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By Claire Lombardo. 2019
APRIL 2024 REESE WITHERSPOON BOOK CLUB PICKLONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2020AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER'A literary…
love child of Jonathan Franzen and Anne Tyler . . . outstanding and highly enjoyable' Observer'The Most Fun We Ever Had is as good as books come' Telegraph'I loved this book' Bryony Gordon'The perfect, engrossing holiday read' RED'A gripping and poignant ode to a messy, loving family in all its glory' Madeline Miller'A moving, immersive, often very funny study of family and sisterhood' Sunday Times'Like Meg Wolitzer. A forensic dissection of family past and present, I loved it. If you like reading about relationships, this one is for you.' Pandora SykesMEET THE SORENSON FAMILY.MARILYN has somehow fallen into motherhood and spent four decades married toDAVID, who's pretty certain he loves her more than anyone has ever loved another person.WENDY, their eldest, a cause for concern, soothes herself with drink after being widowed young,while VIOLET, lawyer-turned-stay-at-home-mother, is disturbed by the reappearance of a son placed for adoption fifteen years earlier.LIZA, a professor, is pregnant with a baby she's not sure she wants by a man she's not sure she lovesand GRACE, their dawdling youngest daughter, lives a lie that no one in her family suspects.By Fiona Sampson. 2021
Finalist for the 2022 Plutarch Award Longlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography A Washington Post Best Book…
of 2021 “An elegant act of rehabilitation.”—New York Times Book Review, Editors’ Choice A "nuanced and insightful" (New Statesman) portrait of Britain’s most famous female poet, a woman who invented herself and defied her times. "How do I love thee? Let me count the ways." With these words, Elizabeth Barrett Browning has come down to us as a romantic heroine, a recluse controlled by a domineering father and often overshadowed by her husband, Robert Browning. But behind the melodrama lies a thoroughly modern figure whose extraordinary life is an electrifying study in self-invention. Born in 1806, Barrett Browning lived in an age when women could not attend a university, own property after marriage, or vote. And yet she seized control of her private income, defied chronic illness and disability, became an advocate for the revolutionary Italy to which she eloped, and changed the course of cultural history. Her late-in-life verse novel masterpiece, Aurora Leigh, reveals both the brilliance and originality of her mind, as well as the challenges of being a woman writer in the Victorian era. A feminist icon, high-profile activist for the abolition of slavery, and international literary superstar, Barrett Browning inspired writers as diverse as Emily Dickinson, George Eliot, Rudyard Kipling, Oscar Wilde, and Virginia Woolf. Two-Way Mirror is the first biography of Barrett Browning in more than three decades. With unique access to the poet’s abundant correspondence, “astute, thoughtful, and wide-ranging guide” (Times [UK]) Fiona Sampson holds up a mirror to the woman, her art, and the art of biography itself.By Josh Kilmer-Purcell. 2006
“A glittering, bittersweet vision of an outsider who turned himself into the life and soul of the party. Kilmer-Purcell’s cast…
is part freak-show, part soap-opera, but his prose is graced with such insight and wit that the laughter is revelatory, and the tears—and there are tears to be shed along this extraordinary journey—are shed for people in whom everybody will find something of themselves. In a word, wonderful.” — Clive Barker“Absolutely hilarious and heartbreaking and heartfelt.” —Armistead Maupin, author of Tales of the CityThe New York Times bestselling, darkly funny memoir of a young New Yorker's daring dual life—advertising art director by day, glitter-dripping drag queen and nightclub beauty-pageant hopeful by night—was a smash literary debut for Josh Kilmer-Purcell, now known for his popular Planet Green television series The Fabulous Beekman Boys. His story begins here—before the homemade goat milk soaps and hand-gathered honeys, before his memoir of the city mouse’s move to the country, The Bucolic Plague—in I Am Not Myself These Days, with “plenty of dishy anecdotes and moments of tragi-camp delight” (Washington Post).By Jim Acosta. 2019
A New York Times bestseller.From CNN’s veteran Chief White House Correspondent Jim Acosta, an explosive, first-hand account of the dangers he faces…
reporting on the current White House while fighting on the front lines in President Trump’s war on truth, featuring new material exclusive to the paperback edition. In Mr. Trump’s campaign against what he calls “Fake News,” CNN Chief White House Correspondent, Jim Acosta, is public enemy number one. From the moment Mr. Trump announced his candidacy in 2015, he has attacked the media, calling journalists “the enemy of the people.”Acosta presents a damning examination of bureaucratic dysfunction, deception, and the unprecedented threat the rhetoric Mr. Trump is directing has on our democracy. When the leader of the free world incites hate and violence, Acosta doesn’t back down, and he urges his fellow citizens to do the same.At Mr. Trump’s most hated network, CNN, Acosta offers a never-before-reported account of what it’s like to be the President’s most hated correspondent. Acosta goes head-to-head with the White House, even after Trump supporters have threatened his life with words as well as physical violence.From the hazy denials and accusations meant to discredit the Mueller investigation, to the president’s scurrilous tweets, Jim Acosta is in the eye of the storm while reporting live to millions of people across the world. After spending hundreds of hours with the revolving door of White House personnel, Acosta paints portraits of the personalities of Sarah Huckabee Sanders, Stephen Miller, Steve Bannon, Sean Spicer, Hope Hicks, Jared Kushner and more. Acosta is tenacious and unyielding in his public battle to preserve the First Amendment and #RealNews.By James Thurber. 1957
From iconic American humorist James Thurber, a celebrated and poignant memoir about his years at The New Yorker with the…
magazine’s unforgettable founder and longtime editor, Harold Ross“Extremely entertaining. . . . life at The New Yorker emerges as a lovely sort of pageant of lunacy, of practical jokes, of feuds and foibles. It is an affectionate picture of scamps playing their games around a man who, for all his brusqueness, loved them, took care of them, pampered and scolded them like an irascible mother hen.” —New York TimesWith a foreword by Adam Gopnik and illustrations by James ThurberAt the helm of America’s most influential literary magazine from 1925 to 1951, Harold Ross introduced the country to a host of exciting talent, including Robert Benchley, Alexander Woollcott, Ogden Nash, Peter Arno, Charles Addams, and Dorothy Parker. But no one could have written about this irascible, eccentric genius more affectionately or more critically than James Thurber, whose portrait of Ross captures not only a complex literary giant but a historic friendship and a glorious era as well. "If you get Ross down on paper," warned Wolcott Gibbs to Thurber," nobody will ever believe it." But readers of this unforgettable memoir will find that they do.Offering a peek into the lives of two American literary giants and the New York literary scene at its heyday, The Years with Ross is a true classic, and a testament to the enduring influence of their genius.By Agatha Christie Mallowan. 2012
Over the course of her long, prolific career, Agatha Christie gave the world a wealth of ingenious whodunits and page-turning…
locked-room mysteries featuring Miss Marple, Hercule Poirot, and a host of other unforgettable characters. She also gave us Come, Tell Me How You Live, a charming, fascinating, and wonderfully witty nonfiction account of her days on an archaeological dig in Syria with her husband, renowned archeologist Max Mallowan. Something completely different from arguably the best-selling author of all time, Come, Tell Me How You Live is an evocative journey to the fascinating Middle East of the 1930s that is sure to delight Dame Agatha’s millions of fans, as well as aficionados of Elizabeth Peters’s Amelia Peabody mysteries and eager armchair travelers everywhere.By Melissa Sweet. 2016
6 Starred Reviews! New York Times Bestseller! A People Magazine Best Children&’s Book! A Washington Post Best Book! A Publishers…
Weekly Best Book! Boston Globe-Horn Book Nonfiction Award Honor recipient Caldecott Honor winner Sweet mixes White&’s personal letters, photos, and family ephemera with her own exquisite artwork to tell the story of this American literary icon. Readers young and old will be fascinated and inspired by the journalist, New Yorker contributor, and children&’s book author who loved words his whole life. This authorized tribute, a New York Times bestseller, includes an afterword by Martha White, his granddaughter.By Michel Leiris. 2024
The fourth and final volume of Michel Leiris’s renowned autobiography, now available in English for the first time, translated by…
Richard Sieburth Ex-surrealist and maverick anthropologist Michel Leiris (1901–1990) crafted his multivolume autobiography over the course of thirty-five years, profoundly influencing generations of French writers, from Sartre and Beauvoir to Modiano and Ernaux. In this fourth and final volume, Richard Sieburth completes the project of bringing Leiris’s monumental experiment in self-portraiture into English. With wit and playfulness, Leiris assembled a scrapbook of fragments—journal extracts, travel notes, transcriptions of dreams, poems—to document the vagaries of a life committed to the difficult marriage of poetry and revolutionary politics, which he witnessed firsthand in Mao’s China, Castro’s Cuba, and on the Paris streets in May ’68. Frail Riffs is a jazz improvisation on the twilight of a life, at once a painstaking self-examination and a chronicle of a century. As Leiris wrote, it is "neither a private diary nor a formal work, neither an autobiographical narrative nor a work of the imagination, neither prose nor poetry, but all this at the same time. . . . A perpetual work in progress.&rdquoBy Ved Mehta. 1989
Book 6 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one…
of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta.The Stolen Light engages with the particular difficulties of Mehta's experience: he was blind in a college made for the seeing, he was an Indian in the United States, a Hindu in a Christian environment, a dark-skinned man surrounded by white people. With compelling honesty and humour, Mehta describes his struggles to live an ordinary university life - dating, riding a bicycle, keeping up with his studies - while dealing with incredible obstacles.Book 5 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one…
of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta.In 1949, fifteen-year-old Ved Mehta -- blind since the age of four -- left his native India and travelled alone to a school for the blind in Arkansas, USA. For the next three years he studied with over a hundred blind or partially sighted children at the school. Here, he would learn how to deal with Western teachers, date girls, and begin to perceive objects by means of 'sound-shadows'. Sound-Shadows of the New World brilliantly traces the emigrant experience amid the difficult transition from adolescence into adulthood.By Elizabeth Winkler. 2023
An &“extraordinarily brilliant&” and &“pleasurably naughty&” (André Aciman) investigation into the Shakespeare authorship question, exploring how doubting that William Shakespeare…
wrote his plays became an act of blasphemy…and who the Bard might really be.The theory that Shakespeare may not have written the works that bear his name is the most horrible, unspeakable subject in the history of English literature. Scholars admit that the Bard&’s biography is a &“black hole,&” yet to publicly question the identity of the god of English literature is unacceptable, even (some say) &“immoral.&” In Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies, journalist and literary critic Elizabeth Winkler sets out to probe the origins of this literary taboo. Whisking you from London to Stratford-Upon-Avon to Washington, DC, she pulls back the curtain to show how the forces of nationalism and empire, religion and mythmaking, gender and class have shaped our admiration for Shakespeare across the centuries. As she considers the writers and thinkers—from Walt Whitman to Sigmund Freud to Supreme Court justices—who have grappled with the riddle of the plays&’ origins, she explores who may perhaps have been hiding behind his name. A forgotten woman? A disgraced aristocrat? A government spy? Hovering over the mystery are Shakespeare&’s plays themselves, with their love for mistaken identities, disguises, and things never quite being what they seem. As she interviews scholars and skeptics, Winkler&’s interest turns to the larger problem of historical truth—and of how human imperfections (bias, blindness, subjectivity) shape our construction of the past. History is a story, and the story we find may depend on the story we&’re looking for. &“Lively&” (The Washington Post), &“fascinating&” (Amanda Foreman), and &“intrepid&” (Stacy Schiff), Shakespeare Was a Woman and Other Heresies will forever change how you think of Shakespeare…and of how we as a society decide what&’s up for debate and what&’s just nonsense, just heresy.By Alison Scott-Wright. 2021
*** WITH A FOREWORD BY MILLIE MACKINTOSH ***From the author of the hugely successful The Sensational Baby Sleep Plan.A follow-up…
guide, helping parents to handle sleep issues in toddlers and children aged over twelve months.With clear and realistic advice on how to: *Implement the fail-safe reassurance sleep-training technique*Establish healthy bedtime associations *Understand your toddler's development*Implement a routine through responsible and positive parenting *Manage changes such as moving from a cot to a bed and travelling *Cope with dietary intolerances and acid reflex that might affect child's ability to fall and stay asleep*Introduce a new baby into the family and deal with sibling issues This book will get your child - and you - the sleep you need!Praise for The Sensational Baby Sleep Plan:***** 'This book is a Godsend . . . simple, supportive and easy to apply.'***** 'Literally changes our lives . . . absolutely invaluable advice.'***** 'This books now allows our little one to enjoy her sleep . . . She is a happy content smiley baby now and so are mummy and daddy!'By American Medical Association. 2006
A boy&’s &“straightforward, accessible, and nonjudgmental&” guide to everything they need to know about puberty and becoming a teen (Booklist).…
Becoming a teen is an important milestone in every boy&’s life. It&’s especially important at this time to get answers and advice from a trusted source. The American Medical Association Boy&’s Guide to Becoming a Teen is filled with invaluable advice to get you ready for the changes you will experience during puberty. Learn about these important topics and more: · Puberty and what kinds of physical and emotional changes you can expect—from your developing body to your feelings about girls · The importance of eating the right foods and taking care of your body · Pimples, acne, and how to properly care for your skin · Your reproductive system—inside and out · Thinking about relationships and dealing with new feelings The American Medical Association Boy&’s Guide to Becoming a Teen will help you understand the health issues that are of most concern to teenage boys, and will teach you how to be safe, happy, and healthy through these years.By Selina Hastings. 2002
The life of Rosamond Lehmann was as romantic and harrowing as that of any of her fictional heroines. Her first…
novel, the shocking Dusty Answer, became wildly successful launching her career as a novelist and, just as her novels depicted the tempestuous lives of her heroines, Rosamond's personal life would be full of heartbreaking affairs and lost loves. Escaping from a disastrous early marriage Rosamond moved right into the heart of Bloomsbury society with Wogan Philipps. Later on she would embark on the most important love affair of her life, with the poet Cecil Day Lewis; nine years later he abandoned her for a young actress - a betrayal from which she would never recover. Selina Hastings masterfully creates a portrait of a woman whose dramatic life, work and relationships criss-crossed the cultural, literary and political landscape of England in the middle of the twentieth century.By David Bellos. 1950
Airman, war hero, immigrant, law student, diplomat, novelist and celebrity spouse, Romain Gary had several lives thrust upon him by…
the history of the twentieth century, but he also aspired to lead many more. He wrote more than two dozen books and a score of short stories under several different names in two languages, English and French, neither of which was his mother tongue. Gary had a gift for narrative that endeared him to ordinary readers, but won him little respect among critics far more intellectual than he could ever be. His varied and entertaining writing career tells a different story about the making of modern literary culture from the one we are accustomed to hearing.Born Roman Kacew in Vilna (now Lithuania) in 1914 and raised by only his mother after his father left them, Gary rose to become French Consul General in Los Angeles and the only man ever to win the Goncourt Prize twice.This biography follows the many threads that lead from Gary's wartime adventures and early literary career to his years in Hollywood and his marriage to the actress Jean Seberg. It illuminates his works in all their incarnations, and culminates in the tale of his most brilliant deception: the fabrication of a complex identity for his most successful nom de plume, Émile Ajar.In his new portrait of Gary, David Bellos brings biographical research together with literary and cultural analysis to make sense of the many lives of Romain Gary - a hero fit for our times, as well as his own.Book 9 in Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is one…
of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta.In Remembering Mr. Shawn's New Yorker, Ved Mehta provides an unparalleled glimpse into the inner workings of the one of world's most famous magazines. He portrays in detail the strange, nurturing atmosphere at the New Yorker, and he recounts the earthquakes that shook the magazine as it moved into the hands of more commercial ownership. At once a tribute to William Shawn - one of the longest serving editors in the New Yorker's history - Mehta's memoir is also a joyful tribute to the intricately linked arts of editing, writing, and reading.By Ved Mehta. 2005
The last volume of Ved Mehta's Continents of Exile series. Nearly 50 years in the making, Continents of Exile is…
one of the great works of twentieth-century autobiography: the epic chronicle of an Indian family in the twentieth century. From 1930s India to 1950s Oxford and literary New York in the 1960s-80s, this is the story of the post-colonial twentieth century, as uniquely experienced and vividly recounted by Ved Mehta.During the clamour of a New York dinner party, Mehta is startled to find his father crying on his mother's shoulders. This episode begins a painful and revealing voyage into his father's personal history. In stark prose, Mehta unravels a passionate, clandestine affair that bore quiet yet extraordinary consequences for himself and his family. Red Letters also serves as a brilliant exploration and a recreation of British India: its sights and sounds, its injustices and its secrecy.By A. J. Symons. 1955
'What had happened to the lost manuscripts, what train of chances took Rolfe to his death in Venice? The Quest…
continued'One summer afternoon A.J.A. Symons is handed a peculiar, eccentric novel that he cannot forget and, captivated by this unknown masterpiece, determines to learn everything he can about its mysterious author. The object of his search is Frederick Rolfe, self-titled Baron Corvo - artist, rejected candidate for priesthood and author of serially autobiographical fictions - and its story is told in this 'experiment in biography': a beguiling portrait of an insoluble tangle of talents, frustrated ambitions and self-destruction.By Adriana Hunter, Queen Charlotte'S Hospital. 1998
This book is a practical, sympathetic and complete guide to having a baby - from conception to delivery. Written in…
association with Britain's leading maternity hospital, it draws on the wide experience of the hospital's doctors and midwives and also contains insightful comments from parents themselves. Organised on a week-by-week basis and illustrated throughout, this comprehensive book shows step-by-step how the baby develops and what changes the mother will experience. It tells you how you may be feeling both phyically and emotionally and when, how to choose the right nutrition and exercise at various times of the pregnancy, how to prepare for the birth and the choices available to you, what to expect during labour and the options for pain relief, care after birth and much more. The very first book of its kind to obtain such a unique endorsement, The Queen Charlotte's Hospital Guide to Pregnancy and Birth answers every question parents might ask and promises to become the definitive book on this important subject.By Jan De Vries. 1995
Allaying the doubts and fears which surround the most natural and yet probably the most traumatic experience a woman will…
go through, Pregnancy and Childbirth takes you step by step through conception, pregnancy, labour and the care of your baby. Calling upon a lifetime's experience in helping couples who have come to him following years of trying for a baby, Jan de Vries explains how he has helped them with either herbal or homoeopathic medicine, acupuncture or osteopathy. He describes how acupuncture can help, especially during labour, and provides advice for couples who have undergone severe stress when dealing with problems such as impotence, or feelings of inadequacy or rejection. What emerges from his extensive research is an overwhelming sense of hope in the wonder of nature and joy at the miracle of each new birth.