Publication date: 2008-04-17
RRP: £18.99
Price: £4.95
Review The House of Happy Endings / Jonathan Cape Ltd:
Publication date: 2006-10-02
RRP: £16.99
Price: £8.95
Review The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History / Fourth Estate Ltd:
Publication date: 2007-02-15
Dewey code: 820
RRP: £29.99
Price: £19.79
Review The Life and Works of David Lindsay / Cambridge University Press:
Edition: Reprint
Publication date: 2004-07-21
Dewey code: 813.54
RRP: £10.09
Price: £5.68
Review Algernon, Charlie, and I: A Writer's Journey / Harvest/HBJ Book:
Publication date: 2002-10-25
Dewey code: 843.912
Price: £24.95
Review The World of Proust, as Seen by Paul Nadar / MIT Press:
Publication date: 2003-03-20
Dewey code: 920
RRP: £14.99
Price: £11.00
Review A Spoilt Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood / Orion:
Publication date: 2005-05-01
Dewey code: 823.912
RRP: £22.50
Price: £2.50
Review Before Leonard: The Early Suitors of Virginia Woolf / Peter Owen Ltd:
Creator: Dan H. Laurence
Publication date: 1988-06
RRP: £30.00
Price: £72.61
Review Collected Letters: 1926-50 v. 4 (Bernard Shaw: collected letters) / The Bodley Head Ltd:
Publication date: 2001-05
Dewey code: 810
RRP: £9.99
Price: £6.59
Review Edith Wharton (Writers & Their Work) / Northcote House Publishers Ltd:
Publication date: 1998-10-15
RRP: £20.00
Price: £12.99
Review A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women & his Art / Chatto and Windus:Biography is one of the tastes of the age, but it is rare to read a biography that is as gripping as a novel. Happily, Lyndall Gordon's account of the life of Henry James provides an exception to this rule. Gordon takes us to the heart of James's emotional life by detailing his relationships with two extraordinary women with whom he was particularly close. First was James's cousin, Mary Temple, a brilliant young woman whose death of tuberculosis in 1870 at the age of 24 profoundly affected James. The second woman was Constance Fenimore Woolson, a minor novelist whom James befriended in his middle years, and who ended her own life (it seems) by throwing herself out of an upstairs window in Venice in 1894. James acted secretively and strangely about his relationships with both these women (the book opens with the striking scene of James being rowed into the deepest part of the Venetian lagoon to drown all Fenimore Woolson's dresses shortly after her death-why would he do such a thing, we wonder?); and Gordon's biography is an attempt to unravel what these two relationships meant to James-a highly civilised man, shy and rather repressed about his homosexuality. As Gordon says, by focusing on what it is that James tried to "screen" from the world, we discover a "more compelling and dangerous character, as well as a new reading of the major novels. " Gordon is always scholarly, and never surrenders her writing to sensationalising or caricature. Yet she is never less than gripping, with each of the main characters analysed in a sensitive and rounded manner, and the mystery at the heart of the relationships explored without being crassly exploded. And, best of all, Gordon writes superbly-this is probably the most beautifully written biography I have ever read, and the elegant, poised sentences go some way to capturing the subtle complexities of its themes. [+]It is a piece of writing worthy of "the Master" himself. -Adam Roberts.
Creator: John Johnson
Publication date: 2007-10-31
Dewey code: 920
RRP: £34.93
Price: £24.57
Review Memoirs of the Life and Writings of William Hayley V2: The Friend and Biographer of Cowper (1823): 2 / Kessinger Publishing:
Creator: Lawrence Lee
Edition: New Ed
Publication date: 1999-10-19
RRP: £10.00
Price: £3.99
Review Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac ("Rebel Inc") / Canongate Books Ltd:
Edition: New edition
Publication date: 1999-06-03
Dewey code: 823.912
RRP: £12.50
Price: £32.95
Review Lord Berners, The Last Eccentric / Pimlico:An author who invented a character like Berners for a novel would be accused of exaggeration. Reading this elegant biography of him gives the impression of a figure from a Margery Allingham novel or one of Evelyn Waugh's odder comedies-a shy, diminutive English Lord, a composer of Stravinsky influenced atonal music and a writer of novels and poems ("On the pale yellow sands / There's a pair of clasped hands / And an Eyeball tangled with string / Sing Fifty / Sing Forty" and so on). He was also friends with an impressive circle of artists, including Picasso and Dali and was no mean artist himself. But he put his real genius into his eccentricity, installing a clavichord in his car to facilitate composing, building a folly on his estate (the last constructed in England) and happily entertaining horses as well as people for tea. He also dyed his pigeons strange colours, hung Woolworth pearl necklaces around the necks of his dogs and ate a special recipe of blue mayonnaise. Mark Armory's biographical skill is in his sensitivity. His Berners is no mere caricature, but rather a complex man whose eccentricity was a response to depression. He had a lifelong terror of being bored and of boring others, because boredom was so close to despair. Amory's book never offends on that score. -Adam Roberts.
Publication date: 1990-08-08
Dewey code: 811.54
RRP: £6.99
Price: £21.95
Review Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath / Houghton Mifflin:
Publication date: 2002-05-20
RRP: £15.99
Price: £2.51
Review Wrong Rooms: A Memoir / Scribner:Wrong Rooms is a deeply moving memoir of what it means to watch the love of your life die before your very eyes. In 1992 Mark Sanderson, a respected writer on London magazine Time Out, had an unlucky love life which had left him feeling like "a pallid, lonely Englishman". Deciding to put an advert in a lonely hearts' column, he received a reply from an Australian called Drew, "a sci-fi-loving computer nerd who told lousy jokes". Inevitably he replied, and over the next two years, they fell in love. "Drew made me happier than I had ever been before. He took me to places I never expected to see" writes Sanderson. But in April 1994 Drew was diagnosed with skin cancer. Within three months he was dead. Wrong Rooms is the emotionally raw story of Sanderson's life with Drew, from domestic bliss through sickness and finally slow, painful death. The early sections of the book honestly evoke their blossoming relationship, as well as offering a deft portrait of gay life in 90s London. [+]Sanderson writes with a clarity and sincerity that is all the more extraordinary because of the contrast between his life before and after Drew: "we entered a grave new world of waiting rooms, consulting rooms, hospital wards and theatres. The facts that our lives had only just changed for the better made the shock even worse". In the final moments with Drew Sanderson "experienced true horror for the first time", and at times it feels almost too intimate to read on. The book is clearly a cathartic experience for Sanderson; it is also probably one of the most painfully honest books about the loss of a lover to be written in a long time. -Jerry Brotton.
Authors
- Doris May Lessing
- Stendhal
Publication date: 2003-05-07
Dewey code: 813
RRP: £7.99
Price: £4.00
Review Memoirs of an Egotist (Hesperus Classics) / Hesperus Press Ltd:
Publication date: 2007-08-20
RRP: £14.99
Price: £4.05
Review Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man / I B Tauris & Co Ltd:
Publication date: 1995-02-23
Dewey code: 823.8
RRP: £54.00
Price: £48.51
Review Mrs.Oliphant: A Fiction to Herself - A Literary Life / Clarendon Press:
Publication date: 1999-01-31
Dewey code: 823.914
Price: £15.43
Review Elegy for Iris / Saint Martin's Press:
Creator: Margaret Smith
Publication date: 2000-04-06
Dewey code: 823.8
RRP: £128.00
Price: £121.60
Review The Letters of Charlotte Bronte: 1848-1851 v.2: With a Selection of Letters by Family and Friends: 1848-1851 Vol 2 (Letters of Charlotte Bronte 1848-1851) / Clarendon Press:
| Browse Novelists, Poets & Playwrights:
Models & Brands:
The House of Happy Endings, The Discomfort Zone: A Personal History, The Life and Works of David Lindsay, Algernon, Charlie, and I: A Writer's Journey, The World of Proust, as Seen by Paul Nadar, A Spoilt Boy: A Memoir of a Childhood, Before Leonard: The Early Suitors of Virginia Woolf, Collected Letters: 1926-50 v. 4 (Bernard Shaw: collected letters), Edith Wharton (Writers & Their Work), A Private Life of Henry James: Two Women & his Art, Memoirs of the Life and Writings of William Hayley V2: The Friend and Biographer of Cowper (1823): 2, Jack's Book: An Oral Biography of Jack Kerouac ("Rebel Inc"), Lord Berners, The Last Eccentric, Bitter Fame: A Life of Sylvia Plath, Wrong Rooms: A Memoir, Memoirs of an Egotist (Hesperus Classics), Dante: The Poet, the Political Thinker, the Man, Mrs.Oliphant: A Fiction to Herself - A Literary Life, Elegy for Iris, The Letters of Charlotte Bronte: 1848-1851 v.2: With a Selection of Letters by Family and Friends: 1848-1851 Vol 2 (Letters of Charlotte Bronte 1848-1851) |
