Over the course of his long career, Nathaniel Tarn has been a poet, anthropologist, and book editor, while his travels have taken him into every continent. Born in France, raised in England, and earning a Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, he knew Andre Breton, Salvador Dali, Marcel Duchamp, Margot Fonteyn, Charles Olson, Claude Levi-Strauss, and many more of the twentieth century's major artists and intellectuals. In Atlantis, an Autoanthropology he writes that he has "never (yet) been able to experience the sensation of being only one person." Throughout this literary memoir and autoethnography, Tarn captures this multiplicity and reaches for the uncertainties of a life lived in a dizzying array of times, cultures, and environments. Drawing on his practice as an anthropologist, he takes himself as a subject of study, examining the shape of a life devoted to the study of the whole of human culture. Atlantis, an Autoanthropology prompts us to consider our own multiple selves and the mysteries contained within.

"Here's the thing with kissing: it matters intensely or not at all." Mid-kiss, do you ever wonder who you are, who you're kissing, where it's leading? It can feel luscious, libidinal, friendly, but are we trying to make out something through our kissing? For Kathryn Bond Stockton, making out is a prism through which to look at the cultural and political forces of our world: race, economics, childhood, books, and movies. Making Out is Stockton's memoir about a non-binary childhood before that idea existed in her world. We think about kissing as we accompany Stockton to the bedroom, to the closet, to the playground, to the movies, and to solitary moments with a book, the ultimate source of pleasure. Avidly Reads is a series of short books about how culture makes us feel. Founded in 2012 by Sarah Blackwood and Sarah Mesle, Avidly-an online magazine supported by the Los Angeles Review of Books-specializes in short-form critical essays devoted to thinking and feeling. Avidly Reads is an exciting new series featuring books that are part memoir, part cultural criticism, each bringing to life the author's emotional relationship to a cultural artifact or experience. Avidly Reads invites us to explore the surprising pleasures and obstacles of everyday life.

The second volume of exuberant, lively letters from legendary travel writer Patrick Leigh Fermor

The first collection of letters from Patrick Leigh Fermor, Dashing for the Post, delighted critics and public alike. This second volume, More Dashing, presents a further selection of letters that exude a zest for life and adventure characteristic of the man known to all as 'Paddy'.

Paddy's exuberant letters contain glimpses of the great and the good: a chance conversation with the Foreign Secretary, Anthony Eden, when Paddy opens the wrong door, or a glass of ouzo under the pine trees with Harold Macmillan. They describe encounters with such varied figures as Jackie Onassis, Camilla Parker-Bowles, Oswald Mosley and Peter Mandelson, while also relating adventures with the humble: a 'pick-nick' with the stonemasons at Kardamyli, or a drunken celebration in the Cretan mountains with his old comrades from the Resistance, most of them simple shepherds and goatherds. Paddy was at ease in any company - unfailingly charming, boyish, gentle and fun.

Patrick Leigh Fermor has long been recognised as one of the greatest travel writers of his time. Nowhere is his restless curiosity and delight in language more dazzlingly displayed than in his letters, skilfully edited in this collection by Adam Sisman.

Met Adam Small se oorlye op 25 Junie 2016 het daar ’n einde gekom aan die lewe van ’n unieke mens en ’n unieke oeuvre: ’n digter, dramaturg en denker met besonderse insig in die aktualiteite van sy tyd. Hoewel die toekenning van die Hertzogprys aan Small in 2012 en die gepaardgaande publisiteit daarrondom die idee vir ’n huldigingsbundel by die SA Akademie vir Wetenskap en Kuns laat ontstaan het, was dit Small se dood wat die deurslag gegee het om die publikasie te verwesenlik: Wanneer ’n kunstenaar sterf en sy stem vir ewig verstom het, bied dit immers die geleentheid om oorkoepelend oor die geheel van sy kunstenaarskap te besin. Die bydraes in hierdie bundel dra die ondertoon van ’n afsluiting, ’n terugblik op die mens en kunstenaar Adam Small, met temas soos die toekoms van Afrikaans en die Afrikaanse letterkunde, die uitbreidende rol van Kaaps, en sosiale vraagstukke soos bendegeweld en armoede. Mense wat Small van naby geken het is hier aan die woord saam met literatore en kollegas uit die maatskaplikewerk-omgewing waarby Small lewenslank betrokke was. Adam Small: Denker, digter, dramaturg – ’n Huldiging hoef nie as afsluiting van die gesprek oor Small se lewe en werk beskou te word nie – inteendeel: Dit bied juis ook geleentheid om die oorkoepelende blik oor Small se kunstenaarskap as inleiding tot verdere ondersoek te benut.

Christy Brown was born with cerebral palsy and severe physical disability. He grew up to become a brilliantly imaginative and sensitive writer who would take his place among the giants of Irish literature.

This autobiography, published in 1954 when he was twenty-two, recounts his early life in Dublin – the poverty of his childhood, the support of his mother and his hope for a better life. Above all it describes his struggle to learn to read, write, paint and finally type, all with the toe of his left foot. Warm, honest and inspiring, this is a unique and captivating story of disability told by an extraordinary man.

Richard Yates has been referred to as American's least known great writer. Today Yates is known primarily for the novel Revolutionary Road, considered by many critics as the greatest American novel of the second half of the twentieth century. This critical study examines the life and work of Yates by placing his body of work in both cultural and personal context. Topics covered include the writing of his major novels, homosexuality, his role as a critic, and his relationship with Hollywood. This text divulges new details about his life and offers a thorough analysis of unpublished materials from the Richard Yates archives at Boston University.

A retelling of American modernism through the lines of solidarity and division within and among ethnic and religious identities found in poetry. What happens if we approach the reading and writing of poetry not as an individual act, but as a public one? Answering this question challenges common assumptions about modern poetry and requires that we explore the important questions that define genre: Where is this poem situated, and how did it get there? Joshua Logan Wall's Situating Poetry studies five poets of the New York literary scene rarely considered together: James Weldon Johnson, Charles Reznikoff, Lola Ridge, Louis Zukofsky, and Robert Hayden. Charting their works and careers from 1910-1940, Wall illustrates how these politically marginalized writers from drastically different religious backgrounds wrestled with their status as American outsiders. These poets produced a secularized version of America in which poetry, rather than God, governed individual obligations to one another across multiethnic barriers. Adopting a multiethnic and pluralist approach, Wall argues that each of these poets-two Black, two Jewish, and one Irish-American anarchist-shares a desire to create more truly democratic communities through art and through the covenantal publics created by their poems despite otherwise sitting uncomfortably, at best, within a more standard literary history. In this unique account of American modernist poetics, religious pluralism creates a lens through which to consider the bounds of solidarity and division within and among ethnic identities and their corresponding literatures.

In Facts and Fiction, Michael Holroyd reflects on the eccentricities of the art of writing about others. With characteristic playfulness and guilefulness, he considers the ways in which lives can be written about, with all the subtle differences of design and intention that this entails.

From Rudyard Kipling to forgetfulness, the glories of Mary Norton's Borrowers books to fellow biographers like Richard Holmes and Alexander Masters, Holroyd tackles an eclectic range of topics with wit, warmth and humour.

This is a unique insight into the mind of a master.

The perfect gift for fans of All Creatures Great and Small, this is a charming collection of classic stories from James Herriot's much-loved books with insights into his life and work from his children Rosie and Jim. With astute observations and boundless humour, country vet Herriot captures the spirit of the Yorkshire Dales and of rural communities on the cusp of change, before tractors and machines had taken over and modern medicines and antibiotics transformed veterinary work. Along the way a beloved cast of characters emerges, from the squabbling brothers Tristan and Siegfried to Herriot's hapless courtship and eventual family life with Helen Anderson. But it's the animals which are at the heart of Herriot's stories. Whether he's dodging a raging bull on a risky artificial insemination assignment, becoming pen pals with Tricki Woo the spoilt Pikingese or the inevitable trials and tribulations of lambing season, there's never a dull moment in Herriot's company. At times moving and often laugh-out-loud funny, The Wonderful World of James Herriot will delight fans old and new.

On 3 August 1845, Emily Dickinson declared, "All things are ready"-and with this, her life as a poet began. Despite spending her days almost entirely "at home", Dickinson's interior world was extraordinary. She loved passionately, was ambivalent towards publication, embraced seclusion and created 1,789 poems that she tucked into a dresser drawer. Martha Ackmann unravels the mysteries of Dickinson's life through ten decisive episodes that distil her evolution as a poet. She follows Dickinson through her religious crisis while a student, her decision to ask a famous editor for advice, her letters to an unidentified "Master", her frenzy of composition and her terror in confronting blindness. These ten days provide new insights into Dickinson's wildly original poetry and render a concise and vivid portrait of this enigmatic figure.

Hualien, on the Pacific coast of eastern Taiwan, and its mountains, especially Mount Qilai, were deeply inspirational for the young poet Yang Mu. A place of immense natural beauty and cultural heterogeneity, the city was also a site of extensive social, political, and cultural change in the twentieth century, from the Japanese occupation and the American bombings of World War II to the Chinese civil war, the White Terror, and the Cold War.

Taken as a whole, these evocative and allusive autobiographical essays provide a personal response to history as Taiwan transitioned from a Japanese colony to the Republic of China. Yang Mu recounts his childhood experiences under the Japanese, life in the mountains in proximity to indigenous people as his family took refuge from the American bombings, his initial encounters and cultural conflicts with Nationalist soldiers recently arrived from mainland China, the subsequent activities of the Nationalist government to consolidate power, and the burgeoning of the island's new manufacturing society.

Nevertheless, throughout those early years, Yang Mu remained anchored by a sense of place on Taiwan's eastern coast and amid its coastal mountains, over which stands Mount Qilai like a guardian spirit. This was the formative milieu of the young poet. Yang Mu seized on verse to develop a distinct persona and draw meaning from the currents of change reshuffling his world. These eloquent essays create an exciting, subjective realm meant to transcend the personal and historical limitations of the individual and the end of culture, "plundered and polluted by politics and industry long ago."

Leonard Woolf: Bloomsbury Socialist is an invaluable biography of an important if somewhat neglected figure in British cultural and political life,whose significance has been overshadowed by that of his wife, Virginia Woolf. His vital role in her life and career is a central aspect of this incisive study. Born to a prosperous middle-class Jewish family, he was profoundly affected by the early death of his father, a prominent barrister and QC, which left his family in reduced economic circumstances. Fred Leventhal and Peter Stansky expertly reveal that, despite his youthful loss of religious faith, being Jewish was as crucial in shaping Woolf's ideas as the Hellenism he imbibed at St Paul's and Trinity College, Cambridge. As an undergraduate member of the celebrated elite Apostles-along with his close friends, Lytton Strachey and John Maynard Keynes-he played a formative role in what later became the Bloomsbury Group. He subsequently spent seven years as a colonial servant in Ceylon, the background to his powerful novel, The Village in the Jungle. Within a year of his return to England in 1911 he married Virginia Stephen, and in 1917 they founded the Hogarth Press, an innovative and commercially successful publishing house. In the course of his long life he wrote prolifically on international relations, notably on the creation of the League of Nations, on socialism, and on imperial policy, particularly in Africa. Throughout this authoritative study,Leventhal and Stansky illuminate the life, scope, and thought of this seminal figure in twentieth-century British society.

Victor Hugo is an icon of French culture. He achieved immense success as a poet, dramatist, and novelist, and he was also elected to both houses of the French Parliament. Leading the Romantic campaign against artistic tradition and defying the Second Empire in exile, he became synonymous with the progressive ideals of the French Revolution. His state funeral in Paris made headlines across the world, and his breadth of appeal remains evident today, not least thanks to the popularity of his bestseller, Les Miserables, and its myriad theatrical and cinematic incarnations. This biography, the first in English for more than twenty years, provides a concise but comprehensive exploration of Hugo's monumental body of work within the context of his dramatic life. Hugo wrestled with family tragedy and personal misgivings while being pulled into the turmoil of the nineteenth century, from the fall of Napoleon's Empire to the rise of France's Third Republic. Throughout these twists of fate, he sensed a natural order of collapse and renewal. This unending cycle of creation shaped his ideas about freedom and roused his imagination, which he channeled into his prolific writing and other outlets like drawing. As Bradley Stephens argues, such creative intellectual vigor suggests that Hugo was too restless to sit comfortably on the pedestal of literary greatness; Hugo's was a mind as revolutionary as the time in which he lived.

The Sorrows of Young Werther is an epistolary novel by Wolfgang von Johann Goethe, originally published in 1774. In a series of letters to a friend, Werther recounts his time in the simple village of Walheim and the peasants he befriends there. He falls in love with Charlotte, but is tortured by his emotions as she is soon to be married and cannot return his love. The novel is celebrated as an early example of Romantic literature and its influence on later writings sustains its continued importance.

First U.S. Publication

A major literary event--the complete, uncensored journals of Sylvia Plath, published in their entirety for the first time.

Sylvia Plath's journals were originally published in 1982 in a heavily abridged version authorized by Plath's husband, Ted Hughes. This new edition is an exact and complete transcription of the diaries Plath kept during the last twelve years of her life. Sixty percent of the book is material that has never before been made public, more fully revealing the intensity of the poet's personal and literary struggles, and providing fresh insight into both her frequent desperation and the bravery with which she faced down her demons. The complete Journals of Sylvia Plath is essential reading for all who have been moved and fascinated by Plath's life and work.

Here, firmly rooted in her own social setting for the first time, is the real Jane Austen--the shy woman willing to challenge convention, the woman of no pretensions who nevertheless called herself "formidable," a woman who could be frivolous and yet suffer from black depressions, who showed unfailing loyalty and, in the conduct of her own life, unfailing bravery. In an act of understanding and brilliant synthesis, Claire Tomalin reveals Jane Austen with a clarity never before achieved, one which makes us look upon her novels with fresh and even greater admiration.

The world she wrote about--that place of civility and reassuring stability--was never quite her own. As Tomalin shows, Jane Austen's family existed on the very fringe of the world she described in her fiction, struggling to get ahead with little money and no land in the competitive society of Georgian England, sometimes succeeding but often failing with painful consequences. New research in family papers has yielded a rich, tragicomic picture of the Austen clan--their ambitions, their matrimonial alliances, their exotic connections with India and France. At the same time, Tomalin's explorations in local archives reveal a surprising view of the neighbors the family lived among in Hampshire, more extravagant and eccentric by far than anyone depicted in Austen's books. We realize how much closer her genius lies, in its splendid artifice, to the great comic operas of Mozart than to the main tradition of the English novel.

But it is in the deeply human portrait of Jane Austen herself that this biography excels. The honesty and directness of her personality (perfect heroines made her "sick and wicked"), her strength in giving up a chance at marriage to follow the path her vocation as a writer required her to take, the warmth and long consistency of her relationship with her sister, Cassandra, the poignancy of her death--Claire Tomalin here captures, with unforgettable skill, the living character of a great writer who is read, reread, read again, and adored, now more than ever.


From the Hardcover edition.

When Brian Doyle died of brain cancer at the age of sixty, he left behind dozens of books -- fiction and nonfiction, as well as hundreds of essays -- and a cult-like following who regarded his writing on spirituality as one of the best-kept secrets of the 21st century. Though Doyle occasionally wrote about Catholic spirituality, his writing is more broadly about the religion of everyday things. He writes with a delightful sense of wonder about the holiness of small things, and about love in all its forms: spiritual love, brotherly love, romantic love, friendly love, love of nature, and even the love of a nine-foot sturgeon. At a time when our world feels darker than ever, Doyle's essays are a balm for the tired soul. He finds beauty in the quotidian: the awe of a child the first time she hears a river, the whiskers a grieving widow misses seeing in her sink every day -- but through his eyes, nothing is ordinary. David James Duncan sums up Doyle's sensibilities best in his introduction to the collection: "Brian Doyle lived the pleasure of bearing daily witness to the glories hidden in people, places and creatures of little or no size or renown, and brought inimitably playful or soaring or aching or heartfelt language to his tellings." In a time when wonder seems to be in short supply, Your One Wild and Precious Life, Doyle and Duncan invite readers to experience it in the most ordinary of moments, and allow themselves joy in the smallest of things.

Through the novels of England's foremost woman writer, we explore the Regency world at the time of the Napoleonic wars, its manners, fashion and style, pastimes and entertainments. Jane Austen - loved now by a huge audience, thanks partly to modern-day TV and film - led a quiet, uneventful life - yet lived amid great events, in a society viewed with remarkable wit and perception. Here are the places Austen knew, visited and featured in her books: the settings for balls, country strolls, holiday tours, carriage drives, walks, picnics, rendezvous and revelations. The guide includes evocative quotations, surprising facts and places to visit.

By the time of his death, Herve Guibert had become a singular literary voice on the impact of AIDS in France. He was prolific. His oeuvre contained some twenty novels, including To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life and The Compassion Protocol. He was thirty-six years old. In Cytomegalovirus, Guibert offers an autobiographical narrative of the everyday moments of his hospitalization because of complications of AIDS. Cytomegalovirus is spare, biting, and anguished. Guibert writes through the minutiae of living and of death-as a quality of invention, of melancholy, of small victories in the face of greater threats-at the moment when his sight (and life) is eclipsed. This new edition includes an Introduction and Afterword contextualizing Guibert's work within the history of the AIDS pandemic, its relevance in the contemporary moment, and the importance of understanding the quotidian aspects of terminal illness.

This is the brilliant memoir of a man who starts out in Manhattan and comes of age in the skies over Korea, before emerging as one of America's finest authors in the New York of the 1960s. Burning the Days showcases James Salter's uniquely beautiful style with some of the most evocative pages about flying ever written, together with portraits of the actors, directors and authors who later influenced him. It is an unforgettable book about passion, ambition and what it means to live and to write.

El caso de Rulfo es el del escritor que tiene mucho que decir -no tanto en extension como en profundidad- y que por condicionamientos de su misma biografia se ve obligado a expresarse a traves de personajes sumamente rusticos, "gente que aparte de ignorante casi no habla." Por lo que no le queda mas que infiltrarse, si se quiere subrepticiamente, en el mundo interior de sus personajes y dotarlos de su propia sensibilidad artistica para que puedan apreciar la realidad que los rodea y expresarse sobre esa realidad en consonancia con la vision del mundo que el, Rulfo, elabora a lo largo de su obra literaria.