In 1954 18-year-old Irma Kurtz left New Jersey to travel across Europe, intent on transforming herself and changing the world. On her post-war Grand Tour she found what she believed in: art, culture, beauty and love, and some horror as a Jewish girl encountering the seat of much of her family's destruction. In the year 2000, sifting through a cardboard box of memories, she rediscovered the journal of her first journey, which marked the beginning of a life of writing and living abroad. Gripped by...
The Life of Henry A. Wise of Virginia, 1806-1876
by Barton Haxall Wise
Describing Tolstoy's crisis of depression and estrangement from the world, A Confession (1879) is an autobiographical work of exceptional emotional honesty. By the time he was fifty, Tolstoy had already written the novels that would assure him of literary immortality; he had a wife, a large estate and numerous children; he was 'a happy man' and in good health - yet life had lost its meaning. In this poignant confessional fragment, he records a period of his life when he began to turn away from f...
Explores the author's possibility of writing for American periodicals, and deals with the various claims made on his time as a celebrity author.
The centenary of Laurie Lee, the much-loved author of Cider with Rosie, falls in June 2014. To mark the occasion the British Library is releasing this latest audio CD in its highly-acclaimed 'Spoken Word' series. The disc features the first commercial issue of recordings of the author in interview and reading his own poetry and prose. The recordings are sourced from BBC broadcasts and include excerpts from Cider with Rosie, reflections on his life and work, and a live recording of Lee reading so...
With "Gentleman Junkie," Graham Caveney gives us the definitive life of William S. Burroughs - less a biography than a "chronology of the Burroughs phenomenon, " an examination of the myth behind the man. Filled with 150 color photos - many of them never seen before - and new biographical material, "Gentleman Junkie" shows how Burroughs's fascinating life, from Harvard to Greenwich Village to Tangiers, was matched only by his enormous impact on modern literature and pop culture. Dapper radical,...
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A deeply affecting coming-of-age memoir about family, love, loss, basketball—and life itself—by the beloved author of The Prince of Tides and The Great Santini During one unforgettable season as a Citadel cadet, Pat Conroy becomes part of a basketball team that is ultimately destined to fail. And yet for a military kid who grew up on the move, the Bulldogs provide a sanctuary from the cold, abrasive father who dominates his life—and a crucible for becoming his own...
Laura Skandera Trombley, the preeminent Twain scholar at work today, reveals the never-before-read letters and daily journals of Isabel Lyon, Mark Twain’s last personal secretary. For six years, Isabel Lyon was responsible for running the aging Man in White’s chaotic household, nursing him through several illnesses and serving as his adoring audience. But after a dramatic breakup of their relationship, Twain ranted in personal letters that she was “a liar, a forger, a thief, a hypocrite, a drun...
Berliner Kindheit um Neunzehnhundert (Grossdruck)
by Consultant Statistician Walter Benjamin
Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa - the author of The Leopard - got married late and against the will of his parents to the Baltic noblewoman Alexandra Wolff. His relationship with Baroness "Licy", which had started in the heat of passion and romance, ended in a strange domestic arrangement in which the couple lived thousands of miles apart - Licy in her ancestral home in Latvia, Giuseppe in his run-down palazzo in Palermo - meeting only once or twice a year and exchanging long letters in Ste...
In the summer of 1858, in a garden behind Christ Church in Oxford, Charles Dodgson-better known by his pseudonym Lewis Carroll-dressed the six-year-old Alice Liddell in ragamuffin's clothes, draped the folds of cloth low enough to expose her bare chest, asked her to look deep into his eyes-and then snapped the camera's shutter. In The Alice Behind Wonderland, Simon Winchester uses the famous photograph of Alice-notorious for the child's alluring pose-as the launching pad for an energetic a...
A revelatory portrait of Chekhov during the most extraordinary artistic surge of his life. In 1886, a twenty-six-year-old Anton Chekhov was publishing short stories, humor pieces, and articles at an astonishing rate, and was still a practicing physician. Yet as he honed his craft and continued to draw inspiration from the vivid characters in his own life, he found himself-to his surprise and ocassional embarassment-admired by a growing legion of fans, including Tolstoy himself. He had not...
In late October 1820, having sailed to Italy in the hope the warmer climate would improve his failing health, John Keats endured 10 days' quarantine in the Bay of Naples. Those ten days are the timescale and one half of this narrative in which Keats looks back on his life, his development as a poet, and the tragic love relationship with his nineteen year old fiancee Fanny Brawne. A second timescale, and the other half of the narrative, follows the six weeks Fanny spent in Wentworth Place, Hamps...
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