Romantic Memoir

Charlotte Gordon's new work is a fresh look at the lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Mary Shelley, who together comprise one of the most illustrious and inspiring mother-daughter pairs in history.

I was known as the traitor's daughter. When I was five years old, my father was tortured, branded with the letter Z, then beaten and left for dead. The grueling punishment for his crime was a reminder to all others who dared threaten the Russian's reign. I was the young girl left behind. A living piece of the traitorous puzzle the Russian leader tried so diligently to ignore - until I grew up. No longer could he deny how much my existence had always been intertwined with his. And in order to survive the life I was thrown into, I was forced to learn my place inside of it.

When young Joseph Banks stepped onto a Tahitian beach in 1769, he hoped to discover Paradise. Inspired by the scientific ferment sweeping through Britain, the botanist had sailed with Captain Cook in search of new worlds. Other voyages of discovery—astronomical, chemical, poetical, philosophical—swiftly follow in Richard Holmes's thrilling evocation of the second scientific revolution.

Published in time for the 250th anniversary of William Wordsworth's birth, this is the biography of a great poetic genius, a revolutionary who changed the world. Wordsworth rejoiced in the French Revolution and played a central role in the cultural upheaval that we call the Romantic Revolution. He and his fellow Romantics changed forever the way we think about childhood, the sense of the self, our connection to the natural environment, and the purpose of poetry.

Everything I've done, everything I will do, there will be no regret. The world is a vicious place for a woman. It's even crueler to the daughter of the Ceann na Conairte - discarded, married off, left powerless. But I am no ordinary daughter of the mafia. Unlike every other mafia family, my mother was Melody Callahan, Bloody Mel, the Don of the Italian Mafia, and the Don didn't raise some precious mafia princess. Bone by bone she broke me first, so no one else could - and bone by bone, I pieced myself back together.

Join Jigi Brown as he embarks on an epic journey looking for love, sex, and adventure across East Africa.As a graduate student backpacking across Western Europe, Jigi Brown discovered the tremendous erotic diversity that thrives in cultures around the world. A year later, Brown takes off for East Africa: traveling the length and breadth of the region for work and pleasure -- from the slopes of Mt. Kilimanjaro to the vast grasslands of the Mara; the warm waters of Lake Victoria to the cold climes of the Kenyan highlands. Brown finds passionate lovers and wonderful colleagues who help him ...

Join Jigi Brown on this naughty, funny, and incredibly adventurous journey as he bonks his way through Europe and learns to make the most of every moment. A diehard romantic, a perfect gentleman and an awkward engineering graduate student, Jigi Brown has never understood why black socks don't go with running shoes or why being too respectful and nice seems to be a turn-off for the ladies. After giving up on love and intimacy, Brown embarks on a solo two-month backpacking trip across Europe. On his first night in Paris, Brown meets Emma, a spontaneous and irreverent leukemia survivor, who ...

Although they are separated by more than 150 years, Nell finds herself drawn to the Victorian novelist by their shared experiences of unrequited love - Gaskell for an American critic she met in Rome, Nell for a soulful American screenwriter living in Paris. As Nell's romance founders and her passion for academia fails to materialize, she finds herself wondering if the indomitable Mrs. Gaskell might rescue her pursuit of love, family, and a writing career.

Lauded as "a rip-roaring life" (Wall Street Journal), T.R. is a magisterial biography of Theodore Roosevelt by best-selling author H. W. Brands. In his time, there was no more popular national figure than Roosevelt. It was not just the energy he brought to every political office he held or his unshakable moral convictions that made him so popular, or even his status as a bona fide war hero. Most important, Theodore Roosevelt was loved by the people because this scion of a privileged New York family loved America and Americans.

He's baseball's biggest heartbreaker. I'm a recovering romantic...and his new trainer. Parker Knight is a smooth-talking pitcher with a smile for days and a roster of broken hearts behind him. Those are only a few reasons why a guy like him is never getting near my heart. After making a move to prove I deserve a place within my dad's baseball empire, the last thing on my mind is a playboy pitcher. I didn't know who he was when we randomly met off the field, and Parker certainly had no idea I'm the team owner's daughter. He thought I was going to be his next conquest.

It is the spring of 1945, and in a dusty, remote community, the world’s most brilliant minds have come together in secret. Their mission: to split an atom and end a war. But among those who have come to Robert Oppenheimer’s "enchanted campus" of foreign-born scientists, baffled guards, and restless wives is a simple man in search of a killer. Michael Connolly has been sent to the middle of nowhere to investigate the murder of a security officer on the Manhattan Project.

Why did Norman Mailer stab his second wife at a party? Who was Edith Wharton's secret transatlantic lover? What motivated Anais Nin to become a bigamist? Writers Between the Covers rips the sheets off these and other real-life love stories of the literati - some with fairy tale endings and others that resulted in break-ups, breakdowns, and brawls. Among the writers laid bare are Agatha Christie, who sparked the largest-ever manhunt in England as her marriage fell apart; Arthur Miller, whose jaw-dropping pairing with Marilyn Monroe proved that opposites attract, at least initially.

In I'll Have What She's Having, entertainment journalist Erin Carlson tells the story of the real Nora Ephron and how she reinvented the romcom through her trio of instant classics. With a cast of famous faces including Reiner, Hanks, Ryan, and Crystal, Carlson takes listeners on a rollicking, revelatory trip to Ephron's New York City, where reality took a backseat to romance and Ephron - who always knew what she wanted and how she wanted it - ruled the set with an attention to detail that made her actors feel safe but sometimes exasperated crew members.

One moment, I was a normal (if somewhat germaphobic) math teacher getting ready for summer vacation. Then my sister died, leaving me with a sword...and her destiny as dragon hunter. It turns out there's a whole other world out there filled with demons, dragons, and spirits. Now my job is to protect mortals - and I haven't got a clue what I'm doing. Then there's tattooed hotness Ian Iskander. Part dragon hunter and part demon, Ian's got some seriously creepy business associates and keeps trying to steal my sword. So why do we keep getting lost in hungry, crazy-hot kisses?

As the snow begins to fall over Manhattan, Angelina, the now ex-pop sensation (now known as Sarah Rose), begins to embark on her long journey - destination unknown - to find a way to somehow bury her checkered past and abusive ex-husband, as well as her family ties to organized crime to begin to rebuild a new life for herself and her five-year-old daughter Isabel (Izzy).

From USA Today Bestselling Author, Uvi Poznansky, comes a compelling novel about family secrets: Coming back to his childhood home after years of absence, Ben is unprepared for the secret, which is now revealed to him: his mother, Natasha, who used to be a brilliant pianist, is losing herself to mysterious disease, which turns the way her mind works into a riddle. His father’s new wife, Anita, looks remarkably similar to her—only much younger. “In our family, forgiveness is something you pray for, something you yearn to receive—but so seldom do you give it to others.” What emerges...

Lord Byron’s very name conjures up visions of the Romantic movement and outlandishly dressed bohemians, for if Alfred, Lord Tennyson was the poetic darling of the masses, Byron was the hero of the hedonists. While the traditional English literary hero was a nobleman rescuing a damsel in distress, Byron created the antihero, a man plagued by self-doubt and hidden sorrow. At the same time, his hero was also capable of facing reality once he had wrestled through his own angst, and even of occasionally acting nobly in the great tradition of the author’s Puritan forebears.

Betty Dodson's memoir is the story of one woman's struggle to liberate female sexuality while enjoying her own. In the 70s, as the feminist movement evolved, Betty latched on to sexual liberation as a symbol for self empowerment. Realizing that so many women weren't enjoying sex, she asked, "How could women ever be truly equal if they were reliant on men for their sexual satisfaction?" She quickly became the leader of the sex-positive feminist movement.

Fanny Hill is an erotic novel that was first published in 1748 and has remained a best seller for over 250 years, in spite of its being banned shortly after publication. In 1966 the US Supreme Court ruled that it was not obscene, shortly after making the same ruling for Lady Chatterley's Lover by D.H. Lawrence and Tropic of Cancer by Henry Miller. Today, it is considered, by many critics, to be an erotic masterpiece and a true literary classic.

In this chronicle of his lifelong obsession with recreating the lives of writers and scientists, Richard Holmes here casts a new eye not only on the Romantic poets and lost women of Romantic science he has long studied, but on their biographers, as well. He examines the evolution of the myths that have overshadowed certain lives, and reveals how the manner in which each generation tells the stories of the lives that came before it shapes and is shaped by a contemporary understanding of human nature.