Literary Figures

Based on thousands of pages of typed and handwritten notes, journal entries, letters, and story sketches, The Exegesis of Philip K. Dick is the magnificent and imaginative final work of an author who dedicated his life to questioning the nature of...

From one of the most important chroniclers of our time, come two extended excerpts from her never-before-seen notebooks - writings that offer an illuminating glimpse into the mind and process of a legendary writer. ...

'Superlative... definitive and genuinely gripping' SUNDAY TIMES'Utterly engrossing' EVENING STANDARD'Compulsively readable... Beautifully written... Definitive' OBSERVER Appointed by Philip Roth and granted complete access and independence, Blake Bailey...

Jeoffry was a real cat who lived 250 years ago, confined to an asylum with Christopher Smart, one of the most visionary poets of the age. In exchange for love and companionship, Smart rewarded Jeoffry with the greatest tribute to a feline ever written...

Unruly Times is a superlative portrait of the relationship between Wordsworth and Coleridge, and a fascinating exploration of the Romantic Movement and the dramatic events that shaped it. With a novelist's insight and eye for detail, A. S. Byatt brings...

'Sharp, unsentimental and ruefully funny. A fascinating portrait not only of Lively but of the times through which she has lived' Daily Telegraph'Clever and poignant . . . there is much to enjoy. This is Lively at her best' Sunday ExpressIn this...

With an introduction by Siri Hustvedt Friday 30 October 1936. I do not wish, for reasons I cannot now develop, to analyse that extraordinary summer. It will be more helpful & healthy for me to write scenes; to take up my pen & describe actual events:...

America is obsessed with Los Angeles. And America has been thinking about Los Angeles all wrong, for decades, on repeat. Los Angeles is not just the place where the American dream hits the Pacific. Not just the end of the line anymore. Not just the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780399174902Author Philip GreeneFormat HardbackPage Count 384Imprint TarcherPerigeePublisher Penguin Putnam IncWeight(grams) 1g

Poets must read and study, but also they must learn to tilt and whisper, shout, or dance, each in his or her own way, or we might just as well copy the old books. But, no, that would never do, for always the new self swimming around in the old world...

'A compelling memoir. Absorbing and graced with a deceptive lightness of touch, [Hanging with the Elephant] is clever and brilliantly pieced together. Harding writes like an angel' Sunday TimesFrom the No.1 bestselling author of Staring at Lakes, Talking...

This volume contains a selection of early works by Yevgeny Alexandrovich Yevtushenko who blazed a trail for a generation of Soviet poets with a confident poetic voice that moves effortlessly between social and personal themes. 'Zima Junction' vividly...

*A BOOK TO LOOK FORWARD TO IN 2021 IN THE TIMES, FINANCIAL TIMES, DAILY MAIL, SUNDAY TIMES AND GUARDIAN*The epitaph John Keats composed for his own gravestone - 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water' - seemingly damned him to oblivion. When he died...

Mary Wollstonecraft, Elizabeth Garrett Anderson, Millicent Fawcett, Emmeline Pankhurst, Constance Markievicz, Nancy Astor They terrorised the establishment. They fought for the vote. They pushed back boundaries and revolutionised our world. ...

OUTSIDERS tells the stories of five novelists - Mary Shelley, Emily Bronte, George Eliot, Olive Schreiner, Virginia Woolf - and their famous novels.We have long known their individual greatness but in linking their creativity to their lives as outsiders,...

A magnificent new biography of the man who gave us David Copperfield, Oliver Twist, and Ebenezer Scrooge This long-awaited biography, twenty years after the last major account, uncovers Dickens the man through the profession in which he excelled. Drawing...

Everyone knows Frank Herbert's Dune. This science fiction epic combines politics human evolution and ecology and has captured the imagination of generations of readers. It is one of the most popular science fiction novels ever written, has won awards,...

Featuring an introduction by Neil Gaiman! "J. Michael Straczynski is, without question, one of the greatest science fiction minds of our time." -- Max Brooks (World War Z) For four decades, J. Michael Straczynski has been one of the most...

Virginia Woolf was a feminist and a bohemian but without her servants - cooking, cleaning and keeping house - she might never have managed to write.Mrs Woolf and The Servants explores the hidden history of service. Through Virginia Woolf's extensive...

A.A. Milne is one of the most successful English writers ever. His heart-warming creations-Winnie-the-Pooh, Christopher Robin, Eeyore, Tigger and Piglet-have become some of the best-loved children's characters of all time, and readers the world over are...

Fifty Forgotten Books is a very special sort of book about books, by a great bookman and for book-people of all ages and levels of experience. Not quite literary criticism, not quite an autobiography, it is at once a guided tour through the dusty...

'Barfield towers above us all... the wisest and best of my unofficial teachers.' - C.S. Lewis --- 'We are well supplied with interesting writers, but Owen Barfield is not content to be merely interesting. His ambition is to set us free from the prison...

'There has been a lot of fighting hereabouts. The trenches have made themselves rather than been made, and run inconsequently in and out of the big thirty-foot high stacks of bricks; it is most confusing. The parapet of a trench which we don't occupy is...

An entirely new portrait of Keats, rich with insights into the torments of his life and the imaginative sources of his works This landmark biography of celebrated Romantic poet John Keats explodes entrenched conceptions of him as a delicate, overly...

Max Brod, a successful novelist, was a boyhood companion of Kafka's and remained closely tied to him until Kafka's death in 1924. He was undoubtedly the one man whom Kafka trusted more than any other, and it is to Brod, as his literary executor and...

A vivid and original account of one of Ireland's greatest poets by an acclaimed Irish historian and literary biographerThe most important Irish poet of the postwar era, Seamus Heaney rose to prominence as his native Northern Ireland descended into...

**WINNER of the 2019 PEN Ackerley Prize**'A major literary talent . . . speaks about the power and powerlessness that young women are subject to in a wholly fresh, clear-eyed way . . . you'll find it hard to come away from The Terrible without a stab of...

'He was "not of an age, but for all time".' (Shakespeare's contemporary Ben Jonson) No writer, before or since, has matched Shakespeare in terms of influence, critical acclaim or popular success. His genius lay in his sheer dramatic skill, his powerful...

Aristocrat, literary celebrity, 'Rose Queen', devoted wife, lesbian, recluse, iconoclast - Vita Sackville-West was many things, but she was never straightforward. Her life is re-told here in a dazzling new biography. Vita Sackville-West was a...

Draft No. 4 is a master class on the writer's craft. In a series of playful, expertly wrought essays, John McPhee shares insights he has gathered over his career and has refined while teaching at Princeton University, where he has nurtured some of the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781958972106Author Elizabeth CunninghamFormat PaperbackPage Count 260Imprint Monkfish Book Publishing CompanyPublisher Monkfish Book Publishing Company

Theodore Dreiser's Russian Diary is an extended record of the American writer's travels throughout the Soviet Union in 1927-28. Dreiser was initially invited to Moscow for a week-long observance of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. He...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781770414204Author Kari HesthamarFormat PaperbackPage Count 288Imprint ECW Press,CanadaPublisher ECW Press,Canada

Probably the greatest British novelist of his generation, Graham Greene's own story was as strange and compelling as those he told of Pinkie the Mobster, Harry Lime, or the Whisky Priest. A restless traveller, he was a witness to many of the key events...

One of the most brilliant writers of her day, George Eliot (1819-1880) was also one of the most talked about. Intellectual and independent, she had the strength to defy polite society with her highly unorthodox private life, so why did she deny her...

Four questions consumed Shelley and coloured everything he wrote. Who, or what, was he? What was his purpose? Where had he come from? And where was he going? He sought the answers in order to free and empower not only himself, but the whole human race...

The memoir of legendary cartoonist John Callahan, now a major motion picture directed by Gus Van Sant and starring Joaquin Phoenix, Jonah Hill, and Rooney Mara.Featuring more than 60 of Callahan's original cartoonsIn 1972, at the age of twenty-one, John...

'One day there is life . . . And then, suddenly, it happens there is death.'So begins Paul Auster's moving and personal meditation on fatherhood, The Invention of Solitude. The first section, 'Portrait of an Invisible Man', reveals Auster's memories and...

Graham Robb's brilliant biography moves Rimbaud on from his perpetual adolescence where our imaginations have held him to show the extent of his transformations. From phenomenally precocious schoolboy he became Europe's most shocking and exhilarating...

The first comprehensive biography of an extraordinary English poet and composer whose life was haunted by fighting in the First World War and, later, confinement in a mental asylumIvor Gurney (1890-1937) wrote some of the most anthologized poems of the...