Biography & Autobiography : Literary

A haunting and triumphant story of a difficult and keenly felt life, Change Me into Zeus's Daughter is a remarkable literary memoir of resilience, redemption, and growing up in the South. Barbara Robinette Moss was the fourth in a family of eight children raised in the red-clay hills of Alabama. Their wild-eyed, alcoholic father was a charismatic and irrationally proud man who, when sober, captured his children's timid awe, but when (more often) drunk, roused them from bed for severe punishment or bizarre all-night poker games. Their mother was their angel: erudite and stalwart -- her only sin her inability to leave her husband for the sake of the children. more...

Price: $15.00

Definitive, concise, and very interesting... From William Shakespeare to Winston Churchill, the Very Interesting People series provides authoritative bite-sized biographies of Britain's most fascinating historical figures - people whose influence and importance have stood the test of time. Each book in the series is based upon the biographical entry from the world-famous Oxford Dictionary of National Biography. - more...

Price: $8.95

Charles Dickens's public readings have not had the attention they deserve; and yet Dickens put as much effort into perfecting his performances as he did with his novels. These performances were sensational events and won Dickens thousands of new admirers. This book tells that story and brings the events alive, with more detail than ever before. - ;Charles Dickens had three professional careers: novelist, journalist and public Reader. That third career has seldom been given the serious attention it deserved. For the last 12 years of his life he toured Britain and America giving 2-hour readings from his work to audiences of over two thousand. These readings were highly dramatic performances in which Dickens's great gift for mimicry enabled him to represent the looks and voices of his characters, to the point where audiences. forgot they were watching Charles Dickens. His novels came alive on the platform: at the end of a reading, it seemed to many that a whole society had broken up rather than that a solitary recitalist had concluded. This book tries to recreate, in greater detail than hitherto, the sense of how those. readings were performed and how they were received, how Dickens devised his stage set and tailored his books to make them into performance scripts, how he conducted his reading tours all around the country and developed a quite extraordinary rapport with his listeners. No single study of this late career of Dickens has drawn to such an extent on contemporary witnesses to the readings as well as tried to assess in some depth the significance of what Dickens called 'this new expression of the. meaning of my books'. 'I shall tear myself to pieces', he said as he waited eagerly to go on stage for his performance, and that is ironically what he did, in ways he perhaps had not quite intended: he fractured into dozens of different characters up there on the platform, and as he thus tore himself to. pieces his health collapsed irretrieva more...

Price: $45.00

Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy is an exploration of G.K. Chesterton's imaginative and spiritual development, from his early childhood in the 1870s to his intellectual maturity in the first decade of the twentieth century. William Oddie draws extensively on Chesterton's unpublished letters and notebooks, his journalism, and his early classic writings. - ;On the publication of Orthodoxy in 1908, Wilfrid Ward hailed G. K. Chesterton as a prophetic figure whose thought was to be classed with that Burke, Butler, Coleridge, and John Henry Newman. When Chesterton died in 1936, T. S. Eliot pronounced that 'Chesterton's social and economic ideas were the ideas for his time that were fundamentally Christian and Catholic'. But how did he come by these ideas? Eliot noted that Chesterton attached 'significance also to his development, to his. beginnings as well as to his ends, and to the movement from one to the other'. It is on that development that this book is focused. Chesterton and the Romance of Orthodoxy is an exploration of G.K. Chesterton's imaginative and spiritual development, from his early childhood in the 1870s to his intellectual maturity in the first decade of the twentieth century. William Oddie draws extensively on Chesterton's unpublished letters and notebooks, his journalism, and his early classic writings, to reveal the writer in his own words. In the first major study of Chesterton to draw on this source material, Oddie charts the. progression of Chesterton's ideas from his first story (composed at the age of three and dictated to his aunt Rose) to his apologetic masterpiece Orthodoxy, in which he openly established the intellectual foundations on which the prolific writing of his last three decades would build. Part One explores the years of Chesterton's obscurity; his childhood, his adolescence, his years as a student and a young adult. Part Two examines Chesterton's emergence on to the public stage more...

Price: $50.00

A candid, colorful memoir about a nerd from the Brooklyn projects who made it big. Nelson George grew up in the Tilden housing project in the crime- and despair-ridden Brownsville section of Brooklyn during the 1960s and 70s. In this tough neighborhood, Nelson was the nerdy kid who, in between stickball and street games, devoured Captain America comics, Ernest Hemingway novels, and album liner notes. City Kid introduces us to Nelson’s family: his absent wanna-be-hustler father; his tough-minded sister, who is seduced by the streets; and his mother, who dreams of becoming a teacher and returning to the South. Amid the struggles of his family, Nelson finds himself drawn into the world of black pop culture, first as a writer and then as a filmmaker, eventually collaborating with some of the major figures of the era—Spike Lee, Russell Simmons, Chris Rock, and many others. Nelson’s story is ultimately one of triumph, but it is not saccharine, sentimental, or full of false inspiration. Seeking transcendence through art and loving New York City, Nelson creates an insightful portrait of the emergence of black artists in the 1980s and 90s and illuminates how the pain of life can be turned into thoughtful books and cinema. more...

Price: $25.95