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.

'An absolute belter of a biography' MARINA HYDE A Times Literary Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2022 An LA Times Best Book of the Year 2022 An intimate, revealing and profoundly moving biography of Jean Rhys, acclaimed author of Wide Sargasso Sea. An obsessive and troubled genius, Jean Rhys is one of the most compelling and unnerving writers of the twentieth century. Memories of a conflicted Caribbean childhood haunt the four fictions that Rhys wrote during her extraordinary years as an exile in 1920s Paris and later in England. Rhys's experiences of heartbreak, poverty, notoriety, breakdowns and even imprisonment all became grist for her writing, forming an iconic 'Rhys woman' whose personality - vulnerable, witty, watchful and angry - was often mistaken, and still is, for a self-portrait. Many details of Rhys's life emerge from her memoir, Smile Please and the stories she wrote throughout her long and challenging career. But it's a shock to discover that no biographer - until now - has researched the crucial seventeen years that Rhys spent living on the remote Caribbean island of Dominica; the island which haunted Rhys's mind and her work for the rest of her life. Luminous and penetrating, Seymour's biography reveals a proud and fiercely independent artist, one who experienced tragedy and extreme poverty, alcohol and drug dependency, romantic and sexual turmoil - and yet was never a victim. I Used to Live Here Once enables one of our most excitingly intuitive biographers to uncover the hidden truth about a fascinatingly elusive woman. The figure who emerges for Seymour is powerful, cultured, self-mocking, self-absorbed, unpredictable and often darkly funny. Persuasive, surprising and compassionate, this unforgettable biography brings Jean Rhys to life as never before.

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.

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.

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.

No writer alive today exerts the magical appeal of Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Now, in the long-awaited first volume of his autobiography, he tells the story of his life from his birth in 1927 to the moment in the 1950s when he proposed to his wife. The result is as spectacular as his finest fiction.
Here is Garcia Marquez's shimmering evocation of his childhood home of Aracataca, the basis of the fictional Macondo. Here are the members of his ebulliently eccentric family. Here are the forces that turned him into a writer. Warm, revealing, abounding in images so vivid that we seem to be remembering them ourselves, Living to Tell the Tale" "is a work of enchantment.

Delve into the fascinating life of Ray Bradbury, one of the most prolific writers of our time, spokesperson for the Space Age, and idea man for Disney. Author of more than forty-five books and nearly five hundred short stories, Bradbury has entertained generations of readers worldwide with imaginative stories, poetry, TV shows and movies.

In "Ray Bradbury-Uncensored " author and journalist Gene Beley examines the life of this literary King Kong of writers. A plethora of interesting insights and milestones from Bradbury's life includes:

• Advice to writers
• Non-edited speeches from the 1960s
• Views on architecture, religion, and space
• CBS television plagiarism court battles
• Sparring with movie producer John Huston over the Moby Dick screenplay
• How and where he got his ideas for his classic books and short stories. Beley offers an intriguing look at one of the world's greatest, iconoclastic minds, revealing why Bradbury has inspired many other creative people to practice his "optimal optimism."

As a single mother of two young children, Charlotte set out to build a new life. She leaves her entire family behind in Virginia for the opportunities Ohio offered to her and her family. With just a high school education, no money, and completely alone, she redefined herself into a woman destine for success. building new friendships, and raising two children, Charlotte blended herself into small town life amongst the corn and soy fields of Centerburg, Ohio. Her two sons, Trent and David, were given a life better than the one she had as a child. She had done what every mother dreamed of doing for her two boys. tragedy entered her home. Cancer took from her what had taken years to build. Not only did the disease destroy her, it destroyed the lives of her two teenage sons. They would be the ones who would feel the full hurt of a broken home. of those left behind to put the pieces back together. Death was just the beginning of many pains Charlotte's sons would endure before rebuilding their own lives.

The early years of poet P.J. Kavanagh's life - which took him from a Butlin's Holiday Camp to Switzerland and Paris, to a battlefield in Korea, to Oxford and Barcelona, and finally to Java - made little sense to him, until 'something extraordinary happened': his meeting with Sally, 'the perfect stranger'. This tender, funny and quite unsentimental record of the uniqueness of human love is as much a celebration of joy - despite its abrupt and shocking conclusion - as it is a poet's tribute of thanks.

With more than two million copies in print, "Manchild in the Promised Land" is one of the most remarkable autobiographies of our time--the definitive account of African-American youth in Harlem of the 1940s and 1950s, and a seminal work of modern literature.
Published during a literary era marked by the ascendance of black writers such as Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, and Alex Haley, this thinly fictionalized account of Claude Brown's childhood as a hardened, streetwise criminal trying to survive the toughest streets of Harlem has been heralded as the definitive account of everyday life for the first generation of African Americans raised in the Northern ghettos of the 1940s and 1950s.
When the book was first published in 1965, it was praised for its realistic portrayal of Harlem--the children, young people, hardworking parents; the hustlers, drug dealers, prostitutes, and numbers runners; the police; the violence, sex, and humor.
The book continues to resonate generations later, not only because of its fierce and dignified anger, not only because the struggles of urban youth are as deeply felt today as they were in Brown's time, but also because of its inspiring message. Now with an introduction by Nathan McCall, here is the story about the one who "made it," the boy who kept landing on his feet and grew up to become a man.

Franz Baermann Steiner (1909-52) provided the vital link between the intellectual culture of central Europe and the Oxford Institute of Anthropology in its post-Second World War years. This book demonstrates his quiet influence within anthropology, which has extended from Mary Douglas to David Graeber, and how his remarkable poetry reflected profoundly on the slavery and murder of the Shoah, an event which he escaped from. Steiner's concerns including inter-disciplinarity, genre, refugees and exile, colonialism and violence, and the sources of European anthropology speak to contemporary concerns more directly now than at any time since his early death.