With his magisterial and ingenious re-creations of the lives of Chaucer, Dickens, T.S. Eliot, William Blake, and Sir Thomas More, Peter Ackroyd has long been recognized as today's foremost practitioner of the literary biography. Now, in Shakespeare: The Biography, Ackroyd delivers his crowning achievement. Young Adult. View More...
Born into a proud Berber family in 1953, the eldest daughter of the King of Morocco's closest aide, Malika Oufkir was adopted at the age of five by King Muhammad V to be brought up as the companion of his daughter, Princes Amina. When he died, his son Hassan II became King and took charge of rearing the two girls as well as his own children. Malika spent eleven years living at the court, in the seclusion of the harem, until she left the palace, at the age of 16, as one of the most eligible heiresses in the kingdom and tasted a couple of years of a heady jet-set lifestyle. On August 16th, 1972,... View More...
This is a collection of stories diverse in subject, but sutured together by the limitless affection the author holds for the land and the people of New England. Donald Hall tells about life on a small farm where, as a boy, he spent summers with his grandparents. Gradually the boy grows to be a young man, sees his grandparents aging, the farm become marginal, and finally, the cows sold and the barn abandoned. But these are more than nostalgic memories, for in the measured and tender prose of each episode are signs of the end of things - a childhood, perhaps a culture. In an Epilogue written for... View More...
An extraordinary political biography of English suffragist, feminist, and socialist Sylvia Pankhurst Along with her mother Emmeline, and her sister Christabel, Sylvia Pankhurst was one of the leading women's suffrage activists in early twentieth-century England, working with the militant Women's Social and Political Union. Unlike her family, however, who looked to parliament and spoke to elite and middle-class women's concerns, Sylvia consistently looked to working women and the labour movement as central to her feminist politics. In this illuminating political biography, feminist historian Ba... View More...
The author's account of World War II, his wife's death, and his political and literary activities. A splendid ending to one of the most remarkable literary achievements of our time (New York Times Book Review). Index; photographs.
Patricia Highsmith, one of the great writers of 20th Century American fiction, had a life as darkly compelling as that of her favorite "hero-criminal," talented Tom Ripley. In this revolutionary biography, Joan Schenkar paints a riveting portrait, from Highsmith's birth in Texas to Hitchcock's filming of her first novel, "Strangers On a Train, " to her long, strange, self-exile in Europe. We see her as a secret writer for the comics, a brilliant creator of disturbing fictions, and erotic predator with dozens of women (and a few good men) on her love list. "The Talented Miss Highsmith" is the f... View More...
After discovering the travel writings of a Victorian explorer and writer, Cherry Briggs decides to retrace his footsteps across the island of Ceylon--now known as the recently war-torn, tsunami-effected Sri LankaMr Fernando led me into a dark room that was lined with book-cases and smelled of leather and damp. The polished, concrete floor of the library was covered with white jasmine flowers that had blown through the windows during the storm. He began to select from the shelves a collection of disintegrating books. 'If you are going to read any of them, it should really be this one, ' he said... View More...
A Spare and Unsparing Look at Affliction and Recovery that Heralds a Stunning New Voice The events that began in 1995 might keep happening to me as long as things can happen to me. Think of deep space, through which heavenly bodies fly forever. They fly until they change into new forms, simpler forms, with ever fewer qualities and increasingly beautiful names. There are names for things in spacetime that are nothing, for things that are less than nothing. White dwarfs, red giants, black holes, singularities. But even then, in their less-than-nothing state, they keep happening. At twenty-one, ... View More...
"A classic, for a reason" - Celeste Ng via Twitter In her award-winning book The Woman Warrior, Maxine Hong Kingston created an entirely new form--an exhilarating blend of autobiography and mythology, of world and self, of hot rage and cool analysis. First published in 1976, it has become a classic in its innovative portrayal of multiple and intersecting identities--immigrant, female, Chinese, American. As a girl, Kingston lives in two confounding worlds: the California to which her parents have immigrated and the China of her mother's "talk stories." The fierce and wily women warriors of her ... View More...
Many people consider Morrison's novels difficult to read. Most of her readers have at least one book on their shelves that they couldn't finish or, when they did finish one, just scratched their heads in confusion. And when we think we are sure we know what she's writing about, it turns out we are half wrong or only getting the tip of the iceberg instead of the whole, beautiful, brooding thing.Toni Morrison For Beginners is about the woman, her books, her mission, her word music, and all that subtext in her writings. Morrison's books are like the ocean: the surface is beautiful but everything ... View More...
A lyrical and intimate account of how a poet, in the midst of a bad divorce, finds consolation and grace through viewing the paintings of Vermeer, in six world cities. In the midst of a divorce (in which the custody of his young daughter is at stake) and over the course of a year, the poet Michael White, travels to Amsterdam, The Hague, Delft, London, Washington, and New York to view the paintings of Johannes Vermeer, an artist obsessed with romance and the inner life. He is astounded by how consoling it is to look closely at Vermeer's women, at the artist's relationship to his subjects, and a... View More...
"A touching and very funny account. . . . Thoroughly engaging."--New York TimesHilarious and heartfelt, Truck: A Love Story is the tale of a man struggling to grow his own garden, fix his old pickup, and resurrect a love life permanently impaired by Neil Diamond. In the process, he sets his hair on fire, is attacked by wild turkeys, and proposes marriage to a woman in New Orleans. The result is a surprisingly tender testament to love."Part Bill Bryson, part Anne Lamott, with a skim of Larry the Cable Guy and Walt Whitman creeping around the edges."--Lincoln Journal Star"Perry takes each moment... View More...
Bastard Out of Carolina, nominated for the 1992 National Book Award for fiction, introduced Dorothy Allison as one of the most passionate and gifted writers of her generation. Now, in Two or Three Things I Know for Sure, she takes a probing look at her family's history to give us a lyrical, complex memoir that explores how the gossip of one generation can become legends for the next. Illustrated with photographs from the author's personal collection, Two or Three Things I Know for Sure tells the story of the Gibson women -- sisters, cousins, daughters, and aunts -- and the men who loved them,... View More...
In this candid, intimate account, an award-winning 20-year veteran NPR correspondent takes readers behind the scenes of the major events of our time, letting us see what it's really like gathering the news on the front linesAs a radio journalist whose work appears regularly on Morning Edition and All Things Considered, John F. Burnett has reported from the Branch Davidian standoff and the Kosovo conflict. He has covered the drug wars in Central America; been embedded in a Marine Division in Iraq; and weathered Hurricane Katrina, breaking news hourly on the conditions in New Orleans. And he was... View More...
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for biography and hailed by critics as both "monumental" (The Boston Globe) and "utterly romantic" (New York magazine), Stacy Schiff's V ra (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov) brings to shimmering life one of the greatest literary love stories of our time. Vladimir Nabokov--the migr author of Lolita; Pale Fire; and Speak, Memory--wrote his books first for himself, second for his wife, V ra, and third for no one at all. "Without my wife," he once noted, "I wouldn't have written a single novel." Set in prewar Europe and postwar America, spannin... View More...
By the time she was twenty-four, Virginia Woolf had suffered a series of devastating losses that later she would describe as "sledge-hammer blows," beginning with the death of her mother when she was thirteen years old and followed by those of her half-sister, father, and brother. Yet vulnerable as she was ("skinless" was her word) she began, through these years, to practice her art--and to discover how it could serve her. Ultimately, she came to feel that it was her "shock-receiving capacity" that had made her a writer.Astonishingly gifted from the start, Woolf learned to be attentive to the ... View More...
They were best friends. They were collaborators, literary gadflies, and champions of the common people. They were the leading lights of the Harlem Renaissance. Zora Neale Hurston, the author of Their Eyes Were Watching God, and Langston Hughes, the author of "The Negro Speaks of Rivers" and "Let America Be America Again," first met in 1925, at a great gathering of black and white literati, and they fascinated each other. They traveled together in Hurston's dilapidated car through the rural South collecting folklore, worked on the play Mule Bone, and wrote scores of loving letters. They even ha... View More...
