A dispatch from a foreign land, when crafted by an attentive and skilled writer, can be magical, transmitting pleasure, drama, and seductive strangeness.
A 2016 Edgar Award NomineeBefore he became a household name in America as perhaps our greatest hard-boiled crime writer, before his attachment to Lillian Hellman and blacklisting during the McCarthy era, and his subsequent downward spiral, Dashiell Hammett led a life of action.
The author of this important contribution to the study of Blake was tragically drowned in a sailing accident when he had almost completed it in manuscript.
The noted author recounts the struggles and triumphs of his search for spiritual meaning in this “exquisite memoir that often reads like a novel” (Publisher’s Weekly).
The long-awaited biography of one of the great writers of the twentieth century - 'a wonderful blend of scholarly fact and juicy storytelling' (Mail on Sunday).
Mark Doty has always felt haunted by Walt Whitman s bold, new American voice, and by his equally radical claims about body and soul and what it means to be a self.
A biography of Vergil, Rome's greatest poet, by the acclaimed translator of the Aeneid The Aeneid stands as a towering work of Classical Roman literature and a gripping dramatization of the best and worst of human nature.
The New York Times columnist recounts growing up in rural Louisiana in this "e;brave and powerful memoir"e; of poverty, abuse, sexuality, and perseverance (Publishers Weekly).
Memoirs and Madness examines memoir as a literary genre, investigates the creation of Leonid Andreev's posthumous legacy by his contemporaries, and explores the possibility that Andreev, Russia's leading literary figure at the beginning of the twentieth century, suffered from mental illness.
WINNER OF THE 2023 MARY LYNN KOTZ AWARD FOR ART IN LITERATUREIt is so good, after so many years of public indifference, even hostility towards Vincent and his work, to feel towards the end of my life that the battle is won.
A Mexican literary and political figure of the early nineteenth century whose writings present the best existing portrayal of Spanish colonial society.
Filled with dramatic, ironic, and sometimes tragic turns, this superb biography captures the story of one of America's most extraordinary figures, producing at once the best life of Fuller ever written, and one of the great biographies in American history.
Winner of the 2024 Adult Nonfiction Award from the Mississippi Library AssociationBecoming Ezra Jack Keats offers the first complete biography of acclaimed children's author and illustrator Ezra Jack Keats (1916-1983) intended for adult readers.
In this revised and expanded edition of Medicine Stories, Aurora Levins Morales weaves together insights and lessons learned over a lifetime of activism to offer a new theory of social justice.
The definitive biography of a pivotal figure in American literary historyA major poet, Paul Laurence Dunbar (18721906) was one of the first African American writers to garner international recognition in the wake of emancipation.
The first part of this fascinating account of a biographer's problems tells of the adventures of one biographer in tracking down clues in several parts of the world--accidental discovery, long pursuit of a watward detail, and suggestions of new ways of turning up evidence.
Alan Adamson's biography takes recent scholarship into account and adds new material about Nicholl's family, education, and early life in Ireland to give a more balanced view.
Gregory Benford is perhaps best known as the author of Benford's law of controversy: "e;Passion is inversely proportional to the amount of real information available.
To this day The White Hart and The Red Lion are two of the most popular names for a public house in England both talismans that served as the insignia for Richard II and the banished Henry Bolingbroke, Duke of Lancaster, who usurped the throne in 1399.
On a wharf in Provincetown, Massachusetts, where Greenwich Village bohemians gathered in the summer of 1916, Susan Glaspell was inspired by a sensational murder trial to write Trifles, a play about two women who hide a Midwestern farm wife's motive for murdering her abusive husband.
This memoir is less a chronicle of the life of a leading scholar and critic of matters French than a series of differently angled fragments, each with its attendant surprise, in what one commentator has called Jeffrey Mehlman's amour vache-his injured and occasionally injurious love-for France and the French.
This study explores the surprising relationship between Proust's creative genius, his financial extravagance, and the steady hand that kept him afloat.
Peter Levi teases a remarkably vivid life from Virgil's poems, a life-long study of poetry and the few facts that have come down to us through Suetonius.
A groundbreaking biography that recreates the cosmopolitan world in which a wine merchant's son became one of the most celebrated of all English poets More than any other canonical English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer lived and worked at the centre of political life-yet his poems are anything but conventional.
Since the beginning of his artistic career in 1959, Bahram Beyzaie's oeuvre has incorporated various aspects of Iranian, Euro-American, Chinese, Japanese, and Indian performance traditions and cinema.
