Searching for Schindler - A Memoir by Thomas Keneally

$16.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Reading Level: very good

In 1980 Tom Keneally was in Beverley Hills returning from the Sorrento film festival where The Chant of Jimmy Blacksmith had been showing. Looking for a new briefcase, Tom meets the Polish-Jewish Leopold Pfefferberg Page aka Poldek and his life for the next few years is taken over by this charismatic an d driven man and the story he wants shared. "It's a story for you, I swear," he says to Tom. The story is of course that of The all-drinking, all-screwing, all black-marketeering Nazi. But to me he was Jesus Christ, Oskar Schindler". And Poldek shared with Tom the story of SCHINDLERS ARK which went on to win the Booker Prize and ultimately to become the Oscar award-winning film SCHINDLERS LIST. Schindler, the ruined Catholic hedonist, had something ambiguous about him that appealled to the ex-seminarian Tom Keneally who still struggled with his own Catholicism and his humanist view of the world. Oskar showed that virtue, regardless of race, creed or religion, emerged where it would. Tom was a small child during WWII and these memories, along with the appeal of Schindler and Poldek's insistence, influenced him to write the book SCHINDLER'S ARK.Oskar and his Jews reduced the Holocaust - an almost untellable story in its scope and devastation - to an understandable human scale. SEARCHING FOR SCHINDLER is very much Tom's journey, he reflects on his early days as a writer with quite a bit of success - but no confidence - and how this book, the people he met, and the film it became, changed his life. From his Sydney home, he tracked down the main player's in Poldek and Schindler's story. Tom and Poldek travelled across the US, Germany, Israel, Austria and Poland interviewing survivors and discovering extraordinary stories. SCHINDLERS ARK took a huge toll on Tom, and his family, he had never been so overwhelmed by the writing of a story. It forced him to think about Australians and their attitudes to the Holocaust, to think about the Israel / Palestine situation and about families. Not ready to give up the story of Schindler and his Jews after the enormous success of the book, Tom is there for the film adaptation and on set for the filming.Filled with stories of Steven Spielberg, Liam Neeson, Ben Kingsley, Ralph Fiennes and many other well-known and strong characters SEARCHING FOR SCHINDLER gives Tom Keneally scope to show the wonderful, warm, thinking, compassionate and very funny man that he is. ...Show more

E. M. Forster: A New Life by Wendy Moffat

$25.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Reading Level: very good

One of the great mysteries in the life of E. M. Forster (1879-1970) is why, after the publication of "A Passage to India" in 1924, he never published another novel although he lived to be 90. In Wendy Moffat's biography, based on a lifetime's dedication to her subject, we gain extraordinary insights int o a man with a gift for writing fiction of great humanity, warmth and humour, who realised early that the society of his time would not allow him to publish the fiction he really wanted to write. At the end of "A Passage to India", his readers were left with the melancholy sight of Aziz and Fielding, friends of different races and cultures, riding out of the novel down separate paths. In real life, although frustrated at not being able to write out of his true self - it would not be until after his death that Maurice, his novel of a homosexual affair, would be published - E. M.Forster led a full and energetic life. He was a successful broadcaster, a brilliant essayist ("Abinger Harvest" and "Two Cheers for Democracy" are still must-reads) and a leading figure in Europe's intellectual life. ...Show more

The Pigeon Tunnel - Stories from My Life by John Le Carre

$14.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Reading Level: good-very good

'Out of the secret world I once knew, I have tried to make a theatre for the larger worlds we inhabit. First comes the imagining, then the search for reality. Then back to the imagining, and to the desk where I'm sitting now.' The Pigeon Tunnel, John le Carre's memoir and his first work of non-fiction, is a thrilling journey into the worlds of his 'secret sharers' - the men and women, who inspired some of his most enthralling novels - and a testament to the author's extraordinary engagement with the last half-century. The reader is swept along not just by the chilling winds of the Cold War or by the author's frightening journeys into places of terrible violence but, most importantly, by the author's inimitable voice. In this astonishing work we see our world, both public and private, through the eyes of one of this country's greatest writers. "No other writer has charted - pitilessly for politicians but thrillingly for readers - the public and secret histories of his times." (Guardian). "John le Carre is as recognizable a writer as Dickens or Austen." (Financial Times). "When I was under house arrest I was helped by the books of John le Carre...they were a journey into the wider world. ..These were the journeys that made me feel that I was not really cut off from the rest of humankind." (Aung San Suu Kyi). ...Show more

Proust - A Biography by Ronald Hayman

$14.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Reading Level: very good

An accessible account of the life and work of one of the century's greatest and most singular writers (1871-1922), drawing on letters, memoirs, manuscripts, and critical work not explored in previous biographies. Annotation copyright Book News, Inc. Portland, Or.--Book News

Living To Tell The Tale by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

$12.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Reading Level: good-very good

In this long-awaited first volume of a planned trilogy, the most acclaimed and revered living Nobel laureate begins to tell us the story of his life. Like all his work, Living to Tell the Tale is a magnificent piece of writing. It spans Gabriel Garcia Marquez's life from his birth in 1927 through the st art of his career as a writer to the moment in the 1950s when he proposed to the woman who would become his wife. It has the shape, the quality, and the vividness of a conversation with the reader - a tale of people, places, and events as they occur to him: the colorful stories of his eccentric family members; the great influence of his mother and maternal grandfather; his consuming career in journalism, and the friends and mentors who encouraged him; the myths and mysteries of his beloved Colombia; personal details, undisclosed until now, that would appear later, transmuted and transposed, in his fiction; and, above all, his fervent desire to become a writer. ...Show more

Robert Louis Stevenson : A Biography by Claire Harman

$12.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Reading Level: very good

The short life of Robert Louis Stevenson (1850-94) was as adventurous as almost anything in his fiction: his travels, illness, struggles to become a writer, relationships with his volatile wife and step-family, friendships and quarrels have fascinated readers for over a century. In his time he was both engineer and aesthete, dutiful son and reckless lover, Scotsman and South Sea Islander, Covenanter and atheist. Stevenson's books, including Treasure Island, The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and Kidnapped, have achieved world fame; others The Master of Ballantrae, A Child's Garden of Verses, Travels with a Donkey remain all-time favourites. His unique gift for storytelling and dramatic characterisation has meant that that some of his characters live in the consciousness even of those who have never read his work: Long John Silver, with his wooden leg and his parrot, is more real to most people than any historical pirate, while 'Jekyll and Hyde' has become a universally recognised term for a split personality.No biography has yet done justice to the complex, brilliant and troubled man who was responsible for so many remarkable creations. His interest in psychology, genetics, technology and feminism anticipated the concerns of the next century, while his experiments in narrative technique inspired post-modern innovators such as Borges and Nabokov. Stevenson's recently collected correspondence shows him to have been the least 'Victorian' of Victorian writers, a man of humour, resilience and strongly unconventional views. With access to this and much previously unpublished material, Claire Harman, the acclaimed biographer of Sylvia Townsend Warner and Fanny Burney, has written the most authoritative, comprehensive and perceptive portrait of Robert Louis Stevenson to date. First published 2005. ...Show more

Marcel Proust: Selected Letters 1880-1903 by Marcel Proust; Philip Kolb (Editor); Ralph Manheim (Translator); J. M. Cocking (Introduction by)

$20.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Reading Level: very good

Siegfried Sassoon - A Biography by Max Egremont

$16.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Reading Level: very good

Marcel Proust: A Biography by Tadie Jean-Yves

$30.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Reading Level: very good

Violet to Vita - The Letters of Violet Trefusis to Vita Sackville-West by Mitchell A. Leaska; John Phillips (Editor)

$20.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Reading Level: very good

Marcel Proust - Selected Letters Volume Two 1904-1909 by Philip Kolb (ed.)

$30.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Reading Level: very good

Marcel Proust - A Life by William C. Carter

$30.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Series: Henry McBride Series in Modernism and Modernity | Reading Level: very good

This book is a magisterial account of the life and times of Marcel Proust, one of the greatest literary voices of the twentieth century. Based on a host of recently available letters, memoirs, and manuscripts, it sheds new light on Proust's character, his development as an artist, and his masterpiece In Search of Lost Time (long known in English as Remembrance of Things Past). The biography also sets Proust's life in the decadent artistic and social context of the French fin de sihcle and the years leading up to World War I. The glittering Parisian world of which Proust was a part was also home to such luminaries as Anatole France, Jean Cocteau, and Andri Gide. William Carter brings this vibrant social world to life while he explores the inner world of Proust's intellectual and artistic development, as well as his most intimate personal experience. Carter examines Proust's passionate attachment to his mother, his deep love for the scenes of his youth, his flirtation with Parisian high society, his complicated sexual desires, and his irrevocable commitment to literary truth and shows how all these played out in the making of his great novel. In the book's abundance of detail, its we ...Show more