In her study of the married couple as the smallest political unit, Phyllis Rose uses the marriages of five Victorian writers who wrote about their own lives with unusual candor: Charles Dickens, John Ruskin, Thomas Carlyle, John Stuart Mill, and George Eliot--née Marian Evans.

Can you have an Extreme Adventure in a library? Phyllis Rose casts herself into the wilds of an Upper East Side lending library in an effort to do just that. Hoping to explore the "real ground of literature," she reads her way through a somewhat randomly chosen shelf of fiction, from LEQ to LES. The shelf has everything Rose could wish for - a classic she has not read, a remarkable variety of authors, and a range of literary styles. The early nineteenth century Russian classic A Hero of Our Time by Mikhail Lermontov is spine with The Phantom of the Opera by Gaston Leroux. Stories of French Canadian farmers sit beside those about aristocratic Austrians. California detective novels about a picaresque novel from the seventeenth century. There are several novels by a wonderful, funny, contemporary novelist who has turned to raising dogs because of the tepid response to her work. In The Shelf, Rose investigates the books on her shelf with exuberance, candor, and wit while pondering the many questions her experiment raises and measuring her discoveries against her own inner shelf - those texts that accompany us through life. "Fairly sure that no one in the history of the world has read exactly this series of novels," she sustains a sense of excitement as she creates a refreshingly original and generous portrait of the literary enterprise.

A fascinating biography of a revolutionary American artist ripe for rediscovery as a photographer and champion of other artists Alfred Stieglitz (1864-1946) was an enormously influential artist and nurturer of artists even though his accomplishments are often overshadowed by his role as Georgia O'Keeffe's husband. This new book from celebrated biographer Phyllis Rose reconsiders Stieglitz as a revolutionary force in the history of American art. Born in New Jersey, Stieglitz at age eighteen went to study in Germany, where his father, a wool merchant and painter, insisted he would get a proper education. After returning to America, he became one of the first American photographers to achieve international fame. By the time he was sixty, he gave up photography and devoted himself to selling and promoting art. His first gallery, 291, was the first American gallery to show works by Picasso, Rodin, Matisse, and other great European modernists. His galleries were not dealerships so much as open universities, where he introduced European modern art to Americans and nurtured an appreciation of American art among American artists.

By the time Phyllis Brandow was twenty-years-old she had moved many times. Her life became one adventure after another. And in this memoir, she tells the stories that shaped her life.

The stories in Tell us about the Olden Days, Please Mommy originated from the tales Brandow relayed to her two children when they were young and crawled in bed and asked her to describe the olden days. The narrative encompasses events and life experiences from her early years growing up in Manitoba, Canada, to her nomadic years moving throughout Canada, to eventually settling down in Calgary to begin the ultimate adventure with grandchildren.

From the anecdotes contained within the pages of Tell us about the Olden Days, Please Mommy, Brandow seeks to impart memories of herself as a person who loved nothing more than to seek out a wild and crazy adventure, to unravel a mystery, to laugh out loud, and to have lots of fun.

A brilliant and original memoir of midlifea writing life, a reading life, a womans lifeby the distinguished author of Parallel Lives. Phyllis Rose, a biographer, essayist, and literary critic, finally got around to reading Proust in middle age. As Rose learned, you dont have to live through an unhappy childhood or celebrity adulthood to write an autobiography. You just need patience, candor, and a close-to-scientific passion for truth. She begins to learn how to navigate the intricacies of Prousts novels, at the same time reflecting on the course of her own life.With striking honesty, Rose writes about marriage, friendship, childbirth, and her own mortality. As she moves from daily experience to what shes read and back again, she illuminates how the close reading of her own life reveals truths for the rest of us and how such a subtle celebration of books can help us live.