Letters Literature

Chicago, 1944. Liz Stephens has little interest in attending a USO club dance with her friends Betty and Julia. She doesn't need a flirtation with a lonely serviceman when she's set to marry her childhood sweetheart. Yet something happens the moment Liz glimpses Morgan McClain. They share only a brief exchange - cut short by the soldier's evident interest in Betty - but Liz can't forget him. Thus, when Betty asks her to ghostwrite a letter to Morgan, stationed overseas, Liz reluctantly agrees.

A secret from the past. A scandal that leads to murder. Who knew antiques could be so deadly? The priceless Satterthwaite Desk has found its way to the island of Jersey and is on display at the local museum. This valuable antique is rich with history, exquisitely crafted, and hides a secret that could destroy the lives of powerful politicians and prominent citizens alike.

La Correspondance de Marcel Proust avec sa mère constitue à la fois une véritable biographie de l'écrivain, mais aussi et surtout une porte ouverte sur tous les éléments d'une vie sublimée par l'œuvre à la "Recherche du temps perdu", où on retrouve le narrateur sous un aspect parfois drôle, et souvent provocateur. La sélection de lettres que proposent les Éditions Thélème dresse le portrait vif d'un auteur pour qui "la littérature, c'est la vie".

Each working day from January 29 to November 1, 1951, John Steinbeck warmed up to the work of writing East of Eden with a letter to the late Pascal Covici, his friend and editor at The Viking Press. It was his way, he said, of "getting my mental arm in shape to pitch a good game." Steinbeck's...

Robert E. Lee is remembered by history as a tragic figure, stoic and brave but distant and enigmatic. Using dozens of previously unpublished letters as departure points, Pryor produces a stunning personal account of Lee's military ability, his beliefs, and his time, shedding new light on every aspect of the complex and contradictory general's life story.

For as long as Bridget Northcott can remember, she has loved her brother's closest friend, Colin Foster. She loved him long before he grew up, became Captain Foster, and long before he left her behind for a life at sea. Although she knows her feelings will never be returned, Bridget cannot help but turn away every suitor in the hopes that one day Colin will come back to Larkhall and see her for what she has grown up to be—refined, elegant, and the precise opposite of the silly girl he once knew.

Set in 17th-century Puritan Boston, The Scarlet Letter tackles the subjects of social stigma, shame, and judgment. Hester Prynne is at the forefront of the scandal, subject to public humiliation for bearing a child out of wedlock. Forced to wear a scarlet "A" on her clothing for the rest of her life, she cannot run from her sin. Hester refuses to name her daughter's father, a local reverend whom she is in love with, a timid man who keeps his secret from the community.

Molly Alcott didn't expect to open her mailbox one summer morning and find an old letter stuffed between bills and a supermarket flyer. Penned in familiar handwriting, dated over 15 years ago, the letter was written to Molly after her first date with the man she'll never forget. Week after week, new letters appear. Each marks an event in the history of their epic love affair. Each heals a wound. Each holds the confession of the man who still owns Molly's heart. Molly wishes she could unread them all. Because the man who wrote these letters is not the one sending them.

Here, for the first time, is the private and most intimate correspondence of one of America’s most influential and incisive journalists: Hunter S. Thompson. In letters to a Who’s Who of luminaries from Norman Mailer to Charles Kuralt, Tom Wolfe to Lyndon Johnson, William Styron to Joan Baez—not to mention his mother, the NRA, and a chain of newspaper editors—Thompson vividly catches the tenor of the times in 1960s America and channels it all through his own razor-sharp perspective.

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.

From the king of “Gonzo” journalism and bestselling author who brought you Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas comes another astonishing volume of letters by Hunter S. Thompson.

From the writer of the classic Letters to a Young Poet, reflections on grief and loss, collected and published here in one volume for the first time. “A great poet’s reflections on our greatest mystery.”—Billy Collins “A treasure . . . The solace Rilke offers is uncommon, uplifting and...

Gwen Elsmere fell in love with Sebastian Kirkwood when she was 16, but a dead frog stole her chance to land the guy of her daydreams. Ten years later, when Gwen makes a desperate 911 call, Sebastian reenters her life as the first paramedic on the scene. Unfortunately, she’s smeared in blood, and he’s engaged to another woman. The awkward rescue is far from the passionate reunion she’d secretly hoped for. Still, Gwen’s brief transformation from postal worker to neighborhood hero has her reevaluating her cautious nature.

Sade Morgan’s world is built on soil, sacrifice, and the unwavering love she has for her son, Eli. As the owner of a beloved pumpkin farm in Statesville, North Carolina, she’s long since traded in dreams of romance for harvest seasons and hayrides. But when Lorenzo Tate, her childhood best friend and first love, returns to town after a failed marriage, his quiet strength stirs everything she thought she had buried.

Here is a stirring fictional account of the amazing real-life story of John Riley, an Irishman who led his men to desert the American military during the Mexican-American War, as seen through the eyes of two memorable narrators. It is June 1845, and Paddy Quinn is a camp boy for the American army which is bound for Mexico. A young man with journalistic aspirations, Paddy writes letters for illiterate soldiers and learns that, like him, many are Irish, including the enigma John Riley.

Mary has been nursing a secret. Forty years ago, she made a choice that would change her world for ever, and alter the path of someone she holds dear. Beth is searching for answers. She has never known the truth about her parentage, but finding out could be the lifeline her sick child so desperately needs. When Beth finds a faded newspaper cutting amongst her mother's things, she realises the key to her son's future lies in her own past. She must go back to where it all began to unlock...the Secret.

After Jane Austen's earliest known writings, she began a more serious work, Lady Susan, in 1793 or 1794. It is a short, epistolary novel that portrays a woman bent on the exercise of her own powerful mind and personality to the point of social self-destruction.

Grace is a worker in the new Industrial Revolution town, Lowell, MA. Despite only being 14 years old, she hopes to send extra money to help her poor family. To do so, she must work 12 hours a day in a factory helping machines wind thread. Learn about her life as a textile mill worker in the 1830s and the working conditions that she and her fellow workers endured in order to stay employed.

A bewitchingly brilliant collection of never-before-published letters from the renowned author of “The Lottery” and The Haunting of Hill House i must stop writing letters and get to writing a novel. Shirley Jackson is one of the most important American authors of the last hundred years and...

Salt Letters to a Younger Me is a tender correspondence between memory and tide—a series of lyrical letters written by a marine biologist to his younger self. Each letter drifts between science and solitude, salt and sorrow, tracing how the sea mirrors the human heart: its erosion, its return, its endless capacity to begin again. Through quiet observations of coral bleaching, migrating whales, and the hush of coastal dawns, the narrator learns that every loss leaves behind a mineral trace—something that glimmers even after grief recedes.