Showing titles in Art & Literature

The comprehensive collection of letters spanning the adult life of one of the world’s greatest storytellers, now revised and expanded to include more than 150 previously unseen letters, with revealing new insights into The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion.

In this storybook memoir, the author unravels the mystery behind a legacy inherited from her mother, whose work was known for its ability to inspire emotional and spiritual renewal. But before the author could fully claim this inheritance, she must first journey back in time, beyond her own birth, to uncover the origins of the healing power embedded in the art.

Biographer Alexandra Popoff traces the life and creative achievement of Ayn Rand (1905–1982), one of America’s most provocative writers and whose best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged have enjoyed impressive longevity. Born into a Jewish family in Saint Petersburg, Russia, Rand (then Alisa Rosenbaum) lived through the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, Civil War, and the onset of Soviet totalitarian dictatorships––experiences that made her profoundly anticommunist.

Poland, 1939. Professional photographer Wilhelm Brasse is deported to Auschwitz-Birkenau and finds himself in a deadly race to survive, assigned to work as the camp's intake photographer and take "identity pictures" of prisoners as they arrive by the trainload. The Auschwitz Photographer takes listeners behind the barbed wire fences of the world's most feared concentration camp, bringing Brasse's story to life as he clicks the shutter button thousands of times before ultimately joining the Resistance, defying the Nazis, and defiantly setting down his camera for good.

Paddy Gower has never been afraid to stand up for what he believes in. From his teenage and university years where he learnt to defend himself from cruel bullying about his looks, to the pressure-cooker years he spent in the Press Gallery holding politicians to account, to advocating for the families of the Christchurch terrorist attacks and for sufferers of cystic fibrosis, he has scrapped and fought for the truth and justice for others.

Finding Oz tells the remarkable tale behind one of the world’s most enduring and best loved stories. Offering profound new insights into the true origins and meaning of L. Frank Baum’s 1900 masterwork, it delves into the personal turmoil and spiritual transformation that fueled Baum’s fantastical parable of the American Dream.

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.

Moving from her childhood in Oakland and growing up with her Chinese parents through her success as a novelist, Amy Tan delves into her creative interests in music, the paralysis of beginning a new project, journal writing, and travelling. Where the Past Begins chronicles the making of a writer. With characteristic humor and poignant observation, Tan weaves a nontraditional introspective narrative that is as complex and vibrant as this beloved American novelist's fiction.

Late Have I Loved You, Recollections of a Life - Foreword by Mike Aquilina - is Grammy / Dove award winning, multi-platinum selling, Best-Selling Author John Michael Talbot's first autobiography.

After 16 novels, Jacqueline Winspear has taken the bold step of turning to memoir, revealing the hardships and joys of her family history. Both shockingly frank and deftly restrained, her story tackles the difficult, poignant, and fascinating family accounts of her paternal grandfather’s shell shock; her mother’s evacuation from London during the Blitz; and her soft-spoken animal-loving father’s torturous assignment to an explosives team during WWII.

بين هذه الصفحات سترى نفسك أو بعضًا منك وستلتهم الكلماتِ دفعةً واحدة لتصلَ إلى جوابٍ لسؤال تكوَّن في ذهنكَ تلقائيًا منذ اللحظة الأولى !!

Throughout his life, the poet Rainer Maria Rilke addressed letters to individuals who were close to him, who had contacted him after reading his works, or who he had met briefly – anyone with whom he felt an inner connection. Within his vast correspondence, there are about two dozen letters of condolence. In these direct, personal and practical letters, Rilke writes about loss and mortality, assuming the role of a sensitive, serious and uplifting guide through life’s difficulties.

Forged in the stress of early motherhood, The Mother Artist explores the fraught yet generative ties between caregiving and creative practice. As a young mother working at a museum, essayist Catherine Ricketts began asking questions about the making of motherhood and the making of art. Now, with incantatory prose and an intuitive gaze, she twines intimate meditations on parenthood with studies of the work and lives of painters, writers, dancers, musicians, and other creatives.

Growing up in the 1960s in the suburbs of Chicago, Meg Kissinger’s family seemed to live a charmed life. With eight kids and two loving parents, the Kissingers radiated a warm, boisterous energy. Whether they were spending summer days on the shores of Lake Michigan, barreling down the ski slopes, or navigating the trials of their Catholic school, the Kissingers always knew how to live large and play hard. But behind closed doors, a harsher reality was unfolding.

May Sarton's parrot chatters away as Sarton looks out the window at the rain and contemplates returning to her "real" life - not friends, not even love, but writing. In her bravest and most revealing memoir, Sarton casts her keenly observant eye on both the interior and exterior worlds. She shares insights about everyday life in the quiet New Hampshire village of Nelson, the desire for friends, and need for solitude - both an exhilarating and terrifying state.

Un autorretrato de insólita emotividad al tiempo que exquisita recreación de la sensibilidad de las mujeres de nuestra época.... Cualquier libro de Isabel Allende es un acontecimiento. Paula lo es especialmente porque se trata del más conmovedor, más personal y más íntimo de todos los que ha publicado hasta la fecha.

Charles Dickens: A Life gives full measure to Dickens's heroic stature - his huge virtues both as a writer and as a human being - while observing his failings in both respects with an unblinking eye. Renowned literary biographer Claire Tomalin crafts a story worthy of Dickens's own pen, a comedy that turns to tragedy as the very qualities that made him great - his indomitable energy, boldness, imagination, and showmanship - finally destroyed him.

Show Time is a true story which found its roots in the answer to the question, 'how did the author get into tattooing', which she fielded from almost every person that she met. The book travels the backroads of Europe in the 1980s and 90s as a young woman chronicles her relentless determination to find scraps of information, loopholes and chinks in the armor of the male-dominated secretive world of tattooing where females were not welcome or encouraged.

In the years leading up to 1606, since the death of Queen Elizabeth and the arrival in England of her successor, King James of Scotland, Shakespeare's great productivity had ebbed, and it may have seemed to some that his prolific genius was a thing of the past. But that year, at age 42, he found his footing again, finishing a play he had begun the previous autumn - King Lear - then writing two other great tragedies, Macbeth and Antony and Cleopatra.

For Glory Edim, that "friend of my mind" is books. Edim, the daughter of Nigerian immigrants growing up in Virginia, started the popular Well-Read Black Girl book club at age 30, but her love of books stretches far back: to public libraries alongside her little brothers after elementary school while her mother was working; to high school libraries where she discovered books she wasn't being taught in class; to dorm rooms and airplanes and subway rides—and, eventually, to a community of half a million other listeners.