Literary Biography

Raised in South Carolina and New York, Woodson always felt halfway home in each place. In vivid poems, she shares what it was like to grow up as an African American in the 1960s and 1970s, living with the remnants of Jim Crow and her growing awareness of the Civil Rights movement. Touching and powerful, each poem is both accessible and emotionally charged, each line a glimpse into a child's soul as she searches for her place in the world.

David loved Cindy and was loved in return. Or so he thought. The troubled young man clung to his new love and dreamed of their future together. So begins the chain of events that was to evolve into a horror of terrifying proportions. Jack Olsen, best-selling author of Son, now reveals the details of a true-life romance gone hideously awry.

In this autobiography, woven from personal pieces composed over the course of a celebrated writing life of more than 50 years, you'll meet William Buckley the boy, growing up in a family of 10 children; Buckley the daring young political enfant terrible, whose debut book, God and Man at Yale, was a shocking New York Times best seller; Buckley the editor of National Review, widely hailed as the founder of the modern conservative movement; and Buckley the husband and father.

This is a gritty story of a badminton star, Pullela Gopi Chand, who brought laurels to India by winning the coveted All England Championships in 2001. The player for whom losing was not an option, who went against all rules and conventions. This book , the authorised biography of Pullela Gopichand, is about his rise from humble beginnings to become a star on Indian Badminton's horizon, as well as his endeavours to produce more sports icons like him through his one-of-a-kind badminton Academy.

Sylvia Plath is an object of enduring cultural fascination―the troubled patron saint of confessional poetry, a writer whose genius is buried under the weight of her status as the quintessential literary sad girl. Emily Van Duyne―a superfan and scholar―radically reimagines the last years of Plath’s life, confronts her suicide and the construction of her legacy.

Award-winning author Colm Tóibín turns his incisive gaze to three of the world's greatest writers, Oscar Wilde, W.B. Yeats, and James Joyce, and their earliest influences: their fathers. In Mad, Bad, Dangerous to Know, Colm Tóibín illuminates not only the complex relationships between three of the greatest writers in the English language and their fathers, but also illustrates the surprising ways they surface in their work.

From renowned translators Richard Pevear and Lindsay Volokhonsky comes a new translation - certain to become the definitive version - of the first great prison memoir, a fictionalized account of Fyodor Dostoevsky's life-changing penal servitude in Siberia.

In this first scholarly biography of Lorraine Hansberry (1930-1965), the author of A Raisin in the Sun, theater professor Soyica Diggs Colbert considers the playwright's life at the intersection of art and politics, with the theater operating as a "rehearsal room for [her] political and intellectual work". Colbert argues that the success of Raisin overshadows Hansberry's other contributions, including the writer's innovative journalism and lesser-known plays touching on controversial issues such as slavery, interracial communities, and Black freedom movements.

An experienced Iditarod racer, Gary Paulsen brings his love of the sport to readers on a personal level in this intimate essay about the life of a litter of pups born to pull sleds across the snowy frontier - and the marvel he experiences as he watches them grow and learn.

Long before she was a rare book dealer, Rebecca Romney was a devoted reader of Jane Austen. She loved that Austen’s books took the lives of women seriously, explored relationships with wit and confidence, and always, allowed for the possibility of a happy ending. She read and reread them, often wishing Austen wrote just one more. But Austen wasn’t a lone genius. She wrote at a time of great experimentation for women writers—and clues about those women, and the exceptional books they wrote, are sprinkled like breadcrumbs throughout Austen’s work.

Ghalib's poetic trajectory begins from Urdu, then moves to composing almost entirely in Persian and finally swings back to Urdu. It is nearly as complex as his poetry. However, his poetic output in Persian is far more than what he wrote in Urdu. More important is that he gave precedence to Persian over Urdu. Ghalib's voice presents us with a double bind, a linguistic paradox. Exploring his life, works and philosophy, this authoritative critical biography of Ghalib opens a window to many shades of India and the subcontinent's cultural and literary tradition.

For twenty-five years, the trusted family doctor in a small Wyoming town had been raping and molesting the women and children who most relied on him. Mostly Mormons, the naive victims sometimes realized on their wedding nights the truth about what had happened in Dr. Story's office.

From the big woods of Wisconsin to the Indian country of the Great Plains, new adventures and landscapes filled the rich childhood of Laura Ingalls Wilder. On a frontier steeped in both danger and great possibility, Laura would grow up to witness firsthand the rapid transformation of the West as pioneers and covered wagons gave way to farms, towns, and railroads. A pioneer, teacher, farmer's wife, and storyteller, Laura Ingalls Wilder experienced one of the most exciting times in American history.

From the best-selling and award-winning author of novels Bone and Steer Toward Rock, Fae Myenne Ng’s Orphan Bachelors is an extraordinary memoir of her beloved San Francisco’s Chinatown and of a family building a life in a country bent on their exclusion.

Cette biographie de la faim, de ce désir jamais rassasié, de cette quête qui n'a jamais de fin, Amélie Nothomb la décline sous toutes ses formes, du ravissement à l'horreur, avec brio, douleur, amour, humour et lucidité, pour dire ce terrible paradoxe d'exister. Il s'en dégage une puissance de vision, une perception fatale où l'absolu et sa dérision se côtoient. C'est une mise à nu éblouissante où l'auteur est le sujet de son œuvre et qui prouve ô combien qu'Amélie Nothomb est un de nos grands auteurs contemporains.

This narrative charts Annie Ernaux's teenage awakening and then the parallel progression of her desire to be desirable and her ambition to fulfill herself in her chosen profession - with the inevitable conflict between the two. And then she is 30 years old, a teacher married to an executive, a mother of two infant sons.

In the summer of 1925, Ernest Hemingway traveled to Pamplona for the infamous running of the bulls. He then channeled that trip’s drunken brawls, sexual rivalry, midnight betrayals, and midday hangovers into a novel that redefined modern literature. Lesley Blume tells the full story behind Hemingway’s legendary rise for the first time, revealing how he created his own image as the bull-fighting aficionado, hard-drinking literary genius, and expatriate bon vivant. In all its youth, lust, and rivalry, the Lost Generation is illuminated here as never before.

In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: Understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep the child. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist and ended up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly died. In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days.

In the opening of Holding Silvan: A Brief Life, Monica Wesolowska gives birth to her first child, a healthy-seeming boy who is taken from her arms for "observation" when he won't stop crying. Within days, Monica and her husband have been given the grimmest of prognoses for Silvan, and they must make a choice about his life. The story that follows is not a story of typical maternal heroism. There is no medical miracle here. Instead, we find the strangest of hopes.

When X - an iconoclastic artist, writer and polarizing shape-shifter - dies suddenly, her widow, wild with grief, hurls herself into writing a biography of the woman she deified. Though X was recognised as a crucial creative force of her era, she kept a tight grip on her life story. Not even CM, her wife, knew where X had been born, and in her quest to find out, she opens a Pandora's box of secrets, betrayals and destruction.