Literary Figures

In Journey Through a Small Planet (1972), the writer Emanuel Litvinoff recalls his working-class Jewish childhood in the East End of London: a small cluster of streets right next to the city, but worlds apart in culture and spirit. With vivid intensity...

FROM THE BESTSELLING AUTHOR OF REBECCA. 'Miss du Maurier creates on the grand scale . . . observation, sympathy, courage, a sense of the romantic, are here' OBSERVER 'It is my pick of the Spring biographical material for sheer entertainment value . . . a...

Unpublished for 90 years, Agatha Christie's extensive and evocative letters and photographs from her year-long round-the-world trip to South Africa, Australia, New Zealand, Canada and America as part of the British trade mission for the...

Edward Thomas's death in the Second World War robbed the world of a great poet, a fine writer, and a pioneering environmentalist. Published in 1909, The South Country is the happiest of all his books. Lyrical, passionate, acutely sensitive to life in the...

When Memoirs was first published in 1975, it created quite a bit of turbulence in the media--though long self-identified as a gay man, Williams' candour about his love life, sexual encounters, and drug use was found shocking in and of itself, and such...

For decades, Janet Malcolm's books and dispatches for the New Yorker have poked and prodded at biographical convention, gesturing towards the artifice that underpins both public and private selves. Here, Malcolm turns her gimlet eye on her own life,...

'Theirs was a pre-urban world in the glow of its last sunset, without a care or doubt, in which it seemed as if nothing could ever come to harm. Here was their version of that ideal world that has haunted the dreamer, rebel and pastoral poet for...

Shortlised for the Saltire Society Non Fiction Book of the Year Award Almost every adult and child is familiar with his Treasure Island, but few know that Robert Louis Stevenson lived out his last years on an equally remote island, which was squabbled...

During the ten years she lived at the edge of Putney Common Jilly Cooper walked daily on this expanse of green. For most of the time she lived there she kept a diary, noting the effects of the changing seasons and writing about her encounters with dogs...

Known for his journalism, biographies and novels, A. N. Wilson turns a merciless searchlight on his own early life, his experience of sexual abuse, his catastrophic mistakes in love (sacred and profane) and his life in Grub Street - as a prolific writer...

Now in paperback, a beautifully illustrated account of of Tove Jansson's life and artThe definitive biography of one of the most unique and beloved children's authors of the 20th century, the creator of the Moomins. Tove Jansson (1914-2001) led a long,...

A fascinating picture of the American frontier emerges from Twain's fictionalized recollections of his experiences prospecting for gold, speculating in timber, and writing for a succession of small Western newspapers during the 1860s.About the AuthorBorn...

Emily Bronte occupies a special place in the English literary canon. And rightly so: the incomparable Wuthering Heights is a novel that has bewitched us for almost 200 years, and the character of Heathcliff is, perhaps, the ultimate romantic hero - and...

One should either wear a work or art, or be a work of art', Wilde once declared. In The Invention of Oscar Wilde, Nicholas Frankel explores Wilde's self-creation as a 'work of art' and a carefully constructed cultural icon. Frankel takes readers on a...

Diana Athill helped shape some of the most celebrated books in modern literature. For nearly five decades, she edited (and nursed and coerced and coaxed) writers including Jean Rhys, V. S. Naipaul and Philip Roth. From the pleasures, intrigues and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780486833026Author Jane AustenFormat PaperbackPage Count 224Imprint Dover Publications Inc.Publisher Dover Publications Inc.Weight(grams) 170gDimensions(mm)...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781590174142Author Elizabeth Marshall ThomasFormat PaperbackPage Count 208Imprint NYRB ClassicsPublisher The New York Review of Books, IncWeight(grams)...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780060919887Author Annie DillardFormat PaperbackPage Count 111Imprint HarperPerennialPublisher HarperCollins Publishers Inc

In 2013, the filmmaker Chantal Akerman's mother was dying. She flew back from New York to care for her, and between dressing her, feeding her and putting her to bed, she wrote. She wrote about her childhood, the escape her mother made from Auschwitz but...

Shortlisted in Scotland's National Book Awards By the time she reached her fifties, Catherine had experienced period pain, childbirth, and early menopause, alongside love and laughter, a career in journalism, and raising two daughters. Like many of her...

Kafka's letters to Felice Bauer were written between 1912 and 1917, during which time they were twice engaged to be married. This complex relationship, which coincided with a period of great productivity for Kafka, gave him both hope and strength, but...

Volume One of the Letters of T. S. Eliot, edited by Valerie Eliot in 1988, covered the period from Eliot's childhood in St Louis, Missouri, to the end of 1922, by which time he had settled in England, married and published The Waste Land. Since 1988,...

From New York Times bestselling author Amy Tan, a memoir on her life as a writer, her childhood and the symbiotic relationship between fiction and emotional memory. In Where the Past Begins, bestselling author of The...

The prize-winning biography of Wordsworth's beloved sister, champion, muse who was at the heart of the Romantic movement in Britain - reissued to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Dorothy's birth.'Genius ... Its own kind of heaven.' New York Times 'A...

When friends die, one's own credentials change: one becomes a survivor. Graham Greene has already had biographers, one of whom has served him mightily. Yet I hope that there is room for the remembrance of a friend who knew him - not wisely, perhaps, but...

Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language--and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank's monumental, 2500-page work has been...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780156260367Author Virginia WoolfFormat PaperbackPage Count 384Imprint Houghton MifflinPublisher Houghton MifflinWeight(grams) 295gDimensions(mm) 201mm *...

'It's very candid, and movingly so.... Not only in Blackman a grafter- even more, and in the face of more, than we already knew. She's someone with whom you do not mess. Good on her. She's earned it' The Telegraph Malorie Blackman is one of Britain's...

Wilbur Smith has lived an incredible life of adventure, and now he shares the extraordinary true stories that have inspired his fiction. I've been writing novels for over fifty years. I was lucky enough to miss the big wars and not get shot, but lucky...

Wilbur Smith has lived an incredible life of adventure, and now he shares the extraordinary true stories that have inspired his fiction. I've been writing novels for over fifty years. I was lucky enough to miss the big wars and not get shot, but lucky...

'I remember seeing the lion looking yellow and heavy-headed and enormous against a scrubby-looking tree in a patch of orchard bush and P. O. M. kneeling to shoot him. Then there was the short-barrelled explosion of the Mannlicher and the lion was going...

'I remember seeing the lion looking yellow and heavy-headed and enormous against a scrubby-looking tree in a patch of orchard bush and P. O. M. kneeling to shoot him. Then there was the short-barrelled explosion of the Mannlicher and the lion was going...

'If a man is to write A Panegyrick, he may keep vices out of sight; but if he professes to write A Life, he must represent it really as it was.' In the last of his major writings, Samuel Johnson looked back over the previous two centuries of English...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781905512331Author Bernard KopsFormat PaperbackPage Count 244Imprint Five Leaves PublicationsPublisher Five Leaves Publications

Now the subject of major Disney film starring Ewan McGregor, this is Christopher Robin in his own words.Millions of readers throughout the world have grown up with the stories and verses of A. A. Milne; have envied Christopher Robin in his enchanted...

A unique portrait of a great playwright by one of our leadin literary biographers. With unprecedented access to private papers, diaries, letters, and countless interviews with figures ranging from Felicity Kendal to John Boorman and Trevor Nunn to Steven...

'Textured literary portraits of the masculine mind and body'Raymond Antrobus, author of The PerseveranceIn October 1960, James Baldwin and John Cheever spoke on a panel together at San Francisco State College. The troubled state of American society was...

A continuous text made up of extracts from Dorothy Wordsworth's Journal and a selection of her brother's poems. Dorothy Wordsworth kept her Journal 'because I shall give William pleasure by it'. In doing so, she never dreamt that she was giving future...

In this timely gathering, Patricia Hampl, one of our most elegant practitioners, "weaves personal stories and grand ideas into shimmering bolts of prose" (Minneapolis Star Tribune) as she explores the autobiographical writing that has enchanted or...

From one of the great modern writers, the acclaimed lectures in which he draws on a lifetime of experience to take the measure of Shakespeare's plays and sonnets "W. H. Auden, poet and critic, will conduct a course on Shakespeare at the New School for...