Literary Biography

Tourists have sought out the landmarks, streets, and alleys of Charles Dickens's London ever since the death of the world-renowned author. Late Victorians and Edwardians were obsessed with tracking down the locations—dubbed "Dickensland"—that famously featured in his novels. But his fans were faced with a city that was undergoing rapid redevelopment, where literary shrines were far from sacred. Over the following century, sites connected with Dickens were demolished, relocated, and reimagined.

The literary establishment tends to regard Bob Dylan as an intriguing, if baffling, outsider. That changed overnight when Dylan was awarded the 2016 Nobel Prize in Literature, challenging us to think of him as an integral part of our national and international literary heritage. No One to Meet places Dylan the artist within a long tradition of literary production and offers an innovative way of understanding his unique, and often controversial, methods of composition.

Il primo atlante mondiale della grande criminalità. Le mafie sono cambiate immensamente negli ultimi decenni. Fanno meno morti, forse, ma sono molto più potenti, ramificate, ricche. Si sono internazionalizzate, spesso hanno lasciato gli affari «piccoli» (prostituzione, gioco d’azzardo ecc.) a organizzazioni minori per concentrarsi su più redditizi business (dal traffico d’armi a quello di organi ed esseri umani all’emigrazione al traffico delle scorie radioattive ecc.).

Over his decade and a half with the New York Police Department, Edwin Raymond consistently exposed the dark underbelly of modern policing, becoming the highest-ranking whistleblower in the history of the force and one of the country’s leading voices against police injustice. Offering a rare, often shocking view of American policing, An Inconvenient Cop pulls back the curtain on the many flaws woven into the NYPD’s training, data, and practices, which have since been repackaged and repurposed by police departments across the country.

In a heartwarming first-person account, dePaola retells his experiences at home and in school when he was a boy. 26 Fairmount Avenue is full of humor, drama, suspense and just the day to day ups and downs of a little boy's life.

This book reveals, for the first time, the story behind the writing of ‘Desiderata’. Beloved by millions, the poem was first published in 1927, but its true origins, along with the life of its author, have largely been lost to literary history. This account by actor and author Tim Dalgleish includes not only the story of ‘Desiderata’ but two additional, previously unpublished, chapters from a forthcoming biography of Max Ehrmann. This new material helps bring Max Ehrmann, the author of 'Desiderata', out of the shadows.

Horace was one of the greatest poets during the reign of Augustus and is seen as mark of cultural sophistication since this time. This Very Short Introduction examines how Horace's poetry has exerted enormous influence but argues that it is best understood within the traditions of ancient literature.

What happens when a Canadian radio host gets together with a Nigerian actress, a bisexual Jew, a break-up coach, an American thought leader, an Indian men’s rights activist, a religious minister, an African American brand strategist, a Brazilian law professor, an African single mother of 21 orphans.... It is an anthology written by 21 brave and unstoppable women. It guarantees you laughter and tears, but more than that...it guarantees your freedom.

A classic portrait of immigrant life in the early decades of the twentieth century, A Walker in the City is a tour of tenements, subways, and synagogues—but also a universal story of the desires and fears we experience as we try to leave our small, familiar neighborhoods for something new.

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?

Che cosa si prova a vivere con la morte come assidua compagna? Per piú di un anno Ilan Fernández, uno dei maggiori narcotrafficanti a livello internazionale, oggi imprenditore di successo, ha raccontato a Giulio Laurenti la sua vita rocambolesca e pericolosa: anzi, le sue due vite. Quelle confessioni sono diventate un romanzo, dalla voce inconfondibile e unica, col timbro della verità definitiva. E la cocaina ci appare sotto una luce che non avevamo mai considerato, frutto come è di uno smercio intriso di morte.

Once you have read about Chris Crutcher's life as a dateless, broken-toothed, scabbed-over, God-fearing dweeb, and once you have contemplated his ascension to the buckskin-upholstered throne of the King of the Mild Frontier, you will close this book, close your eyes and hold it to your chest, and say, "I, too, can be an author." Hell, anyone can.

Charles M. Blow’s mother was a fiercely driven woman with five sons, brass knuckles in her glove box, and a job plucking poultry at a factory near their segregated Louisiana town, where slavery's legacy felt close. When her philandering husband finally pushed her over the edge, she fired a pistol at his fleeing back, missing every shot, thanks to “love that blurred her vision and bent the barrel.” Charles was the baby of the family, fiercely attached to his “do-right” mother. Until one day that divided his life into Before and After—the day an older cousin took advantage of the young boy.

Ted Geisel loved to doodle from the time he was a kid. He had an offbeat, fun-loving personality. He often threw dinner parties where guests wore outrageous hats! And he donned quirky hats when thinking up ideas for books-like his classic The Cat in the Hat. This biography brings an amazingly gifted author/illustrator to life.

Frank Moorhouse was legendary in Australian literary and cultural life, the author of a huge and diverse body of work - essays, short stories, journalism, scripts, the iconic Edith Trilogy - an unapologetic activist, intellectual, libertarian and champion of freedom of speech and sexual self determination. Though he lived his life publicly, his private stories have not been shared, the many paths he forged left unexamined, until now. This landmark study is the fascinating story of how one of Australia's most original writers and pioneer of the discontinuous narrative came to be.

There are artists out there able to lift the spirits of the downtrodden, who point towards a better world with all they are. Sometimes, they do this in DIY punk style: raw, unplugged, and deeply human. Patrick Schneeweis, better known as Pat the Bunny, is an artist who chose the road less travelled, instinctively deeming it more honest and less controlling. Freer. He grew up in Vermont, where he found people liked his voice and the controversial topics he tackled, and by 16 years old, he had released his first album ‘Fire Hazard’.

In Cross of Snow, the result of more than 12 years of research, including access to never-before-examined letters, diaries, journals, and notes, Nicholas Basbanes reveals the life, the times, the work - the soul - of the man who shaped the literature of a new nation with his countless poems, sonnets, stories, essays, and translations, and whose renown was so wide-reaching that his deep friendships included Charles Dickens, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Julia Ward Howe, and Oscar Wilde.

The superb classic memoir from a dazzlingly eccentric and endlessly fascinating author - a woman very much ahead of her time - including her time spent on the glorious island of Skiathos. Nancy Spain was one of the most celebrated - and notorious - writers and broadcasters of the '40s, '50s and '60s. Hilarious, controversial and brilliant, she lived openly as a lesbian (sharing a household with her two lovers and their various children) and was frequently litigated against for her newspaper columns - Evelyn Waugh successfully sued her for libel...twice.

Capturing everyday lives and exceptional dreams, Australian novels have held up a mirror to the nation, reflecting the good and the bad. Touching on colonial invasion, the bush myth, world wars, mass migration, the recognition of Indigenous sovereignty and the emergence of a modern global, multicultural nation, Carl examines how these pivotal events and persuasive ideas have shaped some of Australia's most influential novels and how these books, in turn, made us.

Le petit Rital de la rue Sainte-Anne a grandi. Septembre 1939 : il vient d'avoir seize ans. Une année mémorable. Les six qui suivent sont pas mal non plus. Pour lui et pour beaucoup d'autres. Cette fois encore, c'est le jeune gars de ce temps-là qui parle, avec ses exacts sentiments de ce temps-là, ses exacts sentiments tels que sa mémoire les lui fait revivre. Il n'est pas forcément triste là où il devrait l'être, ni joyeux là où d'autres le seraient. La guerre, ça n'a pas le même goût pour tout le monde.