The portrayal of Stephen Dedalus's Dublin childhood and youth, his quest of identity through art and his gradual emancipation from the claims of his family, religion and Ireland itself, is also an oblique self-portrait of the young James Joyce and a testament to the artist's "eternal imagination".
"The Autogiography of Alice B. Toklas" is in fact Gertrude Stein's own autobiography, seen through the eyes of her friend, Alice B. Toklas. With occasional glimpses into her early life, it describes her years in Paris until 1932.
THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE BESTSELLER 'Out of the secret world I once knew, I have tried to make a theatre for the larger worlds we inhabit. First comes the imagining, then the search for reality. Then back to the imagining, and to the desk where I'm sitting now.' From his years serving in British Intelligence during the Cold War, to a career as a writer that took him from war-torn Cambodia to Beirut on the cusp of the 1982 Israeli invasion, to Russia before and after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, John le Carre has always written from the heart of modern times. In this, his first memoir, le Carre is as funny as he is incisive - reading into the events he witnesses the same moral ambiguity with which he imbues his novels. Whether he's writing about the parrot at a Beirut hotel that could perfectly mimic machine gun fire, or visiting Rwanda's museums of the unburied dead in the aftermath of the genocide, or celebrating New Year's Eve with Yasser Arafat, or interviewing a German terrorist in her desert prison in the Negev, or watching Alec Guinness preparing for his role as George Smiley, or describing the female aid worker who inspired the main character in his The Constant Gardener , le Carre endows each happening with vividness and humour, now making us laugh out loud, now inviting us to think anew about events and people we believed we understood. Best of all, le Carre gives us a glimpse of a writer's journey over more than six decades, and his own hunt for the human spark that has given so much life and heart to his fictional characters. 'No other writer has charted - pitilessly for politicians but thrillingly for readers - the public and secret histories of his times' Guardian 'John le Carre is as recognizable a writer as Dickens or Austen' Financial Times 'When I was under house arrest I was helped by the books of John le Carre ... they were a journey into the wider world ... These were the journeys that made me feel that I was not really cut off from the rest of humankind' Aung San Suu Kyi
Contains three books - "My Family and Other Animals", "Birds, Beasts and Relatives" and "The Garden of the Gods". Offering portraits of the author's family and their many unusual hangers-on, this work also captures the beginnings of his lifelong love of animals.
Every Thursday morning in a living room in Iran, over tea and pastries, eight women meet in secret to discuss forbidden works of Western literature. As they lose themselves in the worlds of Lolita, The Great Gatsby and Pride and Prejudice, gradually they come to share their own stories, dreams and hopes with each other, and, for a few hours, taste freedom. Azar Nafisi''s bestselling memoir is a moving, passionate testament to the transformative power of books, the magic of words and the search for beauty in life''s darkest moments.>
An autobiography, in which the author - painter, photographer, sculptor, film maker and writer - relates the story of his life, from his childhood determination to be an artist and his technical drawing classes in a Brooklyn high school, to the glamorous and heady days of Paris in the 1940s.
A memoir that offers a picture of the author's growing up in a bourgeois French family, rebelling as an adolescent against the conventional expectations of her class, and striking out on her own with an intellectual and existential ambition exceedingly rare in a young woman in the 1920s.
Gabrielle Coco Chanel was many things to many people. Raised in emotional and financial poverty, she became one of the defining figures of the twentieth century. She was mistress to aristocrats and spies. She broke rules of style and decorum, seducing both men and women, in her work expected the highest standards. This title presents her portrait.
An autobiographical volume covering Nabokov's first 40 years up to his departure from Europe for America at the outset of World War II, telling of his emergence as a writer, his early loves and his marriage, his passion for butterflies and his lost homeland.
In The English Jeremy Paxman sets out to find about the English. Not the British overall, not the Scots, not the Irish or Welsh, but the English. Why do they seem so unsure of who they are? Jeremy Paxman is to many the embodiment of Englishness yet even he is sometimes forced to ask: who or what exactly are the English? And in setting about addressing this most vexing of questions, Paxman discovers answers to a few others. Like: Why do the English actually enjoy feeling persecuted? What is behind the English obsession with games? How did they acquire their odd attitudes to sex and to food? Where did they get their extraordinary capacity for hypocrisy? Covering history, attitudes to foreigners, sport, stereotypyes, language and much, much more, The English brims over with stories and anecdotes that provide a fascinating portrait of a nation and its people. 'Intelligent, well-written, informative and funny...A book to chew on, dip into, quote from and exploit in arguments' Andrew Marr, Observer 'Bursting with good things' Daily Telegraph Jeremy Paxman is a journalist, best known for his work presenting Newsnight and University Challenge. His books include Empire , On Royalty , The English and The Political Animal . He lives in Oxfordshire.
George Orwell was an inveterate keeper of diaries. The Orwell Diaries presents eleven of them, covering the period 1931-1949, and follows Orwell from his early years as a writer to his last literary notebook. An entry from 1931 tells of a communal shave in the Trafalgar Square fountains, while notes from his travels through industrial England show the development of the impassioned social commentator.
This same acute power of observation is evident in his diaries from Morocco, as well as at home, where his domestic diaries chart the progress of his garden and animals with a keen eye; the wartime diaries, from descriptions of events overseas to the daily violence closer to home, describe astutely his perspective on the politics of both, and provide a new and entirely refreshing insight into Orwell's character and his great works.
Presents the author's journey from Cairo to Cape Town. This book describes a trip where chance encounter is everything, where departure and arrival times are an irrelevance, and where contentment can be found balancing on the top of a truck in the middle of nowhere.
SUNDAY TIMES TOP TEN BESTSELLER Beloved travel writer Paul Theroux turns his attention to America, exploring the landscapes and communities of his homeland as an outsider for the first time For the past fifty years, Paul Theroux has travelled to the far corners of the earth - to China, India, Africa, the Pacific Islands, South America, Russia, and elsewhere - and brought them to life in his cool, exacting prose. In Deep South he turns his gaze to a region much closer to his home. Travelling through North and South Carolina, Georgia, Tennessee, Mississippi, Alabama and Arkansas, Paul Theroux writes of the stunning landscapes he discovers - the deserts, the mountains, the Mississippi - and above all, the lives of the people he meets. The South is a place of contradictions. There is the warm, open spirit of the soul food cafes, found in every town, no matter how small. There is the ruined grandeur of numberless ghostly towns, long abandoned by the industries that built them. There are the state gun shows and the close-knit,subtly forlorn tribe of people who attend and run them. Deep in the heart of his native country, Theroux discovers a land more profoundly foreign than anything he has previously experienced.
'I am most grateful for two things: that I was born in North Korea, and that I escaped from North Korea.' Yeonmi Park was not dreaming of freedom when she escaped from North Korea. She didn't even know what it meant to be free. All she knew was that she was running for her life, that if she and her family stayed behind they would die - from starvation, or disease, or even execution. This book is the story of Park's struggle to survive in the darkest, most repressive country on earth; her harrowing escape through China's underworld of smugglers and human traffickers; and then her escape from China across the Gobi desert to Mongolia, with only the stars to guide her way, and from there to South Korea and at last to freedom; and finally her emergence as a leading human rights activist - all before her 21st birthday. 'Clear-eyed and devastating' Observer
Following the tracks, holloways, drove-roads and sea paths that form part of a ancient network of routes criss-crossing the British Isles and beyond, the author discovers a lost world - a landscape of the feet and the mind, of pilgrimage and ritual, of stories and ghosts.
'I adored this book, and I could quote from it forever. It's real, odd, life-affirming, sharp, loving, and contains more than one reference to Arsenal FC' Nick Hornby,The Believer 'Adrian Mole meets Mary Poppins mashed up in literary north London . . .
Little Failure is Gary Shteyngart's bestselling and very funny memoir. A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER In 1979 seven-year-old Gary Shteyngart and his parents left the Soviet Union for the consumerist paradise of America. As good Russian Jews, Gary's parents were determined that he make something of himself. As a diminutive asthmatic with a runny nose, Gary knew his was to be a life of spectacular disappointments. He wasn't wrong. In Little Failure he reveals how, by ending up a prize-winning novelist, he visited great shame on his family. 'Dazzling, exquisitely charted. Time spent with Shteyngart is like being with Woody Allen on speed: razor-sharp, funny and deeply moving' Mail on Sunday 'A marvel of a story. His finest book yet' Zadie Smith 'An immigrant story, a coming-of-age story, a becoming-a-writer story. Dazzling' Meg Wolitzer Gary Shteyngart was born in Leningrad in 1972. In 2007 he was named one of Granta 's Best Young American novelists. His debut The Russian Debutante's Handbook was widely acclaimed (and won the National Jewish Book Award for Fiction), as were his second, Absurdistan (one of the 10 Best Books of the Year in the New York Times) and Super Sad True Love Story (which won the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize).
A tapestry of Elizabethan beliefs and obsessions, private passions and political intrigues. It leads you on a tour of the extraordinary, colorful and often violent world that shaped and informed Shakespeare's thinking.
Gives an account of the author's journey by rail through Asia. This work describes the many places, cultures, sights and sounds he experienced and the fascinating people he met. It also shows how he is drawn into conversation with fellow passengers, from Molesworth, while avoiding the forceful approaches of pimps and drug dealers.
Tells of the author's journey down the length of North and South America. Beginning on Boston's subway, this work depicts a voyage from ice-bound Massachusetts to the arid plateau of Argentina's most southerly tip, via pretty Central American towns and the ancient Incan city of Macchu Pichu.
Ryszard Kapuscinski has been writing about the people of Africa throughout his career. In this study, he sets out to create an account of post-colonial Africa seen as both a whole and as a location, defying generalized explanations, and avoiding the official routes, palaces and big politics.
