Showing titles in Authors

This explosively entertaining memoir abounds in gossip, satire, historical apercus, and trenchant observations. Vidal’s compelling narrative weaves back and forth in time, providing a whole view of the author’s celebrated life, from his birth in 1925 to today, and features a cast of memorable characters - including the Kennedy family, Marlon Brando, Anais Nin, and Eleanor Roosevelt.

Although it is said that he owed his poetic vision to his Sephardic Jewish roots, Siegfried Sassoon was, in many ways, a conventionally Edwardian squire. A gifted poet, who refused to become part of any literary movement, his poetry shattered the ideals of wartime heroism, and his friendships ranged from Thomas Hardy and Robert Graves to the Sitwells, Rupert Brooke and T.E. Lawrence. In this acclaimed biography, John Stuart Roberts skillfully chronicles Sassoon's life and work, including his homosexuality, his marriage and his quest for a personal religious faith.

Nora Ephron was one of the most popular, accomplished, and beloved writers in American journalism and film. Nora Ephron: A Biography is the first biography of the Manhattan-born girl who forged a path of her own, earning accolades and adoration from critics and fans alike. Author Kristin Marguerite Doidge explores the tremendous successes and disappointing failures Ephron sustained in her career and examines the private life she tried to keep in balance with her insatiable ambition.

In the tradition of Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes and Alice Taylor’s To School Through the Fields, Tom Phelan’s We Were Rich and We Didn't Know It is a heartfelt and masterfully written memoir of growing up in Ireland in the 1940s. We Were Rich and We Didn't Know It recounts Tom’s upbringing in an isolated, rural community from the day he was delivered by the local midwife. With tears and laughter, it speaks to the strength of the human spirit in the face of life's adversities.

Baby Boy Fisher was raised in institutions from the moment of his birth in prison to a single mother. He ultimately came to live with a foster family, where he endured near-constant verbal and physical abuse. In his midteens he escaped and enlisted in the navy, where he became a man of the world, raised by the family he created for himself. Finding Fish shows how, out of this unlikely mix of deprivation and hope, an artist was born.

In 2010,Clive James was diagnosed with terminal leukemia. Deciding that "if you don't know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do," James moved his library to his house in Cambridge, where he would "live, read, and perhaps even write". James is the award-winning author of dozens of works of literary criticism, poetry, and history, and this volume contains his reflections on what may well be his last reading list.

Penguin presents the unabridged, downloadable, audiobook edition of Charlotte Brontë: A Life written and read by Claire Harman. Raised motherless on remote Yorkshire moors, watching five beloved siblings sicken and die, haunted by unrequited love: Charlotte Brontë's life has all the drama and tragedy of the great Gothic novels it inspired. Charlotte was a literary visionary, a feminist trailblazer and the driving force behind the whole Brontë family.

On 14 February 1989, Valentine's Day, Salman Rushdie was telephoned by a BBC journalist and told that he had been "sentenced to death" by the Ayatollah Khomeini. For the first time he heard the word fatwa. His crime? To have written a novel called The Satanic Verses, which was accused of being "against Islam, the Prophet and the Quran". So begins the extraordinary story of how a writer was forced underground, moving from house to house, with the constant presence of an armed police protection team.

During the 1930s at Oxford, C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and Charles Williams - remarkable friends, writers, and scholars - met regularly to discuss philosophy and literature and to read aloud from their own works in progress. Calling themselves the Inklings, their circle grew. It was in this company that such classics as The Lord of the Rings, The Screwtape Letters, and The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe first found an audience.

The long-awaited portrait of a literary master from one of our generation's greatest biographers. Anthony Powell: the literary genius who gave us A Dance to the Music of Time, an undisputed classic of English literature. Spanning 12 spectacular volumes and written over 25 years, his comic masterpiece teems with idiosyncratic characters, capturing 20th-century Britain through war and peace. Drawing on Powell's letters and journals, and the memories of those who knew him, Hilary Spurling explores his life.

More than any other canonical English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer lived and worked at the center of political life - yet his poems are anything but conventional. Edgy, complicated, and often dark, they reflect a conflicted world, and their astonishing diversity and innovative language earned Chaucer renown as the father of English literature. Marion Turner, however, reveals him as a great European writer and thinker.

In London during the interwar years, five women's lives intertwined around one address. Mecklenburgh Square, on the radical fringes of Bloomsbury, was home to activists, experimenters and revolutionaries; among them were the modernist poet H. D., detective novelist Dorothy L. Sayers, classicist Jane Harrison, economic historian Eileen Power, and author and publisher Virginia Woolf.

Mostly drawn from the earliest part of her astonishing five-decade career, the wide-ranging pieces in this collection include Didion writing about a Gamblers Anonymous meeting, a visit to San Simeon and a reunion of WWII veterans in Las Vegas and about topics ranging from Nancy Reagan to Robert Mapplethorpe to Martha Stewart.

In Mother's Boy, Booker Prize winner Howard Jacobson reveals how he became a writer. It is an exploration of belonging and not-belonging, of being an insider and outsider, both English and Jewish. Full of Jacobson's trademark humour and infused with bittersweet memories of his parents, this is the story of a writer's beginnings - as well as the twists and turns that life takes - and of learning to understand who you are before you can become the writer you were meant to be.

This audiobook includes unabridged recordings of all George Orwell's greatest non-fiction: three full-length books, a collection of his most well-renowned essays and the complete collection of his poetry.

Hilaire Belloc is one of the most important writers of the 20th century. At turns reviled or revered, depending on the audience, he was a razor sharp social commenter and a master of both poetry and prose who continues to captivate readers. In Old Thunder, Joseph Pearce examines Belloc's enduring impact on British intellectual life.

A masterful, much-anticipated biography of one of the most celebrated figures in American literature: Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike - a candid, intimate, and richly detailed look at his life and work. In this magisterial biography, Adam Begley offers an illuminating portrait of John Updike, the acclaimed novelist, poet, short-story writer, and critic who saw himself as a literary spy in small-town and suburban America.

From one of America’s greatest and most iconic writers: an honest and courageous portrait of age and motherhood. Several days before Christmas 2003, Joan Didion’s only daughter, Quintana, fell seriously ill. In 2010, Didion marked the sixth anniversary of her daughter’s death. Blue Nights is a shatteringly honest examination of Joan Didion’s life as a mother, a woman and a writer.

Eminent Victorians, Lytton Strachey's wonderfully witty and Wildean quartet of biographies, stands out as one of the most radical and groundbreaking works of its genre. With relentless precision, Strachey explores the lives of four exemplars of the Victorian age: Cardinal Manning, Florence Nightingale, Thomas Arnold and General Gordon, irreverently bringing to light the flaws, strengths, ambitions and hypocrisies of these treasured legends.

Young Romantics tells the story of the interlinked lives of the young English Romantic poets from an entirely fresh perspective - celebrating their extreme youth and outsize yearning for friendship as well as their individuality and political radicalism. The book focuses on the network of writers and readers who gathered around Percy Bysshe Shelley and the campaigning journalist Leigh Hunt.