National Book Award-winning biographer Deirdre Bair explores her fifteen remarkable years in Paris with Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir, painting intimate new portraits of two literary giants and revealing secrets of the biographical art.In 197...

From the National Book Award-winning author of Just Kids and M Train, a profound, beautifully realized memoir in which dreams and reality are vividly woven into a tapestry of one transformative year.Following a run of New Year's concerts at San Franc...

An illuminating new biography of one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Bishop Elizabeth Bishop's friend James Merrill once observed that "Elizabeth had more talent for life—and for poetry—than anyone else ...

A unique exploration of the life and work of Rudyard Kipling in Gilded Age America, from a celebrated scholar of American literature At the turn of the twentieth century, Rudyard Kipling towered over not just English literature, but the entire litera...

An authoritative, wide-ranging, and incredibly timely history of 1984--its literary sources, its composition by Orwell, its deep and lasting effect on the Cold War, and its vast influence throughout world culture at every level, from high to pop.1984...

In Furious Hours, Casey Cep unravels the mystery surrounding Harper Lee's first and only work of nonfiction, and the shocking true crimes at the center of it"A triumph on every level . . . Casey Cep has excavated this mesmerizing story and tells it w...

The definitive, fascinating, all-reaching biography of Dr. Seuss. Dr. Seuss is a classic American icon. Whimsical and wonderful, his work has defined our childhoods and the childhoods of our own children. The silly, simple rhymes are a bottomless wel...

In arguably his most personal and lasting book, America's most daringly original and controversial critic gives us brief, luminous readings of more than eighty texts by canonical authors-- texts he has had by heart since childhood.Gone are the polemi...

"Enthralling . . . A page-turner that can hold its own with any one of the many murder-minded podcasts out there."—JezebelFrom the acclaimed biographer--the fascinating, little-known story of a Victorian-era murder that rocked literary London, ...

From the bestselling author of Operating Instructions and Bird by Bird comes a chronicle of faith and spirituality that is at once tough, personal, affectionate, wise and very funny.With an exuberant mix of passion, insight, and humor, Anne Lamott ta...

“Astonishing, powerful, so important at this time.” --Margaret Atwood, via TwitterThe powerful story of a young poet who becomes an activist through a trial by fireWhat You Have Heard is True is a devastating, lyrical, and visionary memoi...

A lost nineteenth-century literary life, brilliantly rediscovered--Letitia Elizabeth Landon, hailed as the female Byron; she changed English poetry; her novels, short stories, and criticism, like Byron though in a woman's voice, explored the dark sid...