midsummer morning I left home and walked to London and down the blazing length of Spain during the innocent days of the early thirties. Never had I felt so fat with time, so free to go where I would. Then such indulgence was suddenly broken by the savage outbreak of the Civil War . . .' - Laurie Lee

Jacques Schiffrin changed the face of publishing in the twentieth century. As the founder of Les Editions de la Pleiade in Paris and cofounder of Pantheon Books in New York, he helped define a lasting canon of Western literature while also promoting new authors who shaped transatlantic intellectual life. In this first biography of Schiffrin, Amos Reichman tells the poignant story of a remarkable publisher and his dramatic travails across two continents. Just as he influenced the literary trajectory of the twentieth century, Schiffrin's life was affected by its tumultuous events. Born in Baku in 1892, he fled after the Bolsheviks came to power, eventually settling in Paris, where he founded the Pleiade, which published elegant and affordable editions of literary classics as well as leading contemporary writers. After Vichy France passed anti-Jewish laws, Schiffrin fled to New York, later establishing Pantheon Books with Kurt Wolff, a German exile. Following Schiffrin's death in 1950, his son Andre continued in his father's footsteps, preserving and continuing a remarkable intellectual and cultural legacy at Pantheon. In addition to recounting Schiffrin's life and times, Reichman describes his complex friendships with prominent figures including Andre Gide, Jean-Paul Sartre, Peggy Guggenheim, and Bernard Berenson. From the vantage point of Schiffrin's extraordinary career, Reichman sheds new light on French and American literary culture, European exiles in the United States, and the transatlantic ties that transformed the world of publishing.

In the autumn of 1915, in a "slightly heroic mood", E.M. Forster arrived in Alexandria, full of lofty ideals as a volunteer for the Red Cross. Yet most of his time was spent exploring "the magic, antiquity and complexity" of the place in order to cope with living in what he saw as a "funk-hole". With a novelist's pen, he brings to life the fabled, romantic city of Alexander the Great, capital of Graeco-Roman Egypt, beacon of light and culture symbolised by the Pharos, where the doomed love affair of Antony and Cleopatra was played out and the greatest library the world has ever known was built. Threading 3,000 years of history with vibrant strands of literature and punctuating the narrative with his own experiences, Forster immortalised Alexandria, painting an incomparable portrait of the great city and, inadvertently, himself.

Beloved by children and adults worldwide, the writings of C.S. Lewis have a broad and enduring appeal. Although he is best known for the iconic Chronicles of Narnia series, C. S. Lewis was actually a man of many literary parts. Already well-known as a scholar in the thirties, he became a famous broadcaster during World War Two and wrote in many genres, including satire (The Screwtape Letters), science fiction ( Perelandra), a novel (Till We Have Faces), and many other books on Christian belief, such as Mere Christianity and Miracles. His few sermons remain touchstones of their type. In addition to these, Lewis wrote hundreds of poems and articles on social and cultural issues, many books and articles in his field of literary criticism and history, and thousands of letters. At Oxford University he became a charismatic lecturer and conversationalist. Taken together his writings have engaged and influenced, often very deeply, millions of readers. Now Lewis societies, television documentaries, movies, radio plays, and theatrical treatments of his work and life have become common, and he is frequently quoted by journalists, critics, and public thinkers. This Very Short Introduciton delves into the vast corpus of C. S. Lewis' work, discussing its core themes and lasting appeal. As James Como shows, C. S. Lewis' life is just as interesting as his work. A complex man, he came to his knowledge, beliefs, and wisdom only after much tortuous soul-searching and many painful events. Moving chronologically through Lewis' life, Como provides throughout a picture of the whole man, his work, and his enduring legacy. ABOUT THE SERIES: The Very Short Introductions series from Oxford University Press contains hundreds of titles in almost every subject area. These pocket-sized books are the perfect way to get ahead in a new subject quickly. Our expert authors combine facts, analysis, perspective, new ideas, and enthusiasm to make interesting and challenging topics highly readable.

The extraordinary character of Ben Jonson has only recently been brought into the light. Critics traditionally exalted Shakespeare, at Jonson's expense. In this biography, first published in 1986, the author presents a full and accurate account of Jonson's life in modern times. Rosalind Miles follows Jonson from his obscure beginnings to his burial in Westminster Abbey, as the first Poet Laureate, in 1637. Her Jonson is vivid and vigorous, equally alive in his life and in his work. This title will be of interest to students of history, English literature and Renaissance drama.

The first English-language biography of one of the great literary talents of the twentieth century, written by his award-winning translator Finalist for the 2021 NBCC Award for Biography "[An] authoritative, moving biography. . . . Walser made of his own multiform solitudes a gift to the outside world, offering readers an existential sympathy of a kind for which only he could find the appropriate literary expression."-Paul Binding, Times Literary Supplement The great Swiss-German modernist author Robert Walser lived eccentrically on the fringes of European society-his pronounced interest in everything inconspicuous and modest prompted W. G. Sebald to dub him "a clairvoyant of the small." His revolutionary use of short prose forms won him the admiration of Franz Kafka, Walter Benjamin, Robert Musil, and many others. In this immaculately researched and beautifully written biography Susan Bernofsky sets Walser in the context of early twentieth century European history, establishing him as one of the most important modernist writers.

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."

David Pryce-Jones weaves a vivid life story through vignettes of the many famous authors-friends, acquaintances, interview subjects-who gave him personally inscribed books. In Signatures he offers a window onto the lives and work of these extraordinary people. As a child, Pryce-Jones spent time at Isaiah Berlin's house. As a teenager, lunching with Bernard Berenson at I Tatti, he prompted an outburst about Parisian anti-Semitism. W. H. Auden found him at Oxford to praise his competition poem, and he later visited Auden in his loft studio in Austria. Svetlana Alliluyeva reminisced about her father, Joseph Stalin, while staying at the Pryce-Jones house in Wales. A highbrow salon gathered in the home of Arthur Koestler, who strove to be an English gentleman and who was with Pryce-Jones in Reykjavik covering the Fischer-Spassky chess match. Saul Bellow spoke of an old friend, now a capo famiglia, promising to deal with student rioters in 1968 Chicago. After swapping houses with Pryce-Jones one summer, Jessica Mitford insisted that he would have been a Communist in the 1930s. Robert Graves challenged a quotation from Virgil, and told the Queen that she was a descendant of Muhammad. We meet V. S. Naipaul, a free spirit who understood that "the world is what it is." Muriel Spark would come round for lunch with the Pryce-Joneses in Florence, enjoying conspiratorial stories about Italian politics. At his sepulchral home in Heidelberg, Albert Speer demonstrated his way of "admitting a little to deny a great deal." In Isaac Singer we see generosity, candor, and mischievous humor. This is only a small sampling of the remarkable personalities who have left their signatures on a fascinating life.

Byron, more than any other poet, has come to personify the poet as rebel; imaginative and lawless, reaching beyond race, creed or frontier, his notorious flaws redeemed by a magnetism and ultimately a heroism that by ending in tragedy raised it and him from the particular to the universal. Everything about Lord George Gordon Byron was a paradox - insider and outsider, beautiful and deformed, serious and facetious, profligate but on occasion miserly, and possessed of a fierce intelligence trapped forever in a child's magic and malices. He was also a great poet, but as he reminded us, poetry is a distinct faculty and has little to do with the individual life of its creator. Edna O'Brien's exemplary biography focuses upon the diverse and colourful women in Byron's life. 'O'Brien charts the many loves of the notorious 19th-century poet's reckless life in immediate and candid prose' Sunday Telegraph 'Edna O'Brien has always had a gift for writing about affairs of the heart' Guardian 'There is much to enjoy in this idiosyncratic and highly readable account of the poet whose writing enthralled and whose actions appalled in equal measure' Independent

Jack Foley has been prominent in the San Francisco Bay Area poetry scene since the mid-1980s. The Light of Evening traces the arc of his life since his birth in New Jersey in 1940. Foley has spent his life in the pursuit of ways to continue writing poetry in a world in which the status of poetry has been seriously diminished. This candid autobiography offers a portrait of an artist who has continued to produce experimental as well as traditional work and who created theoretical underpinnings for that work. His exciting "choruses" - duets performed with his late wife Adelle - established him as a unique presenter of poetry in an area in which poets abound. Along with his creative work, Foley studied at Cornell with the brilliant and notorious deconstructionist critic Paul de Man. He lived through the 1960s in and around Berkeley, California, attending the university at the height of the Free Speech Movement. Following on the heels of Kenneth Rexroth, he has presented poetry on KPFA-FM, Berkeley's radical radio station, for over thirty years. He produced a 1300-page history of Californian poetry from 1940 to 2005 that has been called "an oddball masterpiece ... the first adequate account of California's complex and contradictory literary life." At eighty, Foley looks back at a life in which he managed to maintain himself as a contrarian poet who never resorted to the academy for sustenance and who never courted fame from the East Coast literary hegemony. The Light of Evening is the story of a complex, always-in-motion public intellectual for whom poetry was first, last, and always.

Since the first publication of 'Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia' in 2003 there has been a resurgence of interest in his ground-breaking work and flamboyant personality. Synonymous though he is with Soho, his uniquely strange life included spells in the army and on the French Riviera. So chaotic was his existence that he makes Jack Kerouac and Charles Bukowski appear models of stability and self-restraint. During fifty-two hectic years Maclaren-Ross endured alchoholism, drug-induced psychosis, poverty, homelessness, imprisonment, near insanity and a Scotland Yard man-hunt. At one stage he even stalked and planned to murder George Orwell's glamorous widow. 'Fear and Loathing in Fitzrovia' provides a vibrant and justly acclaimed portrait of Maclaren-Ross and the world he inhabited.

"A loving homage to one of America's greatest writers."

July 2, 2011, marks the 50th anniversary of the tragic death of Ernest Hemingway. The year will also see the release of two documentaries about the famed writer.

In this first-ever tribute to her grandfather, Mariel opens the family album to reveal all aspects of the man. More than 350 carefully selected photographs show a childhood filled with harbingers of the future -- the five-year-old fishing, the 16-year-old writing, the wounded soldier, the young groom -- and an adult life of success and failure -- journalist, serial husband, prize-winning author, big-game hunter, "Papa" Hemingway, foul-mouthed drinker, self-idealized hero.

A compelling 40,000-word narrative gives chronological details and adds fascinating context to the photos. What influenced Hemingway's writing? Who were the important figures in his life? Why was he compelled to write? Was he as confident as he presented himself to be?

"Hemingway: A Life in Pictures" surveys the touchstones of a celebrated life to reveal the character, dreams and disappointments of one of America's greatest writers.

A collection of essays on Jorge Luis Borges by his long-time friend and collaborator.

Jorge Luis Borges - Argentine poet, essayist, and short-story writer - is widely considered one of the giants of 20th-century world literature.

Norman Thomas di Giovanni worked alongside Borges for a number of years creating English translations of his work, the only translations personally overseen by Borges himself. In The Lesson of the Master, a memoir and essays, he writes about his time with Borges but also offers us a unique insight on the man and his work.

It is an indispensable volume for Borges readers and his growing legion of students and scholars.

The story of Richard Aldington, outstanding Imagist poet and author of the bestselling war novel Death of a Hero (1929), takes place against the backdrop of some of the most turbulent and creative years of the twentieth century. Vivien Whelpton provides a remarkably detailed and sensitive portrayal of the writer from the age of thirty-eight to his death from a heart attack in 1962. The first volume, Richard Aldington: Poet, Soldier and Lover, described Aldington's life as a stalwart of the pre-war London literary scene, his experience as an infantryman on the Western Front and his postwar personal and creative crises; this second volume seeks to balance the stories of Aldington's subsequent public and private lives through a careful reading of his novels, poems and letters with his circle of acquaintances. The ways in which Aldington's dysfunctional childhood and survivor's guilt continued to haunt him through the inter-war years and beyond are masterfully untangled by an author with gifted psychological insight into her subject. Volume Two covers Aldington's personal and public lives as he transformed himself from poet to novelist and from novelist to biographer and explores his debacles and triumphs, particularly in the wake of his hugely controversial attack on the reputation of T.E. Lawrence. This authoritative biography recounts the life of one of the most underrated writers of the last century.

Tim Parks's best seller, "Italian Neighbors," offered a sparkling, witty, and acutely observed account of an expatriate's life in a small village outside of Verona. Now in "An Italian Education," Parks continues his chronicle of adapting to Italian society and culture, while raising his Italian-born children. With the exquisite eye for detail, character, and intrigue that has brought him acclaim as a novelist, Parks creates an enchanting portrait of Italian parenthood and family life at home, in the classroom, and at church. Shifting from hilarity to despair in the time it takes to sing a lullaby, Parks learns that to be a true Italian, one must live by the motto "All days are one."

Hailed on its original publication as "eloquent testimony to the engaging power of art in a man's life" (Washington Post), this deeply moving memoir, long out of print, is reissued with an illuminating new afterword. When acclaimed poet Gregory Orr was twelve years old, he shot and killed his brother in a hunting accident. From the immediate aftermath-a period of shock, sadness, and isolation-it quickly became clear that support and guidance would not be coming from his distant mother. Nor would it come from his father, a philandering country doctor addicted to amphetamines. Left to his own devices, the boy suffered. Guilt weighed on him throughout a childhood split between the rural Hudson Valley and jungles of Haiti. As a young man, his feelings and a growing sense of idealism prompted him to activism in the civil rights movement, where he marched and was imprisoned, and then scarred again by a terrifying abduction. Eventually, Orr's experiences led him to understand that art, particularly poetry, could work as a powerful source of healing and meaning to combat the trauma he carried. Throughout The Blessing, Orr articulates his journey in language as lyrical as it is authentic, gifting us all with a singular tale of survival, and of the transformation of suffering into art.

Losing Helen is a moving and inspiring essay that tracks an adult daughter through the many complex phases of grief as she anticipates the inevitable loss of her elderly mother. Finding strength and guidance in the spiritual insights of writers, artists, Western religion, and Eastern philosophies, the narrator undergoes a profound transformation while striving to design an end-of-life experience that is meaningful and sacred not only for her mother but also for herself.

Amid the turmoil of the Ming-Qing dynastic transition in seventeenth-century China, some intellectuals sought refuge in romantic memories from what they perceived as cataclysmic events. This volume presents two memoirs by famous men of letters, Reminiscences of the Plum Shadows Convent by Mao Xiang (1611-93) and Miscellaneous Records of Plank Bridge by Yu Huai (1616-96), that recall times spent with courtesans. They evoke the courtesan world in the final decades of the Ming dynasty and the aftermath of its collapse. Mao Xiang chronicles his relationship with the courtesan Dong Bai, who became his concubine two years before the Ming dynasty fell. His mournful remembrance of their life together, written shortly after her early death, includes harrowing descriptions of their wartime sufferings as well as idyllic depictions of romantic bliss. Yu Huai offers a group portrait of Nanjing courtesans, mixing personal memories with reported anecdotes. Writing fifty years after the fall of the Ming, he expresses a deep nostalgia for courtesan culture that bears the toll of individual loss and national calamity. Together, they shed light on the sensibilities of late Ming intellectuals: their recollections of refined pleasures and ruminations on the vagaries of memory coexist with political engagement and a belief in bearing witness. With an introduction and extensive annotations, Plum Shadows and Plank Bridge is a valuable source for the literature of remembrance, the representation of women, and the social role of intellectuals during a tumultuous period in Chinese history.

At the start of 1987, Primo Levi took part in a remarkable series of conversations about his early life with a friend and fellow writer, Giovanni Tesio. This book is the result of those meetings, originally intended to be the basis for an authorized biography and published here in English for the first time. In a densely packed dialogue, Levi responds to Tesio's tactful and never too insistent questions with a watchful readiness and candour, breaking through the reserve of his public persona to allow a more intimate self to emerge. Following the thread of memory, he lucidly discusses his family, his childhood, his education during the Fascist period, his adolescent friendships, his reading, his shyness and his passion for mountaineering, and recounts his wartime experience as a partisan and the terrible price it exacted from him and his comrades. Though we glimpse his later life as a writer, the story breaks off just before his deportation to Auschwitz owing to his sudden death. In The Last Interview, Levi the man, the witness, the chemist and the writer all unite to offer us a story which is also a window onto history. These conversations shed new light on Levi's life and will appeal to the many readers of this most eloquent witness to the horrors of the Holocaust.

Radclyffe Hall was the pen-name of Marguerite Radclyffe-Hall, the author of The Well of Loneliness, which on its publication in 1928 became the centre of a trial for obscenity and was banned in Britain until 1949. The novel itself openly discussed lesbian relationships and challenged contemporary ideas about lesbianism. Radclyffe-Hall's life as well as her novel flouted convention, and Sally Cline's biography, first published in 1998, explores her other literary works, as well as her relationships and politics, which were often at odds.

His mother was against it, but he grew up to be a cowboy anyway. Zane Grey was a corn-fed mid-westerner who ended up an unhappy dentist in New York City. After a journey to Arizona and Utah in 1907, he decided he would rather wear chaps and a Stetson rather than return to a mundane life pulling teeth in Manhattan. Thus began his career as a writer. Zane Grey faced mountains of rejection and disappointment in publishing his early novels, but when Riders of the Purple Sage was published in 1912, and it set in motion the entire western genre in books, movies, and eventually country western music. It was and remains an epic, colorful novel, filled with action, romance, and vivid descriptions of the Old West. Drawing on his letter, diaries, and personal papers, the story of his growth as a writer and of the creation of this book is a rag to riches saga sure to appeal to writers of any age, history buffs, motion picture fans, and lovers of music. Plus, it is a story set against the grandeur and sublimity of the American west.