Literary Figures

Allen Ginsberg occupies a significant and enduring position in American literature. Following Ginsberg's death in 1997, Barry Miles has drawn on both his long friendship with the poet and on Ginsberg's journals and correspondence to produce an immensely...

The National Book Award-winner Patti Smith updates her treasure box of a childhood memoir about "clear unspeakable joy" and "just the wish to know" with a radiant new afterword, written during the pandemic and reflecting on current times. This expanded...

'A masterly performance by the greatest literary biographer of his generation' Oldie In this kaleidoscope of stories spanning art, science and poetry, award-winning writer Richard Holmes travels across three centuries, through much of Europe...

A new look at a revolutionary writer, a diverse imperial city, and a controversial trick on the Royal Navy. In February 1910, the future Virginia Woolf played the most famous practical joke in British military history. Blackening her face and...

A searingly personal memoir of the great Russian poet by his American friend and publisher, containing much previously unknown material about how Brodsky left Russia and how he made his way in the new world, and how, during the cold war, Americans...

The first book to explore the extraordinary story of the legendary friendship - and quarrel - between Wordsworth and Coleridge, two giants of English Romanticism. Wordsworth and Coleridge's passionate intimacy, shared ambition and subsequent...

The work of the great literary and cultural critic Walter Benjamin is an audacious plotting of history, art, and thought; a reservoir of texts, commentaries, scraps, and fragments of everyday life, art, and dreams. Throughout his life, Benjamin...

In these remarkable interviews with Andre Vltchek and Rossie Indira, edited by Nagesh Rao, Indonesia's most celebrated writer speaks out against tyranny and injustice in a young and troubled nation. Toer here discusses personal and political topics he...

Bram Stoker, despite having a name nearly as famous as Count Dracula, has remained an enigma. David J. Skal, in a psychological and cultural portrait, exhumes the inner world and strange genius of the writer who conjured an undying cultural icon. Stoker...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781914066214Author Marcus SedgwickFormat PaperbackPage Count 310Imprint Hawksmoor PublishingPublisher Hawksmoor Publishing

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781612196930Author Hunter S. ThompsonFormat PaperbackPage Count 208Imprint Melville House PublishingPublisher Melville House Publishing

This new critical biography provides a complete picture of German novelist, playwright and poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. The book offers fresh, thought-provoking interpretations of all the major works, including novels such as The Sorrows of Young...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780374536152Author Vivian GornickFormat PaperbackPage Count 192Imprint Farrar, Straus and GirouxPublisher Farrar, Straus and GirouxWeight(grams)...

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, better known by his pen name of Mark Twain, is one of the most famous writers in American (and world) literature. Twain had a fascinating life that began in hardship in 1835 (only three of his seven siblings survived childhood)...

Frances Partridge: the last survivor of the Bloomsbury group - the authorised biography.Frances Partridge was one of the great British diarists of the 20th century. She became part of the Bloomsbury group encountering Virginia Woolf, Lytton Strachey,...

** WINNER OF THE L.A. TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY **'Exhilarating.' Joyce Carol Oates, Times Literary Supplement Books of the Year'Sharp-eyed and revealing.' The New Yorker'Brilliant . . . Remarkable.' New York Journal of BooksStephen Crane produced...

'Government by its very nature counteracts the improvement of original mind' - William Godwin William Godwin was the first major anarchist thinker in the Anglophone world, who rocked the establishment at the beginning of the nineteenth century...

A definitive biography of the great French essayist and thinkerOne of the most important writers and thinkers of the Renaissance, Michel de Montaigne (1533-92) helped invent a literary genre that seemed more modern than anything that had come before. But...

What does it mean to create, not in "a room of one's own" but in a domestic space? Do children and genius rule each other out? In The Baby on the Fire Escape, award-winning biographer Julie Phillips traverses the shifting terrain where motherhood and...

From the author of the definitive biography of Fyodor Dostoevsky, never-before-published lectures that provide an accessible introduction to the Russian writer's major worksJoseph Frank (1918-2013) was perhaps the most important Dostoevsky biographer,...

A famous poet, a mysterious death and a story stranger than fiction. - this is the lost life and mytserious death of the 'Female Byron' On 15 October 1838, the body of a thirty-six-year-old woman was found in Cape Coast Castle, West Africa, a bottle of...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781590170656Author Aleksander WatFormat PaperbackPage Count 448Imprint NYRB ClassicsPublisher The New York Review of Books, IncWeight(grams)...

This miscellany explores the fascinating and enigmatic world created by the undisputed 'Queen of Crime', Agatha Christie. Examining her place in literary history, her books and her iconic characters, including Hercule Poirot and Miss Marple, this unique...

With a foreword by Lee Child.Andy Martin spent a year in the company of Lee Child, creator of tough-guy hero Jack Reacher. With Child is the diary of their adventures, tracking the publication and reception of Make Me, the writing of Night School at an...

As one of the leading proponents of the nouveau roman, Nathalie Sarraute is often remembered for her novels, including "The Golden Fruits", which earned her the Prix international de litterature in 1964. But her carefully crafted and evocative memoir...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780593328088Author Laurence LeamerFormat HardbackPage Count 368Imprint G P Putnam's SonsPublisher Penguin Putnam IncWeight(grams) 550gDimensions(mm) 235mm *...

Hans Fallada was a drug addict, womanizer, alcoholic, jailbird and thief. Yet he was also one of the most extraordinary storytellers of the twentieth century, whose novels, including Alone in Berlin, portrayed ordinary people in terrible times with a...

Ernest Hemingway's friend AE Hotchner once described a 'yellowed four-by-five picture of Ernest', shown to him by Hemingway, 'aged five or six, holding a small rifle. Written on the back in his mother's hand was the notation, "Ernest was taught to shoot...

An accessible and reliable introduction to the life and works of Charles Dickens, offering a unique combination of academic biography and literary analysis The Life of the Author: Charles Dickens explores the relationship between Dickens' lived...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780948238376Author Carolyn CassadyFormat PaperbackPage Count 480Imprint Eyewear PublishingPublisher Eyewear PublishingWeight(grams) 405gDimensions(mm) 195mm...

In 1939 Christopher Isherwood and W. H. Auden emigrated together to the United States. In spare, luminous prose these diaries describe Isherwood's search for a new life in California; his work as a screenwriter in Hollywood, his pacifism during World War...

When the New Yorker writer Rebecca Mead relocated to her birth city, London, with her family in the summer of 2018, she was both fleeing the political situation in America and seeking to expose her son to a wider world. With a keen sense of what she'd...

Everybody knows Charlotte Bronte. World-famous for her novel Jane Eyre, she's a giant of literature and has been written about in reverential tones in scores of textbooks over the years. But what do we really know about Charlotte? As the famous siblings...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781681374499Author Peter BrooksFormat PaperbackPage Count 304Imprint The New York Review of Books, IncPublisher The New York Review of Books, Inc

In The Fellowship, Philip and Carol Zaleski offer the first complete rendering of the Inklings' lives and works. Lewis maps the medieval mind, accepts Christ while riding in the sidecar of his brother's motorcycle, becomes a world-famous evangelist and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781612197791Author Ursula Le GuinFormat PaperbackPage Count 208Imprint Melville House PublishingPublisher Melville House Publishing

The first biography to examine Mailer's life as a twisted lens, offering a unique insight into the history of America from the end of World War II to the election of Barack Obama. Twice winner of the Pulitzer Prize, firstly in 1969 for The Armies of...

Over forty-five years have elapsed since Derek Mahon announced his arrival at the forefront of Irish literary life with the release of Night-Crossing, but he remains an elusive figure. In the first comprehensive biography of Ireland's greatest...

"Walden. Yesterday I came here to live." That entry from the journal of Henry David Thoreau, and the intellectual journey it began, would by themselves be enough to place Thoreau in the American pantheon. His attempt to "live deliberately" in a small...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780307389985Author Julian BarnesFormat PaperbackPage Count 256Imprint Vintage BooksPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 242gDimensions(mm) 203mm *...