Literary Figures

In 1926, Tom Rolt who was then sixteen years old, abandoned his public school education. Having taken a job with a small firm of agricultural engineers, he realised that he had found his life’s calling. But the way ahead was neither smooth nor easy...

Readers and students of Ayn Rand will value seeing in this collection of interviews how Ayn Rand applied her philosophy and moral principles to the issues of the day. Objectively Speaking includes half a century of print and broadcast interviews drawn...

Building on his enormously successful series of Philosophers in 90 Minutes, Paul Strathern now applies his witty and incisive prose to brief biographical studies of the world's great writers. He brings their lives and ideas to life in entertaining and...

This is the story of a man who left instructions that the word “WRITER”—in capital letters—should be carved into the centre of his tombstone. Philip F Deaver’s writing won America’s Flannery O’Connor and O. Henry awards. For 20 years, he was the...

Since her death in 1963, Sylvia Plath has become an endless source of fascination for a wide audience, ranging from readers of The Bell Jar, her semiautobiographical novel, to her groundbreaking poetry as exemplified by Ariel. Beyond her writing,...

A comprehensive study of the life of F. Scott Fitzgerald, related in two-year chapters by twenty-three leading writers on the Jazz Age author “There never was a good biography of a novelist,” F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote in The Crack-Up. “There couldn’t be...

Larry Brown (1951–2004) was unique among writers who started their careers in the late twentieth century. Unlike most of them—his friends Clyde Edgerton, Jill McCorkle, Rick Bass, and Kaye Gibbons, among others—he was neither a product of a writing...

Mary MacLeod (Màiri nighean Alasdair Ruaidh) was a rarity: a female bard in seventeenth-century Scotland. While her lyrics were honoured, she was also marginalized, denigrated as a witch, and exiled, both for being a writer and for what she wrote...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781034548881Author Mrs Humphry WardFormat PaperbackPage Count 162Imprint BlurbPublisher BlurbWeight(grams) 152g

This biography covers both the literary and political career of John Morley, later Lord Morley of Blackburn (1838-1923). As a writer, Morley made his reputation as the radical editor of The Fortnightly Review from 1867 to 1882. This was an influential...

"Rewriting" in the context of critical work on Caribbean literature has tended to be used to discuss revisionism from a variety of postcolonial perspectives, such as "rewriting history" or "rewriting canonical texts." By...

Nearly a century after his wrenching death, the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa (1888-1935) remains one of our most enigmatic writers. Believing he could do "more in dreams than Napoleon," yet haunted by the specter of hereditary madness,...

What is the taste of life as we really live it, rather than the way we imagine it in others? What does it feel like to become aware of the hand of cards we've been dealt, to play them as well as we can, to understand what has happened to us, and to try...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780141180533Author Quentin CrispFormat PaperbackPage Count 224Imprint Penguin ClassicsPublisher Penguin Putnam IncWeight(grams) 187gDimensions(mm) 196mm *...

In Jerusalem, as World War II was coming to an end, an extraordinary circle of friends began to meet at the bar of the King David Hotel. This group of aspiring artists, writers, and intellectuals—among them Wolfgang Hildesheimer, Jabra Ibrahim Jabra,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781400034543Author Gabriel Garcia MarquezFormat PaperbackPage Count 544Imprint VintagePublisher VintageWeight(grams) 399g

KQED Radio's Michael Krasny is one of the country's leading interviewers of literary luminaries, a maestro for educated listeners who prefer their discourse high and civil. He is a writer's interviewer. But it didn't start out that way. In Off Mike,...

This historical and biographical text explores the numerous up-and-down stages of Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway's friendship, one of the most fascinating and instructive literary associations of the twentieth century. Over a span of twenty-four...

The gifted and rebellious writer Claude McKay grew up in the British West Indies and then moved to the United States. As he traveled from Jamaica to South Carolina to Harlem, then to Europe and Africa, he embraced various causes and political ideologies...

During Shakespeare's life, the History Plays were more than a collection of history lessons. They were cause to compare and contrast with the current monarchy and perhaps draw out some allegories and allusions. They were political and therefore dangerous...

The name Joseph Addison was once synonymous with the finest of English prose. Eminent writers from Voltaire to Lord Macaulay to John Steinbeck considered him a consummate master to be studied and emulated. According to Benjamin Franklin, Addison’s...

Mary Edwards Bryan became one of America's best-known writers of popular fiction in the nineteenth century. She reached literary success despite a tough frontier life, the upheavals of secession and war, disruptive affairs with authors and politicians,...

This revelatory documentary biography of Anton Chekhov (1860-1904), one of the world's best playwrights, consists of over 100 memories of Chekhov's close friends, family and colleague writers and artists, such as Ivan Bunin, Konstantin Stanislavsky and...

Richard Halliburton was the quintessential world traveler of the early 20th century. In 1930, his celebrity equaled that of Charles Lindbergh and Amelia Earhart. Halliburton called himself a ""horizon chaser,"" forwarding the idea...

Chicago was home to the Pulitzer Prize winning Studs Terkel, who moved there in 1922 and made it his home until his death in 2008 at the age of 96. A tribute to the 'Second City' that is part history, part memoir and 100% Studs Terkel, the book is...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Drama for The Young Man from Atlanta and Academy Awards for the screen adaptation of To Kill a Mockingbird and the original screenplay Tender Mercies, as well as the recipient of an Academy Award nomination for the...

The first full-length biography of the celebrated novelist, critic, editor (of The Masses), poet, and playwright who was both central to radical culture in the early 20th century and profoundly skeptical of it. Intelligent, sympathetic...a superb life of...

Novelist, short-story writer, winner of the National Book Award and the Pulitzer Prize, Katherine Anne Porter is one of America's most respected and enduring literary figures. Upon her death in 1980 at the age of ninety, she left behind thousands of...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780812973273Author James L. W. WestFormat PaperbackPage Count 240Imprint Random House Trade PaperbacksPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams)...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780679772743Author Sharon Sloan FifferFormat PaperbackPage Count 272Imprint Vintage BooksPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 289g

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780743497121Author Jewell Parker RhodesFormat PaperbackPage Count 176Imprint Atria BooksPublisher Atria BooksWeight(grams) 314g

The acclaimed author of "Jewel" "observes and beautifully renders those small moments that can change a life" ("The New York Times Book Review"), in this sweeping true saga of the ties that bind. Photos. Father's Day tie in...

Charles Baudelaire is often regarded as the founder of modernist poetry. Written with clarity and verve, Baudelaire's World provides English-language readers with the biographical, historical, and cultural contexts that will lead to a fuller...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780820327631Author Craig AmasonFormat PaperbackPage Count 136Imprint University of Georgia PressPublisher University of Georgia Press

Nick Flynn met his father when he was working as a caseworker in a homeless shelter in Boston. As a teenager he'd received letters from this stranger father, a self-proclaimed poet and con man doing time in federal prison for bank robbery. Another...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780143112228Author Paul AusterFormat PaperbackPage Count 192Imprint The Penguin PressPublisher Penguin Putnam IncWeight(grams) 170g

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780812980301Author Maya AngelouFormat PaperbackPage Count 214Imprint Random House IncPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 191g

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781250872227Author Livia Manera SambuyFormat PaperbackPage Count 352Imprint St Martin's PressPublisher St Martin's PressWeight(grams) 454g

The New York Times bestselling memoir of pilgrimage and self-discovery by Sue Monk Kidd, the author of The Secret Life of Bees and The Book of Longings, and her daughter, Ann Kidd Taylor Sue Monk Kidd has touched the hearts of millions of readers with...

In Doing More with One Life, best-selling author Piasecki welcomes the reader into his home, revealing the heart-breaking early death of his father, and his deep respect and love for the women in his life, especially his mother, who devoted her life to...