Biography & Autobiography : Literary

The author of The Debt to Pleasure digs into his family’s extraordinary past in a. memoir as enthralling as his finest fiction. It was only when his mother died that John Lanchester realized how little he really knew about his. parents. With the cache of letters and papers she left behind, he set out to reconstruct just who. his parents had been. In doing so, he did much more than trace the remarkable story of a. reluctant international banker, a secretive former nun, and the life they shared; he also gained. extraordinary insight into his own nature and a deeper understanding of the universal push-pull of. family love—and family loss. Part detective work, part evocation of character, this is, above all,. compelling storytelling. more...

Price: $15.00

Change Me Into Zeus's Daughter, Barbara Moss's charming first book, looked at her childhood growing up in a poor and chaotic household in Anniston, Alabama, one of 8 children struggling under an alcoholic and abusive father whom they both adored and feared. Her new book weaves together a patchwork of true stories that look at what happens to a family like this when the children grow up. Fierce is a warm, honest, moving and redemptive story of a woman determined to shrug off the handicaps of her childhood, to forge an artistic career for herself and raise her lovable son responsibly -- in short, to break the patterns that she has been taught. Moss paints a moving and amusing portrait of her life as a single mother in art school and on welfare in the suburbs of Florida and the Midwest. And she shows us the great lengths to which she went to make a different life for her son Jason, and for herself. (She writes bittersweetly of Jason sleeping in a sleeping bag at her feet during her night job; together hunting up and down streets of questionable safety for returnable bottles and cans; Barbara, on a dinner date, filling her purse full of bread and shrimp and even a doily to bring home to her 8-year-old.). Ultimately she learns that the legacies of addiction and abuse can manifest in many different ways. While her brother Stewart struggles with fatal alcoholism, Barbara resolutely never drinks a drop, but after their father dies suddenly her world spins out of control. An unhealthy tendency toward abusive relationships with men gets exponentially worse as she cultivates a relationship that will threaten everything she has accomplished. It's a painful awakening when she realizes that her obsession with drama and rescue and abusive relationships is no less of an addiction than her brother's alcoholism. Moss was so busy trying not to become her alcoholic father, and to save her alcoholic brother, that she didn't notice turning into her co-dependent mother more...

Price: $17.99

On sale 1/20/04! In this honest, hilarious, fiercely intelligent memoir, journalist Susan Shapiro dares to do what every woman dreams of: track down the five men who'd broken her heart and find out what really went wrong. Between the ages of thirteen and thirty-five, Susan had plunged into love, heart-first, five times. more...

Price: $9.95

The story of the legendary friendship between Wordsworth and Coleridge. The friendship between William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge produced dazzling results. From it came Lyrical Ballads, the volume that kick-started the Romantic Movement in England. Rarely have two such gifted writers cooperated so closely. They met in 1795 when both were in their early twenties, and in the euphoria of mutual discovery these brilliant and idealistic young men planned a poem that would succeed where the French Revolution failed—a poem that would, quite literally, change the world. In this wonderfully lively and readable account, acclaimed author Adam Sisman explores their passionate and tempestuous bond and the way in which rivalry bred tension between them. Though much has been written about this extraordinary duo, no previous biographer has considered them together. The result offers insights into the rich yet neglected topic of friendship and tantalizing glimpses of the creative process itself. more...

Price: $27.95

An insightful and inspirational biography of the heroic and spiritual poet. Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844–1889) may well have been the most original and innovative poet writing in the English language during the nineteenth century. Yet his story of personal struggle, doubt, intense introspection, and inward heroism has never been told fully. As a Jesuit priest, Hopkins’s descent into loneliness and despair and his subsequent recovery are a remarkable and inspiring spiritual journey that will speak to many readers, regardless of their faith or philosophies. Paul Mariani, an award-winning poet himself and author of a number of biographies of literary figures, brilliantly integrates Hopkins’s spiritual life and his literary life to create a rich and compelling portrait of a man whose work and life continue to speak to readers a century after his death. more...

Price: $34.95