The second volume is in Koestler's own words âa typical case history of a member of the educated middle classes of Central Europe in our time. We see him in Germany, Russia, England, France and Spain, working for the cause he believed in until his eventual break with Communism in 1938.

This book is a more personal history than has ever before been written by or about Marianne Faithfull. Anecdotal, conversational, intimate and revealing, this is her no-holds-barred account of her life, her friends, her triumphs and mistakes. A decade after the publication of ‘Faithfull’, one of the most acclaimed rock autobiographies of all time, Marianne Faithfull is back, vowing periodically leave her wicked ways behind and grow up, but finding that somehow strange things keep happening. A wry observer of her slightly off-kilter world, Marianne muses nostalgically about afternoons languishing on Moroccan cushions at George and Pattie's, getting high and listening to new songs. She fondly recalls the outlandish antics of her Beat friends Allen Ginsberg and William Burroughs; is frequently baffled at her image in the press (opening the paper to read of her own demise: 'Sixties Star in Death Plunge'); terrified by the curse sent by Kenneth Anger; mortified by her history of reckless behaviour; not to mention her near-death experience in Singapore while looking for an opium den. Marianne peoples her anecdotal memoir with legendary characters one can imagine only Marianne assembling around her, both the eccentric and the beautiful, from Henrietta Moraes and Donatella Versace to Sofia Coppola, Juliette Greco, and Yves St. Laurent's dog. Here is Marianne on the dark side of the sixties and the bright side of the nineties, which saw her collaborating with the likes of Blur and Jarvis Cocker; compelling recollections of an unconventional childhood in her father's orgiastic literary commune to a hilariously decadent few days at Lady Caroline Blackwood's deathbed. Here she is her blossoming movie career, on her records as subliminal autobiography. This is as intimate a portrait as we've ever had of Marianne, as she meditates on sex and drugs, confronts her alter-ego, the Fabulous Beast, and faces her own mortality in her battle with breast cancer. Since her last book Marianne has, in her own words, 'made quite a few records, gone on many tours, tried to play it straight, and... Well, the rest is the subject of this book.'

An acclaimed journalist and novelist explores the legacy and future of American liberalism through the history of his family's politically active history George Packer's maternal grandfather, George Huddleston, was a populist congressman from Alabama in the early part of the century—an agrarian liberal in the Jacksonian mold who opposed the New Deal. Packer's father was a Kennedy-era liberal, a law professor and dean at Stanford whose convictions were sorely—and ultimately fatally—tested in the campus upheavals of the 1960s. The inheritor of two sometimes conflicting strains of the great American liberal tradition, Packer discusses the testing of ideals in the lives of his father and grandfather and his own struggle to understand the place of the progressive tradition in our currently polarized political climate. Searching, engrossing, and persuasive, Blood of the Liberals is an original, intimate examination of the meaning of politics in American lives.

In an unforgettable addition to the literature of memoir, one of America’s preeminent literary scholars tells his story of coming of age in France during the buildup to the Second World War. As a Jewish youth in France during the 1930s, Victor Brombert’s heady explorations of sex and love were cut short by the rise of Nazi power and the Vichy Regime. His family narrowly escaped to New York, where Brombert joined the U.S. Army, only to return to Europe to fight on the beaches of Normandy and in the Battle of the Bulge. As he shuttles between the stations of his life, Brombert’s narrative recaptures the textures of childhood, the horrors of war, and his own discovery of a sustaining passion for literature. By turns melancholy and erotic, his memoir is also a meditation on memory itself, and a Proustian re-creation of a lost time and place.

A chronologically arranged anthology and history of poetry is supplemented with biographies of the poets

On Stendhal: "The study of human nature, 'the observation of the human heart and its passions, ' was his constant preoccupation. But where could he study the passions better than in himself? Though he lived exuberantly, submitting himself to experience... he went on incessantly writing down everything that happened to him just as it happened. he even led to perform some remarkable experiments upon himself.He laid claim to having been a soldier, a man of fortune, a great lover, a society wit, a diplomat, a traveler, and even, sometimes, a revolutionary conspirator. "Fifty years after his death he becomes one of the demigods of the world's letters, taking his place in the ranks of the great social writers who appeared toward the end of the last century. his manner of life itself has fascinated whole regiments of literary scholars in France, Italy and Germany in the last forty years." -Matthew Josephson, From the Introduction (1946) "Like Josephson's Victor Hugo, it is the best and most comprehensive English study of its subject, a careful collection of material, skillfully assembled and organized...When Freud read Stendhal's memoirs of his childhood and adolescence he called them 'a manifestation of psychological genius.' Stendhal, he saw, had been a Freudian some 70 years before Freud himself."-TIME Magazine (1946)

The Staplehurst rail crash of June 9th, 1865 which claimed ten lives, might have passed relatively unnoticed but for the presence of a celebrity passenger among the survivors. Charles Dickens, returning from France on the ill-fated boat train from Folkestone to London, was to be profoundly affected by the experience. In a fascinating exploration of the circumstances surrounding the disaster and probing insight into Dickens' personal life, the writer's great-great-grandson, Gerald Dickens, examines his secret relationship with the actress Ellen Ternan and professional motivation in the years either side of the accident. Questions concerning the conduct of the inquest into the crash and apportioning of blame are raised that remain unresolved even today. Striking parallels are drawn with more recent disasters and the signs of wrestling with Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder are evident in the account of Dickens' final years, powerfully reflected in the stirring ghost story The Signalman.

This is a love story; an unlikely convergence of two people from different worlds who were able to make a rich and tender life together, and not only endure each other's company in alarmingly close quarters but revel in it. Edith Iglauer was born in Cleveland and lived an urban, sophisticated life in New York until she met and married John Daly, a commercial fisherman in British Columbia. She spent more than four years on his forty-one-foot troller, the Morekelp until his sudden death. John Daly was an impassioned and greatly talented fisherman who was convinced that he could "think like a fish"; an amateur philosopher who worked out, and followed, an orginal set of beliefs and principles; a mystic who, after forty years of fishing, felt himself to be at one with the sea and the mountains along the British Columbia coast; a scholarly looking, high-spirited, full-blown eccentric who covered the white walls of his pilothouse with his favorite quotations in bold black letters ("Lawyers spend their professional careers shoveling smoke. O.W. Holmes") Fishing with John established Edith Iglauer as one of BC's most popular writers. This unusual West Coast love story sold 16,000 copies in hardcover and continues to be a bestseller in paperback.

Winner of the 2007 B.C. Award for Canadian Non-fiction A Globe and Mail Best 100 Book (2006) National Post Best Books (2006) A bold cultural portrait of contemporary Canada through the work of its most celebrated novelists, short story writers, and storytellers. Stories are the surest way to know a place, and at a time when the fabric of the country seems daily more uncertain, Noah Richler looks to our authors for evidence of the true nature of Canada. He argues why fiction matters and seeks to discover — in the extra-ordinary diversity of communities these writers represent — what stories, if any, bind us as a nation. Over two years, Richler has criss-crossed the country and interviewed close to one hundred authors — a who’s who of Canadian literature, including Wayne Johnston, Michael Crummey, Alistair MacLeod, Gil Courtemanche, Jane Urquhart, Joseph Boyden, Miriam Toews, Yann Martel, Fred Stenson, Douglas Coupland, and Rohinton Mistry — about the places and ideas that are most meaningful to their work. The result is a journey through the reality of Canada and its imagination at a critical point in the country’s evolution. Within thematic chapters he exposes our “Myths of Disappointment” and considers the stories of our native peoples, the rise of the city, and how our history as a colony shapes our society and politics even today. This Is My Country, What's Yours? is an impassioned literary travelogue and a vivid portrayal of our society, the work of Canadian authors, and the idea of writing itself. This Is My Country, What's Yours? is based on Noah Richler’s ten-part documentary of the same name originally broadcast on CBC Radio’s flagship Ideas program in spring 2005.

Search-Cover"I was four years old when my father came back to kidnap me," begins this gripping memoir about Matousek's search for James Matousek, the drifter father he never knew. Described by the New York Times as " part reminiscence, part detective story, part spiritual musing," this memoir is more than the story of one man's search for his father; it is also a look at the meaning of life and how fathers contribute to that meaning. Growing up in a family of troubled women (Matousek's sister committed suicide when the author was 29), he describes the turmoil of growing up "fatherless in America" - an experience shared by millions of children in what sociologists have called the Age of the Absent Father - and the difficult, ultimately successful, struggle to figure out what being a man really means in an age of shifting definitions, evolving sexuality, and "breaking out the man box" of stereotyping and patriarchy. With the tension of a mystery story, the climax occurs when Matousek meets a man he believes to be his father. But is he? And does Matousek, who has reconciled with his mother as she lay dying, really care? These are just two questions leading to this memoir's surprising conclusion. Praise for The Boy He Left Behind "Mark Matousek's memoir The Boy He Left Behind begins with the gripping sentence, 'I was four years old when my father came back to kidnap.' Part reminiscence, part detective story, part spiritual musing, the book is more than the story of one man's search for his father, it is also a look at the meaning of life and how fathers contribute to that meaning." -The New York Times Book Review "This thoughtful and lovingly rendered portrait of an American childhood is a refreshing addition to the genre. Matousek not only tells his own story but brilliantly evokes the troubled lives of his mother and sisters with humor, honesty, and above all, compassion." -Kathleen Norris, author of The Cloister Walk and Amazing Grace "A riveting story in the hands of a master storyteller. Mark Matousek has written a family memoir that is tight and revealing. This is one fine book." -James McBride, author of The Color of Water "[A] searing memoir....The writing is exhilarating...deeply soulful, compassionate, and self-scrutinizing. It is an explosive memoir filled with prose that sings, one that provokes readers to question where we come from and what our places are in this world. Matousek...writes from the heart. Read this book" -Los Angeles Magazine "Matousek's account of his search for the father he hadn't seen since he was four [is] sharp and funny, thanks to the punchy dialogue and dead-on character sketches." -Elle "Interweaving the frustrating suspenseful search for his long-lost father with unsparing recollections of a fatherless boyhood and his confrontation with a life-threatening disease, Mark Matousek expertly guides you through the particulars of his life into a harrowing meditation on the difficulties of becoming a man in a country without fathers. The Boy He Left Behind is beautifully crafted, artful and inspiring. It merits a place alongside the late Paul Monette's masterwork, Becoming a Man; Half a Life Story. Like Monette, Matousek's triumph is twofold - In the book he has written, and in the man he has become. Matousek's probing memoir of lost childhood and found history celebrates the power of manhood." -The Utne Reader "Mark Matousek has produced [a] riveting account of his search-at age 38, with the help of a private detective-for the father who abandoned him at age four. A searing meditation on the psychic harm suffered by men and women without fathers, this wise odyssey wrestles with questions of life and death and the search for the meaning of one's existence." -Publishers Weekly (starred review)

I always meant to be a writer from my earliest recall, writes Marcia Davenport in her memoir, Too Strong For Fantasy, and like all such people I lived from infancy in the world of stories and books, most of them fantasy. When I began to outgrow fantasy, history seized me by the throat and has held on ever since. History is inseparable from place and politics and political men.

"In our brave new world, techno-evolution is often decried as the death knell of the written word. Award-winning author Andrei Codrescu demolishes this doomsday provocation in Bibliodeath: My Archives (With Life in Footnotes). Our moment of bibliodeath marks a tectonic shift under the ocean of human consciousness and the written word. As words migrate from the book into other means of transport, we are "privy to ... the passage of the soul from one body into another, a reincarnation that is not a meta-physics." A suspenseful meditation planted in a bed of alluring stories-cum-footnotes, Codrescu wades into the bibliodeath waters to examine his own evolution as a writer. From the poetic lines of an unlined notebook in 1960s Romania to the founding of Exquisite Corpse in 1983 to his ongoing commentary on NPR's All Things Considered, his journey is an archive of reinvention. Codrescu's literal Archives and his unsentimental and savage faith in reinvention take in the history of the literate world, the transformation of the printed word, and language itself. This picaresque adventure of a mind at work spans the fin-de-siécle to the 21st century, as the bibliodeath of one medium meets the birth of the next. The evolution of technology must deal with the indomitable bond between language and the human being. In the story of Codrescu, "leaving the traces of one's passage is worth the labor of a lifetime."--Back cover.

A hilarious guide to masculinity and self-destruction. Fifty years have passed since the death of Ernest Hemingway, history's ultimate man, and young males today-obsessed with Facebook, Twitter, and Nintendo-know nothing about his legendary brand of rugged, alcoholic masculinity. They cannot skin a fish, dominate a battlefield, or transform majestic creatures of the Southern Hemisphere into piano keyboards.With chapters such as "For Whom the Beer Flows," "Death in the Afternoon... Lunch is Served," and "The Old Man and the See You in Hell," former Esquire editor Marty Beckerman demonstrates how millions of technology-addled eunuchs-brainwashed by PETA and Alcoholics Anonymous-can learn from Papa's glorious example: drunken, unshaven, meat-devouring, wife-divorcing, and suicide-committing.The Heming Way is a difficult path, and not for the weak, but truth is manlier than fiction.

Personal narratives of a British officer on the Western front during World War I.

At the dawn of the 1980s, there was one serious name in horror and exploitation film criticism: Bill Landis. While other magazines were concerned with behind-the-scenes information, tributes, and SFX tutorials, Landis' Sleazoid Express was one part film journal and one part anthropological study, seriously critiquing the grindhouse movies that played the theaters of 42nd Street while also documenting the dying subculture that had grown up around them. Profiled in Film Comment and Rolling Stone for his pioneering work, Landis' over-the-top "Mr. Sleazoid" persona and double-life as an adult film star masked the pain behind the excess: a child genius whose intellect alienated him from his peers; a sexual abuse survivor who numbed his trauma with drugs; a consummate outcast who only felt at home among other outcasts. After settling into life as a husband, father, and author in the 90s, it seemed that Landis had turned a corner-but the ghosts of Times Square were never far behind him. Dead at the age of 49 on the eve of what should have been a successful comeback, his legacy has nominally been forgotten, most of his work lost, and his memory relegated to a footnote in journalism history. Now, award-winning author and journalist Preston Fassel (Our Lady of the Inferno; Fangoria magazine; The Daily Grindhouse) pieces together the full story of his life for the first time, from his turbulent childhood, to his meteoric rise in the New York vice scene, to his tragic demise on the streets of Chicago. Featuring exclusive interviews with Kurt Loder (MTV; Rolling Stone), Michael J. Weldon (Psychotronic Video), Art Ettinger (Ultra Violent Magazine), Carl Abrahamsson, Mike McPadden (Heavy Metal Movies; Teen Movie Hell), and others, plus excerpts from Landis' unpublished autobiographical novella Last Exit in Manattan and a reprint of Landis' seminal Fangoria interview with Andy Milligan, Landis at last pulls back the curtain on one of genre writing's most influential-yet unknown-figures. In that lost, damned, golden age called the 80s, there was a movie star named Bobby Spector and a writer named Mr. Sleazoid. Most importantly, there was a man named Bill Landis. This is his story.

Norman Levine's Canada Made Me , first published in England in 1958, is a bitter, critical reassessment of the moral and cultural values of Canada. His account of his three-month journey from Halifax to Ucluelet, a fishing village on the west coast, is an unconventional portrait of Canada's underbelly. The book ends with the words: `I wondered why I felt so bitter about Canada. After all, it was all part of a dream, an experiment that could not come off. It was foolish to believe that you can take the throwouts, the rejects, the human kickabouts from Europe and tell them: Here you have a second chance. Here you can start a new life. But no one ever mentioned the price one had to pay; how much of oneself you had to betray.' Canada Made Me was regarded as so controversial that it did not appear in a Canadian edition until 1979. Critical opinion, however, has slowly swung around to the point the book was recently described in the Globe and Mail as a `laconic classic'. For this new edition Norman Levine has written an introduction which traces the book's publishing history and reputation.

A tattoo is a bugle call, a summoning that lingers in the ear. Although Hortense Calisher's family eventually migrated north to New York City, the echoes of their days as a slave-owning family in the South still resonate with this acclaimed author, who uncovers a part of history never before so strongly and tenderly revealed. Calisher traces her family's years in the South and their transformative move up north, beautifully evoking the mood and texture of the early twentieth century. Her family was an eccentric combination of traditions and tragedies. Her Virginia-born father, a perfume manufacturer, was twenty-two years older than her German-born mother. Marked by longer-than-normal gaps between the generations and conflicts between the mercantile and the scholarly, the "American" and the emigre, her family is characterized by Calisher as "volcanic to meditative to fruitfully dull, and bound to produce someone interested in character, society, and time." "

"Here is a singular story of survival, an earthly miracle wrought by family devotion, gardens, horses, guts. A compelling read."—Carolyn Heilbrun In July 1998, when Maxine Kumin's horse bolted at a carriage-driving clinic, she was not expected to live. Yet, less than a year later, her progress pronounced a miracle by her doctors, she was at work on this journal of her astonishing recovery. She tells of her time "inside the halo," the near-medieval device that kept her head immobile during weeks of intensive care and rehabilitation, of the lasting "rehab" friendships, and of the loving family who always believed she would heal. "[S]he resonates wisdom while announcing a triumph of body and soul."—Anne Roiphe, New York Times Book Review "Maxine Kumin brings the sensitivity and imagination of a poet to her extraordinary ordeal."—Richard Selzer, author of Mortal Lessons: Notes on the Art of Surgery "From a singular experience she has created a lesson that is universal, which, it seems to me, is the essence of being a poet."—Abraham Verghese, author of The Tennis Partner

Elias Canetti originally intended Party in the Blitz to capture an image of his time in post-war London. Well known throughout Europe, Canetti scorned British intellectuals who weren't familiar with his work. By force of will alone he accumulated English followers, but not before being christened "the godmonster of Hampstead." Canetti's memories of various people in his social circle are brief and scathing brimstone sketches. T.S. Eliot, Iris Murdoch, Wittgenstein, Herbert Read, Bertrand Russell-Canetti rakes them all over the coals. To Canetti, T.S. Eliot was nothing more than an American emigrant trying desperately to act British, and Canetti's portrayal of Iris Murdoch, with whom he had an affair, is nothing short of brutal. Michael Hofmann's translation pulls no punches, delivering the goods on Canetti's searing injection: "when you write down your life, every page should contain something no one has ever heard about."

The #1 national bestseller now revised and updated with a new Epilogue. Now aged 75, Peter C. Newman at last tells the story of his stranger-than-fiction life. Try to keep up as we follow his many lives: as a pampered child in a Czech chateau; a Jewish kid in short pants being machine-gunned by Nazi fighter planes on the beach at Biarritz, en route to the last ship to escape from France in 1940; as a refugee on an Ontario farm; as an outsider on a scholarship at Upper Canada College; as a Financial Post journalist, then an author whose Renegade in Power made Canadian politics dramatic and disrespectfully exciting for the first time; as the man who revealed the secrets of the rulers of the Canadian business world in The Canadian Establishment , and other huge business success stories, including The Establishment Man , on Conrad Black; or the millionaire who turned his back on business books and tackled Canadian history ( Company of Adventurers and other triumphs), in a career where his work has dominated the bestseller lists in politics, business, history, and current affairs. In the midst of all this were his years at the Toronto Star and Maclean’s where, as editor, he took the magazine weekly – a huge accomplishment. He is still a legend there, where his columns continue to run. He knew and wrote about every prime minister from Louis St. Laurent to Paul Martin and every prominent Canadian – hero or villain – in between. Yet his most interesting character is – Peter C. Newman. Incredibly, this central figure known to millions of Canadians sees himself as a perennial outsider. In personal terms, the rich little Czech boy whose nannies never stayed talks frankly about his marriages and the women he has known before his ultimate marriage to his beloved Alvy. His enthusiasms – from jazz to the Canadian Navy, not to mention his adventures on his beloved sailboat – make for a rich portrait of an astonishingcharacter, one who never stops being controversial.