Art Biography

Based on the chart-topping Business Wars podcast, stories and lessons from history’s greatest business rivalries, interspersed with audio clips from the podcast. Using Chinese military genius Sun Tzu’s strategies as a guide, Brown examines why some companies triumph while others crumble...

What does it mean to create, not in "a room of one's own," but in a domestic space? Do children and genius rule each other out? In The Baby on the Fire Escape, Julie Phillips traverses the shifting terrain where motherhood and creativity converge. With fierce empathy and vivid prose, Phillips evokes the intimate struggles of brilliant artists and writers, including Doris Lessing, Ursula K. Le Guin, Audre Lorde, and Alice Neel. A meditation on maternal identity and artistic greatness, Phillips illuminates some of the most pressing conflicts in contemporary women's lives.

A classic of modern travel writing, An Area of Darkness is Nobel Laureate V. S. Naipaul’s profound reckoning with his ancestral homeland and an extraordinarily perceptive chronicle of his first encounter with India. Traveling from the bureaucratic morass of Bombay to the ethereal beauty of Kashmir, from a sacred ice cave in the Himalayas to an abandoned temple near Madras, Naipaul encounters a dizzying cross-section of humanity: browbeaten government workers and imperious servants, a suavely self-serving holy man, and a deluded American religious seeker.

Charles Dickens and Nelly Ternan met in 1857; she was 18, a hard-working actress performing in his production of The Frozen Deep, and he was 45, the most lionized writer in England. Out of their meeting came a love affair that lasted 13 years and destroyed Dickens's marriage while effacing Nelly Ternan from the public record.

Commissioned in 1750, the Palazzo Venier was planned as a testimony to the power and wealth of a great Venetian family, but the fortunes of the Venier family waned, and the project was left abandoned and unfinished. Yet in the early 20th century, it attracted three fascinating women: Luisa Casati, Doris Castlerosse and Peggy Guggenheim.

Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. But while Jamison has never shied away from challenging material—scouring her own psyche and digging into our most unanswerable questions across four books—Splinters enters a new realm. In her first memoir, Jamison turns her unrivaled powers of perception on some of the most intimate relationships of her life: her consuming love for her young daughter, a ruptured marriage once swollen with hope, and the shaping legacy of her own parents’ complicated bond.

For fans and watchers of the Beckham Netflix documentary who want the rest of the story—an explosive tell-all account of the real lives of David and Victoria Beckham. As one of the most famous and influential couples in the world, David and Victoria Beckham have attained iconic status. The...

Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov’s life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including Lolita, Pnin, Despair, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Luhzin Defense.

Gonzo journalist Hunter S. Thompson penned groundbreaking works as outrageous—and provocative—as the author himself. His memoir Kingdom of Fear provides compelling insight into his life and literary output.

Charles Dickens: A New Biography is an epic, fully immersive portrait of the most celebrated novelist of the Victorian age, stripping away the polished legend to reveal the driven, brilliant, deeply conflicted man behind the greatest stories ever told.

The definitive biography of country legend Merle Haggard by the New York Times bestselling biographer of Clint Eastwood, Cary Grant, The Eagles, and more. Merle Haggard was one of the most important country music musicians who ever lived. His astonishing musical career stretched across the...

Charlotte Gordon's new work is a fresh look at the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, who together comprise one of the most illustrious and inspiring mother-daughter pairs in history.

After performing with Ronnie Hawkins as the Hawks (1957-1964), The Band (Rick Danko, Garth Hudson, Richard Manuel, Robbie Robertson, and Levon Helm) eventually rose to fame in the sixties as backing musicians for Bob Dylan. This collaboration with Dylan presented the group with a chance to expand musically and strike out on their own. The Band's fusion of rock, country, soul, and blues music-all tinged with a southern flavor and musical adventurousness—created a unique soundscape.

""A brilliant book...illuminates a forgotten world."" —The Times, Best of the Year ""Heretic tells a moreish intellectual story and shakes up your understanding of Western history. At the same time, somewhat improbably, it supplies at least one good joke per paragraph; you have to keep turning...

The art world is a much dirtier, nastier business than you might expect. Tony Tetro, one of the most renowned art forgers in history, will make you question every masterpiece you’ve ever seen in a museum, gallery, or private collection. Tetro’s “Rembrandts,” “Caravaggios,” “Miros,” and hundreds of other works now hang on walls around the globe.

As an A&R man at Epic Records, Tom Werman helped introduce the world to REO Speedwagon, Boston, Ted Nugent, and Cheap Trick; he also discovered KISS, Rush, and Lynyrd Skynyrd, but his record label passed on all of them. Then, as an independent producer, he oversaw landmark albums by Mötley Crüe, Twisted Sister, Lita Ford, Jeff Beck, Poison, and many more. All in all, his record-making resume includes twenty-three gold- or platinum-selling albums and cumulative sales of more than fifty-two million copies.

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize “The book is a form of meditation, written with headlong urgency, about seeing. . . . There is an ambition about [Dillard's] book that I like. . . . It is the ambition to feel.” — Eudora Welty, New York Times Book Review Pilgrim at Tinker Creek is the story of...

Cosmopolitan.com editor Amy Odell takes listeners behind the stage of New York's hottest fashion shows to meet the world's most influential models, designers, celebrities, editors, and photographers. But first, she has to push her way through the crowds outside, where we see the lengths people go to be noticed by the lurking paparazzi, and weave her way through the packed venue, from the very back row to the front.

In That Time of Year, Garrison Keillor looks back on his life and recounts how a Brethren boy with writerly ambitions grew up in a small town on the Mississippi in the 1950s and, seeing three good friends die young, turned to comedy and radio. Through a series of unreasonable lucky breaks, he founded A Prairie Home Companion and put himself in line for a good life, including mistakes, regrets, and a few medical adventures.

Avec une plume aussi bien trempée que son caractère, Nathalie Petrowski a toujours été un esprit libre. Dans La critique n'a jamais tué personne, elle nous livre, sans faux-fuyants et sans règlements de compte, ses mémoires de journaliste. Ceux d'une femme qui, du p'tit Simard à Marie-Mai, de René Lévesque à Manon Massé, du sexisme ordinaire à #metoo et du Jerrold au iPad, jette un regard passionné et critique sur la culture, le journalisme et ses enjeux.