Literary Figures

Twenty years after the publication of his classic novel Ulverton, the acclaimed poet and novelist Adam Thorpe revisits the landscape which inspired him. Silbury Hill in Wiltshire has perplexed people for generations. Was it once an island, moated by...

In the hills above Florence, Santa Maddalena is like a secret garden where writers hone their craft and meet like-minded people. Paired with evocative images, these essays by 27 acclaimed authors invite readers to understand how the spirit of this...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781642860894Author Linda Bostroem KnausgardFormat PaperbackPage Count 240Imprint World EditionsPublisher World Editions

Four popular novelists of the same generation each wrote a novel inspired by a holiday that the author spent in France. In the nineteen-fifties, Rumer Godden based The Greengage Summer on her recollections of her family's 1923 battlefield-tour manque in...

Lewis Carroll's books have delighted children and adults for generations, but behind their exuberant fantasy and delightful nonsense was the mind of a brilliant mathematician. Now his forgotten achievements in the world of numbers are brought to light by...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781578631384Author Susan Johnston GrafFormat PaperbackPage Count 240Imprint Red Wheel/WeiserPublisher Red Wheel/WeiserWeight(grams) 340g

A witty, provocative look inside the tumultuous marriages of five writers, illuminating the creative process as well as the role of money, power, and fame in these complex and fascinating relationships."The five marriages that Carmela Ciuraru explores in...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780312280765Author Edward BunkerFormat PaperbackPage Count 320Imprint St. Martins Press-3PLPublisher St. Martins Press-3PLWeight(grams) 431gDimensions(mm)...

Autobiographies consists of six autobiographical works that William Butler Yeats published together in the mid-1930s to form a single, extraordinary memoir of the first fifty-eight years of his life, from his earliest memories of childhood to winning the...

George Orwell was one of the most significant literary figures on the left in the twentieth century. While titles such as 1984, Animal Farm and Homage to Catalonia are still rightly regarded as modern classics, his own politics are less well understood. ...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781951142629Author Matthew SpecktorFormat PaperbackPage Count 300Imprint Tin House BooksPublisher Tin House BooksWeight(grams) 340gDimensions(mm) 211mm *...

Ngugi wa Thiong'o's powerful prison memoir begins half an hour before his release on 12 December 1978. A year earlier, he recalls, armed police arrived at his home and took him to Kenya's Kamiti Maximum Security Prison. There, Ngugi lives in a block...

During his lifetime, William Gaddis (1922-1998) evaded biographical questions, never read from his work publicly, and didn't allow his photograph to appear on his books. Before his novel J R (1975) won Gaddis the National Book Award and some measure of...

John Took provides an entirely original view of one of the most important poets and thinkers in all of Western literature, Dante Alighieri. The year 2021 marks the 700th anniversary of the death of Dante Alighieri, a poet who, as T. S. Eliot put it,...

'Poignant and fiercely intelligent, this is the best work of creative non-fiction I have read in years' FIONA MOZLEY'Profound, moving and courageous' NICHOLAS ALLEN, IRISH TIMESIn April 1931, modernist poet Hart Crane arrived in Mexico City. Between mood...

In 2010, Ted Geltner drove to Gainesville, Florida, to pay a visit to Harry Crews and ask the legendary author if he would be willing to be the subject of a literary biography. His health rapidly deteriorating, Crews told Geltner he was on board and...

'When I was a child in Scotland, I was fond of everything that was wild, and all my life I've been growing fonder and fonder of wild places and wild creatures.'John Muir was eleven when he and his family left Scotland in 1849 to build a new life on a...

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...

The definitive biography of one of the twentieth century's finest poets, Siegfried Sassoon combines material from The Making of a War Poet and The Journey from the Trenches, the two bestselling volumes on Sassoon from his biographer and foremost scholar,...

One couple's inspiring memoir of healing a Rwandan village, raising a family near the old killing fields, and building a restaurant named Heaven.Newlyweds Josh and Alissa were at a party and received a challenge that shook them to the core: do you think...

Rather than resist the vast social and cultural changes sweeping Japan in the nineteenth century, the poet Masaoka Shiki (1867-1902) instead incorporated new Western influences into his country's native haiku and tanka verse. By reinvigorating these...

One morning Mel Toews put on his coat and hat and walked out of town, prepared to die. A loving husband and father, faithful member of the Mennonite church, and immensely popular schoolteacher, he was a pillar of his close-knit community. Yet after a...

An eclectic history of human curiosity, a great feast of ideas, and a memoir of a reading life from an internationally celebrated reader and thinker Curiosity has been seen through the ages as the impulse that drives our knowledge forward and the...

Volume Two covers the early years of his editorship of The Criterion (the periodical that Eliot launched with Lady Rothermere's backing in 1922), publication of The Hollow Men and the course of Eliot's thinking about poetry and poetics after The Waste...

One was the mother who bore him; three were women who adored him; one was the sister he slept with; one was his abused and sodomized wife; one was his legitimate daughter; one was the fruit of his incest; another was his friend Shelley's wife, who...

At the outset of his career Ted Hughes described letter-writing as 'excellent training for conversation with the world', and he was to become a prolific master of this art which combines writing and talking. This selection begins when Hughes was...

Winner of the 2019 Somerset Maugham Award'A great galloping joy of a book - funny, lyrical, fast paced, heart-warming - a delicious celebration of love and life' Rebecca Stott, author of In the Days of RainIn 1857, after two years of writing The Life of...

A vivid portrait of the man behind the writings, placing Orwell and his work at the centre of the current political landscape. One of the most enduringly popular and controversial writers of the twentieth century, George Orwell's work is as relevant...

Part of the "Writers' Britain" series, first published in the 1940s. This work offers Graham Greene's evaluation of British drama, from its roots in the Mystery and Miracle plays of the market carnival through Shakespeare and the Restoration to the 20th...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780714530130Author Luis J. RodriguezFormat PaperbackPage Count 260Imprint Marion Boyars Publishers LtdPublisher Marion Boyars Publishers Ltd

'Adds enormously to our understanding of the man' Evening Standard George Orwell was one of the greatest writers England produced in the last century. He left an enduring mark on our language and culture, with concepts such as 'Big Brother' and 'Room...

Ralph Freedom traces the career of Rainer Maria Rilke - perhaps one of Europe's greatest poets - in this scholarly biographical volume that includes examples of Rilke's poetry and prose.Book InformationISBN 9780810115439Author Ralph FreedomFormat...

A New York Times Notable BookA New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceA Boston Globe and LitHub Best Book of the YearWhen "The Fourth State of Matter," her now famous piece about a workplace massacre at the University of Iowa was published in The New...

Internationally bestselling novelist and American icon Tom Robbins delivers the long awaited tale of his wild life and times, both at home and around the globe. Tom Robbins' warm, wise, and wonderfully weird novels-including Still Life With Woodpecker,...

'My future mother-in-law burst into tears when she heard her son was to marry an actress. There's still something disturbing, I grant you, about the word "actress". If an MP or some other outstanding person plays fast and loose with an...

Lady Diana Cooper had been famous from her earliest youth, the subject of gossip and adoration as the queen of the 'Coterie', an exclusive high society set. Her marriage to Duff Cooper, a rising political star, and her career on the stage and in early...

To Evelyn Waugh he was simply "the Master." He wrote ninety novels and story collections, and among his immortal characters are Jeeves, Psmith, and the Empress of Blandings (who is, of course, a pig). Equally impressive is the range of his devotees:...

How does a writer compose a suicide note? This was not a question that the prize-winning novelist William Styron had ever contemplated before. In this true account of his depression, Styron describes an illness that reduced him from a successful writer...

Best known as the author of the classic Darkness at Noon, Koestler was one of the most influential and controversial intellectuals, involved in and commenting on almost every political movement of the twentieth century. As young man, he was a committed...

'A daring and mesmerizing twist on the art of biography' - Douglas Smith, author of Rasputin: The Biography 'Anyone who loves [Dostoevsky's] novels will be fascinated by this book' - Sue Prideaux, author of I Am Dynamite! A Life of Friedrich...