Literary Biography

Orlando: A Biography is a groundbreaking English novel by Virginia Woolf that explores English history, gender roles, and sexual politics in a way few books have before or since. Inspired by the life of Woolf's friend and lover Vita Sackville-West—herself an accomplished poet and novelist—the story follows the life of an aristocratic nobleman who changes from man to woman and goes on to live for centuries, meeting all of the most influential and powerful figures in English history.

Ein neuer Blick auf Leben und Werk des letzten Universalgenies. Das Goethe-Hörbuch für unsere Zeit: Rüdiger Safranski führt uns Goethe in neuem Licht vor und macht uns zu Zeitgenossen dieses Genies und Menschen, dessen Lebensspanne das verspielte Rokoko, die klassisch-romantische Zeit und die Nüchternheit des Eisenbahnzeitalters umgreift. Mit seinem Namen hat man später eine ganze Epoche bezeichnet: die Goethezeit.

George Bernard Shaw has been called the second greatest playwright in English (after William Shakespeare) and one of the inventors of modern celebrity as the most famous public intellectual of his time. Beginning in the 1880s, as a critic and as a playwright, he transformed British drama, bringing to it intellectual substance, ethical imperatives, and modernity itself, setting the theatrical course for the subsequent century. That his legacy endures 70 years after his death is testament to the prescience of his thinking and his prolific creativity.

When Jules Verne was born in 1828, his family had his future planned out for him. They expected him to become a lawyer, but he dreamed of writing. He started out writing more traditional poetry and plays, but then he began to create a new, unconventional kind of fiction. It combined adventure, the modern world of science and invention, and his personal view of the future. With fantastical characters, spaceships to the moon, and deep-sea submarines, his books told of things that would not actually occur for decades.

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.

Not heard of Paul Sykes? Mentioned in the book Legends by Charles Bronson, an A to Z guide of the men Bronson had regarded to be the toughest in Britain. Referring to "Sykesy", Bronson describes him as "a Legend, Born and Bred" and writing: "I first met Sykes in Liverpool in the early 70s and at that time he was probably the fittest Con in Britain. A notorious hard man from Yorkshire, a fighting man in every sense. A lot of people never liked him, perhaps they even feared him but I respected the man for what he stood for."

John le Carré led a life entirely constructed of secrets—not just in his first career, as a British spy and agent runner during the height of the Cold War or in his second, as a world-renowned writer of espionage fiction, but also in his personal involvements. He guarded his private life with fierce determination, fending off all would-be biographers until his ninth decade, when he finally relented and permitted his life story to be written. But there was still one element that he insisted be excluded, even then: the women.

It is not often that an author and his editor strike up a relationship which survives forty years of epistolary exchanges and intellectual sparring. The strangely enduring and occasionally fractious friendship which developed between the famously outspoken historian Ramachandra Guha and his reticent editor Rukun Advani is the subject of this quite eccentric and thoroughly compelling literary memoir.

Before turning to her life of crime - running a one-woman forgery business out of a phone booth in a Greenwich Village bar and even dodging the FBI - Lee Israel had a legitimate career as an author of biographies. But by 1990, almost broke and desperate to hang onto her Upper West Side studio, Lee made a bold and irreversible career change: inspired by a letter she’d received once from Katharine Hepburn, and armed with her considerable skills as a researcher and celebrity biographer, she began to forge letters in the voices of literary greats.

Friedrich Hölderlin ist der große Unbekannte unter den Klassikern der deutschen Literatur: ein Genie des Zusammenwirkens von philosophischer, religiöser und poetischer Kraft. Ein Einzelgänger, der keinen Halt im Leben fand, obwohl er hingebungsvoll liebte und geliebt wurde. Als Dichter, Übersetzer, Philosoph, Hauslehrer und Revolutionär lebte Hölderlin in zerreißenden Spannungen, unter denen er schließlich zusammenbrach. Seelisch tief verwundet, verbrachte er die zweite Hälfte seines Lebens im Tübinger Turm. Erst das 20. Jahrhundert entdeckte seine tatsächliche Bedeutung.

Friedrich Schiller: Jugendliches Genie, Revolutionär, Dichter. Rüdiger Safranski entstaubt in seiner großen Schiller-Biographie eine der schwungvollsten Gestalten unserer Literatur. Friedrich Schiller läutete mit seinem Enthusiasmus die Epoche der deutschen Geistesgeschichte ein, die man später den "Deutschen Idealismus" genannt hat. Mit diesem großen Buch über Schillers Leben und Denken könnte seine Renaissance beginnen.

Known to most as Lemony Snicket, the tormented narrator of A Series of Unfortunate Events, Daniel Handler spends his days writing—for children and adults; film and television; and, on occasion, the accordion. Tracing his life in books from his first encounter with Baudelaire at a local library, And Then? And Then? What Else? offers a witty, poignant exploration of reading, writing and why we tell stories.

In the fall of 1948 Hemingway and his fourth wife traveled for the first time to Venice, which Hemingway called "a goddam wonderful city." He was a year shy of his 50th birthday and hadn't published a novel in nearly a decade. At a duck shoot in the lagoon he met and fell in love with Adriana Ivancich, a striking Venetian girl just out of finishing school. Di Robilant - whose great-uncle moved in Hemingway's revolving circle of bon vivants, aristocrats, and artists - re-creates with sparkling clarity this surprising, years-long relationship.

The further adventures of "Dr. Gonzo" as he defends the "cucarachas" - the Chicanos of East Los Angeles. Before his mysterious disappearance and probable death in 1971, Oscar Zeta Acosta was famous as a Robin Hood Chicano lawyer and notorious as the real-life model for Hunter S. Thompson's "Dr. Gonzo" a fat, pugnacious attorney with a gargantuan appetite for food, drugs, and life on the edge.

The Story of Dr. Seuss explores the fascinating life behind one of our favorite authors through rhyme. We know and love his books, including The Cat in The Hat, The Grinch, and Green Eggs and Ham, and now we can get to really know the man himself. In this short and fun biography, you will learn about Ted’s early years, family life, path to success, building and flourishing in his writing career and beyond!

Just as Anne had to use a male pseudonym in order to publish, Helen Graham, the novel's protagonist and a battered wife, must assume an alias in order to gain freedom from her suffering. With her young child, Helen takes up residence at Wildfell Hall, shrouding her past in secrecy, yet earning the attentions of a young, unmarried country gentlemen.

In the summer of 1925, Ernest Hemingway traveled to Pamplona for the infamous running of the bulls. He then channeled that trip’s drunken brawls, sexual rivalry, midnight betrayals, and midday hangovers into a novel that redefined modern literature. Lesley Blume tells the full story behind Hemingway’s legendary rise for the first time, revealing how he created his own image as the bull-fighting aficionado, hard-drinking literary genius, and expatriate bon vivant. In all its youth, lust, and rivalry, the Lost Generation is illuminated here as never before.

An inventive, unique, and extraordinarily moving literary debut that pieces together the fascinating story of one woman's family across 20th-century Russia, Ukraine, Poland, and Germany. Katja Petrowskaja wanted to create a kind of family tree, charting relatives who had scattered across multiple countries and continents. Her idea blossomed into this striking and highly original work of narrative nonfiction, an account of her search for meaning within the stories of her ancestors.

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.

حكاياتٌ عن أعظم شعراء العربية، وقصص يسردها الأديب الكبير طه حسين كأنه يجلس أمامك. مناقشة الجانب الفني لشعراء الجاهلية، مع شرح وتحليل قصائدهم. ويختتم كتابه بمراسلات جرت بينه وبين عدد من أدباء عصره حول قضايا أدبية ونقدية كثيرة. فاستمع الآن