Showing titles in Art & Literature

This is a book about ten women over the past three hundred years who have found walking essential to their sense of themselves, as people and as writers. Wanderers traces their footsteps, from eighteenth-century parson's daughter Elizabeth Carter—who desired nothing more than to be taken for a vagabond in the wilds of southern England—to modern walker-writers such as Nan Shepherd and Cheryl Strayed.

In the bitter winds of autumn 1963, Tove Jansson, helped by Brunström, a maverick fisherman, raced to build a cabin on a treeless island in the Gulf of Finland. The island was Klovharun, where for thirty summers Tove and her beloved partner, the visual artist, Tuulikki “Tooti” Pietilä, lived, painted, and wrote, energized by the solitude and shifting seascapes. The island's flora, fauna, and weather patterns provided deep inspiration which can be seen reflected in all of Jansson's work, most famously in her novel The Summer Book and her longstanding comic strip and novels for children, Moomin.

Amy Tan has touched millions of people with haunting and sympathetic novels of cultural complexity and profound empathy. With the same spirit and humor that characterize her acclaimed novels, she now shares her insight into her own life and how she escaped the curses of her past to make a future of her own. She takes us on a journey from her childhood of tragedy and comedy to the present day and her arrival as one of the world's best-loved novelists.

"Quelque chose a changé". Avec ces quatre mots, commence le nouveau livre de Philippe Labro. Ce "quelque chose", n'est autre que le début de la plongée dans une dépression nerveuse dont le célèbre romancier, journaliste et cinéaste, a été victime entre septembre 1999 et mai 2001. Dans un récit sans concession, l'auteur raconte ce que signifie perdre le désir, l'énergie, la passion, l'estime de soi. Il va tenter de chercher dans des scènes de son passé des explications à ce qui n'est "peut-être pas explicable". Il démontre que l'on peut "en sortir". Car ce témoignage unique, porté par le souffle de l'écriture, constitue aussi une éclatante affirmation de la force de la vie et de l'amour.

From renowned translators Richard Pevear and Lindsay Volokhonsky comes a new translation - certain to become the definitive version - of the first great prison memoir, a fictionalized account of Fyodor Dostoevsky's life-changing penal servitude in Siberia.

في هذا الكتاب سنقترب أكثر من درويش الإنسان..درويش المواطن الفلسطيني..درويش شاعر الأرض المحتلة في ثمانية عشر فصلًا وهي: العرب فى إسرائيل، كفر قاسم، شعراء وشهداء، المهزومون، الشاعر الجديد، ملامح شخصية، ملامح فنية، الغموض والتصوف، مع الطبيعة، الحب والمرأة، المسيح يصلب فى القرن العشرين، الدين والثورة، إنسانيون لا متعصبون، بدلا من الحب القاسى، اتهامات ظالمة، لماذا خرج من إسرائيل، شيوعيون وقوميون، وماذا نتعلم منه ومن رفاقه.

Two new BBC Radio 4 full-cast dramatisations of Roald Dahl's gripping autobiographical stories. These two compelling adaptations, based on Roald Dahl's real-life tales of his of his boyhood and youthful overseas adventures, celebrate his remarkable life and commemorate his genius.

This book essentially launched the memoir craze that has been going strong ever since. The story is pretty grim: teen-aged Wolff moves with his divorced mother from Florida to Utah to Washington State to escape her violent boyfriend. When she remarries, Wolff finds himself in a bitter battle of wills with his abusive stepfather, a contest in which the two prove to be more evenly matched than might have been supposed.

Declan Walsh is one of the New York Times's most distinguished international correspondents. His electrifying portrait of Pakistan over a tumultuous decade captures the sweep of this strange, wondrous, and benighted country through the dramatic lives of nine fascinating individuals. On assignment as the country careened between crises, Walsh traveled from the raucous port of Karachi to the salons of Lahore, and from Baluchistan to the mountains of Waziristan. He met a diverse cast of extraordinary Pakistanis....

Lord Byron was the most celebrated of all the Romantic poets. Troubled, handsome, sexually fluid, disabled, and transgressive, he wrote his way to international fame—and scandal—before finding a kind of redemption in the Greek Revolution. He also left behind the vast trove of thrilling letters (to friends, relatives, lovers, and more) that form the core of this remarkable biography.

Julian Barnes' new book is, among many things, a family memoir, an exchange with his brother (a philosopher), a meditation on morality and the fear of death, a celebration of art, an argument with and about God, and homage to the French writer Jules Renard. Though he warns us that 'this is not my autobiography', the result is a tour of the mind of one of our most brilliant writers.

Welcome to a world of oddities curated by Regina and Ryan Cohn, trendsetters and tastemakers who have reinvented what the artifact collectors market looks like. Together, they are the founders of Oddities Flea Market, artfully curating a selection of the best artists and collectors at several events across the US throughout the year, with an eye towards expanding globally. In The Witch's Door, Ryan, who starred in the reality television show Oddities, and Regina, who comes from the world of fashion, give us a rare peek behind the curtain into the business of collecting the strange and unusual.

Books tell all kinds of stories—romances, tragedies, comedies—but if we learn to read the signs correctly, they can tell us the story of their own making too. The Book-Makers offers a new way into the story of Western culture’s most important object, the book, through dynamic portraits of eighteen individuals who helped to define it.

Long days of boredom in confinement, the general inefficiency of prison bureaucracy and a critically over-stretched prison service. The tediousness of prison life kicks in for prisoner FF8282, also known as author Jeffrey Archer, in the second volume of his best-selling series The Prison Diaries. Still his fellow inmates show inspiring spirit and courage, amid an otherwise gloomy prison landscape, revealing that even in the darkest hours light can always be found.

Goethe was the inventor of the psychological novel, a pioneer scientist, great man of the theatre and a leading politician. As A. N. Wilson argues in this groundbreaking biography, it was his genius and insatiable curiosity that helped catapult the Western world into the modern era. A N. Wilson tackles the life of Goethe with characteristic wit and verve. From his youth as a wild literary prodigy to his later years as Germany’s most respected elder statesman, Wilson hones in on Goethe’s undying obsession with the work he would spend his entire life writing – Faust.

Andy Warhol claimed that he loved being outside a party—so that he could get in. But more often than not, the party was at his own studio, The Factory, where celebrities—from Edie Sedgwick and Allen Ginsberg to the Rolling Stones and the Velvet Underground—gathered in an ongoing bash.

Michael Peppiatt met Francis Bacon in June 1963 in Soho's French House to request an interview for a student magazine he was editing. Bacon invited him to lunch, and over oysters and Chablis they began a friendship and a no-holds-barred conversation that would continue until Bacon's death 30 years later. Fascinated by the artist's brilliance and charisma, Peppiatt accompanied him on his nightly round of prodigious drinking from grand hotel to louche club and casino, seeing all aspects of Bacon's 'gilded gutter life' and meeting everybody around him.

Based on her popular class at Yale, this “tender and profound” (Booklist) essay collection from one of our greatest living playwrights and teachers, Sarah Ruhl, is a testament to the singular impact of teachers across every stage of our lives. Anchored in stories both personal and universal, drawing on Sarah’s experiences with her parents and children, with schoolteachers, creative influences, and beyond, Lessons from My Teachers is a “a true tribute to those who teach… [that] masterfully captures the ineffable essence of all that passes between teacher and student” (Sharon Salzberg).

Dans son autobiographie, Louise Forestier nous raconte son parcours artistique, dévoilant dans le même souffle toutes les femmes qui cohabitent en elles et parfois s'entredéchirent. De son enfance à Shawinigan jusqu'à aujourd'hui, elle relate les hauts et les bas de sa vie d'artiste qui a débuté avec beaucoup d'audace… et un pieux mensonge à une religieuse! Celle qui a été de la distribution de plusieurs comédies musicales nous entraine dans les coulisses et sur la scène de Demain matin, Montréal m'attend, L'Osstidcho et Starmania.

As anchor for the BBC's key political news programme, Newsnight, Emily Maitlis has interviewed some of the most powerful and controversial figures on the political scene. She plans each interview meticulously, knowing what she wants to ask and where she wants it to go, but as one of the most experienced journalists in her field she knows that no interview will ever go to plan....