Later Auden by Edward Mendelson

$25.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Reading Level: very good

The definitive study of Auden's poems from 1939 to 1973. "For a poet like myself, an autobiography is redundant," W. H. Auden wrote to a friend, "since anything of importance that happens to one is immediately incorporated, however obscurely, in a poem." This book is the history of Auden's poems, and o f the events that went into them, from the time he moved to the United States until his death, completing the story begun in Edward Mendelson's acclaimed Early Auden. Later Auden links the changes in Auden's intellectual, emotional, religious, and erotic life with his shifting public roles - as representative of political causes, as researcher working with the U.S. Army in postwar Germany, as public moralist, as lecturer and teacher, and above all as poet. Mendelson deftly reveals how Auden converted the success and later wreckage of his relationship with Chester Kallman into the seemingly impersonal meditations of some of his long poems, and explores the ways his later poetry celebrates the human body and represents it in verse. Throughout, he reveals the depth of Auden's struggles with himself and with the temptations of his growing fame, showing how these struggles gave shape to his imperishable art. This inner biography of a great poet and thinker has unusual breadth and intensity. An absorbing narrative of a varied, productive life, it will interest everyone who cares about literature. ...Show more

Blazing Star: The Life and Times of John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester by Alexander Larman

$25.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Reading Level: very good

He was 'THE WICKEDEST MAN ALIVE'. He went to Oxford University at the age of 12 He slept with his first prostitute at 13 He was an alcoholic by 14 He was imprisoned in the Tower at 18 He was acclaimed a war hero at 19 He died of syphilis at the age of 33 He was English history's first celebrity. He was John Wilmot, 2nd Earl of Rochester: Poet, dandy and libertine. BLAZING STAR is a compelling portrait of a remarkable and complex man, and of a cultural golden age that often spilled over into depravity. ...Show more

The Collected Letters of Katherine Mansfield Volume 5 1922-1923 by Vincent O'Sullivan and Margaret Scott (eds)

$55.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Literature | Reading Level: near fine

Katherine Mansfield's letters are as finely written as her stories and prized by ordinary readers as much as by literary critics and feminists. The fifth and final volume of this celebrated edition reveals Mansfield's courage, wit, independence, and honesty in the final year of her life.

Living to Tell the Tale by Gabriel Garcia Marquez

$25.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Reading Level: very good

He is perhaps the most acclaimed, revered and widely read writer of our time, and in this first volume of a planned trilogy - a book that has already become a bestseller in its Spanish-language edition both abroad and in the United States - the Nobel Laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez 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 Garcia Marquez's life from his birth in 1927 through the beginning 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, the aliveness of a conversation with the reader: a tale of people, places and events as they occur to him: family, work, politics, books and music, his beloved Colombia, parts of his history until now undisclosed and incidents that would later appear, transmuted and transposed, in his fiction. And as in his fiction, the narrator here is an inspired observer of the physical world, able to make clear the emotions and passions that lie at the heart of a life - in this instance, his own. A vivid, powerful, beguiling memoir that gives us the formation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez as a writer and as a man. ...Show more

The Diaries of Kenneth Tynan by Kenneth Tynan; John Lahr (Editor)

$20.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Reading Level: very good

For over three decades, on both sides of the Atlantic, Tynan was at the hot centre of the theatre and film worlds. He knew everybody; and everybody wanted to know him. His diaries so full of gossip bear witness to the fame he courted and the price he paid for it. These sizzling diaries will remind older readers of a man whose reputation as one of the greatest critics of the twentieth century is still unchallenged and introduce younger readers to an electrifying writer who simply could not be boring. ...Show more

The Journals Of Sylvia Plath 1950-1962 by Karen V Kukil (ed.)

$35.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Reading Level: very good

The Journals of Sylvia Plath offers an intimate portrait of the author of the extraordinary poems for which Plath is so widely loved, but it is also characterized by a prose of vigorous immediacy which places it alongside The Bell Jar as a work of literature. These exact and complete transcriptions of t he journals kept by Plath for the last twelve years of her life - covering her marriage to Ted Hughes and her struggle with depression - are a key source for the poems which make up her collections Ariel and The Colossus. 'Everything that passes before her eyes travels down from brain to pen with shattering clarity - 1950s New England, pre-co-ed Cambridge, pre-mass tourism Benidorm, where she and Hughes honeymooned, the birth of her son Nicholas in Devon in 1962. These and other passages are so graphic that you look up from the page surprised to find yourself back in the here and now . . . The struggle of self with self makes the Journals compelling and unique.' John Carey, Sunday Times ...Show more

Selected Letters of Dashiell Hammett, 1921-1960 by Richard Layman (Editor); Julie M. Rivett (Editor); Josephine Hammett Marshall (Introduction by); Dashiell Hammett

$30.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Reading Level: very good

This work is compiled of the letters, both private and professional, of Dashiell Hammett, creator of Sam Spade. In his five great crime novels, all of them written between 1927 and 1935, Dashiell Hammett gave America a cast of immortal characters - Sam Spade, the Continental Op, and Nick and Nora Charle s, mold-breaking, red-blooded alternatives to Sherlock Holmes and Lord Peter Wimsey. A popular writer from the start, he aspired to a higher goal. As he was working on his classic The Maltese Falcon, he wrote a letter to his publisher about the potential of the detective-story form: Someday somebody's going to make literature out of it. ...Show more

Dirt & Deity - A Life of Robert Burns by Ian McIntyre

$12.00 NZD

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

This biography illuminates and explores the complexities and contradictions of Burns's character and personality, untangling the myth from the legend. Based on new evidence from 700 letters Burns wrote during his life, McIntyre concentrates on the circumstances of the writing of poetry itself, and paint s a vivid picture of Burns's emotional and impulsive political views, the cruelty and gentleness of which he was capable, stressing the importance and the quality of the satirical poetry as well as the unforgettable love poetry immediately associated with his name. ...Show more

North Face of Soho: More Unreliable Memoirs by Clive James

$10.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Series: Unreliable Memoirs Ser. | Reading Level: very good

At the very end of May Week Was in June, we left our hero sitting beside the River Cam one beautiful 1968 spring day, jotting down his thoughts in a journal. Newly married and about to leave the cloistered world of Cambridge academia for the racier, glossier life promised by Literary London, he was, so he informed his journal, reasonably satisfied. But what happened next? This is the question posed (and answered) by North Face of Soho. Intelligent, amusing and provocative - the words apply to the man himself as much as his writing - the fourth volume of Unreliable Memoirs is every bit as eventful, entertaining, engrossing and honest as the previous three. ...Show more

Dorothy L. Sayers - A Biography by James Brabazon

$12.00 NZD

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

A Voice from Old New York - A Memoir of my Youth by Louis Auchincloss

$14.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Reading Level: very good

At the time of his death, Louis Auchincloss--enemy of bores, self-pity, and gossip less than fresh--had just finished taking on a subject he had long avoided: "himself." His memoir confirms that, despite the spark of his fiction, Auchincloss himself was the most entertaining character he has created. No traitor to his class but occasionally its critic, he returns us to his Society which was, he maintains, less interesting than its members admitted. You may differ as he unfurls his life with dignity, summoning his family (particularly his father who suffered from depression and forgave him for hating sports) and intimates. Brooke Astor and her circle are here, along with glimpses of Jacqueline Onassis. Most memorable, though, is his way with those outside the salon: the cranky maid; the maiden aunt, perpetually out of place; the less-than-well-born boy who threw himself from a window over a woman "and" a man. Here is Auchincloss, an American master, being Auchincloss, a rare eye, a generous and lively spirit to the end. ...Show more

To the Is-Land by Janet Frame

$12.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Reading Level: good

To the Is-land is the first book of Janet Frame's three-volume autobiography, described by Michael Holryod as 'one of the greatest autobiographies written this century.' It chronicles her childhood and adolescence spent in a materially poor but intellectually intense railway family in the 1920s and 30s. First published in 1983, it won the prestigious Wattie Book of the Year Award. ...Show more