Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Biography

"Thoroughly absorbing, lively . . . Fuller, so misunderstood in life, richly deserves the nuanced, compassionate portrait Marshall paints." --" Boston Globe"

Pulitzer Prize finalist Megan Marshall recounts the trailblazing life of Margaret Fuller: Thoreau's first editor, Emerson's close friend, daring war correspondent, tragic heroine. After her untimely death in a shipwreck off Fire Island, the sense and passion of her life's work were eclipsed by scandal. Marshall's inspired narrative brings her back to indelible life.

Whether detailing her front-page "New-York Tribune" editorials against poor conditions in the city's prisons and mental hospitals, or illuminating her late-in-life hunger for passionate experience--including a secret affair with a young officer in the Roman Guard--Marshall's biography gives the most thorough and compassionate view of an extraordinary woman. No biography of Fuller has made her ideas so alive or her life so moving.

"Megan Marshall's brilliant "Margaret Fuller" brings us as close as we are ever likely to get to this astonishing creature. She rushes out at us from her nineteenth century, always several steps ahead, inspiring, heartbreaking, magnificent." -- Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, author of "Betraying Spinoza: The Renegade Jew Who Gave Us Modernity"

"Shaping her narrative like a novel, Marshall brings the reader as close as possible to Fuller's inner life and conveys the inspirational power she has achieved for several generations of women." --" New Republic"

Daphne du Maurier's correspondence with Oriel Malet began in the early 1950s, after they met at a cocktail party in London. At least twenty years separated them: Oriel was a gauche young writer while Daphne was the famous, much-feted author of bestselling novels including Jamaica Inn, My Cousin Rachel, and Rebecca. The friendship flourished for thirty years, fed by the letters that arrived faithfully from Menabilly, the du Maurier house in Cornwall. While Oriel tasted life on a houseboat on the Seine and mixed with the aristocratic Who's Who of Paris, Daphne's letters tell of her family, past and present, her marriage to General Sir Frederick Browning-a war hero known privately as 'Moper' whose fits of melancholy caused many a crisis at Menabilly-and events like Prince Philip coming for dinner: 'We've got only four knives with handles, and one silver candlestick must be glued!' Most of all, her letters are a valuable record of the complex and rigorous art of a fine and well-loved writer: the 'brewing' of a plot, the research, and the 'pegging' of secret fantasies onto a living person in order to create classical characters such as Cousin Rachel and Roger Kylmerth. Disarmingly frank about sex, an earnest seeker after spiritual and psychological truth, Daphne du Maurier is revealed in her letters as an inspiring and delightful correspondent-as well as a once-in-a-lifetime friend.

One of the most prolific African American authors of his time, John A. Williams (1925-2015) made his mark as a journalist, educator, and writer. Having worked for Newsweek, Ebony, and Jet magazines, Williams went on to write twelve novels and numerous works of nonfiction. A vital link between the Black Arts movement and the previous era, Williams crafted works of fiction that relied on historical research as much as his own finely honed skills. From The Man Who Cried I Am, a roman a clef about expatriate African American writers in Europe, to Clifford's Blues, a Holocaust novel told in the form of the diary entries of a gay, black, jazz pianist in Dachau, these representations of black experiences marginalized from official histories make him one of our most important writers. Conversations with John A. Williams collects twenty-three interviews with the three-time winner of the American Book Award, beginning with a discussion in 1969 of his early works and ending with a previously unpublished interview from 2005. Gathered from print periodicals as well as radio and television programs, these interviews address a range of topics, including anti-black violence, Williams's WWII naval service, race and publishing, interracial romance, Martin Luther King Jr., growing up in Syracuse, the Prix de Rome scandal, traveling in Africa and Europe, and his reputation as an angry black writer. The conversations prove valuable given how often Williams drew from his own life and career for his fiction. They display the integrity, social engagement, and artistic vision that make him a writer to be reckoned with.

Bloke of All Ages is an expansive reflection that offers refreshing new insights into the works of one of South Africa’s most important literary, intellectual and artistic figures, William Bloke Modisane. Born in Sophiatown, Modisane was a remarkable author, playwright and actor, and a leading member of the DRUM generation in the 1950s. The contributors trace Modisane’s intellectual and cultural journey from his early years in South Africa to his exile in the United Kingdom, East Africa, North America, Italy, the German Democratic Republic, and the Federal Republic of Germany. Through a comprehensive and diverse exploration of Modisane’s body of work, they offer critical literary essays on his early short stories, his autobiography Blame Me on History, his journalism as well as his writings while in exile. The volume also includes little-known and previously unpublished essays by Modisane, written during his time in exile. Bloke of All Ages highlights the relevance and resilience of Modisane’s intellectual and cultural contribution by situating his work in the broader historic context of South African creative arts.

Oscar Wilde's reputation has shifted dramatically during the twentieth century from outcast in the wake of his trials for homosexual offences, to martyr to the gay cause in the 1980s and 90s, to important figure in the history of writing in English. Ruth Robbins introduces Wilde through a focus on his manipulations of genre and sets Wilde's life and work in its literary and cultural context, including the history of Victorian drama; the contexts of criticism in the period; poetry as post-romantic and pre-modernist mode of expression; the uses and subversions of fictional forms in his work; and his subversion of the autobiographical mode in his prison letter De Profundis. This comprehensive and readable introduction offers readers and students a lively and informative guide to Wilde's significance in the context of his own time and his extensive afterlife in literature, criticism and popular culture.

At the age of nineteen Arthur Rimbaud committed suicide, not in the flesh but as a writer. At that point he had composed a body of poetry now ranked among the classics of France and of the world. He never wrote another line. He cut himself not only from literature but from his native country and from European civilization, and lost himself in the inaccessible mountains of North Africa. When he reappeared it was to die, in torment, in a hospital on the coast. Further research has reconstructed the 'lost' life of this extraordinary man and his amazing second career. Traveling as a trader under terrible difficulties, he acted unknowingly as a pioneer agent of the French Empire. The routes he discovered became military and commercial highways of the French Empire in North Africa. Jean Marie Carre has written the first complete and authoritative biography of this genius and adventurer. It opens the mystery of Rimbaud's renunciation, a profound research into a tortured soul woven into a powerful narrative of his adventures in Africa. Also included in this volume is a translation of Rimbaud's moving spiritual autobiography A Season in Hell.

NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY
"San Francisco Chronicle - "Newsweek/The Daily Beast - "The Seattle Times - The Economist - Kansas City Star - BookPage"
On February 14, 1989, Valentine's Day, Salman Rushdie was telephoned by a BBC journalist and told that he had been "sentenced to death" by the Ayatollah Khomeini. For the first time he heard the word "fatwa." His crime? To have written a novel called "The Satanic Verses, " which was accused of being "against Islam, the Prophet and the Quran."
So begins the extraordinary story of how a writer was forced underground, moving from house to house, with the constant presence of an armed police protection team. He was asked to choose an alias that the police could call him by. He thought of writers he loved and combinations of their names; then it came to him: Conrad and Chekhov--"Joseph Anton."
How do a writer and his family live with the threat of murder for more than nine years? How does he go on working? How does he fall in and out of love? How does despair shape his thoughts and actions, how and why does he stumble, how does he learn to fight back? In this remarkable memoir Rushdie tells that story for the first time; the story of one of the crucial battles, in our time, for freedom of speech. He talks about the sometimes grim, sometimes comic realities of living with armed policemen, and of the close bonds he formed with his protectors; of his struggle for support and understanding from governments, intelligence chiefs, publishers, journalists, and fellow writers; and of how he regained his freedom.
It is a book of exceptional frankness and honesty, compelling, provocative, moving, and of vital importance. Because what happened to Salman Rushdie was the first act of a drama that is still unfolding somewhere in the world every day.
Praise for "Joseph Anton"
"A harrowing, deeply felt and revealing document: an autobiographical mirror of the big, philosophical preoccupations that have animated Mr. Rushdie's work throughout his career."--Michiko Kakutani, "The New York Times"
"A splendid book, the finest . . . memoir to cross my desk in many a year."--Jonathan Yardley, "The Washington Post"
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"Thoughtful and astute . . . an important book.""--USA Today"
"Compelling, affecting . . . demonstrates Mr. Rushdie's ability as a stylist and storytelle. . . . He] reacted with great bravery and even heroism.""--The Wall Street Journal"
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"Gripping, moving and entertaining . . . nothing like it has ever been written.""--The Independent" (UK)
"A thriller, an epic, a political essay, a love story, an ode to liberty.""--Le Point "(France)
"Action-packed . . . in a literary class by itself . . . Like Isherwood, Rushdie's eye is a camera lens --firmly placed in one perspective and never out of focus."--Los Angeles Review of Books
"Unflinchingly honest . . . an engrossing, exciting, revealing and often shocking book."--"de Volkskrant "(The Netherlands)
"One of the best memoirs you may ever read."--"DNA "(India)
"Extraordinary . . . "Joseph Anton" beautifully modulates between . . . moments of accidental hilarity, and the higher purpose Rushdie saw in opposing--at all costs--any curtailment on a writer's freedom."--"The Boston Globe"

Margaret Mitchell was as complex and compelling as her legendary heroine, Scarlett O'Hara, and her story is as dramatic as anything out of her own imagination-indeed, it is the basis for the legend she created. Gone With the Wind took the American reading public by storm and went on to become the most popular motion picture of all time. It was a phenomenon whose success has never been equaled-and it shattered Margaret Mitchell's private life. In this commemorative reprint of Road to Tara, Anne Edwards tells the real story of Margaret Mitchell and the extraordinary novel that has become part of our heritage.

He has been called passionate and violent, cryptic and probing, hostile and eloquent. His works have been called brilliant and unbearable, poetic and documentary, classic and controversial. He is a major voice of the Civil Rights Movement. His words, which have compelled, agitated and hypnotized a nation, are now heard around the world. That is the public image of James Baldwin. But there is also an aspect of Baldwin that grew out of self-deprecation and a search for personal identity; a timorous side that his mother worried over in the presence of a step-father who would not acknowledge him, and that his teachers watched carefully because there was precocity beneath it, trying to force its way out. There was a child who thought he was ugly and useless, who was overly self-conscious about his appearance and couldn't find the love he needed to make his own existence bearable. There is a man who claims: "I've been scared to death since I was born and I'll be scared till I die. But if you're scared to death, walk toward it." And there is an author whose tremendous impact on American literature-and American life-has, until now, not been fully measured. Fern Marja Eckman has based this vivid book on hours and hours of taped interviews with Baldwin and with the people who are significant in his story. She presents a detailed account of Baldwin's Harlem childhood, a portrait of the exile who returned to his country to shock it into reappraisal of its racial and sexual attitudes, and an inside view of his part in Robert Kennedy's civil-rights meeting in 1963. Speaking with James Baldwin and probing the complex mixture of extreme hate and intense love that characterize him, she presents a profile told largely in his own words-one which is essentially Baldwin on Baldwin.

Maxims and Reflections is a collection of several hundred brilliant, unforgettable paragraphs and aphorisms by the legendary German Renaissance writer Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, divided into the categories Life and Character, Literature and Art, Science and Nature. Like the Manual of Epictetus and Seneca s Letters, Goethe s Maxims and Reflections is a timeless guide to navigating the mysteries of existence.

A searingly honest, funny and moving family memoir in which David Baddiel exposes his mother’s idiosyncratic sex life, and his father’s dementia, to the same affectionate scrutiny.

On the surface, David Baddiel’s childhood was fairly standard: a lower-middle-class Jewish family living in an ordinary house in Dollis Hill, north-west London. But David came to realise that his mother was in fact not ordinary at all. Having escaped extermination by fleeing Nazi Germany as a child, she was desperate to make her life count, which took the form of a passionate, decades-long affair with a golfing memorabilia salesman. David’s detailing of the affair – including a hilarious focus on how his mother turned their household over to golf memorabilia, and an eye-popping cache of her erotic writings – leads to the inescapable conclusion that Sarah Baddiel was a cross between Jack Niklaus and Erica Jong.

Meanwhile, as Baddiel investigates his family’s past, his father’s memories are fading; dementia is making him moodier and more disinhibited, with an even greater penchant for obscenity. As with his mother’s affair, there is both comedy and poignancy to be found: laughter is a constant presence, capable of transforming the darkest of experiences into something redemptive.

My Family: The Memoir is David Baddiel’s candid examination of his childhood, family and memory offering a twisted love letter to his parents.

The Shelf2Life Literature and Fiction Collection is a unique set of short stories, poems and novels from the late 19th to early 20th centuries. From tales of love, life and heartbreaking loss to humorous stories of ghost encounters, these volumes captivate the imaginations of readers young and old. Included in this collection are a variety of dramatic and spirited poems that contemplate the mysteries of life and celebrate the wild beauty of nature. The Shelf2Life Literature and Fiction Collection provides readers with an opportunity to enjoy and study these iconic literary works, many of which were written during a period of remarkable creativity.

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was written in 1933 by Gertrude Stein in the guise of an autobiography authored by Alice B. Toklas, who was her lover. It is a fascinating insight into the art scene in Paris as the couple were friends with Paul Cezanne, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. They begin the war years in England but return to France, volunteering for the American Fund for the French Wounded, driving around France, helping the wounded and homeless. After the war Gertrude has an argument with T. S. Eliot after he finds one of her writings inappropriate. They become friends with Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. It was written to make money and was indeed a commercial success. However, it attracted criticism, especially from those who appeared in the book and didn't like the way they were depicted.

Though better known for his literary merits, Shakespeare made money, wrote about money and enabled money-making by countless others in his name. With chapters by leading scholars on the economic, financial and commercial ramifications of his work, this multifaceted volume connects the Bard to both early modern and contemporary economic conditions, revealing Shakespeare to have been a serious economist in his own right.

"A richly rewarding, insightful, and engaging study."
--"American Literary Realism"

"Glass provides a novel, nuanced, and sound critical perspectives on the productive interaction of seemingly opposite forces: modernism and the mass market."--"Choice"

"Glass offers insightful readings of such books as Stein's "Everybody's Autobiography"(1937) and Hemingway's "Death in the Afternoon" (1932)."
--"The Journal of American History"

"A fascinating exploration of the relationship among modern authorial celebrity, the rise of the mass market, and the crisis of masculinity at the turn of the twentieth century. This crisply argued book unites sophisticated theoretical arguments about the changing shape of subjectivity in American culture with attentive literary readings and careful historical scholarship."
--Janice Radway, Duke University

"Provocatively and deftly tackles the question of literary celebrity in modern America. A smart and combelling book that has broken through the silence on literary celebrity, and it will serve as the foundation for other inquiries into this complex phenomenon."
--"The Hemingway Review"

The first comprehensive and systematic study of literary celebrity in the twentieth-century United States, Authors Inc. focuses on the autobiographical work of Mark Twain, Jack London, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, and Norman Mailer. Through these classic American authors, Loren Glass reveals the degree to which literary modernism in the United States is inseparable from the mass cultural forces it opposed.

Chronicling the emergence of literary celebrity in the late nineteenth century up through its contemporary manifestations, Glass focuseson how individual authors themselves struggled with the conditions of mass cultural renown. Furthermore, by emphasizing the complex relation between masculinity and modernist authorship in the United States, the book provides a bracing new account of the psychosexual economy of the American profession of authorship.

By combining a socio-historical approach with a rhetorical analysis of the autobiographical work in which classic American writers attempted to intervene in the formation of their public personae, Authors Inc. offers a long overdue study of one of the most important, and neglected, aspects of modern American literature.

If you were attending school in the late-nineteenth century, it's very likely that your teacher would have taught you to memorize lines from "The Village Blacksmith" by renowned poet Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. And on the classroom wall you'd probably see his portrait looking down benignly on you and your classmates. Longfellow was so famous and beloved by youth in this era that he was known as "the children's poet." Students not only memorized his poetry but sent him hundreds of letters.
In this charming biography, storyteller and author Sydelle Pearl recounts the life of Henry Wadsworth Longfellow by drawing upon the letters he received from his young admirers. In their letters, children from yesteryear reveal details about their lives that reach across the years to young people today. The letters also highlight the unique, close relationship that children shared with Longfellow. A girl from West Virginia writes, "Thank you so much for writing for children.... It makes us feel that we are not forgotten." Others ask him about what he did as a boy or a young man. In one extraordinary gesture of friendship, the schoolchildren of Cambridge celebrated his birthday by presenting him with a chair created from the wood of the "spreading chestnut tree" made famous in his poem "The Village Blacksmith." Longfellow dedicated his poem "From My Arm-Chair" to these thoughtful children.
Complete with selected poems and photographs of the poet and his family, "Dear Mr. Longfellow" brings to life a famous figure of American literature and a distant, simpler age in the history of our country.

Acknowledged Legislator: Critical Essays on the Poetry of Martin Espada stands as the first-ever collection of essays on poet and activist Martin Espada. It is also, to date, the only published book-length, single-author study of Espada currently in existence. Relying on innovative, highly original contributions from thirteen Espada scholars, its principal aim is to argue for a long overdue critical awareness of and cultural appreciation for Espada and his body of writing. Acknowledged Legislator accomplishes this task in three fundamental ways: by providing readers with background information on the poet s life and work; offering an examination into the subject matter and dominant themes that are frequently contained in his writing; and finally, by advocating, in a variety of ways, for why we should be reading, discussing, and teaching the Espada canon. Divided into four distinct sections that modulate through several theoretical frames from Espada s attention to resistance poetics and concerns for historical memory to his oppositional critique of neoliberalism and support for a class consciousness grounded in labor rights Acknowledged Legislator offers a cohesive, forward-thinking interpretive statement of the poet s vision and proposes a critical (re)assessment for how we read Espada, now and in the future.

One Man's Inspiring Journey of Vision and Service
Part memoir and part anthology-this book is a spiritual autobiography. Don describes in vivid scenes the road he has taken through a long life and the epiphanies that have come to him along the turnings of that road. And because he has a gift of lyric poetry, he includes a rich selection of poems written as his life experience unfolds, marking the evolving of a sensitive spirit.

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.