David Foster is the most original, challenging, contradictory, risk-taking and infuriating Australian novelist of his generation. To date he has published twelve novels, three collections of novellas and short stories, two books of poetry, and a collection of essays, with several produced radio plays. Foster writes in an Australian tradition of idiosyncratic satire and comedy that may be traced through the work of Joseph Furphy, Miles Franklin, Xavier Herbert and David Ireland. His novels are the most wide-ranging and fearless of the Australian novels that have contributed to the late twentieth-century re-examination of Western ideologies and the literary forms in which they are expressed. In this first critical study of David Foster's works, Professor Susan Lever steers us into penetrating the mysteries of Foster's fiction, and provides guidance to readers willing to approach them. The book examines the contradictory nature of his commitments and interests as expressed mainly in his novels. Each of his works of fiction and poetry in the order of publication (except for The Adventures of Christian Rosy Cross and The Pale Blue Crochet Coathanger Cover which are discussed with similar novels) are discussed. The development of Foster's philosophical ideas and technique as a novelist over the 35 years of his writing life to date is followed. The book also examines Foster's letters to Geoffrey Dutton early in his career; his interviews and essays provide some of the background to these novels. The book also furnishes a sense of the Australian context for his work. A brief biography of Foster's early life and a discussion of his approach to satire is also included.

The BBC Radio 4 dramatisation of Edna O'Brien's The Country Girls trilogy begins in August 2019. I thought of life's many bounties, to have known the extremities of joy and sorrow, love, crossed love and unrequited love, success and failure, fame and slaughter ... Born in Ireland in 1930 and driven into exile after publication of her controversial first novel, The Country Girls, Edna O'Brien is now hailed as one of the most majestic writers of her era - and Country Girl is her fabulous memoir. Born in rural Ireland, O'Brien weaves the tale of her life from convent school to elopement, divorce, single-motherhood, moving on to the wild parties of 1960s bohemian in London, encounters with Hollywood giants, pop stars, and literary titans, love and unrequited love, and glamorous trips to America as a celebrity writer. Country Girl is a rich and heady accounting of the events, people, emotions, and landscape that have forged a legendary author. O'Brien recasts her life with the imaginative alchemy of a poet, and the result is a memoir of sparkling wisdom and honesty. Edna O'Brien's stunning new novel Girl will be published by Faber in September 2019, available to pre-order now.

When Agatha Christie died in 1976, at age eighty-five, she had become the world's most popular author. At the end of 2004, following the death of Christie's daughter, Rosalind, a remarkable legacy was revealed: seventy-three handwritten volumes of notes, lists, and drafts outlining all her plans for her many books, plays, and stories. Buried in this treasure trove, all in the beloved author's unmistakable handwriting, are revelations about her famous books that will fascinate anyone who has ever read or watched an Agatha Christie story.

Full of details she was too modest to reveal in her own autobiography, this remarkable book includes a wealth of excerpts and pages reproduced directly from the notebooks and her letters--plus, two complete, recently discovered Hercule Poirot short stories never before published.

Walden is one of the best-known non-fiction books ever written by an American. It details Thoreau's sojourn in a cabin near Walden Pond, amidst woodland owned by his friend and mentor Ralph Waldo Emerson. Walden was written with expressed seasonal divisions. Thoreau hoped to isolate himself from society in order to gain a more objective understanding of it. Simplicity and self-reliance were Thoreau's other goals, and the whole project was inspired by Transcendentalist philosophy. This book is full of fascinating musings and reflections. As pertinent and relevant today as it was when it was first written.

Virginia Woolf has been among the most scrutinised figures of the past century. Her unique literary genius, her pioneering work for women's rights, her position at the nucleus of the Bloomsbury group, her high-profile family and marriage, her relationship with Vita Sackville-West, and her suicide have all been dissected. Life and art were, for Woolf, inextricably entangled, and the autobiographical elements of many of her works, including the masterpieces To The Lighthouse and The Waves, have heightened interest in this most fascinating of figures. Elizabeth Wright here takes a fresh look at the life and legacy of one of the greatest figures of English literature. Perfect for Woolf enthusiasts and newcomers alike, Brief Lives: Virginia Woolf offers a concise, authoritative account of the author's life, and presents an engaging overview of her afterlife in literary history.

Edmund Curll was a notorious figure among the publishers of the early eighteenth century: for his boldness, his lack of scruple, his publication of work without author's consent, and his taste for erotic and scandalous publications. He was in legal trouble on several occasions for piracy and copyright infringement, unauthorized publication of the works of peers, and for seditious, blasphemous, and obscene publications. He stood in the pillory in 1728 for seditious libel. Above all, he was the constant target of the greatest poet and satirist of his age, Alexander Pope, whose work he pirated whenever he could and who responded with direct physical revenge (an emetic slipped into a drink) and persistent malign caricature. The war between Pope and Curll typifies some of the main cultural battles being waged between creativity and business. The story has normally been told from the poet's point of view, though more recently Curll has been celebrated as a kind of literary freedom-fighter; this book, the first full biography of Curll since Ralph Straus's The Unspeakable Curll (1927), seeks to give a balanced and thoroughly-researched account of Curll's career in publishing between 1706 and 1747, untangling the mistakes and misrepresentations that have accrued over the years and restoring a clear sense of perspective to Curll's dealings in the literary marketplace. It examines the full range of Curll's output, including his notable antiquarian series, and uses extensive archive material to detail Curll's legal and other troubles. For the first time, what is known about this strange, interesting, and awkward figure is authoritatively told.

On the strength of a National Book Award for his novel "Going After Cacciato" (1978) and a widely acclaimed short-story cycle, "The Things They Carried" (1990), Tim O'Brien (b. 1946) cemented his reputation as one of the most compelling chroniclers of Vietnam--and, in the process, was cast as a "Vietnam writer." But to confine O'Brien to a single piece of ground or a particular style is to ignore the broad sweep of a career spanning nearly four decades.

In addition to detailed discussions of all of O'Brien's work--a memoir, "If I Die in a Combat Zone" (1973), and seven books of fiction--the sixteen interviews and profiles in "Conversations with Tim O'Brien" explore common themes, with subtle differences. Looming large is the experience of Vietnam and its influence as well as O'Brien's youth in Minnesota and the expectations of a Midwestern upbringing. Interviews allowed the writer to fully examine the shifting boundaries of truth and identity, memory, and imagination in fiction, the role of war in society; gender issues; and the craft of writing. O'Brien approaches each of these topics and a host of others with a directness and an evident passion that will resonate with both readers and prospective writers.

In this book John Radner examines the fluctuating, close, and complex friendship enjoyed by Samuel Johnson and James Boswell, from the day they met in 1763 to the day when Boswell published his monumental Life of Johnson. Drawing on everything Johnson and Boswell wrote to and about the other, this book charts the psychological currents that flowed between them as they scripted and directed their time together, questioned and advised, confided and held back. It explores the key longings and shifting tensions that distinguished this from each man's other long-term friendships, while it tracks in detail how Johnson and Boswell brought each other to life, challenged and confirmed each other, and used their deepening friendship to define and assess themselves. It tells a story that reaches through its specificity into the dynamics of most sustained friendships, with their breaks and reconnections, their silences and fresh intimacies, their continuities and transformations.

When Anne D. LeClaire decided to turn an ordinary Monday into a day of silence, little did she realize she had begun an inner voyage that would transform her life.

In the seventeen years since, LeClaire has practiced total silence two days each month. By detaching herself from the bustle of her hectic lifestyle and learning to listen to her deepest self, she has found a center from which to live--one that tests, strengthens, and heals her. In practicing silence, she has discovered her own secret garden--a cloistered, sacred private place where true personal growth is possible.

In this eloquent book--part memoir, part philosophical inquiry, written with clarity and warm humor--LeClaire reflects on how silence can help us expand our awareness, ignite and nurture creativity, and achieve inner peace.

Sir Thomas Browne (1605-1682) was an English writer, physician, and philosopher whose work has inspired everyone from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Jorge Luis Borges, Virginia Woolf to Stephen Jay Gould. In an intellectual adventure like Sarah Bakewell's book about Montaigne, How to Live, Hugh Aldersey-Williams sets off not just to tell the story of Browne's life but to champion his skeptical nature and inquiring mind. Mixing botany, etymology, medicine, and literary history, Aldersey-Williams journeys in his hero's footsteps to introduce us to witches, zealots, natural wonders, and fabulous creatures of Browne's time and ours. We meet Browne the master prose stylist, responsible for introducing hundreds of words into English, including electricity, hallucination, and suicide. Aldersey-Williams reveals how Browne's preoccupations-how to disabuse the credulous of their foolish beliefs, what to make of order in nature, how to unite science and religion-are relevant today. In Search of Sir Thomas Browne is more than just a biography-it is a cabinet of wonders and an argument that Browne, standing at the very gates of modern science, remains an inquiring mind for our own time. As Stephen Greenblatt has written, Browne is "unnervingly one of our most adventurous contemporaries."

Challenging. Successful. Controversial. All terms used to accurately describe African American novelist and autobiographer John Edgar Wideman. This book examines his life and work-and the connections between them. The Life and Work of John Edgar Wideman is ideal for readers who might not be familiar with Wideman's work or those who may have been intimidated by descriptions of his writings. Through its coverage of Wideman's life from several generations back to the present and explanations of how Wideman makes use of life experiences, this book breaks down barriers for new readers and enables them to better relate and connect to his writing. Author Keith E. Byerman discusses Wideman's book-length works of fiction and nonfiction, as well as some of his shorter, journalistic pieces. The book emphasizes how Wideman integrates family and personal experience into what is typically labeled postmodern writing, and explains how he has evolved as a public intellectual who supplies shrewd commentary on subjects such as the prison system, terrorism, and the role of sports in American society.

Joan Didion (b. 1934) is an American icon. Her essays, particularly those in Slouching Towards Bethlehem and The White Album, have resonated in American culture to a degree unmatched over the past half century. Two generations of writers have taken her as the measure of what it means to write personal essays. No one writes about California, the sixties, media narratives, cultural mythology, or migraines without taking Didion into account. She has also written five novels; several screenplays with her husband, John Gregory Dunne; and three late-in-life memoirs, including The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, which have brought her a new wave of renown. Conversations with Joan Didion features seventeen interviews with the author spanning decades, continents, and genres. Didion reflects on her childhood in Sacramento; her time at Berkeley (both as a student and later as a visiting professor), New York, and Hollywood; her marriage to Dunne; and of course her writing. Didion describes her methods of writing, the ways in which the various genres she has worked in inform one another, and the concerns that have motivated her to write.

This Woman's Work presents a social history and critical biography based on the life of award-winning writer Bebe Moore Campbell (1950-2006). It offers the personal story of a popular novelist, journalist, and mental health advocate. This book examines Campbell's life and activism in two periods: first, as a student at the University of Pittsburgh during the 1960s black student movement and, second, as a mental health advocate near the end of her life in 2006. It describes Campbell's activism within the Black Action Society from 1967 to 1971 and her negotiation of the Black Nationalist ideologies espoused during the 1960s. The book also explores Campbell's later involvement in the National Alliance on Mental Illness (NAMI), her role as a national spokesperson, and the local activism that sparked the birth of the NAMI Urban-Los Angeles chapter, which served black and Latino communities (1999-2006). Adjacent to her activist work, Campbell's first novel, Your Blues Ain't Like Mine, connects to her emerging political consciousness (related to race and gender) and the concern for racial violence during the US black liberation period from 1950 to 1970. Similarly Campbell's final novel, 72 Hour Hold, is examined closely for its connection to her activism as well as the sociopolitical commentary, emphasis on mental health disparities, coping with mental illness, and advocacy in black communities. As a writer and activist, Campbell immersed her readers in immediately relevant historical and sociopolitical matters. This Woman's Work is the first full-length biography of Bebe Moore Campbell and details the seamless marriage of her fiction writing and community activism.

How could William Shaksper of Stratford, who was illiterate, be the author of plays that have dazzled the world for centuries? Answer: he wasn't. His authorship is a remarkably successful hoax.

It was not until 1920 that J. Thomas Looney plucked Edward de Vere out of historical obscurity and introduced him as the real Shakespeare. In the next fifty years, powerful articles and books validated his authorship claim but much of this evidence has been neglected.

The first five volumes of this book series salvage this early research which makes Edward de Vere by far the likeliest candidate for being the great playwright, William Shakespeare.

In Volume One, you'll learn:

● Why Shakespeare's breadth of knowledge and intimate familiarity with England's Royal Court exclude Shaksper of Stratford as the true Bard;
● Why Francis Bacon is an unlikely Shakespeare authorship candidate;
● Why Edward de Vere fulfills all criteria to be the great playwright;
● And much more

Stop blindly accepting what the textbooks say. Take a logical, analytical approach to one of history's most important questions. Start Building the Case for Edward de Vere as Shakespeare with Volume 1: The Great Shakespeare Hoax.