Literary Biography

Best known for his best-selling novel, Babe, which was made into a major motion picture, Dick King-Smith draws on his over 14 years of experience on Woodlands Farm to create this thoughtful and humorous memoir. His time on the farm inspired countless stories as well as the numerous lovable characters found in them. In Chewing the Cud, he candidly talks about what moved him to become a children’s author.

From the New York Times best-selling author of Little Leaders: Bold Women in Black History comes the highly anticipated follow-up, a beautifully illustrated collectible detailing the lives of women creators around the world.

Richard Blanco's childhood and adolescence were experienced between two imaginary worlds: his parents' nostalgic world of 1950s Cuba and his imagined America, the country he saw on reruns of The Brady Bunch and Leave it to Beaver—an "exotic" life he yearned for as much as he yearned to see "la patria." A prismatic and lyrical narrative rich with the colors, sounds, smells, and textures of Miami, Richard Blanco's personal narrative is a resonant account of how he discovered his authentic self and ultimately, a deeper understanding of what it means to be American.

Sylvia Plath: A Literary Life examines the way Plath made herself into a writer. Close analysis of Plath's reading and apprenticeship writing both in fiction and poetry sheds considerable light on Plath's work in the late 1960s. In this updated edition, there will be discussion of the aftermath of Plath's death including the publication of her Collected Poems edited by Ted Hughes which won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry in 1982. Biographies of Plath will be examined along with the publication of Hughes's Birthday Letters.

Frances Hodgson Burnett's favorite theme in her fiction was the reversal of fortune, and she herself knew extremes of poverty and wealth. Born in Manchester in 1849, she emigrated with her family to Tennessee because of the financial problems caused by the cotton famine. From a young age she published her stories to help the family make ends meet. Only after she married did she publish Little Lord Fauntleroy that shot her into literary stardom.

An autobiography usually requires a justification. The great autobiographies—those by Benvenuto Cellini, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Benjamin Franklin, and Henry Brooks Adams—were justified by their authors living in interesting times, harboring radically new ideas, or participating in great events. Joseph Epstein qualifies on none of these counts. His life has been quiet, lucky in numerous ways, and far from dramatic. But it has also been emblematic of the great changes in our country since World War II. Never Say You’ve Had a Lucky Life is an intimate look at one life steeped in radical change.

The story of Willa Cather is defined by a lifetime of determination, struggle, and gradual emergence. Some show their full powers early, yet Cather was the opposite—she took her time and transformed herself by stages. The writer who leapt to the forefront of American letters with O Pioneers! (1913), The Song of the Lark (1915), and My Ántonia (1918) was already well into middle age. Through years of provincial journalism in Nebraska, brief spells of teaching, and editorial work on magazines, she persevered in pursuit of the ultimate goal—literary immortality.

"Lei sa la differenza fra un piccolo e un grande giornale? Il grande giornale è quello che pubblica anche le notizie che dispiacciono. S’intende, la notizia che ci dispiace la si commenta come più ci piace." — Eugenio Torelli Viollier Dalla Napoli borbonica alla Milano post-unitaria, dalla fondazione del "Corriere" alla battaglia per difenderne l’indipendenza, la straordinaria avventura dell’uomo che dopo l’Italia provò a fare gli italiani."Nacqui a Napoli, il 26 marzo 1842.

À Berlin assiégé, la femme la plus puissante du IIIe Reich se terre avec ses six enfants dans le dernier refuge des dignitaires de l'Allemagne nazie. L'ambitieuse s'est hissée jusqu'aux plus hautes marches du pouvoir sans jamais se retourner sur ceux qu'elle a sacrifiés. Aux dernières heures du funeste régime, Magda s'enfonce dans l'abîme, avec ses secrets. Au même moment, parmi les colonnes des survivants de l'enfer des camps, marche une enfant frêle et silencieuse. Ava est la dépositaire d'une tragique mémoire : dans un rouleau, elle tient cachées les lettres d'un père.

Look for heroes, far and near. Give your gifts to the world. Have compassion for all creatures. These are just a few of the lessons that Magic Tree House fans will learn on their magical journey through this book. With quotes from the series and classic art by Sal Murdocca, Mary Pope Osborne, beloved author of the number one best-selling Magic Tree House series, shares the wisdom she's gained from her own childhood and 30 years of whisking Jack and Annie away in the magic tree house.

When Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843, he likely had no idea that the story and its main character, Ebenezer Scrooge, would remain so popular nearly two centuries later. Today, audiences still find themselves entertained by the story of a grumpy, selfish man who becomes a holiday hero after he learns generosity through the help of three spirits in Victorian-era England.

Richard and Victoria Tinyes feared the worst when their thirteen year old daughter Kelly Ann vanished from their quiet suburban community of Valley Stream, New York, on March 3, 1999. But the nightmare to come was worse than they could ever imagine. Only five doors away, in the home of John and Elizabeth Golub, police found Kelly Ann's body stuffed in a plastic garbage bag. She'd been brutally beaten, stabbed, strangled, and mutilated. After weeks of intense investigation, police arrested the Golubs twenty-one-year-old son, Robert - a reclusive young man obsessed with bodybuilding and given to fits of rage. The sensational trial and subsequent conviction of Robert Golub shocked the nation and tore the once peaceful community apart. Neighbors took sides. So did the media. And no one who lived on Horton Road would ever be the same. Note on audio book: Except for the beginning and end of the book, there is no longer any music.

Not heard of Paul Sykes? Mentioned in the book Legends by Charles Bronson, an A to Z guide of the men Bronson had regarded to be the toughest in Britain. Referring to "Sykesy", Bronson describes him as "a Legend, Born and Bred" and writing: "I first met Sykes in Liverpool in the early 70s and at that time he was probably the fittest Con in Britain. A notorious hard man from Yorkshire, a fighting man in every sense. A lot of people never liked him, perhaps they even feared him but I respected the man for what he stood for."

Douglas Gibson, one of Canada's premier editors and storytellers, brings new stories about Robertson Davies, Jack Hodgins, W.O. Mitchell, Alistair MacLeod, and Alice Munro, and adds lively portraits of Al Purdy, Marshall McLuhan, Margaret Laurence, Guy Vanderhaeghe, Margaret Atwood, Wayne Johnston, Linwood Barclay, Michael Ondaatje, and many, many others. Whether fly fishing in Haida Gwaii or sailing off Labrador, Douglas Gibson is a first-rate ambassador for Canada and the power of great stories.

In 1941, newlyweds William and Rosalie Schiff are forcibly separated and sent on their individual odysseys through a surreal maze of hate. Terror in the Krakow ghetto, sadistic SS death games, cruel human medical experiments, eyewitness accounts of brutal murders of men, women, children, and even infants, and the menace of rape in occupied Poland make William & Rosalie an unusually explicit view of the chaos that World War II unleashed on the Jewish people.

Presented here is Volume III of our Feminist Literary Classics series, featuring three of the most important feminist novels ever written: Orlando: A Biography by Virginia Woolf, O Pioneers! by Willa Cather and So Big by Edna Ferber. The first book in this collection is Orlando: A Biography, a groundbreaking English novel by Virginia Woolf that explores English history, gender roles and sexual politics in a way few books have before or since.

Moody and restless, teenage Louisa longed for freedom. Faced with the expectations of her loving but hapless family, the Alcotts, and of 19th-century New England society, she struggled to find her place. On long meandering runs through the woods behind Orchard House, she thought about a future where she could write and think and dream. Undaunted by periods of abject poverty and enriched by friendships with some of the greatest minds of her time and place, she was determined to have this future, no matter the cost.

Ein neuer Blick auf Leben und Werk des letzten Universalgenies. Das Goethe-Hörbuch für unsere Zeit: Rüdiger Safranski führt uns Goethe in neuem Licht vor und macht uns zu Zeitgenossen dieses Genies und Menschen, dessen Lebensspanne das verspielte Rokoko, die klassisch-romantische Zeit und die Nüchternheit des Eisenbahnzeitalters umgreift. Mit seinem Namen hat man später eine ganze Epoche bezeichnet: die Goethezeit.

For almost two centuries after his death, Shakespeare had no biography. The makings of one were not available. No chronology had been devised by which to coordinate the events in his life with the writing of his works. Nor was there an archive of primary materials on which to base a life. And the only work by Shakespeare written in the first person, the Sonnets, had yet to be critically edited and incorporated into the canon. Without a biography, how could Shakespeare have been valued and understood?

In June of 1961, A. E. Hotchner visited an old friend in the psychiatric ward of St. Mary's Hospital. It would be the last time they spoke: a few weeks later, Ernest Hemingway was released home, where he took his own life. Their final conversation was also the final installment in a story whose telling Hemingway had spread over nearly a decade.