Literary Biography

Everyone who knew him told stories about Lawrence, and Lawrence told stories about everyone he knew. He also told stories about himself, again and again: a pioneer of autofiction, no writer before Lawrence had made so permeable the border between life and literature. In Burning Man: The Trials of D. H. Lawrence, acclaimed biographer Frances Wilson tells a new story about the author, focusing on his decade of superhuman writing and travel between 1915, when The Rainbow was suppressed following an obscenity trial, and 1925, when he was diagnosed with tuberculosis.

In 2024, one hundred years after his death at the age of forty, customers all over the world will reach for the works of Franz Kafka. Many of them will want to learn more about the enigmatic man behind the classic books. Who, exactly, was Franz Kafka? Karolina Watroba, the first Germanist ever elected as a fellow of Oxford's All Souls College, will tell Kafka's story beyond the boundaries of language, time, and space, traveling from the Prague of Kafka's birth through the work of contemporary writers in East Asia, whose award-winning novels are, in part, homages to the great man himself.

The instant bestselling story of Lee Mackenzie, who was a capable and confident young woman, studying broadcast journalism and honing her skills of observation and objectivity. She was also a little unworldly, the product of a small, rural Western Canadian community where doors were never locked and life was simple and direct. On a backpacking trip in the UK, she met the man who would become her husband. A man who everyone agreed was one of the most intelligent, charming people they had ever met.

Gary Paulsen’s slapstick tales capture the “wonderful madness” of growing up in a small town in northern Minnesota, when high spirits, showing off for girls, and general idiocy led Gary and his pals to attempt some amazing stunts! Wacky, daring, just plain nuts - extreme sports lead to extreme fun in new stories from Gary’s boyhood.

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.

Since its publication on September 30, 1868, Little Women has been one of America's favorite stories. While we now think of it as a girls' book, it was initially read by both boys and girls, men and women of all ages. Professor Anne Boyd Rioux, who read it in her 20s, tells us how Louisa May Alcott came to write the book and drew inspiration for her story from her own life. Rioux sees the novel's beating heart in its honest look at adolescence and its inspiring vision of young women's resilience and hope.

With the groundbreaking Caldecott winner The Snowy Day, the first mainstream picture book to feature an African American child, Ezra Jack Keats became part of children's literature history. Keats's best-loved books are the ones that portray the neighborhood where he grew up. He was an inspiration to many artists of color, who, for the first time, saw themselves reflected in his books.

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.

Before the Soviet invasion of 1980, Enjeela Ahmadi remembers her home - Kabul, Afghanistan - as peaceful, prosperous, and filled with people from all walks of life. But after her mother, unsettled by growing political unrest, leaves for medical treatment in India, the civil war intensifies, changing young Enjeela’s life forever. Amid the rumble of invading Soviet tanks, Enjeela and her family are thrust into chaos and fear when it becomes clear that her mother will not be coming home.

Apple is a slur in Native communities across the country. It's for someone supposedly red on the outside, white on the inside. Eric Gansworth tells his story in Apple (Skin to the Core). The story of his family, of Onondaga among Tuscaroras, of Native folks everywhere. From the horrible legacy of the government boarding schools, to a boy watching his siblings leave and return and leave again, to a young man fighting to be an artist who balances multiple worlds. Eric shatters that slur and reclaims it in verse and prose and imagery that truly lives up to the word heartbreaking.

A River Runs Through It and Other Stories turned Norman Maclean into a late-in-life literary phenomenon and then a household name after the success of the Hollywood film based on the title story. Yet fewer know of Maclean's lifelong struggles to reconcile very different parts of himself: the revered teacher and writer in the intellectual hub of Chicago and the Montana man compelled by the wildness and traumas of his home state and family, including the tragic Mann Gulch fire and the murder of his brother.

A haunting meditation on love, loss, companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark, Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is one of the most important and influential short story collections in contemporary literature. In his entry in the esteemed Bookmarked series, acclaimed author Brian Evenson offers his personal and literary take on this classic Carver collection.

Here is Hemingway: the adventurer, the reporter, the man! More intimately than all his fiction, Hemingway the reporter reveals Hemingway the man, driving an ambulance through a bullet-barrage or leading guerrilla forces into Paris, always in the thick of the action. Here are his most sensational dispatches, the behind-the-scenes stories that became For Whom the Bell Tolls, A Farewell to Arms, and The Sun Also Rises.

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.

Jack Kerouac’s archive is vast. Throughout his life he was constantly writing, and he meticulously saved and catalogued his material. The result is that beyond the work published in his lifetime there has been a rich stream of posthumous writing that is far from tapped. This collection of previously unpublished writing culled from the Kerouac archive, and as a companion to Paul Maher Jr.'s Becoming Kerouac, spans Kerouac’s adult life, from a journal written at age seventeen to autobiographical reflections a few years before his death.

Dylan Thomas wrote "A Child's Christmas in Wales" in 1955, in which he recreated the atmosphere of Christmas Past as he remembered it. Each one of us will have similar memories of the glitter and the emotions of this time of innocence, plenty, fun, anticipation, and excitement.

Walt Whitman was a printer, journalist, editor, and schoolteacher. But today, he's recognized as one of America's founding poets, a man who changed American literature forever. Who Was Walt Whitman? follows his remarkable journey from a young New York printer to one of America's most beloved literary figures.

John Charles Gilkey is an obsessed, unrepentant book thief who has stolen hundreds of thousands of dollars' worth of rare books from book fairs, stores, and libraries around the country. Ken Sanders is the self-appointed "bibliodick" (book dealer with a penchant for detective work) driven to catch him. Journalist Allison Hoover Bartlett befriended both eccentric characters and found herself caught in the middle of efforts to recover hidden treasure.

В центре рассказа «Кремулятора» находится Петр Нестеренко — дворянин, офицер Первой мировой войны и участник Белого движения, ставший агентом НКВД в Париже и первым директором Московского крематория. В июне 1941 года Нестеренко был арестован, а его история стала отголоском воспоминаний из его личных дневников и архивных документов.

In 1914, Harry Colebourn, a veterinarian on his way to tend horses in World War I, followed his heart and rescued a baby bear. He named her Winnie, after his hometown of Winnipeg, and he took the bear to war. Harry Colebourn's real-life great-granddaughter tells the true story of a remarkable friendship and an even more remarkable journey - from the fields of Canada to a convoy across the ocean to an army base in England...and finally to the London Zoo, where Winnie made another new friend: a real boy named Christopher Robin.