The letters Kafka addressed to the woman to whom he was twice engaged make up a collection of some of the most startling "love letters" of our time. They form a revealing record of five crucial years in his life and of his relationship to the one woman who decisively influenced his writing. These letters will take their place alongside Kafka's major novels and stories.

"You're not doing it right." Writer/comedian Michael Ian Black has been hearing these five words all his life. And now--on the eve of his fortieth birthday--he is finally beginning to wonder why. As a husband and father living in the suburbs, Michael asks the question so many of us ask ourselves at one point or another: How did I end up here? (And also: If Fat Kevin Federline succumbs to his own wasted potential, what does that mean for the rest of us?) The answers to these questions, and others that you probably would have never thought to ask, are painstakingly detailed in Black's debut memoir. Darkly humorous and told with raw honesty, Michael shares his neuroses as he takes on his childhood, his marriage, his children, and his career with candor and deadpan wit in this funny-because-it's-true essay collection.--From publisher description.

'Perec is serious fun' The Guardian Both an affectionate portrait of mid-century Paris and a daring memoir, Georges Perec's I Remember is now available in English to UK readers for the first time, with an introduction by David Bellos. In 480 numbered statements, all beginning identically with 'I remember', Perec records a stream of individual memories of a childhood in post-war France, while posing wider questions about memory and nostalgia. As playful and puzzling as the best of his novels, I Remember is an ode to life: the ordinary, the extraordinary, and the sometimes trivial, as seen through the eyes of the irreplaceable Georges Perec.

Safe Conduct is Boris Pasternak's first and best autobiography, penned after the great success of Dr. Zhivago. Here translated by Alec Brown and Lydia Pasternak-Slater, and written when he was forty, Safe Conduct puzzled many readers in Russia and when it appeared in English, because its isolated sharp impressions and juxtapositions seem to deny chronology, but at least one critic recognized it as "the most original of autobiographies, employing a new technique of great important."

Book by Tenn, William

Norman Mailer, Susan Mailer's father, was among the most celebrated, talented, and controversial writers of the 20th Century. The Naked and the Dead (1948), inspired by his experience in World War II, was a bestseller and made him famous at the age of 25. Notoriously combative and egotistical, her father enjoyed a good fight both physically and verbally. Whether cheered or booed, Mailer was front and center in America's cultural battles for more than 50 years. He married six times and was father to nine children. Susan, born in 1949, is the eldest. Susan's parents separated when she was a baby. She grew up shuttling between her mother's home in Mexico and New York. Later she would marry a Chilean activist, spending the majority of her adult life in Chile, where she is a practicing psychoanalyst. In Another Place tells the story of her intense and complex relationship with her father, her five stepmothers and nine siblings, and the joys and pains of being part of the large Mailer clan. It is a tale of separation, and of the rewards and struggles of living in two very different cultures. Of being someone who belongs everywhere and nowhere, always longing for a life . . . In Another Place.

From the bestselling novelist and author of "The Invention of Solitude," a moving and highly personal meditation on the body, time, and language itself ""That is where the story begins, in your body, and everything will end in the body as well." Facing his sixty-third winter, internationally acclaimed novelist Paul Auster sits down to write a history of his body and its sensations--both pleasurable and painful. Thirty years after the publication of "The Invention of Solitude," in which he wrote so movingly about fatherhood, Auster gives us a second unconventional memoir in which he writes about his mother's life and death. "Winter Journal" is a highly personal meditation on the body, time, and memory, by one of our most intellectually elegant writers.

It's a book about show business, where fame is the stock in trade. Each year there are hundreds of stagestruck kids arrive in New York determined to crash the theatre, firmly convinced they're destined to be famous Broadway stars or playwrights.

It was Christmas Eve 1927 and Prohibition was at its height when Diana and Lionel Trilling, that distinguished literary pair, were introduced to each other. They met at a Manhattan speakeasy. Both were 22. Lionel was a graduate student at Columbia, taking his first tentative steps to a literary career. Diana hoped to be a singer. Soon after their marriage in 1929, the stock market crashed. Their families were in financial ruin. Not until the forties did Lionel attain literary recognition and Diana launch her career as fiction critic of the Nation. A long arduous decade had been lost to illness, financial hardship, grueling family responsibility. Also to the lure, and rejection, of Communism. The Beginning of the Journey takes its title from Lionel Trilling's famous novel, The Middle of the Journey. An uncommonly personal account of the upbringing, education, and marriage of two remarkable individuals, it is also a probing portrait of life among the group now so widely referred to as "the New York intellectuals." Mary McCarthy, Dwight Macdonald, William Phillips, Phillip Rahv, Edmund Wilson, James Agee, Sidney Hook, Randall Jarrell, Allen Ginsberg: these are but a few of the well-known figures whom we come to see through the eyes of someone who lived at the center of America's Bloomsbury. Although Mrs. Trilling chiefly deals with the intellectual culture of our century, the range of her memoir is not limited to this single section of society. The Beginning of the Journey speaks to questions of a kind which transcend social lines but which have been largely ignored by our literary biographers. What was it like, what was it really like, to be a woman in this predominantly male universe? What did it feel like to be as respected a critic as Diana Trilling but married to a man so much more celebrated than herself? What did a woman of her generation sacrifice for marriage and motherhood?

"In Another Place brings us to many remarkable new places in the Mailer universe. Written with tenderness, acuity and unadorned psychological depth, Susan Mailer's memoir is a powerful look at the literary world." -Colum McCann, National Book Award-winning author of Let the Great World Spin"Brisk, enthralling [. . .] full of dramatic family scenes, most of them heretofore unknown. I wish I had her memoir in hand when writing my biography." -J. Michael Lennon, author of Norman Mailer: A Double Life Norman Mailer, Susan Mailer's father, was among the most celebrated, talented, and controversial writers of the 20th Century. The Naked and the Dead (1948), inspired by his experience in World War II, was a bestseller and made him famous at the age of 25. Notoriously combative and egotistical, her father enjoyed a good ¿ght both physically and verbally. Whether cheered or booed, Mailer was front and center in America's cultural battles for more than 50 years. He married six times and was father to nine children. Susan, born in 1949, is the eldest.Susan's parents separated when she was a baby. She grew up shuttling between her mother's home in Mexico and New York. Later she would marry a Chilean activist, spending the majority of her adult life in Chile, where she is a practicing psychoanalyst.In Another Place tells the story of her intense and complex relationship with her father, her ¿ve stepmothers and nine siblings, and the joys and pains of being part of the large Mailer clan. It is a tale of separation, and of the rewards and struggles of living in two very di¿erent cultures. Of being someone who belongs everywhere and nowhere, always longing for a life . . . In Another Place.

With trenchant realism and profound understanding, Matthew Josephson presents in VICTOR HUGO the realistic biography of a great romantic who wrote Les Misérables and The Hunchback of Notre Name, among others. Of tremendous sweep and scope, it is a penetrating analysis of a literary titan, who as a political pamphleteer, playwright, novelist, and romantic lover, dominated his time, influenced his peers, and moved the hearts of men. Matthew Josephson, whose Stendhal, Zola, The Robber Barons, and Rousseau defined him as a master of the art of biography, has given us in VICTOR HUGO a highly readable account of this vigorous, zestful, and fruitful career. VICTOR HUGO is the final and definitive work on "France's prince of poets and lord of language." EARLIER BOOK REVIEWS "Matthew Joseph's third full-blown biography of a great French writer.is the best. There is more color and drive in it .because the materials are so rich." New York Times Book Review (1942) "Victor Hugo's varied and colorful career offered Josephson a perfect opportunity to display again his gift for spirited narrative and keen characterization. He skillfully traces Hugo's conversion from literary great to political hero. Along the way he adds texture to his portrait by interweaving the fascinating components of Hugo's personal life -his marriage to Adèle Foucher, his fifty-year liaison with Juliette Drouet, and his friendship and betrayal by Sainte-Beuve.Victor Hugo's life was a success story without parallel, and it provided an apotheosis of Josephson's point about the duty of writers in times of social and political crisis. The critics again praised Josephson's talents as a biographer." - David E. Shi, Matthew Josephson: Bourgeois Bohemian, Yale University Press, 1981

In this engrossing biography, acclaimed novelist Muriel Spark recreates Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley's turbulent life and career and persuasively defends the enigmatic writer's place among the giants of literary history.

D. H. Lawrence is recognized as one of the greatest novelists of this century. His work is taught in schools and universities all over the world. Yet, more than thirty years after the failure to ban Lady Chatterley's Lover in England fundamentally changed the moral climate of that country and of America, Lawrence remains a controversial figure. Regarded by many women during his lifetime as a sexual prophet, in recent years his supposed misogyny has drawn fierce condemnation from feminist critics. In this new biography of Lawrence, Elaine Feinstein explores his relationships with the women in his own life, many of whom have their counterparts in his novels. She traces the obsessive nature of his love for his mother, Lydia; his difficult relationship with his first sweetheart, Jessie Chambers; his pursuit of the bisexual Helen Corke; and the failure of his youthful engagement to Louisa Burrows. She gives a fascinating account of his long, battling marriage to Frieda von Richthofen; his friendships with women writers like Katherine Mansfield and Catherine Carswell; and the attachment to Lawrence of patronesses such as Lady Ottoline Morrell, Lady Cynthia Asquith and Mabel Dodge Luhan. Lawrence and the Women investigates the paradoxes of Lawrence's personality. He was considered to have a rare understanding of women's sexuality, yet his own sexual relationships were unusually difficult. He put all his faith in the energies of the body, yet his own was frail and sickly. He argued that women needed to submit to men, but he never succeeded in dominating his own wife, Frieda. With a novelist's eye for detail and uncanny intuition about character, Elaine Feinstein probes the sources of Lawrence's attitudes toward women with candor and compassion. Always responsive to the poetry and power of his writing, she offers a fresh and surprising portrait of one of the most misunderstood literary figures of our time.

Taken from the journals of distinguished writer Leonard Michaels, Time Out of Mind chronicles the author's life as a friend, lover, husband, and father. With wrenching dramatic intensity, it captures the character and the mind of an extraordinary talent -- from his days as a struggling young writer in Greenwich Village, through the turbulent Vietnam era, to his years as a professor of English literature at Berkeley. This is an unforgettable portrait of an artist in the world -- from one of the most acclaimed authors of our time.

This is the story of a rare sort of American genius, who grew up in grinding poverty in Camden, Maine. Nothing could save the sensitive child but her talent for words, music, and drama, and an inexorable desire to be loved. When she was twenty, her poetry would make her famous; at thirty she would be loved by readers the world over. Edna St. Vincent Millay was widely considered to be the most seductive woman of her age. Few men could resist her, and many women also fell under her spell. From the publication of her first poems until the scandal over Fatal Interview twenty years later, gossip about the poet's liberated lifestyle prompted speculation about who might be the real subject of her verses. Using letters, diaries, and journals of the poet and her lovers that have only recently become available, Daniel Mark Epstein tells the astonishing story of the life, dedicated to art and love, that inspired the sublime lyrics of Edna St. Vincent Millay.

The definitive memoir of Arthur Miller--the famous playwright of The Crucible , All My Sons , Death of a Salesman , A View from the Bridge , and other plays-- Timebends reveals Miller's incredible trajectory as a man and a writer. Born in 1915, Miller grew up in Harlem in the 1920s and 1930s, developed leftist political convictions during the Great Depression, achieved moral victory against McCarthyism in the 1950s, and became president of PEN International near the end of his life, fighting for writers' freedom of expression. Along the way, his prolific output established him as one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century--he wrote twenty-two plays, various screenplays, short stories, and essays, and won the Pulitzer Prize in 1949 for Death of a Salesman and the New York Drama Critics Circle Award in 1947 for All My Sons . Miller also wrote the screenplay for The Misfits, Marilyn Monroe's final film. This memoir also reveals the incredible host of notables that populated his life, including Marilyn Monroe, Elia Kazan, Clark Gable, Sir Laurence Olivier, John F. Kennedy, and Mikhail Gorbachev. Leaving behind a formidable reputation in the worlds of theater, cinema, and politics, Arthur Miller died in 2005 but his memoir continues his legacy.

"Distinguished theater critic John Lahr brings unique perspective to the life of Arthur Miller (1915-2005), the playwright who almost single-handedly propelled twentieth-century American theater into a new level of cultural sophistication. Organized around the fault lines of Miller's life--his family, the Great Depression, the rise of fascism, Elia Kazan and the House Committee on Un-American Activities, Marilyn Monroe, Vietnam, and the rise and fall of Miller's role as a public intellectual--this book demonstrates the synergy between Arthur Miller's psychology and his plays. Concentrating largely on Miller's most prolific decades of the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, Lahr probes Miller's early playwriting failures; his work writing radio plays during World War II after being rejected for military service; his only novel, Focus; and his succession of award-winning and canonical plays that include All My Sons, Death of a Salesman, and The Crucible, providing an original interpretation of Miller's work and his personality."--

With letters from Mordecai Richler, Mavis Gallant, and Brian Moore Getting Started is a wonderful memoir, a collection of extraordinary letters, and a brilliant recreation of a time when Canadian writers were set to make their mark in the world for the first time. Writer Brian Moore emigrated from Ireland to Canada in the late 1940s and found work at the Montreal Gazette, where he also found William Weintraub embarking upon a career as a freelance journalist. When he travelled to Paris, Weintraub saw an old friend and former Gazette writer, Mavis Gallant, who filled him in on the tribulations of the expatriate writer’s life ( “My room is enormous and the radiator very small indeed” ). Gallant introduced Weintraub to another Montreal writer, Mordecai Richler, also pursuing a career as a novelist while living a gloriously Bohemian life. Weintraub joined Richler for a while in Ibiza (he later introduced him to Brian Moore), and later they kept in touch. ( “Dear Bill: I got your highly unintellectual letter yesterday and it confirmed my suspicions that you slipped a chair under your arse in the Deux Magots as soon as you arrived in Paris and probably haven’t moved since.” ) In these years, Gallant had her short stories published for the first time in the New Yorker, Moore methodically churned out money-making thrillers while working on The Lonely Passion of Judith Hearne , and Richler wrote his first acclaimed book, The Acrobats . Weintraub, meanwhile, returned to Montreal, where he saw published his brilliant comic novel, Why Rock the Boat? William Weintraub weaves together his own memories of the 1950s with letters both to and from his literary colleagues. The letters and his recollections are always fascinating, often hilarious, and provide intimate insight into the lives and work of some of Canada’s finest contemporary writers. From the Hardcover edition.

A great critic’s quarrels with himself and others, as revealed in his correspondence In the mid-twentieth century, Lionel Trilling was America’s most respected literary critic. His powerful and subtle essays inspired readers to think about how literature shapes our politics, our culture, and our selves. His 1950 collection, The Liberal Imagination , sold more than 100,000 copies, epitomizing a time that has been called the age of criticism. To his New York intellectual peers, Trilling could seem reserved and circumspect. But in his selected letters, Trilling is revealed in all his variousness and complexity. We witness his ardent courtship of Diana Trilling, who would become an eminent intellectual in her own right; his alternately affectionate and contentious rapport with former students such as Allen Ginsberg and Norman Podhoretz; the complicated politics of Partisan Review and other fabled magazines of the period; and Trilling’s relationships with other leading writers of the period, including Saul Bellow, Edmund Wilson, and Norman Mailer. In Life in Culture , edited by Adam Kirsch, Trilling’s letters add up to an intimate portrait of a great critic, and of America’s intellectual journey from the political passions of the 1930s to the cultural conflicts of the 1960s and beyond.

"To all those who have for several years sought to discredit the new American literature, Lawrence Ferlinghetti has just dealt a most powerful blow," wrote French critic Pierre Lepape in 1961 when Her was published in France as La Quatrième Personne du Singulier. Calling it "a masterpiece of the young American novel," Lepape declared it was "the confirmation of a great American writer who, in the hall of American literary glories, takes the place left vacant by the death of Hemingway." Lepape went on to speak of the "incredible verbal virtuosity" by which the reader is led through this "laby-rêve," and it is this image of the "labyrinth-dream" which relates Her to the anti-novels of the young French school of Robbe-Grillet and Butor. Being thus very far from the kind of novels produced by Ferlinghetti's immediate contemporaries (whether Beat or academic) this book has met with little but bafflement among American critics. With well over 50,000 now in print Her nevertheless continues to make its own way.