The definitive biography of Soviet Jewish dissident writer Vasily Grossman If Vasily Grossman's 1961 masterpiece, Life and Fate, had been published during his lifetime, it would have reached the world together with Pasternak's Doctor Zhivago and before Solzhenitsyn's Gulag. But Life and Fate was seized by the KGB. When it emerged posthumously, decades later, it was recognized as the War and Peace of the twentieth century. Always at the epicenter of events, Grossman (1905-1964) was among the first to describe the Holocaust and the Ukrainian famine. His 1944 article "The Hell of Treblinka" became evidence at Nuremberg. Grossman's powerful anti-totalitarian works liken the Nazis' crimes against humanity with those of Stalin. His compassionate prose has the everlasting quality of great art. Because Grossman's major works appeared after much delay we are only now able to examine them properly. Alexandra Popoff's authoritative biography illuminates Grossman's life and legacy.

In this charming and thought-provoking 1926 volume, Arthur Gray, Master of Jesus College, Cambridge from 1912 to 1940, explored the possibility that William Shakespeare spent his formative years at Polesworth Hall in the Forest of Arden, perhaps serving as a page boy. The Forest of Arden once stretched from just north of Stratford-upon-Avon to Tamworth, and covered what is now Birmingham; Polesworth, near Tamworth, was the home of Sir Henry Goodere and the centre of the famed 'Polesworth Circle'. This splendid focus of creative and cultural activity would have offered the young William exposure to the finest minds, a wonderful education and valuable introductions. Sir Henry, who evidently knew John Shakespeare in Stratford, was certainly patron of many young writers and musicians, including the eminent Elizabethan poet, Michael Drayton. If Gray is correct, Drayton would have been a contemporary of Shakespeare's at Polesworth.

Byron Rogers' biography of Wales' s national poet and vicar, R.S. Thomas has been hailed as a ' masterpiece' , even as a work of ' genius' , by reviewers from Craig Brown to the Archbishop of Canterbury. Within someone considered a wintry, austere and unsociable curmudgeon, Rogers has unearthed an extremely funny story - ' riotously' so, in Rowan Williams' words. Thomas is widely considered as one of the twentieth-century' s greatest English language poets. His bitter yet beautiful collections on Wales, its landscape, people and identity, reflect a life of political and spiritual asceticism. Indeed, Thomas is a man who banned vacuum cleaners from his house on grounds of noise, whose first act on moving into an ancient cottage was to rip out the central heating, and whose attempts to seek out more authentically Welsh parishes only brought him more into contact with loud English holidaymakers. To Thomas' s many admirers this will be a surprising, sometimes shocking, but at last humanising portrait of someone who wrote truly metaphysical poetry.

A wickedly funny memoir with echoes of David Sedaris and Augusten Burroughs, "Beautiful People" (originally published in hardcover as "Nasty") is now a BBC comedy hit series from the producer of "Ab Fab" and "The Office."
Proclaimed "the most brilliant, brash thing in type" by Liz Smith, Simon Doonan's saucy prose has established him as an emerging star among literary humorists. In this break-through memoir, reminiscent of both Sedaris and Burroughs, he revisits the landscape of his youth, and displays the irresistible charm that earned him his dedicated audience.
Long before he became a celebrity in his own right--as the author of best-selling books, as the style arbiter of VH1 and "America's Top Model," and the marketing genius behind Barney's New York--Simon Doonan was a "scabby knee'd troll" in Reading, England. In "Beautiful People," Doonan returns to the working-class neighborhood of his youth, and chronicles the misadventures of the Doonan clan in all their wacky glory. Readers meet his mother Betty, whose gravity-defying, peroxide hairdo signified her natural glamour; his father Terry, an amateur vintner who turned parsnips into the legendary Chateau Doonan; his grandfather D.C., a hard-drinking betting man who plotted to win his fortune by turning Simon into a jockey; and his demented grandma Narg and schizophrenic Uncle Ken, both of whom lived upstairs.
Fearing he would fall victim to the insanity that runs in his family, or, worse, the banality of suburban life, Doonan decamps with his flamboyant best-friend Biddie to London, where they hope to find the Beautiful People, that elusive clan who luxuriate on floor pillows and amuse each other with bon mots. Throughout the memoir--in essays about family holidays, the tart who lived next door, his first job--Doonan continues his bumbling pursuit of the fabulous life, only to learn, in the end, that perhaps the Beautiful People were the ones he left behind.

One of Ireland's greatest contemporary writers turns her attention to one of the country's greatest novelists: James Joyce - in celebration of the 100th anniversary of the iconic classic ULYSSES. 'As skilful, stylish and pacy as one would expect from so adept a novelist' Sunday Telegraph 'A delight from start to finish . . . achieves the near impossibility of giving a thoroughly fresh view of Joyce' Sunday Times 'Accessible and passionate, it is a book which should bring Joyce in all his glory and agony to a new and very wide audience' Irish Independent Edna O'Brien depicts James Joyce as a man hammered by Church, State and family, yet from such adversities he wrote works 'to bestir the hearts of men and angels'. The journey begins with Joyce the arrogant youth, his lofty courtship of Nora Barnacle, their hectic sexuality, children, wanderings, debt and profligacy, and Joyce's obsession with the city of Dublin, which he would re-render through his words. Nor does Edna O'Brien spare us the anger and isolation of Joyce's later years, when he felt that the world had turned its back on him, and she asks how could it be otherwise for a man who knew that conflict is the source of all creation.

R. B. Cunninghame Graham (1852 1936) was one of the most brilliant and mercurial characters of his day. Known as 'Don Roberto' and 'the Modern Don Quixote' because of his Spanish blood and impetuous life-style, and as 'the Uncrowned King of Scotland' because of his descent from King Robert II, he was a paradoxical man whose career was astonishingly varied. After an early period as an adventurer, when he worked as a cattle-rancher and horse-dealer in South America and Texas, he embarked on a stormy political career. He was the first socialist in Parliament, was gaoled after assailing the police at the Battle of Trafalgar Square on Bloody Sunday, 1887, later became the founder and president of the first Labour Party, and was eventually elected president of the Scottish National Party. Meanwhile he travelled in Morocco disguised as an Arab sheik and prospected for gold in Spain.

If the hurt and grief we carry is a woven blanket, it is time to weave ourselves anew. In the Nle kepmxcin language, spilax m are remembered stories, often shared over tea in the quiet hours between Elders. Rooted within the British Columbia landscape, and with an almost tactile representation of being on the land and water, Spilax m explores resilience, reconnection, and narrative memory through stories. Captivating and deeply moving, this story basket of memories tells one Indigenous woman's journey of overcoming adversity and colonial trauma to find strength through creative works and traditional perspectives of healing, transformation, and resurgence.

Published posthumously in 1964, "A Moveable Feast" remains one of Ernest Hemingway's most enduring works. Since Hemingway's personal papers were released in 1979, scholars have examined the changes made to the text before publication. Now, this special restored edition presents the original manuscript as the author prepared it to be published.
Featuring a personal Foreword by Patrick Hemingway, Ernest's sole surviving son, and an Introduction by grandson of the author, Sean Hemingway, editor of this edition, the book also includes a number of unfinished, never-before-published Paris sketches revealing experiences that Hemingway had with his son, Jack, and his first wife Hadley. Also included are irreverent portraits of literary luminaries, such as F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ford Maddox Ford, and insightful recollections of Hemingway's own early experiments with his craft.
Widely celebrated and debated by critics and readers everywhere, the restored edition of "A Moveable Feast "brilliantly evokes the exuberant mood of Paris after ?World War I and the unbridled creativity and unquenchable enthusiasm that Hemingway himself epitomized.

Marylebone has been home to its fair share of rogues, villains and eccentrics, and their stories are told here. The authors also want to remind the reader that alongside the glamour of Society, there has also been hardship and squalor in the parish, as was graphically illustrated in Charles Booth's poverty maps of London in 1889. Over the past 10 years the Marylebone Journal has printed historical essays on the people, places, and events that have helped shape the character of the area. Some are commemorated with a blue plaque, but many are not. This is not a check-list of the grandees of Marylebone, though plenty appear in these pages. The essays have been grouped into themes of: history, politicians and warriors, culture and sport (from pop music and television to high art), love and marriage (stories from romance to acrimonious divorce), criminals, science and medicine, buildings and places, and the mad bad and dangerous to know - those whose stories don't fit a convenient box but are too good not to tell.

Romanticism is where the modern age begins, and Hazlitt was its most articulate spokesman. No one else had the ability to see it whole; no one else knew so many of its politicians, poets, and philosophers. By interpreting it for his contemporaries, he speaks to us of ourselves - of the culture and world we now inhabit. Perhaps the most important development of his time, the creation of a mass media, is one that now dominates our lives. Hazlitt's livelihoo was dependent on it. As the biography argues, he took political sketch-writing to a new level, invented sports commentary as we know it, and created the essay-form as practised by Clive James, Gore Vidal, and Michael Foot. Duncan Wu's profile of one of the greatest journalists in the language draws on over a decade of archival research in libraries across Britain and North America, to reveal for the first time such matters as why Godwin broke with Hazlitt; how Hazlitt came to know Sir John Soane and J. M. W. Turner; the true nature of Hazlitt's dealings with Thomas Medwin, and what the likes of Joseph Farington and Sir Thomas Lawrence thought of him. In addition, it sheds new light on Hazlitt's dealings with such figures as Francis Jeffrey, Robert Stodart, John M'Creery, Henry Crabb Robinson, Joseph Parkes, John Cam Hobhouse, and Stendhal. It benefits also from Wu's New Writings of William Hazlitt, many of which make their appearance here, illuminating hitherto obscure passages of Hazlitt's life.

Andrzej Franaszek's award-winning biography of Czeslaw Milosz-the great Polish poet and winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1980-offers a rich portrait of the writer and his troubled century, providing context for a larger appreciation of his work. This English-language edition, translated by Aleksandra Parker and Michael Parker, contains a new introduction by the translators, along with historical explanations, maps, and a chronology. Franaszek recounts the poet's personal odyssey through the events that convulsed twentieth-century Europe: World War I, the Bolshevik revolution, the Nazi invasion and occupation of Poland, and the Soviet Union's postwar dominance of Eastern Europe. He follows the footsteps of a perpetual outsider who spent much of his unsettled life in Lithuania, Poland, and France, where he sought political asylum. From 1960 to 1999, Milosz lived in the United States before returning to Poland, where he died in 2004. Franaszek traces Milosz's changing, constantly questioning, often skeptical attitude toward organized religion. In the long term, he concluded that faith performed a positive role, not least as an antidote to the amoral, soulless materialism that afflicts contemporary civilization. Despite years of hardship, alienation, and neglect, Milosz retained a belief in the transformative power of poetry, particularly its capacity to serve as a source of moral resistance and a reservoir of collective hope. Seamus Heaney once said that Milosz's poetry is irradiated by wisdom. Milosz reveals how that wisdom was tempered by experience even as the poet retained a childlike wonder in a misbegotten world.

This is the acclaimed central volume of the definitive biography of Franz Kafka. Reiner Stach spent more than a decade working with over four thousand pages of journals, letters, and literary fragments, many never before available, to re-create the atmosphere in which Kafka lived and worked from 1910 to 1915, the most important and best-documented years of his life. This period, which would prove crucial to Kafka's writing and set the course for the rest of his life, saw him working with astonishing intensity on his most seminal writings--"The Trial," "The Metamorphosis," "The Man Who Disappeared" ("Amerika"), and "The Judgment." These are also the years of Kafka's fascination with Zionism; of his tumultuous engagement to Felice Bauer; and of the outbreak of World War I.

"Kafka: The Decisive Years" is at once an extraordinary portrait of the writer and a startlingly original contribution to the art of literary biography.

In 1903, after a fire completely destroyed her family home in Norfolk, UK, the 27- year-old Constance helped her mother redesign their house and recreate the garden. It was an experience from which she never looked back, going on to become an internationally recognised garden expert and connoisseur. A rich woman herself, she was attracted to the most spectacular and extravagant gardens in the world. From Shalimar Bagh, Lahore, to Nishat Bagh, Srinagar, to La Granja near Madrid, Constance earned her reputation studying Mughal and Moorish gardens as well as those in Great Britain, France, Italy and northern Europe. Between 1910 and 1955 she wrote about them, painted and photographed them and lectured on them. She produced two successful illustrated books, and numerous articles for magazines, including Country Life, Vogue, The Burlington Magazine, Harpers Bazaar, and The Times. When she died in 1966, she left paintings, photographs, diaries, press cuttings and scrapbooks to her grandchildren. It is upon this fascinating and hitherto unseen archive of memorabilia that Constance Villiers Stuart: In Pursuit of Paradise is based.

This sequel to Garland's acclaimed autobiography, "A Son of the Middle Border, "continues his story as he sets out for Chicago and settles into a Bohemian encampment of artists and writers. There he meets Zulime Taft, an artist who captures his heart and eventually becomes his wife. The intensity of this romance is rivaled only by Garland's struggle between America's coastal elite and his heartland roots. "A Daughter of the Middle Border" won the Pulitzer Prize in 1922, forever securing his place in the literary canon.

An authoritative, accessible overview of history's greatest literary figure

The great dramatist Ben Jonson wrote that William Shakespeare ""was not of an age, but for all time."" In the nearly four centuries since his death, Shakespeare's plays still have a tremendous impact on everything from the classroom to popular culture. Now you can have at your fingertips all the vital details on the most influential writer in the history of the English language--straight from one of the most trusted sources of information in the world.
In Shakespeare, Encyclopaedia Britannica presents a concise and balanced overview of the Bard's life, work, and legacy. From his upbringing in Stratford to his early theater career in London, from his poetry and plays to the controversy surrounding his authorship, from his contemporaries and collaborators to his critics past and present, this comprehensive guide provides the necessary background to appreciate Shakespeare's unique place in world literature.
This informative volume also looks at new interpretive approaches to Shakespeare and his work and offers insights from the foremost Shakespeare scholars in the world, including David Bevington (University of Chicago), Stephen J. Greenblatt (Harvard University), and Gail Kern Paster (Folger Shakespeare Library), among others. Every concise entry--from All's Well That Ends Well to The Winter's Tale--promotes a deeper understanding of Shakespeare's life, times, writings, and influence that only Encyclopaedia Britannica can provide.
Since 1768, Encyclopaedia Britannica has been a leading provider of learning products and one of the world's most trusted sources of information.

A comprehensive reading of Mark Twain's major work At the end of his long life, Samuel Clemens felt driven to write a truthful account of what he regarded as the flaws in his character and the errors of his ways. His attempt to tell the unvarnished truth about himself is preserved in nearly 250 autobiographical dictations. In order to encourage complete veracity, he decided from the outset that these would be published only posthumously. Nevertheless, Clemens's autobiography is singularly unrevealing. Forrest G. Robinson argues that, by contrast, it is in his fiction that Clemens most fully-if often inadvertently-reveals himself. He was, he confessed, like a cat who labors in vain to bury the waste that he has left behind. Robinson argues that he wrote out of an enduring need to come to terms with his remembered experiences-not to memorialize the past, but to transform it. By all accounts-including his own-Clemens's special curse was guilt. He was unable to forgive himself for the deaths of those closest to him-from his siblings' death in childhood to the deaths of his own children. Nor could he reconcile himself to his role in the Civil War, his part in the duel that prompted his departure from Virginia City in 1864, and-worst of all-his sense of moral complicity in the crimes of slavery. Tracing the theme of bad faith in all of Clemens's major writing, but with special attention to the late work, Robinson sheds new light on a tormented moral life. His book challenges conventional assumptions about the humorist's personality and creativity, directing attention to what William Dean Howells describes as "the depths of a nature whose tragical seriousness broke in the laughter which the unwise took for the whole of him."

Hero Martyr Poet
The inspiring story of a remarkable life cut short.

I don t think Hannah wanted to die for the sake of having her memory exalted in history or to prove herself equal to a romantic image she conceived for herself. Her purpose wasn t to die. She died for her life s purpose. U.S. Senator John McCain, in "Why Courage Matters"

Hannah Senesh, poet and Israel s national heroine, has come to be seen as a symbol of Jewish heroism. Safe in Palestine during World War II, she volunteered for a mission to help rescue fellow Jews in her native Hungary. She was captured by the Nazis, endured imprisonment and torture, and was finally executed at the age of twenty-three.

Like Anne Frank, she kept a diary from the time she was thirteen. This new edition brings together not only the widely read and cherished diary, but many of Hannah s poems and letters, memoirs written by Hannah s mother, accounts by parachutists who accompanied Hannah on her fateful mission, and insightful material not previously published in English.

Described by a fellow parachutist as a spiritual girl guided almost by mysticism, Hannah s life has something of value to teach everyone. Now the subject of a feature-length documentary, Blessed Is the Match: The Life and Death of Hannah Senesh, Hannah s words and actions will inspire people from each generation to follow their own inner voices, just as she followed hers.

A towering figure on the American cultural landscape, H.L. Mencken stands out as one of our most influential stylists and fearless iconoclasts--the twentieth century's greatest newspaper journalist, a famous wit, and a constant figure of controversy.
Marion Elizabeth Rodgers has written the definitive biography of Mencken, the finest book ever published about this giant of American letters. Rodgers illuminates both the public and the private man, covering the many love affairs, his happy marriage at the age of 50 to Sara Haardt, and his complicated but stimulating friendship with the famed theater critic George Jean Nathan. Rodgers vividly recreates Mencken's era: the glittering tapestry of turn-of-the-century America, the roaring twenties, depressed thirties, and the home front during World War II. But the heart of the book is Mencken. When few dared to shatter complacencies, Mencken fought for civil liberties and free speech, playing a prominent role in the Scope's Monkey Trial, battling against press censorship, and exposing pious frauds and empty uplift. The champion of our tongue in The American Language, Mencken also played a pivotal role in defining American letters through The Smart Set and The American Mercury, magazines that introduced such writers as James Joyce, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Langston Hughes.
Drawing on research in more than sixty archives including private collections in the United States and in Germany, previously unseen, on exclusive interviews with Mencken's friends, and on his love letters and FBI files, here is the full portrait of one of America's most colorful and influential men.
"This biography, the best ever on the sage of Baltimore, is exhaustive but never exhausting, and offers readers more than moderate intelligence and an awfully good time."
--Martin Nolan, Boston Globe

An authoritative, accessible overview of history's greatest literary figure

The great dramatist Ben Jonson wrote that William Shakespeare "was not of an age, but for all time." In the nearly four centuries since his death, Shakespeare's plays still have a tremendous impact on everything from the classroom to popular culture. Now you can have at your fingertips all the vital details on the most influential writer in the history of the English language--straight from one of the most trusted sources of information in the world.

In Shakespeare, Encyclopaedia Britannica presents a concise and balanced overview of the Bard's life, work, and legacy. From his upbringing in Stratford to his early theater career in London, from his poetry and plays to the controversy surrounding his authorship, from his contemporaries and collaborators to his critics past and present, this comprehensive guide provides the necessary background to appreciate Shakespeare's unique place in world literature.

This informative volume also looks at new interpretive approaches to Shakespeare and his work and offers insights from the foremost Shakespeare scholars in the world, including David Bevington (University of Chicago), Stephen J. Greenblatt (Harvard University), and Gail Kern Paster (Folger Shakespeare Library), among others. Every concise entry--from All's Well That Ends Well to The Winter's Tale--promotes a deeper understanding of Shakespeare's life, times, writings, and influence that only Encyclopaedia Britannica can provide.

Since 1768, Encyclopaedia Britannica has been a leading provider of learning products and one of the world's most trusted sources of information.

During the early fifties, Kenya was a country in turmoil. While Ngugi enjoys scouting trips, chess tournaments and reading about Biggles at the prestigious Alliance School near Nairobi, things are changing at home. He arrives back for his first visit since starting school to find his house razed to the ground and the entire village moved up the road closer to a guard checkpoint. Later, his brother, Good Wallace, who fights for the rebels, is captured by the British and taken to a concentration camp. Finally, Ngugi himself comes into conflict with the forces of colonialism when he is victimised by a police officer on a bus journey and thrown in prison for six days. This fascinating memoir charts the development of a significant voice in international literature, as well as standing as a record of the struggles of a nation to free itself.

Praise for UPTON SINCLAIR and the other American Century
""I look forward to all of Kevin Mattson's works of history and I've notbeen disappointed yet. Upton Sinclair is a thoughtful, well-researched, and extremely eloquently told excavation of the history of theAmerican left and, indeed, the American nation, as well as a testamentto the power of one man to influence his times. Well done.""
--Eric Alterman, author of When Presidents Lie: A History of Official Deception and Its Consequences
""A splendid read. It reminds you that real heroes once dwelt among us. Mattson not only captures Sinclair's character, but the world he inhabited, with deft strokes whose energy and passion easily match his subject's.""
--Richard Parker, author of John Kenneth Galbraith: His Life, His Politics, His Economics
""From the meat-packing houses of Chicago to the automobile factories of Detroit to the voting booths of California, Upton Sinclair cut a wide swath as a muckraking writer who exposed the injustices rendered by American industrial capitalism. Now Kevin Mattson presents a much-needed exploration of this complex crusader. This is a thoughtful, provocative, and gripping account of an important figure who appeared equal parts intellectual, propagandist, and political combatant as he struggled to illuminate the 'other American century' inhabited by the poor and powerless.""
--Steven Watts, author of The People's Tycoon: Henry Ford and the American Century

This is the first in-depth biography of the German-Jewish writer Gerson Stern. His work, which has been republished only a few years ago, is concerned with important phases in German-Jewish history: the early period of Emancipation in the 18th century, the seemingly successful integration of Jews in Germany, and finally, the collapse of integration. The biography reveals the paradigmatic importance of Stern s life and work and invites the reader to rediscover the author of Weg ohne Ende Way Without End]."