Showing titles in Authors

Many cultural and religious traditions expect those who are grieving to step away from the world. In contemporary life, we are more often met with red tape and to-do lists. This is exactly what happened to Geraldine Brooks when her partner of more than three decades, Tony Horwitz–just sixty years old and, to her knowledge, vigorous and healthy–collapsed and died on a Washington, D. C. sidewalk.

Marcel Proust came into his own as a novelist comparatively late in life, yet only Shakespeare, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, and Dostoyevsky were his equals when it came to creating characters as memorably human. As biographer Benjamin Taylor suggests, Proust was a literary lightweight before writing his multivolume masterwork In Search of Lost Time, but following a series of momentous historical and personal events, he became—against all expectations—one of the greatest writers of his, and indeed any, era.

We remember Audre Lorde as an iconic writer, a quotable teacher whose words and face grace T-shirts, nonprofit annual reports, and campus diversity-center walls. But even those who are inspired by Lorde’s teachings on “the creative power of difference” may be missing something fundamental about her life and work, and what they can mean for us today. Lorde’s understanding of survival was not simply about getting through to the other side of oppression or being resilient in the face of cancer. It was about the total stakes of what it means to be in relationship with a planet in transformation.

This audiobook contains the strange, raw, and epiphany-filled stories that led to Read’s dramatic nine-month conversion from atheism to Catholicism. Focusing not only on Read’s life but also on the lives of others who, knowingly or unknowingly, encountered the Virgin, this literary memoir is a testimony of how a Mother patiently brought one child home to her Son—and slowly revealed her own heart.

Elizabeth Gaskell’s biography of her friend Charlotte Brontë—the first full-length biography of a woman novelist by a woman novelist—is a true classic. It transports us with a deft hand straight into 19th-century Haworth, Yorkshire and crafts an extensive account of Brontë’s life, quoting throughout from letters she sent and received. From her challenging, isolated childhood to her death shortly before the age of 39, newly married and pregnant, the enigmatic author of Jane Eyre is portrayed with enormous care.

William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of wild supposition arranged around scant facts. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself.

Thoreau's classic account of the solitary life, describing his attempts to simplify his life and sort out his priorities by living alone in a cabin beside Walden Pond for nearly two years, is one of the most influential books ever written. The bible of the environmental movement, Walden vividly portrays Thoreau's reverence for nature, and his understanding of the idea that nature is made up of crucially interrelated parts.

Love and death cohabit in The Use of Photography, with alternating chapters by the two authors. First published in France in 2005, the book recounts a passionate love affair between Ernaux and the journalist and author Marc Marie, after the two met in January 2003. Ernaux had been receiving intensive chemo for breast cancer during the prior three months and had lost all her hair from the treatments. At the end of January, she had surgery, followed by radiation therapy.

Drawing on deep archival research and decades of scholarship, Ann Schmiesing tells the affecting story of how the Grimms’ ambitious projects gave the brothers a sense of self-preservation through the atrocities of the Napoleonic Wars and a series of personal losses.

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.

In this inspirational and unflinchingly honest memoir, acclaimed author Reyna Grande describes her childhood torn between the United States and Mexico, and shines a light on the experiences, fears, and hopes of those who choose to make the harrowing journey across the border. Reyna Grande vividly brings to life her tumultuous early years in this “compelling...unvarnished, resonant” (BookPage) story of a childhood spent torn between two parents and two countries.

Begin Again is one of the great books on James Baldwin and a powerful reckoning with America’s ongoing failure to confront the lies it tells itself about race. Just as in Baldwin’s “after times,” argues Eddie S. Glaude Jr., when white Americans met the civil rights movement’s call for truth and justice with blind rage and the murders of movement leaders, so in our moment were the Obama presidency and the birth of Black Lives Matter answered with the ascendance of Trump and the violent resurgence of white nationalism.

La Batalla por el Templo es un viaje a la vida de Jacobo Grinberg narrado por él mismo, desde su infancia y juventud, pasando por la enfermedad de su madre —misma que lo motivó a dedicarse al estudio del cerebro y la conciencia—, hasta su vínculo con su esposa, Lizette, y su hija, Estusha. Así como sus momentos más formativos y clave a lo largo de su trayectoria laboral, sus largos años de trabajo a lado de chamanes como Pachita, cabalistas en Israel y demás sabios de tradiciones antiguas, que lo llevaron a ser el extraordinario hombre que fue.

If F. Scott Fitzgerald was the hero of the Jazz Age, Edna St. Vincent Millay, as flamboyant in her love affairs as she was in her art, was its heroine. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Millay was dazzling in the performance of herself. Her voice was likened to an instrument of seduction, and her impact on crowds and on men was legendary. Yet beneath her studied act, all was not well.

Dedicated to the daughter she never had but sees all around her, Letter to My Daughter reveals Maya Angelou's path to living well and living a life with meaning. Told in her own inimitable style, this book transcends genres and categories: guidebook, memoir, poetry, and pure delight. Here in short spellbinding essays are glimpses of the tumultuous life that led Angelou to an exalted place in American letters and taught her lessons in compassion and fortitude.

Ian Fleming's greatest creation, James Bond, has had an enormous and ongoing impact on our culture. What Bond represents about ideas of masculinity, the British national psyche and global politics has shifted over time, as has the interpretation of the life of his author. But Fleming himself was more mysterious and subtle than anything he wrote.

This telling of the story of Jane's life shows us how and why she lived as she did, examining the places and spaces that mattered to her. It wasn't all country houses and ballrooms, but a life that was often a painful struggle. Jane famously lived a 'life without incident', but with new research and insights Lucy Worsley reveals a passionate woman who fought for her freedom. A woman who far from being a lonely spinster in fact had at least five marriage prospects, but who in the end refused to settle for anything less than Mr Darcy.

"Best Book of 2006 (Non-fiction)"..."shockingly honest, brilliantly written"-----NOTED PRINCETON FILM/BOOK CRITIC KAM WILLIAMS Never ending controversy surrounded this bestseller by KOLA BOOF. Many were spellbound by more than 90 pages detailing her terrifying experience as Osama Bin Laden's former mistress. But the Sudanese-born Novelist/Poet writes even more profoundly about the hardships of being vaginally circumcised, about witnessing her birth parents killed in her presence as a small child, about slavery and Arabism in Sudan, about being adopted and raised in the U.S. by African ...

هل كانت تجارب الروائي الفرنسي «مارسيل پروست» الشخصية صالحة لتغيير حياة أيّ إنسان؟! هذا سؤال قد تسأله لنفسك عند قراءة عنوان هذا الكتاب، لكن الكاتب والفيلسوف البريطاني الشهير «آلان دو بوتون» لا يتركك في حيرتك ويشرع في تناول أفكار كتابه؛ ليشرح لك «كيف يمكن لپروست أن يغير حياتك!».

على خطى والده الشيخ ناصيف اليازجي، عشق ابراهيم كتابة الشعر منذ صباه وقد لازمه هذا العشق حتى ريعان شبابه... ويقال إن إبراهيم، قد تتلمذ على يدي والده، الذي أخذ عنه العلم وسعة الأدب والثقافة والتفقه في اللغة، فضلا على حفظه للقرآن الكريم، باعتبار أن والده، الشيخ ناصيف، كان من حفظة كتاب الله العزيز، مما مكنه من الغوص في بحر اللغة واكتساب فصاحة لم تكن عند أحد غيره من أدباء عصره، رغم أنه كان مسيحيا.