A Wildly Funny and Shockingly True Compendium of the Bad Boys (and Girls) of Western LiteratureRock stars, rappers, and actors haven't always had a monopoly on misbehaving.
In the tradition of The Botany of Desire and Wicked Plants, a witty and engaging history of the first botanists interwoven with stories of today's extraordinary plants found in the garden and the lab.
Inthe tradition of Jeanette Walls’ TheGlass Castle and Sara Gruen’s Water for Elephants, novelist Minrose Gwin offers a beautifullycrafted memoir of rediscovering her mother, the mentally ill poet Erin Taylor,after a life of growing up with her in the South.
In an ';eye-opening memoir' (People) ';as beautiful as it is discomfiting' (The New Yorker), award-winning writer Apricot Irving untangles her youth on a missionary compound in Haiti.
Discover Amos Oz s most iconic work in this extraordinary memoir that is at once a great family saga and a magical self-portrait of a writer who witnessed the birth of a nation*OVER 2 MILLION COPIES SOLD WORLDWIDE* A hero of mine, a moral as well as literary giant Simon SchamaAmos Oz's remarkable, moving story takes us on a seductive journey through his childhood and adolescence, along Jerusalem's war-torn streets in the 1940s and '50s and into a small apartment crowded with books in twelve languages and relatives speaking nearly as many.
Donatien Alphonse Francois, Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), one of the most perplexing personalities of Western culture, has been called 'the freest spirit who ever lived' and 'a frenetic and abominable assemblage of all crimes and obscenities'.
_________________________The perfect accompaniment to the definitive new editions of Georgette Heyer's celebrated novels that are currently being reissued.
Dennis Potter was born and brought up in the Forest of Dean- a 'strange and beautiful place', as he described it in the last interview before his death, 'rather ugly villages in beautiful landscape, a heart- shaped place between two rivers, somehow slightly cut off from the rest of England.
No writer is more charismatic than Robert Burns and no biographer has captured his energy, brilliance and radicalism as well as Robert Crawford does in The Bard.
Richard Wright's memoir of his childhood as a young black boy in the American south of the 1920s and 30s is a stark depiction of African-American life and a powerful exploration of racial tension.
A fascinating exploration of the contents of Agatha Christie's seventy-three private notebooks, including illustrations and two unpublished Poirot storiesWhen Agatha Christie died in 1976, at age eighty-five, she had become the world's most popular author.
I am foreborn of spud runts who fled the famines of Ireland in the 1830s, not a man or woman among them more than five foot two, leaving behind a life of beggarment and setting sail for what since Malory were called the Happy Isles .
Madox Brown, who grew up in France and Belgium before he came to England and won fame with paintings like 'The Last of England', was always an outsider, and the women he loved also burst out of stereotypes.
The Verse Revolutionaries tells the story of the Imagists, a turbulent and colourful group of poets, who came together in London in the years before the First World War.
Born Nikolai Pewsner into a Russian-Jewish family in Leipzig in 1902, Nikolaus Pevsner was a dedicated scholar who pursued a promising career as an academic in Dresden and G ttingen.
In this authorised biography, Zachary Leader argues that Kingsley Amis was not only the finest comic novelist of his generation, but a dominant figure in post-war British writing, as novelist, poet, critic and polemicist.
Born in Nabraska of Irish Quaker parents, educated at Dulwich College, and in the `mean streets' of Los Angeles about which he wrote, Raymond Chandler-writer, oil executive, poet, recluse, charmer, gentlman, drunk-was full of contradictions as his origins.
Part autobiography, part natural history, Bird Cloud is the glorious story of the American West landscape and building a home there by Annie Proulx, winner of a PEN/Faulker Award, Pulitzer Prize, and National Book Award and author of the short story ';Brokeback Mountain.
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR New York Times Book Review The New YorkerEntertainment WeeklyTime Washington PostSan Francisco ChronicleChicago Tribune Christian Science MonitorSlateSt.
An "e;outstandingly dramatic and moving"e; memoir of fleeing a brutal girlhood in Somalia-and becoming a supermodel and UN special ambassador (Kirkus Reviews).
