Showing titles in Art & Literature

J.R.R. Tolkien's creations, imagination, and characters captured the attention of millions of readers. But who was the man who dreamt up the intricate languages and perfectly crafted world of Middle-earth? Tolkien had a difficult life, for many years: orphaned and poor, his guardian forbade him to communicate with the woman he had fallen in love with, and he went through the horrors of the First World War. An intensely private and brilliant scholar, he spent over 50 years working on the languages, history, peoples, and geography of Middle-earth,

For Craig Melvin this book is more an investigation than a memoir. It's an opportunity to better understand his father; to interrogate his family's legacy of addiction and despair but also transformation and redemption; and to explore the challenges facing all dads - including Craig himself, a father of two young children.

After the publication of Atlas Shrugged in 1957, Ayn Rand occasionally lectured in order to bring her philosophy of Objectivism to a wider audience and apply it to current cultural and political issues. These taped lectures and the question-and-answer sessions that followed added not only an eloquent new dimension to Ayn Rand's ideas and beliefs, but a fresh and spontaneous insight into Ayn Rand herself.

De la amplia obra de Stefan Zweig, celebrada por generaciones de lectores alrededor del mundo, quizá sus biografías son las que mejor dan muestra de la destreza del escritor para el retrato, de su agudeza psicológica y de la profunda comprensión del alma humana.

At the end of World War I, young C. S. Lewis was a devout atheist about to begin his studies at Oxford. In the three decades that followed, he would establish himself as one of the most influential writers and scholars of modern times, undergoing a radical conversion to Christianity that would transform his life and his work. Harry Lee Poe unfolds these watershed years in Lewis’s life, offering a unique perspective on his conversion, his friendships with Christians such as J. R. R. Tolkien, and his development from an opponent of Christianity to one of its most ardent defenders.

This audiobook narrated by William Hope examines how Emerson, Thoreau, and William James forged resilience from devastating loss and changed the course of American thought.

When “The Fourth State of Matter”, her now famous piece about a workplace massacre at the University of Iowa, was published in The New Yorker, Jo Ann Beard immediately became one of the most influential writers in America, forging a path for a new generation of young authors willing to combine the dexterity of fiction with the rigors of memory and reportage, and in the process extending the range of possibility for the essay form. Now, with Festival Days, Beard brings us the culmination of her groundbreaking work.

How do you tell the real story of someone misremembered - an icon and idol - alongside your own? Jenn Shapland’s celebrated debut is both question and answer: an immersive, surprising exploration of one of America’s most beloved writers, alongside a genre-defying examination of identity, queerness, memory, obsession, and love.

’n Baie lang brief aan my dogter is Marita van der Vyver, een van Afrikaans se mees geliefde skrywers, se ontroerende jeugmemoires. Dit is 'n speurtog deur die skrywer se beginjare, maar dit is ook ’n liefdesbrief aan ’n dogter en ’n taal en ’n land. En bowenal is dit ’n ma se poging om sin te maak van hierdie onverskillige en wrede wêreld waarin sy haar nou begewe.

In 1845 Henry David Thoreau, one of the principal New England Transcendentalists, left the small town of Concord for the country. Beside the lake of Walden he built himself a log cabin and returned to nature, to observe and reflect – while surviving on eight dollars a year. From this experience emerged Walden, one of the great classics of American literature.

In April 1878, Mark Twain and his family traveled to Europe. Overloaded with creative ideas, Twain had hoped that the sojourn would spark his creativity enough to bring at least one of the books in his head to fruition. Instead, he wrote of his walking tour of Europe, describing his impressions of the Black Forest, the Matterhorn, and other attractions. Neglected for years, A Tramp Abroad sparkles with Twain’s shrewd observations and highly opinionated comments on Old World culture.

Anne Neilson believes that each of us begins our life as a blank canvas: clean and fresh and ready to find texture in our experiences. Each trial, each joy, each heartache, and each hope leaves an explosion of color and sweeping brushstrokes that shape us. When we allow God to take over as the Master artist, we will find that He carefully adds dimension and highlights to create a beautiful masterpiece in us. Often, though, it's hard to find the beauty when we are wading through mess. Anne shares personal stories about why her faith is so important to her and resonates in all her work.

A real-life detective story, investigating how Agatha Christie and colleagues in a mysterious literary club transformed crime fiction, writing books casting new light on unsolved murders whilst hiding clues to their authors' darkest secrets. This is the first book about the Detection Club, the world's most famous and most mysterious social network of crime writers. Drawing on years of in-depth research, it reveals the astonishing story of how members such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers reinvented detective fiction.

​For more than forty years, Katie Couric has been an iconic presence in the media world. In her brutally honest, hilarious, heartbreaking memoir, she reveals what was going on behind the scenes of her sometimes tumultuous personal and professional life—a story she’s never shared, until now.

"If there is any life that is happier than the life we led on our timber ranch, it must be the sort of life which I have not read of in books or experienced in person," wrote Mark Twain, and now you can share in that experience. The beloved American humorist spent seven years on a "pleasure trip" through the untamed wilderness of Nevada. Twain intended to spend three months touring silver mines, but the lure of rough terrain and comfortable clothes proved irresistible - as will this vibrant travelogue.

A fascinating history of the rise and fall of influential Gilded Age magazine McClure's and the two unlikely outsiders at its helm - as well as a timely, full-throated defense of investigative journalism in America. Tracing McClure's from its meteoric rise to its spectacularly swift and dramatic combustion, Citizen Reporters is a thrillingly told, deeply researched biography of a powerhouse magazine that forever changed American life. It's also a timely case study that demonstrates the crucial importance of journalists who are unafraid to speak truth to power.

Kim Barker is not your typical, impassive foreign correspondent—she is candid, self-deprecating, laugh-out-loud funny. At first an awkward newbie in Afghanistan, she grows into a wisecracking, seasoned reporter with grave concerns about our ability to win hearts and minds in the region. In The Taliban Shuffle, Barker offers an insider’s account of the “forgotten war” in Afghanistan and Pakistan, chronicling the years after America’s initial routing of the Taliban, when we failed to finish the job.

On February 14, 1989, Valentine's Day, Salman Rushdie was telephoned by a BBC journalist and told that he had been "sentenced to death" by the Ayatollah Khomeini. For the first time he heard the word fatwa. His crime? To have written a novel called The Satanic Verses, which was accused of being "against Islam, the Prophet and the Quran". So begins the extraordinary story of how a writer was forced underground, moving from house to house, with the constant presence of a police protection team.

The Water Is Wide is Pat Conroy’s extraordinary memoir based on his experience as one of two teachers in a two-room schoolhouse, working with children the world had pretty much forgotten. It was a year that changed his life, and one that introduced a group of poor Black children to a world they did not know existed.

First published in 1967, Stop-Time was immediately recognized as a masterpiece of modern American autobiography, a brilliant portrayal of one boy’s passage from childhood to adolescence and beyond. Here is Frank Conroy’s wry, sad, beautiful tale of life on the road; of odd jobs and lost friendships, brutal schools and first loves; of a father’s early death and a son’s exhilarating escape into manhood.