In this wry, candid, and sometimes poignant memoir, Peter Owen recalls his lonely Jewish boyhood in Nazi Germany and migration to England where he survived the London Blitz, a teenage dalliance with aspiring actress Fenella Fielding, and working with a motley variety of book publishers. He founded his eponymous publishing firm in 1951, becoming one of the youngest publishers in Britain. A pioneer of books on social themes, gay and lesbian writing, and literature in translation, Owen's authors included ten Nobel laureates and brought Hermann Hesse, Ezra Pound, and Anaïs Nin to a wider audience. Enjoying their success, he and his wife Wendy were memorably stylish and eccentric figures at the literary parties of the 1960s and 1970s. Owen describes his often hilarious encounters with many of those he published, including John Lennon, Yoko Ono, and Salvador Dalí, his adventures in Japan with Yukio Mishima and Shūsaku Endō, and in Morocco with Tennessee Williams and Paul and Jane Bowles. As one of the last of the great émigré publishers, his death in 2016 aged 89 signalled the end of a literary era.

Kings and Queens have always provided their subjects with a great deal to talk about. But how much do we really know about them? For instance, who became king when he was only nine months old? Which king invented the handkerchief? Which king died on the toilet? And who is England's longest reigning monarch? In this fascinating and witty look at kings and queens of England, Tony Robinson provides all the answers to these questions and many, many more.

"Manhattan is the tale of a young French scholar who travels to the United States in 1965 on a Fulbright Fellowship to consult the manuscripts of beloved authors. In Yale University's Beinecke Library, tantalized by the conversational and epistolary brilliance of a fellow researcher, she is lured into a picaresque and tragic adventure. Meanwhile, back in France, her children and no-nonsense mother await her return. A young European intellectual's first contact with America and the city of New York are the background of this story. The experience of Manhattan haunts this labyrinth of a book as, over a period of thirty-five years, its narrator visits and revisits Central Park and a half-buried squirrel, the Statue of Liberty and a never again to be found hotel in the vicinity of Morningside Heights: a journey into memory in which everything is never the same. Traveling from library to library, France to the United States, Shakespeare to Kafka to Joyce, Manhattan deploys with gusto all the techniques for which Cixous's fiction and essays are known: rapid juxtapositions of time and place, narrative and description, analysis and philosophical reflection. It investigates subjects Cixous has spent her life probing: reading, writing, and the "omnipotence-other" seductions of literature; a family's flight from Nazi Germany and postcolonial Algeria; childhood, motherhood, and, not least, the strange experience of falling in love with a counterfeit genius"--

The life story of this daring news reporter, globetrotter, and advocate for women's rights is presented chronologically from birth to death.

"At last, National Geographic's award-winning photobiography of Annie Oakley bursts into paperback. This stirring story of an enduring American heroine has won widespread acclaim and was named a School Library Journal Best Book of the Year. Annie's amazing life comes sharply into focus in a compelling narrative, period photography, and in her own words. Two historical maps and a chronology ground the legend in time and place. Readers ride through a life filled with adventure. Annie grows up in the backwoods of Ohio, hunting game to feed her family. Discovered by Buffalo Bill Cody's Wild West Show, she wows crowds with target shooting and daring horse riding. Annie's hardships are examined too, as is her inspirational status as a role model for women. Awards include:"American Library Association Notable BookBest Book of the Year―School Library JournalTexas Bluebonnet Award Master List

Tells the story of how wealthy businessman Julius Rosenwald came to financially support the building of 5,300 schools in rural African-American communities that desperately needed them over the course of twenty years.

In Joseph Epstein's fourth collection of literary essays, he considers the lives and works of 19 writers of note, appreciating many of them, roughing up some others, and overall weighing them in the very finely calibrated balance of his well-stocked mind. "The modern essay has regained a good deal of its literary status in our time, much to the credit of Joseph Epstein"., --"Chicago Tribune".

"Her parents moved her from Austria to Tokyo, Japan before she started school. They were all rendered stateless when Nazi Germany and Austria stripped Jews of their citizenship. She graduated high school fluent in Japanese plus four other languages and went to college in America at age 15. Cut off from her parents by the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, and America's entry into World War II, she went years not knowing if they were alive. She returned to post-war Japan as an interpreter, found her parents, and wrote the fateful words that make her a storied feminist hero in that nation even today. As Justice Sonia Sotomayor said about Beate Sirota Gordon, 'It is a rare life treat for a Supreme Court Justice to get to meet a framer of a Constitution. It is rarer indeed for that framer to have been a woman'"--

An aged Isaac recounts to his grandchildren the story of how God tested Abraham by asking him to sacrifice his son.

Howard Fast's life, from a rough-and-tumble Jewish New York street kid to the rich and famous author of close to 100 books, rivals the Horatio Alger myth. Author of bestsellers such as Citizen Tom Paine, Freedom Road, My Glorious Brothers, and Spartacus, Fast joined the American Communist Party in 1943 and remained a loyal member until 1957, despite being imprisoned for contempt of Congress. Gerald Sorin illuminates the connections among Fast's Jewishness, his writings, and his left-wing politics and explains Fast?s attraction to the Party and the reasons he stayed in it as long as he did. Recounting the story of his private and public life with its adventure and risk, love and pain, struggle, failure, and success, Sorin also addresses questions such as the relationship between modern Jewish identity and radical movements, the consequences of political myopia, and the complex interaction of art, popular culture, and politics in 20th-century America.

“I have read all of Daniel Aaron’s books, and admired them, but in The Americanist I believe he has composed an intellectual and social memoir for which he will be remembered. His self-portrait is marked by personal tact and admirable restraint: he is and is not its subject. The Americanist is a vision of otherness: literary and academic friends and acquaintances, here and abroad. Eloquently phrased and free of nostalgia, it catches a lost world that yet engendered much of our own.” —Harold Bloom “ The Americanist is the absorbing intellectual autobiography of Daniel Aaron, who is the leading proponent and practitioner of American Studies. Written with grace and wit, it skillfully blends Daniel Aaron’s personal story with the history of the field he has done so much to create. This is a first-rate book by a first-rate scholar.” —David Herbert Donald, Professor Emeritus, Harvard University The Americanist is author and critic Daniel Aaron’s anthem to nearly a century of public and private life in America and abroad. Aaron, who is widely regarded as one of the founders of American Studies, graduated from the University of Michigan, received his Ph.D. from Harvard, and taught for over three decades each at Smith College and Harvard. Aaron writes with unsentimental nostalgia about his childhood in Los Angeles and Chicago and his later academic career, which took him around the globe, often in the role of America’s accidental yet impartial critic. When Walt Whitman, whom Aaron frequently cites as a touchstone, wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes,” he could have been describing Daniel Aaron—the consummate erudite and Renaissance individual whose allegiance to the truth always outweighs mere partisan loyalty. Not only should Aaron’s book stand as a resplendent and summative work from one of the finest thinkers of the last hundred years, it also succeeds on its own as a first-rate piece of literature, on a par with the writings of any of its subjects. The Americanist is a veritable Who’s Who of twentieth-century writers Aaron interviewed, interacted with, or otherwise encountered throughout his life: Ralph Ellison, Robert Frost, Lillian Hellman, Richard Hofstadter, Alfred Kazin, Sinclair Lewis, Malcolm Muggeridge, John Crowe Ransom, Upton Sinclair, Edmund Wilson, Leonard Woolf, and W. B. Yeats, to name only a few. Aaron’s frank and personal observations of these literary lights make for lively reading. As well, scattered throughout The Americanist are illuminating portraits of American presidents living and passed—miniature masterworks of astute political observation that offer dazzlingly fresh approaches to well-trod subjects.

One afternoon in December 1992, Yuri Lotman sat down to dictate to his assistant. These sessions were spread out over that winter and into the spring of 1993—the final spring of Lotman's life. The result is this book of memories and recollections. Five sections concern a single anecdote or theme—lice on the front, an encounter with a hare, a "totally Bulgakovian" episode, a visit from the KGB, Tartu School politics. The remaining two sections supply the narrative backbone of the memoir, focusing on the passage of time: school and frontline life, the end of the war, and postwar university life. --

An eye-opening account of time served in the great battles of our century - for workers' rights, against Fascism, Communism, and racism - Jumping the Line is the life story of an American original. William Herrick relates his adventures and misadventures on the front lines of the Spanish Civil War, in (and very much out of) the Communist Party, driving a tractor on a communal farm in Michigan, jumping the line as a hobo, organizing African American sharecroppers in Georgia, at work with Orson Welles, and immersed in his own writing. When Paul Berman interviewed Herrick in the Village Voice in 1986, for the fiftieth anniversary of the Spanish Civil War, Herrick's remarks so incensed other veterans of the Abraham Lincoln battalion that they picketed the paper. What William Herrick has to say doesn't always go down easily. But for those who like the truth, with a dash of wit and a healthy dose of history, it can be exhilarating.

"A biography of Samuel Gompers, leader of the American Federation of Labor."--

A collection of lectures delivered in May 2002 under the auspices of the Samuel and Althea Stroum Lectures in Jewish Studies at the University of Washington. Analyzes autobiographical works of seven Jews from antiquity to the 20th century. Two of these reflect despair in the midst and in the wake of World War II. Ch. 4 (pp. 103-138), "Autobiography as Farewell I: Stefan Zweig, " discusses the Austrian Jewish writer, who committed suicide in 1942, as a non-Zionist universalist even in the face of Nazism. Pp. 131-136 deal with the persecution of the Jews. Ch. 5 (pp. 139-174), "Autobiography as Farewell II: Sarah Kofman, " discusses the life and works of Kofman, who committed suicide in 1994. Focuses on her "Rue Ordoner, Rue Labat" and her Holocaust experiences as a child in Paris. Her father was killed in Auschwitz, and Kofman was looked after by a Christian woman to whom she felt closer than her mother. Deals with the conflicts in Kofman's sexual and religious identities.