Published in its entirety for the first time, a candid conversation with Susan Sontag at the height of her brilliant career "One of my oldest crusades is against the distinction between thought and feeling, which is really the basis of all anti-intellectual views: the heart and the head, thinking and feeling, fantasy and judgment . . . and I don't believe it's true. . . . I have the impression that thinking is a form of feeling and that feeling is a form of thinking." Susan Sontag, one of th...
Christina Rossetti was the youngest of four children. Like Elizabeth Barrett Browning, she suffered the tyranny of a loving family, being restrained by the "police surveillance" of her sister Maria and the goodness of their mother. Although she and her brother Dante Gabriel were known as the "two storms", she curbed her passionate nature, and a love of life was replaced in her work initially by the bitterness of the lonely and ultimately by the conviction of the religious. Comparing her situatio...
The Diary of Samuel Pepys .. (Dover Books on Literature & Drama) (Modern Library)
by Henry Benjamin Wheatley, Samuel Pepys, and Mynors Bright
Samuel Pepys is as much a paragon of literature as Chaucer and Shakespeare. His Diary is one of the principal sources for many aspects of the history of its period. In spite of its significance, all previous editions were inadequately edited and suffered from a number of omissions--until Robert Latham and William Matthews went back to the 300-year-old original manuscript and deciphered each passage and phrase, no matter how obscure or indiscreet. The Diary deals with some of the most dramatic ev...
"An extensively revised and updated edition of the bestselling biography of Harper Lee, reframed from the perspective of the recent publication of Lee's Go Set a Watchman. To Kill a Mockingbird--the twentieth century's most widely read American novel--has sold thirty million copies and still sells a million yearly. In this in-depth biography, first published in 2006, Charles J. Shields brings to life the woman who gave us two of American literature's most unforgettable characters, Atticus Finch...
Brother Mine
The friendship of Jean Toomer and Waldo Frank was one of the most emotionally intense, racially complicated, and aesthetically significant relationships in the history of American literary modernism. Waldo Frank was an established white writer who advised and assisted the younger African American Jean Toomer as he pursued a literary career. They met in 1920, began corresponding regularly in 1922, and were estranged by the end of 1923, the same year that Toomer published his ambitiously modernist...
Published in 1790, this book follows the first 21 years of the author's life. The hero has an unhappy childhood amid parental discord, is apprenticed to a pietistic hatmaker, is sent away to school, runs away from school to go on to the stage but fails as an actor. The book leaves his problem unsolved, but is also an exploration of fiction as psychological process, and one of the great 18th-century autobiographies.
Muse and Messiah: The Life, Imagination and Legacy of Bruno Schulz, (1892-1942) (Axis, #2)
by Brian R. Banks
Dead as Doornails, first published in 1976, brings back into print a true classic of Irish memoir. Anthony Cronin's account of life in post-war literary Dublin is as funny and colourful as one would expect from an intimate of Brendan Behan, Patrick Kavanagh and Myles na Gopaleen; but it is also a clear-eyed and bracing antidote to the kitsch that passes for literary history and memory in the Dublin of today. Cronin writes with remarkable subtlety of the frustrations and pathologies of this gener...
William Empson was the foremost English literary critic of the twentieth century. He was a man of huge energy and curiosity, and a genuine eccentric who remained imperturbable in the face of all the extraordinary circumstances in which he found himself. The discovery of contraceptives in his possession by a bedmaker at Cambridge University led to his being robbed of a promised Fellowship. Yet Seven Types of Ambiguity, drafted while he was still an undergraduate, promptly brought him world-wide f...
Few writers have had a greater impact upon British society than Charles Dickens. His stories, and, in particular, his many memorable characters, highlighted the life of the forgotten poor and disadvantaged within society at a time when Britain was the leading economic and political power in the world. Dickens' portrayal of the poor, such as Oliver Twist daring to ask for more food in the parish workhouse, and Bob Cratchit struggling to provide for his family at Christmas, roused much sympathy a...
Bruce Chatwin's death in 1989 brought a meteoric career to an abrupt end, since he burst onto the literary scene in 1977 with his first book, In Patagonia.Chatwin himself was different things to different people: a journalist, a photographer, an art collector, a restless traveller and a bestselling author; he was also a married man, an active homosexual, a socialite who loved to mix with the rich and famous, and a single-minded loner who explored the limits of extreme solitude.From unrestricted...
The Education of Henry Adams (Modern Library) (Modern Library 100 Best Nonfiction Books)
by Henry Adams
Adams was a historian, an intellectual born into the fourth generation of a family of distinguished politicians, diplomats and statesmen that included two presidents of the United States. His "Education" is thus steeped in history, that of his family and of the American politics, culture and identity they helped to shape. At the same time he elaborates his own 'dynamic theory of history' as the product of what he calls the conflict between the Virgin and the Dynamo: 'All the steam in the world c...
This study charts the stormy emotions of the friendship between Oscar Wilde and Andre Gide, whom he met in Paris in 1891. Through letters and diaries, Fryer looks at the men's lives through the eyes of their mothers, their wives and their boyfriends, The book is not just a chronicle of a cross-channel literary relationship, it also provides an insight into what W.H.Auden would much later call the "Homintern" - an international network of gay men and their companions, as well as the hypocracy of...
`Riveting, tragic tale’ New Yorker `Anna Pasternak has produced an irresistible account of joy, suffering and passion’ Financial Times The heartbreaking story of the passionate love affair between Boris Pasternak and Olga Ivinskaya – the tragic true story that inspired Doctor Zhivago. Doctor Zhivago has sold in its millions yet the true love story that inspired it has never been fully explored. Pasternak would often say `Lara exists, go and m...