Fiction Memoir

King George V predicted that his son, Edward VIII, would destroy himself within a year of succeeding to the throne. In December 1936 he was proved right, and the world’s press revealed the king was abandoning his throne to marry Wallis Simpson. A life spent in the shadow of his charismatic elder brother left the new king, George VI, magnificently unprepared for the demands of ruling the kingdom and empire. Drawing on personal accounts from the royal archives, Deborah Cadbury uncovers the very private conflict.

Grammy Award-nominated, platinum-selling musician Halsey is heralded as one of the most compelling voices of her generation. In I Would Leave Me If I Could., she reveals never-before-heard poetry of longing, love, and the nuances of bipolar disorder.

In Why We Suck, Dr. Denis Leary uses his common sense, and his biting and hilarious take on the world, to attack the politically correct, the hypocritical, the obese, the thin - basically everyone who takes themselves too seriously. He does so with the extra oomph of a doctorate bestowed upon him by his alma mater Emerson College. "Sure it's just a celebrity type of thing - they only gave it to me because I'm famous." Leary explains.

Paris, near the turn of 1933. Three young friends meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and their friend Raymond Aron, who opens their eyes to a radical new way of thinking. Pointing to his drink, he says, 'You can make philosophy out of this cocktail!'

In this spellbinding blend of memoir and insight, best-selling author Chuck Palahniuk shares stories and generous advice on what makes writing powerful and what makes for powerful writing. With advice grounded in years of careful study and a keenly observed life, Palahniuk combines practical advice and concrete examples from beloved classics, his own books, and a "kitchen-table MFA" culled from an evolving circle of beloved authors and artists, with anecdotes, postcards from the road, and much more.

Even those who take no interest in the field of dragon naturalism have heard of Lady Trent's expedition to the inhospitable deserts of Akhia. Her discoveries there are the stuff of romantic legend, catapulting her from scholarly obscurity to worldwide fame. The details of her personal life during that time are hardly less private, having provided fodder for gossips in several countries.

Kennedy steered the nation away from the brink of nuclear war, initiated the first nuclear test ban treaty, created the Peace Corps, and launched American on its mission to the moon and beyond. JFK inspired a nation, particularly the massive generation of baby boomers, injecting hope and revitalizing faith in the American project. 2013 will mark the fiftieth anniversary of Kennedy's untimely death, a milestone to be marked by an avalanche of new books on his life and importance.

After Andrea Dworkin, the famous feminist philosopher and activist, passed away, her chief critic, Susie Bright, who many perceived as Dworkin's opposite, published a stirring obituary and series of essays in which she described the ways that Dworkin was a catalyst for the sex-positive movement in contemporary feminism.

When Freddie Mercury died in 1991, aged just 45, the world was rocked by the vibrant and flamboyant star's tragic secret that he had been battling AIDS. That Mercury had even been diagnosed came as a shock to his millions of fans, with his announcement coming less than 24 hours before his death. In Somebody to Love, biographers Mark Langthorne and Matt Richards skilfully weave Freddie Mercury's incredible pursuit of musical greatness with Queen, his upbringing and his endless search for love with the story of a terrible disease.

Albert Camus (1913-1960) is unsurpassed among writers for a body of work that animates the wonder and absurdity of existence. Personal Writings brings together, for the first time, thematically-linked essays from across Camus's writing career that reflect the scope and depth of his interior life. Grappling with an indifferent mother and an impoverished childhood in Algeria, an ever-present sense of exile, and an ongoing search for equilibrium, Camus's personal essays shed new light on the emotional and experiential foundations of his philosophical thought....

Salman Rushdie is celebrated as “a master of perpetual storytelling” (The New Yorker), illuminating truths about our society and culture through his gorgeous, often searing prose. Now, in his latest collection of nonfiction, he brings together insightful and inspiring essays, criticism, and speeches that focus on his relationship with the written word and solidify his place as one of the most original thinkers of our time.

In 2020, Claire Luchette in O, The Oprah Magazine described the beloved Italian novelist Elena Ferrante as “an oracle among authors”. Here, in these four crisp essays, Ferrante offers a rare look at the origins of her literary powers.

Edith Hahn was an outspoken young woman in Vienna when the Gestapo forced her into a ghetto and then into a slave labor camp. When she returned home months later, she knew she would become a hunted woman, so she went underground.

This is the memoir of the Supervillain known to the world as Iceblade. It chronicles his achievements and his failures, his loves and his losses. Learn about the theft of the Mona Lisa, the subjugation of Lady Victory, and the slaughter of the Holy Order of the Word. Hear for the first time about the death of Bytegeist. All from the point of view of the man himself.

Are you a sensible, universally competent individual? Are you tired of the crushing monotony of leaping gracefully from one lily pad of success to the next? Are you sick of doing everything right? In this brutally honest and humorous debut, musician and artist George Watsky chronicles the small triumphs over humiliation that make life bearable and how he has come to accept defeat as necessary to personal progress. The essays in How to Ruin Everything range from the absurd (how he became an international ivory smuggler) to the comical, to the revelatory.

André Gide, one of the great intellectuals of the 20th century and a devoted pianist, invites readers to reevaluate Frédéric Chopin as a composer "betrayed...deeply, intimately, totally violated" by a music community that had fundamentally misinterpreted his work. As a profound admirer of Chopin’s "promenade of discoveries", Gide intersperses musical notation throughout the text to illuminate his arguments, but most moving is Gide’s own poetic expression for the music he so loved.

For many years, Orhan Pamuk kept a record of his daily thoughts and observations, entering them in small notebooks and illustrating them with his own paintings. This book combines those notebooks into one volume. He writes about his travels around the world, his family, his writing process, and his complex relationship with his home country of Turkey. He charts the seeds of his novels and the things that inspired his characters and the plots of his stories. Intertwined in his writings are the vibrant paintings of the landscapes that surround and inspire him.

Still considered one of the best books ever written about bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon reflects Hemingway's belief that bullfighting was more than mere sport. Here he describes and explains the technical aspects of this dangerous ritual, and "the emotional and spiritual intensity and pure classic beauty that can be produced by a man, an animal, and a piece of scarlet serge draped on a stick."

Lucius Annaeus Seneca (c. 4 BC-AD 65), also known as Seneca the Younger, was a Roman Stoic philosopher, statesman, and dramatist from the Silver Age of Latin literature. This edition of Seneca's Epistles includes all 124 of the letters in a single volume, with explanatory notes, an appendix, and an index of the names occurring in the text. The letters were written by Seneca during his retirement and sent to his friend Lucilius Junior, a procurator of Sicily.

A citizen in the Galacterian Alignment of Space Peoples and Planets, Thyron is an extraterrestrial Titan with a highly evolved soul, but born with a duality disorder. In this parable of the soul's journey towards perfection and rebirth, Thyron must merge his light and dark to evolve into a being spiritually strong enough to lead others towards the light. Archangel Michael, the Universal Sovereign, orders him into the Shadow Chamber to force him to look deep into the darkness within himself.