Biography & Autobiography : Literary

A literary and visual overview of the experiences of the Bloomsbury group of writers and artists, including Virginia Woolf, Duncan Grant, Clive Bell, Roger Fry and Dora Carrington. In particular, this work describes their travels in France which shaped much of their thinking, painting and writing. more...

Price: $29.95

The Stracheys were an exceptionally intelligent and unusual family. Prominent in imperial administration, science, and feminism in the nineteenth century, and in the suffrage movement, women's education, and the bringing of new approaches to sexuality in the twentieth century, they had a wide and significant influence. Examining Lytton Strachey, his parents and nine siblings, Barbara Caine provides a fascinating picture of a diverse and complex family in a period of change from. Victorian England to the beat generation. - ;The Stracheys were an exceptionally intelligent and unusual family, prominent in imperial administration, science, and feminism in the nineteenth century, and in the suffrage movement, women's education, and the bringing of new approaches to sexuality in the twentieth century. The Strachey Family examines the lives of Lytton Strachey, a well-known member of the Bloomsbury set, his nine siblings, and his parents. Richard Strachey worked in India, marrying Jane, the daughter of the Indian Chief Justice, in 1859. A successful imperial couple, they were progressive, following the ideas of Auguste Comte and J. S. Mill, and the teachings of science. Their ten children were born over a period of 27 years and reflect the development and changes in a Victorian society moving to modernity. The richness of their letters provides a fascinating picture of a large, complex, and diverse family where attitudes to the. family name, gender tensions, differing views on sexuality, ideas on modernity, and varying degrees of support for feminism all played a part. Dick Strachey, the eldest son, had an unsuccessful military career in India but a loving marriage, whereas Oliver announced to horrified parents that he wished to learn the piano and give music lessons, eventually finding success as a code-breaker in both world wars. Elinor, married to a man of wealth and position, devoted her life exclusively to family and social life, whilst Ralph, Chief Surveyor in more...

Price: $31.50

The “tell-all” memoir takes on new meaning in the work of poet William Kloefkorn, whose accounts of the moments and movements of life touch on everything that matters, the prosaic and the profound, the extraordinary in the everyday, and the familiar in the new and strange. The fourth and final installment in Kloefkorn’s reflections, Breathing in the Fullness of Time, departs from the elements ruling the other volumes—water, fire, and earth—and floats its insights and observations, its memories and anecdotes on the now wild, now whispering element of air. more...

Price: $22.95

A tribute to New York City's most literary borough-featuring original nonfiction pieces by today's most celebrated writers. Of all the urban landscapes in America, perhaps none has so thoroughly infused and nurtured modern literature as Brooklyn. Though its literary history runs deep-Walt Whitman, Truman Capote, and Norman Mailer are just a few of its storied inhabitants-in recent years the borough has seen a growing concentration of bestselling novelists, memoirists, poets, and journalists. It has become what Greenwich Village once was for an earlier generation: a wellspring of inspiration and artistic expression. Brooklyn Was Mine gives some of today's best writers an opportunity to pay tribute to the borough they love in 20 original essays that draw on past and present to create a mosaic that brilliantly captures the quality and diversity of a unique, literary landscape. Contributors include: Emily Barton, Susan Choi, Rachel Cline, Philip Dray, Jennifer Egan,Colin Harrison, Joanna Hershon, Jonathan Lethem, Dinaw Mengestu, Elizabeth Gaffney, Lara Vapnyar, Lawrence Osborne, Katie Roiphe, John Burnham Schwartz, Vijay Seshadri, Darcey Steinke, Darin Strauss, Alexandra Styron, Robert Sullivan, Michael Thomas more...

Price: $15.00

After a prolific life as an author with a European reputation, outselling Dickens, Edward Bulwer Lytton was ennobled and, on his death, buried in Westminster Abbey. Since the First World War, however, his literary reputation has sunk and he is now little read. Bulwer Lytton is the first modern biography of an extraordinary man whose literary output was prodigious. It ranged from novels, such as The Last Days of Pompeii, and poetry to plays, biographies and extensive political commentaries and journalism. A dandy to rival Disraeli, he lived life in London, at Knebworth, his country house, or more frequently abroad, with hectic intensity. Arousing strong emotions in public, his private life was turbulent in the extreme; his acrimonious and bitter divorce from his wife Rosina providing one of the most public and prolonged marital disputes of the period. Despite this, he became Secretary for the Colonies in 1858 and was responsible for the setting up of Queensland. Leslie Mitchell's biography, written to mark the two hundredth anniversary of Bulwer Lytton's birth, is an account of an eminent and very remarkable Victorian. more...

Price: $160.00