Letters Literature

When an old archeologist friend gives Mary Russell a curled scrap of papyrus, Mary is startled to see that it is covered with Greek symbols. The writing may be a letter from an unknown-female-apostle. Soon the old friend has been murdered, the Holmes' cottage has been ransacked, and Mary is faced with a particularly dangerous and painful investigation. From the solitude of the English countryside to the dark teeming streets of London, A Letter of Mary carries the two quick-witted sleuths through a maze of clues and cul-de-sacs.

The Hell’s Angels Letters: Hunter S. Thompson, Margaret Harrell and the Making of an American Classic is an important revelation in the legacy of Thompson, with letters that survived precarious shipping and travel over decades, cloaked away from the public. “If Hell’s Angels hadn’t happened I never would have been able to write Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas or anything else . . . I felt like I got through a door just as it was closing,” Hunter told Paris Review.

Lenora Fletcher is settling into her new role as Duchess of Blackmoore, after having put the ghost of her husband’s first wife to rest. But when her ne-er-do-well brother-in-law is accused of murder, only Lenora can help him. Using her ability to communicate with the dead, Lenora must contact the deceased sailor and determine who his real killer is in order to clear Edwin’s name. But will her involvement cause the killer to end another life? And will that life be her own?

Filled with empathy and wisdom, instruction and inspiration, this book encourages us to reevaluate the codes and conventions that have shaped our assumptions about how fiction should be written, and also challenges us to apply its lessons to both what we read and how we read. The start of a more inclusive conversation about storytelling, Letters to a Writer of Color will be a touchstone for aspiring and working writers and for curious readers everywhere.

Long, lonely years have passed for the crumbling Château Clement, nestled well beyond the rolling lavender fields and popular tourist attractions of Provence. Once a bustling and dignified ancestral estate, now all that remains is the château's gruff, elderly owner and the softly whispered secrets of generations buried and forgotten. But time has a way of exposing history's dark stains, and when American photographer Cady Drake finds herself drawn to the château and its antique carousel, she longs to explore the relic's shadowy origins.

Blood Letters tells the astonishing tale of Lin Zhao, a poet and journalist arrested by the authorities in 1960 and executed eight years later, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. The only Chinese citizen known to have openly and steadfastly opposed communism under Mao, she rooted her dissent in her Christian faith—and expressed it in long, prophetic writings done in her own blood, and at times on her clothes and on cloth torn from her bedsheets.

In the 1980s, Nina Stibbe wrote letters home to her sister in Leicester describing her trials and triumphs as a nanny to a London family. There’s a cat nobody likes, a visiting dog called Ted Hughes (Ted for short) and suppertime visits from a local playwright. Not to mention the two boys, their favourite football teams, and rude words, a very broad-minded mother and assorted nice chairs.

Elle fut avant tout une star européenne de beauté et de vertu. Sa célébrité rehaussa l'importance de son salon au point que le nom de Récamier est devenu un symbole dans tous les salons. Chateaubriand fut son seul véritable amour.

When a tornado rips through town, 12-year-old Ivy Aberdeen's house is destroyed, and her family of five is displaced. Ivy feels invisible and ignored in the aftermath of the storm - and what's worse, her notebook filled with secret drawings of girls holding hands has gone missing. Mysteriously, Ivy's drawings begin to reappear in her locker with notes from someone telling her to open up about her identity.

¿Te atreverías a pedirle consejo a tu escritor favorito? En 1903, el joven cadete Franz Kappus se atrevió a hacerlo. Envió una carta al poeta alemán más prestigioso de la época: Rainer Maria Rilke. En lugar de una pequeña y escueta respuesta, el cadete Kappus compartió una extensa y hermosa correspondencia con el poeta, donde este le dio consejos sobre la escritura y, sobre todo, de la vida. De cómo vivirla y tratar de ser feliz.

These letters between the pioneering environmentalist and her beloved friend reveal "a vibrant, caring woman behind the scientist" (Los Angeles Times). This very special collection of letters from Rachel Carson to her Maine summer neighbor Dorothy Freeman offers an intimate, spellbinding look at Carson's private life and thoughts.

Hazel has everything she wants. Business is booming at her boutique private investigation firm. She's dating the man of her dreams. Even her perpetually skeptical mother seems impressed. Then the NYPD finds a beloved neighborhood priest dead along with a mysterious red letter. Hazel investigates the murder as a favor to an old friend and discovers that the priest wasn’t the only recent murder victim to receive a red letter...and one victim has ties to a psychopath from a past life that Hazel thought she had buried.

1828, the London countryside. For years, Marietta Stone has harbored a secret infatuation for the handsome Frederick Finch and has poured out her deepest feelings in a series of passionate love letters that she keeps in a locked drawer. But when Marietta’s private letters are accidentally delivered to Frederick’s house, she must retrieve them immediately before they fall into the wrong hands. If the letters were read by anyone else, the resulting scandal could jeopardize her reputation.

For many Christians reading the Old Testament, trying to understand Israel's prophets is like listening to just one side of a phone conversation—you only get half the idea of it. You hear the answer, but how do you know what question the prophet is answering? In The Lost Letters to the Twelve Prophets, John Goldingay uncovers the questions behind the prophets' answers that make their meaning and relevance intelligible to us.

This rich compilation of Joyce Carol Oates’s letters across four decades displays her warmth and generosity, her droll and sometimes wicked sense of humor, her phenomenal energy, and most of all, her mastery of the lost art of letter writing. In this generous selection of Joyce Carol Oates’s letters to her biographer and friend Greg Johnson, listeners will discover a never-before-seen dimension of her phenomenal talent.

In the hopes of receiving some mail of her own, Paula writes a letter to her grandparents.

Ann Workman is smart but naïve, a misfit who’s traveled from rural Kentucky to graduate school in the transformative years of the late 1960s. While Ann fervently seeks higher learning, she wants what all girls yearn for—a boyfriend. But not any boy. She wants the “Real Thing,” to be in love with someone who loves her equally. Then Jimmy appears, as if by magic. Although he comes from a very different place, upper-middle class suburban Chicago, he is a misfit too, a rebel who rejects his upbringing and questions everything.

Die tief reichende Freundschaft, in welcher die zwei bekanntesten Dichterfürsten aus deutschsprachigen Landen miteinander verbunden waren, begann laut einigen Quellen alles andere als günstig, da beim ersten Treffen der beiden Goethe Schiller weder erkannte noch diesem irgendwelche Beachtung schenkte. Das änderte sich mit der Zeit, nachdem sich Goethe näher über Schillers Werk informierte und beide in regen Gedankenaustausch traten, besonders in vorliegender Briefwechsel-Reihe.

Every evening for eight years, at his request, President Obama was given 10 handpicked letters written by ordinary American citizens - the unfiltered voice of a nation - from his Office of Presidential Correspondence. He was the first president to interact daily with constituent mail and to archive it in its entirety. In To Obama, Jeanne Marie Laskas interviews President Obama, the letter writers themselves, and the White House staff who sifted through the powerful, moving, and incredibly intimate narrative of America during the Obama years:

Gwen Elsmere fell in love with Sebastian Kirkwood when she was 16, but a dead frog stole her chance to land the guy of her daydreams. Ten years later, when Gwen makes a desperate 911 call, Sebastian reenters her life as the first paramedic on the scene. Unfortunately, she’s smeared in blood, and he’s engaged to another woman. The awkward rescue is far from the passionate reunion she’d secretly hoped for. Still, Gwen’s brief transformation from postal worker to neighborhood hero has her reevaluating her cautious nature.