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Books > Biography > Literary
Winner of the 2018 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Award for
Non-fiction A poignant, complex and hugely resonant memoir about
the shift from being a daughter to a guardian and caregiver, by a
prizewinning author. From Elizabeth Hay, one of Canada's most
celebrated novelists, comes a startling and beautiful memoir about
the drama of her parents' end, and the longer drama of being their
daughter. Jean and Gordon Hay were a formidable pair. She was an
artist and superlatively frugal; he was a proud and principled
schoolteacher with an explosive temper. Elizabeth, the so-called
difficult child, always suspected she would end up caring for them
in their final years, in part to atone for her childhood sins.
Philip Roth once said, "Old age is a massacre". All Things Consoled
takes you inside the massacre as Hay's ferociously independent
parents become increasingly dependent on her. With remarkable wit
and honesty, Hay lays bare the agony of a family coping as old age
turns into the tragedy of living too long. In the end she arrives
at a more nuanced understanding of her mother and father, and of
herself as their daughter. They were and remain the two vivid
giants in her life.
This is the first book to provide a comprehensive overview of the
entire career of one of Britain's greatest men of letters. It sets
in biographical and historical context all of Hume's works, from A
Treatise of Human Nature to The History of England, bringing to
light the major influences on the course of Hume's intellectual
development, and paying careful attention to the differences
between the wide variety of literary genres with which Hume
experimented. The major events in Hume's life are fully described,
but the main focus is on Hume's intentions as a philosophical
analyst of human nature, politics, commerce, English history, and
religion. Careful attention is paid to Hume's intellectual
relations with his contemporaries. The goal is to reveal Hume as a
man intensely concerned with the realization of an ideal of
open-minded, objective, rigorous, dispassionate dialogue about all
the principal questions faced by his age.
Curious, ruminative, and wry, this literary autobiography tours
what Rachel Kushner called "the strange remove that is the life of
the writer." Frank's essays cover a vast spectrum--from handling
dismissive advice, facing the dilemma of thwarted ambition, and
copying the generosity that inspires us, to the miraculous
catharsis of letter-writing and some of the books that pull us
through. Useful for writers at any stage of development, Late Work
offers a seasoned artist's thinking through the exploration of
issues, paradoxes, and crises of faith. Like a lively conversation
with a close, outspoken friend, each piece tells its experience
from the trenches.
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.
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.
Andre Siegfried (1875-1959) was a leading figure in French academic
and cultural life for over five decades. A world traveller who
trained as a geographer, Siegfried became a leading political
scientist and prominent newspaper columnist. As a long-time
professor at Sciences Po, he shaped generations of his country's
elite. France in the World explores the life and career of Andre
Siegfried. An innovator in the field of political science, he
established himself as France's leading interpreter of the
English-speaking world. Often likened to Alexis de Tocqueville,
Siegfried published influential studies of the United States,
Canada, Great Britain, and New Zealand, striving to understand
France's place in a changing global context. Siegfried was a
cosmopolitan promoter of liberalism and individual freedom. But at
the same time he perceived France to be the core of a Western
civilization whose leadership and values were threatened by
Americanization, anti-imperial nationalism, and non-white
immigration. By following Siegfried's long career and examining the
breadth of his writings, Sean Kennedy shows how his racial and
ethnic essentialism was a unifying aspect of his life's work. That
these ideas were considered unremarkable for most of his lifetime
offers a powerful illustration of how racist thinking permeated
mainstream French republicanism. Exploring the many facets of
Siegfried's career, France in the World examines the entanglement
of liberal and racist thinking during an era that witnessed
political extremism and a rapidly changing international order.
The definitive biography of Vera Brittain, acclaimed author of
Testament of Youth. With a new introduction by Mark Bostridge.
'Riveting and authoritative' Kate Figes, Independent on Sunday
'Honest, precise and smart' Natasha Walter, Guardian 'They succeed
triumphantly... A fascinating portrait' Fiona MacCarthy, Observer
Vera Brittain is most widely known as the woman who immortalized a
lost generation in her haunting autobiography of the Great War,
Testament of Youth. This biography is the most comprehensive,
authoritative life of one of the most remarkable women of her time.
Based on unpublished papers and first-hand knowledge, the authors
create a candid and sympathetic portrait of the writer, pacifist
and feminist. They reveal the truth about Vera Brittain's
'semi-detached' marriage, her friendship with Winifred Holtby, and
her relationships with her brother Edward and fiance Roland
Leighton, killed in the First World War, memories of whom haunted
her all her days. Shortlisted for the Whitbread Prize, the NCR
Non-Fiction Prize and the Fawcett Prize.
On the day that A. M. Homes was born in 1961, she was given up for
adoption. Her birth parents were a twenty-two year old woman and an
older married man with whom she was having an affair. Thirty years
later, out of the blue, Homes was contacted by a lawyer on behalf
of her birth mother, and they began to correspond; her biological
father contacted her soon after. These two individuals and their
effect on the adult Homes are strange and unexpected, and the story
spirals into something utterly raw and hilarious, heartbreaking and
absurd. Along the way, Homes describes the clash between her
childhood fantasies of her birth parents and the disappointing
reality. She writes about the experience of experiencing biological
resemblance for the first time (in 'My Father's Ass') and the
addictiveness of the genealogical research she embarks on. She
reflects on the significance of DNA testing and having two mothers
and two fathers and unearths profound truths about her family and
herself. Finally, she writes movingly about her own baby daughter
and the way she has recently helped to mend Homes' fractured life.
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Dante
(Hardcover)
John Took
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R1,050
Discovery Miles 10 500
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An authoritative and comprehensive intellectual biography of the
author of the Divine Comedy For all that has been written about the
author of the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) remains
the best guide to his own life and work. Dante's writings are
therefore never far away in this authoritative and comprehensive
intellectual biography, which offers a fresh account of the
medieval Florentine poet's life and thought before and after his
exile in 1302. Beginning with the often violent circumstances of
Dante's life, the book examines his successive works as testimony
to the course of his passionate humanity: his lyric poetry through
to the Vita nova as the great work of his first period; the
Convivio, De vulgari eloquentia and the poems of his early years in
exile; and the Monarchia and the Commedia as the product of his
maturity. Describing as it does a journey of the mind, the book
confirms the nature of Dante's undertaking as an exploration of
what he himself speaks of as "maturity in the flame of love." The
result is an original synthesis of Dante's life and work.
The ten brilliant women who are the focus of Sharp came from
different backgrounds and had vastly divergent political and
artistic opinions. But they all made a significant contribution to
the cultural and intellectual history of America and ultimately
changed the course of the twentieth century, in spite of the men
who often undervalued or dismissed their work. These ten
women--Dorothy Parker, Rebecca West, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy,
Susan Sontag, Pauline Kael, Joan Didion, Nora Ephron, Renata Adler,
and Janet Malcolm--are united by what Dean calls "sharpness," the
ability to cut to the quick with precision of thought and wit.
Sharp is a vibrant depiction of the intellectual beau monde of
twentieth-century New York, where gossip-filled parties at night
gave out to literary slugging-matches in the pages of the Partisan
Review or the New York Review of Books. It is also a passionate
portrayal of how these women asserted themselves through their
writing in a climate where women were treated with extreme
condescension by the male-dominated cultural establishment. Mixing
biography, literary criticism, and cultural history, Sharp is a
celebration of this group of extraordinary women, an engaging
introduction to their works, and a testament to how anyone who
feels powerless can claim the mantle of writer, and, perhaps,
change the world.
A memoir about home and belonging, from the author of I KNOW WHY
THE CAGED BIRD SINGS 'A brilliant writer, a fierce friend and a
truly phenomenal woman' BARACK OBAMA Maya Angelou's five volumes of
autobiography, beginning with I KNOW WHY THE CAGED BIRD SINGS, are
a testament to the talents and resilience of this extraordinary
writer. Loving the world, she also knows its cruelty. As a black
woman she has known discrimination and extreme poverty, but also
hope, joy, achievement and celebration. In the fifth volume, Maya
Angelou emigrates to Ghana only to discover that 'you can't go home
again' but she comes to a new awareness of love and friendship,
civil rights and slavery - and the myth of mother Africa. 'She
moved through the world with unshakeable calm, confidence and a
fierce grace . . . She will always be the rainbow in my clouds'
OPRAH WINFREY 'She was important in so many ways. She launched
African American women writing in the United States. She was
generous to a fault. She had nineteen talents - used ten. And was a
real original. There is no duplicate' TONI MORRISON
** Chosen as a New Statesman, Financial Times, Observer and Sunday
Times Book of the Year ** A riveting account of the making of T. S.
Eliot's celebrated poem The Waste Land on its centenary. 'A
rattling good story' Sunday Telegraph 'A work of art' Times
Literary Supplement The Waste Land has been called the 'World's
Greatest Poem'. It is said to describe the moral decay of a world
after war, to find meaning in a meaningless era. It has been
labelled the most truthful poem of its time; it has been branded a
masterful fake. A century after its publication in 1922, T. S.
Eliot's enigmatic masterpiece remains one of the most influential
works ever written, and yet one of the most mysterious. In a
remarkable feat of biography, Matthew Hollis reconstructs the
intellectual creation of the poem and brings the material reality
of its charged times vividly to life. Presenting a mosaic of
historical fragments, diaries, dynamic literary criticism and
illuminating new research, he reveals the cultural and personal
trauma that forged The Waste Land through the lives of its
protagonists - of Ezra Pound, who edited it; of Vivien Eliot, who
sustained it; and of T. S. Eliot himself, whose private torment is
woven into the seams of the work. The result is an unforgettable
story of lives passing in opposing directions and the astounding
literary legacy they would leave behind.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2015 SAMUEL JOHNSON PRIZE 'Gripping and at
times ineffably sad, this book would be poetic even without the
poetry. It will be the standard biography of Ted Hughes for a long
time to come' Sunday Times 'Seldom has the life of a writer rattled
along with such furious activity ... A moving, fascinating
biography' The Times Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the
greatest writers of the twentieth century. He is one of Britain's
most important poets, a poet of claws and cages: Jaguar, Hawk and
Crow. Event and animal are turned to myth in his work. Yet he is
also a poet of deep tenderness, of restorative memory steeped in
the English literary tradition. A poet of motion and force, of
rivers, light and redemption, of beasts in brooding landscapes.
With an equal gift for poetry and prose, and with a soul as
capacious as any poet who has lived, he was also a prolific
children's writer and has been hailed as the greatest English
letter-writer since John Keats. With his magnetic personality and
an insatiable appetite for friendship, for love and for life, he
also attracted more scandal than any poet since Lord Byron. At the
centre of the book is Hughes's lifelong quest to come to terms with
the suicide of his first wife, Sylvia Plath, the saddest and most
infamous moment in the public history of modern poetry. Ted Hughes
left behind him a more complete archive of notes and journals than
any other major poet, including thousands of pages of drafts,
unpublished poems and memorandum books that make up an almost
complete record of Hughes's inner life, preserved by him for
posterity. Renowned scholar Sir Jonathan Bate has spent five years
in his archives, unearthing a wealth of new material. His book
offers for the first time the full story of Ted Hughes's life as it
was lived, remembered and reshaped in his art. It is a book that
honours, though not uncritically, Ted Hughes's poetry and the art
of life-writing, approached by his biographer with an honesty
answerable to Hughes's own.
'The moment I got my job at Virago in 1978 I knew it would be a
long time before I would leave. I certainly wouldn't have had the
brazen hope then-only twenty-five and very recently new to
Britain-that I would ever become the Publisher, but I did know that
I had found my home: where books, ideas, politics, imagination,
feminism, and business was the air we breathed . . .' A Bite of the
Apple is part-memoir, part history of Virago, and part thoughts on
over forty years of feminist publishing. This is the story of how
the authors and staff who, driven by passion, conviction and
excitement, have made Virago Press one of the most important and
influential English-language publishers in the world. Lennie
Goodings has been with the iconic press founded by Carmen Callil
almost since the start. First a publicist and then for over twenty
years, publisher and editor, she has worked with extraordinary
authors: Margaret Atwood, Marilynne Robinson, Sarah Waters, Linda
Grant, Natasha Walter, Naomi Wolf and Maya Angelou among many
others. Virago has been a life-changer for Lennie Goodings - but
certainly not only for her. Following the chronology of the press
and the enormous breadth of the Virago titles published over these
years, she sets her story in the context of feminism, and segues
into thoughts on editing, post-feminism, reading, breaking
boundaries, and the Virago Modern Classics. Virago lives within the
tension between idealism and pragmatism; between sisterhood and
celebrity; between watching feminism wax and wane at the same time
as knowing so many of the battles are still to be won. This book is
about how it felt to be there. A Bite of the Apple is a celebration
of writing, of publishing, and of reading.
Upon publication, "Don't Panic" quickly established itself as the
definitive companion to "Adams" and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the
Galaxy". This edition comes up-to-date, covering the movie, "And
Another Thing" by Eoin Colfer and the build up to the 30th
anniversary of the first novel. Acclaimed author Neil Gaiman
celebrates the life and work of Douglas Adams who, in a field in
Innsbruck in 1971, had an idea that became "The Hitchhiker's Guide
to the Galaxy". The radio series that started it all, the five -
soon to be six - book 'trilogy', the TV series, almost-film and
actual film, and everything in between.
This edition, expanded to include the text of letters unavailable
at the time of the volume's first publication in 1969, records
James Boswell's quest over a period of more than twenty years to
amplify his knowledge of his major biographical subject, Samuel
Johnson, through a detailed correspondence with a wide network of
friends, informants, and other authorities. The volume, with
revised and updated annotation, shows not just Boswell's struggles
through his personal distresses to gather material for his Life of
Johnson, but notes many of his revisions of his sources, changes
made in manuscript and proof, and revisions of the first and second
editions. It presents letters that illuminate the contemporary
reception of his powerfully innovative, controversial, and
influential biography (which appeared first in 1791), taking the
story as far as exchanges in 1808 between Boswell's friend and
editor, Edmond Malone, and his son, James Boswell the younger,
about corrections for the sixth edition of 1811. Throughout, the
annotation brings to life an extensive range of eighteenth-century
figures, issues and topics.The Times Literary Supplement (23 July
1970) found the interest of this 'fascinating' volume threefold:
'It gives fresh evidence of Boswell's scrupulousness, ability and
tact; it leads us to a fuller understanding of what people expected
from biography, and what were eighteenth-century notions of
propriety and accuracy; and it enables us perhaps to define more
clearly the achievement of Boswell's masterpiece. ' This corrected
and enlarged version (the first edition has been out of print for
two decades) will serve as a valuable supplement and companion to
the Yale manuscript edition of the Life of Johnson, upon which all
future editions of Boswell's biography will need to draw.
When John Joseph Mathews (1894-1979) began his career as a writer
in the 1930s, he was one of only a small number of Native American
authors writing for a national audience. Today he is widely
recognized as a founder and shaper of twentieth-century Native
American literature. Twenty Thousand Mornings is Mathews's intimate
chronicle of his formative years. Written in 1965-67 but only
recently discovered, this work captures Osage life in pre-statehood
Oklahoma and recounts many remarkable events in
early-twentieth-century history. Born in Pawhuska, Osage Nation,
Mathews was the only surviving son of a mixed-blood Osage father
and a French-American mother. Within these pages he lovingly
depicts his close relationships with family members and friends.
Yet always drawn to solitude and the natural world, he wanders the
Osage Hills in search of tranquil swimming holes - and new
adventures. Overturning misguided critical attempts to confine
Mathews to either Indian or white identity, Twenty Thousand
Mornings shows him as a young man of his time. He goes to dances
and movies, attends the brand-new University of Oklahoma, and joins
the Air Service as a flight instructor during World War I -
spawning a lifelong fascination with aviation. His accounts of
wartime experiences include unforgettable descriptions of his first
solo flight and growing skill in night-flying. Eventually Mathews
gives up piloting to become a student again, this time at Oxford
University, where he begins to mature as an intellectual. In her
insightful introduction and explanatory notes, Susan Kalter places
Mathews's work in the context of his life and career as a novelist,
historian, naturalist, and scholar. Kalter draws on his unpublished
diaries, revealing aspects of his personal life that have
previously been misunderstood. In addressing the significance of
this posthumous work, she posits that Twenty Thousand Mornings will
challenge, defy, and perhaps redefine studies of American Indian
autobiography.
Arturo Barea (1897-1957) is often seen as merely a spontaneous
writer with a passion against injustice. In fact, he set out
deliberately to write concretely and sensuously: about himself in
order to understand his mid-life nervous breakdown; and about his
generation as a way of explaining the underlying causes of the
Spanish Civil War. With acute psychological insight, this
self-taught boy from the slums, who left school aged 13, drew a
unique portrait of Spanish society in the early twentieth century.
His trilogy "The Forging of a Rebel" was well-received by George
Orwell, "An excellent book -- Senor Barea is one of the most
valuable of the literary acquisitions that England has made as a
result of Fascist persecution"; and Gabriel Garcia Marquez, "One of
the best novels written in Spanish." He is unusual in that he was
one of the first Spanish working-class writers, one of the first
autobiographers in Spain, and someone who published mainly in
English though all his attention was focused on Spain. In this
ground-breaking biography, based on numerous interviews with people
who knew Barea, Michael Eaude revisits Bareas writing qualities and
deficiencies in the context of stimulating intersections of
literature and politics, and of Spain and England. He evaluates all
his major works, including The Track, the story of Barea's time as
a sergeant during the 1920s colonial war in Morocco; The Forge, the
story of city and country, school and work, in the first years of
the twentieth century, told through the eyes of a child; The Clash,
the story of Barea's experience as a censor during the Civil War;
The Broken Root, his last novel, about exile and an imagined return
to Madrid; and his short stories and essays. He also puts into
perspective Barea's more than 800 talks for the BBC, and rebuts
slanders that Barea did not write his own books. Published in
association with the Canada Blanch Centre for Contemporary Spanish
Studies
How did Kafka become Kafka? This eagerly anticipated third and
final volume of Reiner Stach's definitive biography of the writer
answers that question with more facts and insight than ever before,
describing the complex personal, political, and cultural
circumstances that shaped the young Franz Kafka (1883-1924). It
tells the story of the years from his birth in Prague to the
beginning of his professional and literary career in 1910, taking
the reader up to just before the breakthrough that resulted in his
first masterpieces, including "The Metamorphosis." Brimming with
vivid and often startling details, Stach's narrative invites
readers deep inside this neglected period of Kafka's life. The
book's richly atmospheric portrait of his German Jewish merchant
family and his education, psychological development, and sexual
maturation draws on numerous sources, some still unpublished,
including family letters, schoolmates' memoirs, and early diaries
of his close friend Max Brod. The biography also provides a
colorful panorama of Kafka's wider world, especially the convoluted
politics and culture of Prague. Before World War I, Kafka lived in
a society at the threshold of modernity but torn by conflict, and
Stach provides poignant details of how the adolescent Kafka
witnessed violent outbreaks of anti-Semitism and nationalism. The
reader also learns how he developed a passionate interest in new
technologies, particularly movies and airplanes, and why another
interest--his predilection for the back-to-nature movement--stemmed
from his "nervous" surroundings rather than personal eccentricity.
The crowning volume to a masterly biography, this is an unmatched
account of how a boy who grew up in an old Central European
monarchy became a writer who helped create modern literature.
From the Sunday Times bestselling author of The Last Act of Love,
Cathy Rentzenbrink's Dear Reader is the ultimate love letter to
reading and to finding the comfort and joy in stories. 'Exquisite'
- Marian Keyes, author of Grown Ups 'A warm, unpretentious
manifesto for why books matter' - Sunday Express Growing up, Cathy
Rentzenbrink was rarely seen without her nose in a book and read in
secret long after lights out. When tragedy struck, it was books
that kept her afloat. Eventually they lit the way to a new path,
first as a bookseller and then as a writer. No matter what the
future holds, reading will always help. A moving, funny and joyous
exploration of how books can change the course of your life, packed
with recommendations from one reader to another.
Why are Emily Dickinson and Henry James drawn habitually to dashes?
What makes James Baldwin such a fan of commas, which William Carlos
Williams tends to ignore? And why do that odd couple, the novelist
Virginia Woolf and the short story specialist Andre Dubus II, both
embrace semicolons, while E. E. Cummings and Nikki Giovanni forego
punctuation entirely? More generally, what effect do such nonverbal
marks (or their absence) have on an author's encompassing vision?
The first book on modern literature to compare writers'
punctuation, and to show how fully typographical marks alter our
sense of authorial style, Mark My Words offers new ways of reading
some of our most important and beloved writers as well as
suggesting a fresh perspective on literary style itself.
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