Showing titles in Authors

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is now generally recognized as one of the most influential thinkers of the last century. This Very Short Introduction explores his extraordinary life and thought. His complex system of criticism is difficult for many, but it is coherent in its combination of a Judaic...

Julian Barnes' new book is, among many things, a family memoir, an exchange with his brother (a philosopher), a meditation on morality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, an argument with and about God, and homage to the French writer Jules Renard. Though he warns us that 'this is not my autobiography', the result is a tour of the mind of one of our most brilliant writers.

A FASCINATING TRUE STORY OF FRIENDSHIP, INTRIGUE AND UNFORGIVABLE BETRAYAL, NOW A MAJOR TV SERIES Readers LOVE Capote's Women: 'A genuinely fascinating account of a great writer and his muses.' ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ 'Loved it! Fabulous book about a extremely complicated and complex character.'...

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE, STARRING JASON SEGAL AND JESSE EISENBERG, DIRECTED BY JAMES PONSOLDT An indelible portrait of David Foster Wallace, by turns funny and inspiring, based on a five-day trip with award-winning writer David Lipsky during Wallace’s Infinite Jest tour In David...

From one of America’s greatest and most iconic writers: an honest and courageous portrait of age and motherhood. Richly textured with bits of her own childhood and married life with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, and daughter, Quintana Roo, this new book by Joan Didion examines her thoughts...

In this New York Times bestselling memoir about a woman who dares to live life to the fullest, on her own terms, meet the most inspiring and memorable character Kate Mulgrew ever portrayed: herself. Raised by unconventional Irish Catholics who knew "how to drink, how to dance, how to talk, and...

'You put together two things that have not been put together before. And the world is changed...' Julian Barnes's new book is about ballooning, photography, love and grief; about putting two things, and two people, together, and about tearing them apart. One of the judges who awarded him the 2011 Man Booker Prize described him as 'an unparalleled magus of the heart'. This book confirms that opinion.

'Think of the Bible and Homer, think of Shakespeare and think of me,' wrote Gertrude Stein in 1936. Admirers called her a genius, sceptics a charlatan: she remains one of the most confounding—and contested—writers of the twentieth century. In this literary detective story, Francesca Wade delves into the creation of the Stein myth.

'A remarkable achievement' LOUISE KENNEDY 'A deeply moving memoir, raw with loss, yet luminous with love' SARAH WATERS 'What a kind, honest book. What a gift of love' DAVID MITCHELL 'Essential reading from an all-time great' SARA COLLINS Ghost Stories is Siri Hustvedt's most personal work yet, a...

Absence doesn't make the heart grow fonder. It makes people think you're dead. So begins Christopher Fowler's foray into the back catalogues and backstories of 99 authors who, once hugely popular, have all but disappeared from our shelves. Whether male or female, domestic or international, flash-in-the-pan or prolific, mega-seller or prize-winner, no author, it seems, can ever be fully immune from the fate of being forgotten.

'This book is just about my favourite book of all time ... I'm not entirely convinced I could like somebody who didn't like this book ... it's funny and moving and gives you an insight into this extraordinary moment as the war is about to begin ... it's so vivid, and what's more, it's incredibly...

Thanks to the invidious reputation of his most famous work, The Prince, Niccolo` Machiavelli exerts a unique hold over the popular imagination. But was Machiavelli as sinister as he is often thought to be? In Machiavelli: His Life and Times, Alexander Lee reveals the man behind the myth, following him from cradle to grave, from his father's penury and the abuse he suffered at a teacher's hands, to his marriage and his many affairs (with both men and women), to his political triumphs and, ultimately, his fall from grace and exile.

Second Lieutenant Wilfred Owen was twenty-four years old when he was admitted to the newly established Craiglockhart War Hospital for treatment of shell shock. A nascent poet, trying to make sense of the terror he had witnessed, he read a collection of poems from a fellow officer, Siegfried...

The definitive critical study of Tolkien’s greatest works by the respected and world renowned Tolkien scholar Professor T.A. Shippey. Following the unprecedented and universal acclaim for The Lord of the Rings, the respected academic and world-renowned Tolkien scholar, Professor Tom Shippey...

'This is the biography - truthful, sympathetic and thorough - that Coward deserves' DAILY TELEGRAPH The voice, the dressing-gown, the cigarette in its holder, remain unmistakable. There is rarely a week when one of Private Lives, Hay Fever, and Blithe Spirit is not in production somewhere in the...

'Self is the most daring and delightful novelist of his generation'...

In the closest thing we have to an autobiography, C. S. Lewis, an unfailingly honest and perceptive observer of self, here shares the story of his personal spiritual journey. With characteristic candor and insight, he describes how his “search for joy” led him from the conventional...

Dorothy Wellesley was a poet, gardener, traveller and heiress; she was also bisexual and a rebel. She became the lover of Vita Sackville-West, wrecking her marriage to the Duke of Wellington. She was the intimate friend of W.B. Yeats in his final years. On the fringes of the Bloomsbury Group...

A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR From one of our greatest living writers, comes a remarkable memoir of a forgotten England. 'The war went. We sang in the playground, "Bikini lagoon, an atom bomb’s boom, and two big explosions." David’s father came back from Burma and didn’t eat rice...

More than any other canonical English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer lived and worked at the center of political life - yet his poems are anything but conventional. Edgy, complicated, and often dark, they reflect a conflicted world, and their astonishing diversity and innovative language earned Chaucer renown as the father of English literature. Marion Turner, however, reveals him as a great European writer and thinker.