Writers Books

Revered across the globe as an author of compelling novels, journalism, and essays that came to define the twentieth century, George Orwell was anunmatchedpolitical visionary, shining a light on the insidious nature of propaganda. Yet this chronicler of...

In this one-of-a-kind book, novelist and academic Nicholas Royle brings together two remarkably different creative figures: Enid Blyton and David Bowie. His exploration of their lives and work delves deeply into questions about the value of art, music...

In February 1910, the young woman who would become Virginia Woolf played the most famous practical joke in British military history. Blackening her face and masquerading as an African prince, with friends she conned her way onto the Dreadnought, the...

Czesaw Miosz (19112004) was a giant of twentieth-century literature, not least because he lived through and wrote about many of the most extreme events of that extreme century, from the world wars and the Holocaust to the Cold War. Over a seven-decade...

This is a memoiristic book and a dual portrait, built around intense friendships with two leading public intellectuals who achieved celebrity status-Susan Sontag on a global scale, George Steiner principally in Europe, though also for a time in the US...

Born in Greece and abandoned as a child, Lafcadio Hearn lived the life of an exile. He travelled the world and became a famous writer but always felt like an outsider in Dublin, London, Cincinnati, New Orleans, and French-speaking Martinique. To him,...

Over 60 boxes full of notebooks, research, letters, scripts, jokes, speeches, to-do lists, hard drives and even poems...Welcome to the incredible archive of Douglas Adams.After his death in 2001, Douglas Adams's papers were loaned to his old...

Although humankind today can peer far deeper into the universe than ever before, we still find ourselves surrounded by the unknown and perhaps the unknowable. All great science fiction has used the human imagination to explore that realm beyond the...

As far as she could see, her life was ordained to be lonely, and she must subdue her nature to her life, and, if possible, bring the two into harmony. When she could employ herself in fiction, all was comparatively well. The characters were her...

Celebrated by writers including Jonathan Franzen, who said that"[t]his crazy, gorgeous family novel is one of the great literary achievements of the twentieth century," The Man Who Loved Children is a 1940 novel by Australian writer Christina Stead...

A poet who crafted thegreatest character in literary history with his engaging anti-hero of Satan, John Milton connected personal experience with the breadth of cosmic epic. HisParadise Lost is a touchstone of English literature.In the latest entry in...

What makes Indiana University one of the best institutions for higher education in the world? After spending a few months pondering on this questions, I realized that it is a multitude of things. From having some of the most immersive and intentional...

Letters made public for the first time: never-before-seen love letters between Farley Mowat and his wife, Claire. Claire participated fully in the project, giving permission to publish her love letters and photos from her personal archive. Includes...

Dovlatovand Surroundings is a literary ode by one of the mostconsequential late 20th-century Russian writers, Alexander Genis, toanother: Sergei Dovlatov. Though the book's focus is ostensibly the manhimself, the text unfolds as a comprehensive look at...

An old pond; a frog jumps in: the sound of water Basho This comprehensive introduction to Japan's best-loved haiku poets is the perfect book for anyone wanting to learn about haiku. Compiled and with commentary by William Scott Wilson, the book...

Ford Madox Ford (18731939) lived among several of the most important artists and writers of his time. Raised by Pre-Raphaelites and friends with Henry James, H. G. Wells, and Joseph Conrad, Ford was a leading figure of the avant-garde in pre-WWI London,...

A critical biography of one of the most celebrated prose stylists in early modern English.This book provides an overview of the life and work of the scandalous Renaissance writer Thomas Nashe (1567c.1600), whose writings led to the closure of theaters...

In this new book, David Ellis traces Byron's life from rented lodgings in Aberdeen to the crumbling splendours of Newstead Abbey and then on to his grand tour of the East. Describing his exile from England after a disastrous marriage, and subsequent...

Mysterious, esoteric, and baffling, John Ashbery is notorious for the seeming difficulty of his work. But Ashbery is also entertaining, humorous, even charming, and ever responsive to his shifting social and political contexts. This biography charts...

From the global successes of My Beautiful Laundrette and The Buddha of Suburbia, through to late masterpieces such as The Nothing, Hanif Kureishi is one of Britain's most popular and versatile writers.Drawing on Kureishi's unexplored personal archive,...

The great Romantic poet Lord Byron starved himself compulsively for most of his life. His behaviour mystified his friends and other witnesses, yet he never imagined he was ill. Instead, he rationalised his behaviour as a fight for spiritual freedom and...

In the last years of his life, the writer Amos Oz talked regularly with Shira Hadad, who worked closely with him as the editor of his final novel, Judas. These candid, uninhibited dialogues show a side of Oz that few ever saw. What Makes an Apple?...

A sublime essayist and author of the masterful political novels 1984 and Animal Farm, George Orwell is at least as relevant in the age of Trump and Brexit as he was in his own short lifetime (1903-1950). Both of his classic novels have been hot sellers...

Beth Kephart is a writing teacher and the award-winning author of more than thirty books; her many fans and students will embrace this intimate and beautiful memoir in essays The author's books on how to write memoir as well as previous memoirs have...

Two seminal figures of the Beat movement, Allen Ginsberg and William S. Burroughs, discuss literary influences and personal history in a never-before-published three-day conversation following the release of the David Cronenberg film of Burroughs'...

"A kaleidoscopic, open-hearted, shamelessly polymathic storyteller, the kind who brings a blast of oxygen into the room."-Jonathan LethemAn aging writer, disillusioned with the state of literary culture, attempts to disappear in the most cosmically...

Tolkien For Beginners will introduce the reader to the multilayered depth and breadth of Tolkien's tales of Middle-earth, what critics, following Tolkien's lead, refer to collectively as his legendarium.J.R.R. Tolkien sweeps us away to a distant time and...

C.S. Lewis For Beginners is a thorough examination of C. S. Lewis, the greatest Christian apologist of the twentieth century, throughout his career as an author and as a professor at Oxford University.A Christian apologist defends Christianity as a...

Frankenstein was first released in 1818 anonymously.The credit for Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's authorship first occurred in 1823 when a French edition was published. A year earlier, Mary's revolutionary husband, the influential poet, dramatist,...

Good girls do what they're told.Good girls please.Good girls make everyone else happy.Good girls do not cause trouble.Good girls keep their legs open and their mouths shut.Good girls smile and hide their true feelings.Good girls are silent.Good girls...

Fifty Forgotten Books is a very special sort of book about books, by a great bookman and for book-people of all ages and levels of experience. Not quite literary criticism, not quite an autobiography, it is at once a guided tour through the dusty...

Looking to commission an introduction from a fan of Norah Lange's previous works. Translated by award winning translator Charlotte Whittle and we may commission translators note. First translation in English of Norah Lange's memoir. An influential...

A unique literary biography, this book brings to life Waugh's Oxford, exploring the lasting impression it made on one of the most accomplished literary craftsmen of the twentieth century.Oxford held a special place in Evelyn Waugh's imagination. So...

'Invention...does not consist in creating out of void, but out of chaos' - Mary Shelley In the 200 years since its first publication, the story of Frankenstein's creation during stormy days and nights at Byron's Villa Diodati on Lake Geneva has...

In 1912 the young Frdric-Louis Sauser arrived in France, carrying an experimental poem and a new identity. Blaise Cendrars was born. Over the next half-century, Cendrars wrote innovative poems, novels, essays, film scripts, and autobiographical prose...

Louis-Ferdinand Cline was one of the most innovative novelists of the twentieth century, and his influence both in his native France and beyond remains huge. This book sheds light on Cline's groundbreaking novels, which drew extensively on his complex...

Anton Chekhov's stories and plays endure as outstanding modern literary works, and his life was no less dramatic, rising from poor beginnings to become a writer, physician and philanthropist.In this new biography Michael C. Finke analyses Chekhov's major...

Aldous Huxley was one of the twentieth century's most prescient thinkers. This new biography is a rich and lucid account that charts the different phases of Huxley's career: from the early satirist who depicted the glamorous despair of the postwar...

One should either wear a work or art, or be a work of art', Wilde once declared. In The Invention of Oscar Wilde, Nicholas Frankel explores Wilde's self-creation as a 'work of art' and a carefully constructed cultural...

Zen monk Santoka Taneda (18821940) is one of Japan's most beloved modern poets, famous for his "free-verse" haiku, the dominant style today. This book tells the fascinating story of his life, liberally sprinkled with more than...

Over more than four decades J.R.R. Tolkien's son and literary executor, Christopher Tolkien, published some twenty-four volumes of his father's work, much more than his father had succeeded in publishing during his own lifetime. Standing on the mountain...

A world of dew And within every dewdrop A world of struggleThe iconic three-line haiku form is increasingly popular today as people embrace its simplicity and grace-and its connections to the Japanese ethos of mindfulness and minimalism. Say more with...

To build up a future, you have to know the past.' Otto Frank, 1967 In late 1940s Amsterdam, when Otto Frank unwrapped his daughter Anne's diary with trembling hands and began to read the first pages, he discovered a side to his daughter...

At various stages of his life, the celebrated American writer William Faulkner (1897-1962) presented himself as a literary dandy, a shabby bohemian, a wounded war veteran, a humble farmer, a courtly lover, and a genteel but aloof Southerner. In private...

Samuel Langhorne Clemens, born on 30 November 1835 in Monroe County, Missouri, was never one to let the facts get in the way of a good story. A natural-born storyteller, Mark Twain freely adapted the incidents of his life and the stories he heard as a...

Ernest Miller Hemingway (21 July 1899 - 2 July 1961) enjoyed a life of literary triumph set against a backdrop of some of the grandest landscapes in the world. Verna Kale's new, narrative portrait of Hemingway challenges some of the long-held assumptions...

In this biography of one of the twentieth century's most enigmatic personalities and idiosyncratic thinkers, David A. Shafer takes readers on a chronological voyage through Artaud's life. Yet, as Artaud navigated through the...

Shortlisted for the 2023 Robert Kroetsch City of Edmonton Book Prize On his fifteenth birthday, in the summer of 1880, future science-fiction writer M.P. Shiel sailed with his father and the local bishop from their home in the Caribbean out to the nearby...