Biography & Autobiography : Literary

On New Year's Day, 1973, Joyce Carol Oates began keeping a journal that she maintains to this present day. When the journals began, 34–year–old Oates was already a recipient of the National Book Award (1969), with many O. Henry awards, and others, under her literary belt. For all her warm critical reception, however, the author had been (and would remain) fairly reticent about the personal details of her life and background. Housed in her archive at Syracuse University, the journals run to more than 5,000 single–spaced typewritten pages. This volume focuses on excerpts from that first decade, 1973–1983, one of the most productive of Oates's long career. Far more than a daily account of her writing life, the journals offer a candid discussion of Oates' many friendships with other well–known writers –– Philip Roth, Anne Sexton, John Updike, and many others; she describes her teaching, her relationship to the natural world, her family, her vast reading, her critics, her travels, and other topics central to her life during this time. What emerges is a fascinating portrait of the artist as a young woman, fully engaged with her world and her culture, a writer who paradoxically fancied herself "invisible" but who was quickly becoming one of the most respected, discussed, and controversial figures in American letters. more...

Price: $19.95

Though Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's name is recognized the world over, for decades the man himself has been overshadowed by his better understood creation, Sherlock Holmes, who has become one of literature's most enduring characters. Based on thousands of previously unavailable documents, Andrew Lycett, author of the critically acclaimed biography Dylan Thomas, offers the first definitive biography of the baffling Conan Doyle, finally making sense of a long-standing mystery: how the scientifically minded creator of the world's most rational detective himself succumbed to an avid belief in spiritualism, including communication with the dead. Conan Doyle was a man of many contradictions. Always romantic, energetic, idealistic and upstanding, he could also be selfish and fool-hardy. Lycett assembles the many threads of Conan Doyle's life, including the lasting impact of his domineering mother and his wayward, alcoholic father; his affair with a younger woman while his wife lay dying; and his nearly fanatical pursuit of scientific data to prove and explain various supernatural phenomena. Lycett reveals the evolution of Conan Doyle's nature and ideas against the backdrop of his intense personal life, wider society and the intellectual ferment of his age. In response to the dramatic scientific and social transformations at the turn of the century, he rejected traditional religious faith in favor of psychics and seances -- and in this way he embodied all of his late-Victorian, early-Edwardian era's ambivalence about the advance of science and the decline of religion. The first biographer to gain access to Conan Doyle's newly released personal archive -- which includes correspondence, diaries, original manuscripts and more -- Lycett combines assiduous research with penetrating insight to offer the most comprehensive, lucid and sympathetic portrait yet of Conan Doyle's personal journey from student to doctor, from world-famous author to ardent spi more...

Price: $24.99

'Tis is the story of Frank's American journey from impoverished immigrant to brilliant teacher and raconteur. Frank lands in New York at age nineteen, in the company of a priest he meets on the boat. He gets a job at the Biltmore Hotel, where he immediately encounters the vivid hierarchies of this 'classless country', and then is drafted into the army and is sent to Germany to train dogs and type reports. It is Frank's incomparable voice - his uncanny humor and his astonishing ear for dialogue - that renders these experiences spellbinding. more...

Price: $9.99

The Voice of Harriet Taylor Mill is a work about collaboration: Harriet's life with her lover, friends, and members of her family; Harriet's joint work with John Stuart Mill; the author's interaction with the reader. Jacobs explores and expands the concept of biography using Salman Rushdie's analogy of history as a process of 'chutnification'. She gives Harriet's life 'shape and form - that is to say, meaning' in a way that will 'possess the authentic taste of truth'. more...

Price: $31.95

For Anyone Who's Ever Been a Teenager. Who's teenage years weren't terrible? Remember the scary older kids? The sadistic gym teacher? The smelly kid who sat next to you in science class? Your first fumbling kiss? That time you threw up in the cafeteria? Your first attempt at putting on a condom? The period that arrived unexpectedly? That awful fight with your parents? The first time you got drunk? That note you wrote that you shouldn't have written? The day you forgot to zip your fly? That monster zit? When, you wondered, would it all end? more...

Price: $11.99