Two Lives is Janet Malcolm's stunning portrait of a legendary couple: Gertrude Stein, the modernist master, and Alice B Toklas, the 'worker bee' who ministered to Stein's needs throughout their forty-year expatriate 'marriage'. As Malcolm pursues the truth of the couple's charmed life in a village in Vichy France her subject becomes the larger question of biographical truth. 'The instability of human knowledge is one of our few certainties,' she writes. The portrait of their relationship that emerges is unexpectedly charged. The two world wars Stein and Toklas lived through together are paralleled by the private war that went on between them. This war, as Malcolm learned, sometimes flared into bitter combat. Janet Malcolm is at her finest in this extraordinary work of literary biography and investigative journalism.

“The intricacies of family and the complexities of the games they play mingle wonderfully here in a memoir quite unlike any other.”—George Plimpton, author of Truman Capote Katy Lederer grew up on the bucolic campus of an exclusive East Coast boarding school where her father taught English, her mother retreated into crosswords and scotch, and her much older siblings played “grown-up” games like gin rummy and chess. But Katy faced much more than the typical trials of childhood. Within the confines of the Lederer household an unlikely transformation was brewing, one that would turn this darkly intellectual and game-happy group into a family of professional gamblers. Poker Face is Katy Lederer’s perceptive account of her family’s lively history. From the long kitchen table where her mother played what seemed an endless game of solitaire, to the seedy New York bars where her brother first learned to play poker, to the glamorous Bellagio casino in Las Vegas, where her sister and brother wager hundreds of thousands of dollars a night at the tables, Lederer takes us on a tragicomic journey through a world where intelligence and deceit are used equally as currency. Not since Mary McCarthy’s Memories of a Catholic Girlhood has a writer cast such a witty and astringently analytic eye on the demands of growing up. An unflinching exploration of trust and betrayal, competition, suspicion, and unconventional familial love, Poker Face is a testament to the human spirit’s inventiveness when faced with unusually difficult odds.

“Sexy, surprising, funny, insightful, and wildly entertaining” ( Huffington Post )—the definitive biography of Giacomo Casanova, the impoverished boy who became the famous writer, notorious libertine, and self-invented genius in decadent eighteenth-century Europe. Today, “Casanova” is a synonym for “great lover,” yet the real story of this remarkable figure is little known. A figure straight out of a Henry Fielding novel, Giacomo Casanova was erotic, brilliant, impulsive, and desperate for recognition; a self-destructive genius. Over the course of his lifetime, he claimed to have seduced more than one hundred women, among them married women, young women in convents, girls just barely in their teens, women of high and low birth alike. Abandoned by his mother, an actress and courtesan, Casanova was raised by his illiterate grandmother, coming of age in a Venice filled with spies and political intrigue. He was intellectually curious and read forbidden books, for which he was jailed. He staged a dramatic escape from Venice’s notorious prison, I Piombi, the only person known to have done so. He then fled to France, ingratiated himself at the royal court, and invented the national lottery that still exists to this day. He crisscrossed Europe, landing for a while in St. Petersburg, where he was admitted to the court of Catherine the Great. He corresponded with Voltaire and met Mozart and Lorenzo da Ponte—assisting them as they composed the timeless opera Don Giovanni . And he wrote what many consider the greatest memoir of the era, the twelve-volume Story of My Life . Laurence Bergreen’s Casanova recounts this astonishing life in rich, intimate detail, and at the same time, paints a dazzling portrait of eighteenth-century Europe, filled with a cast characters from serving girls to kings and courtiers, “great fun for any history lover” ( Kirkus Reviews ).

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.

A New York Times “Books for Summer Reading” selection Winner of the 2003 National Jewish Book Award for History By the time he died in 1993 at the age of 73, Irving Howe was one of the twentieth century’s most important public thinkers. Deeply passionate, committed to social reform and secular Jewishness, ardently devoted to fiction and poetry, in love with baseball, music, and ballet, Howe wrote with such eloquence and lived with such conviction that his extraordinary work is now part of the canon of American social thought. In the first comprehensive biography of Howe’s life, historian Gerald Sorin brings us close to this man who rose from Jewish immigrant poverty in the 1930s to become one of the most provocative intellectuals of our time. Known most widely for his award-winning book World of Our Fathers, a rich portrayal of the East European Jewish experience in New York, Howe also won acclaim for his prodigious output of illuminating essays on American culture and as an indefatigable promoter of democratic socialism as can be seen in the pages of Dissent, the journal he edited for nearly forty years. Deeply devoted to the ideal of democratic radicalism and true equality, Howe was constantly engaged in a struggle for decency and basic fairness in the face of social injustice. In the century of Auschwitz, the Gulag, and global inter-ethnic mass murder, it was difficult to sustain political certainties and take pride in one's humanity. To have lived a life of conviction and engagement in that era was a notable achievement. Irving Howe lived such a life and Gerald Sorin has done a masterful job of guiding us through it in all its passion and complexity.

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.'

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.

"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.

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.

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

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.

The son and biographer of William Saroyan, one of the most acclaimed writers in American history, Aram Saroyan grew up in a world of celebrities and geniuses. His own writings soon placed him among the best known figures in the New York School of poets, and his essays and reviews helped to characterize his generation. Starting Out in the Sixties is a powerful collection of essays, memoirs, and reflections with commentary and anecdotes about publishing, Allen Ginsberg, Andy Warhol, Jack Kerouac, the author's author's Armenian heritage, his famous father, William Burroughs, and much, much more. Variously humorous, reflective, and profound, Saroyan's book should prove to be both a very popular work and, for many years to come, a key guide to the taste and literary values of the generation that started out in the sixties.