Inside Memory - Pages from a Writer's Workbook by Timothy Findley

$20.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Reading Level: very good

Timothy Findley is on the bestseller lists again. Pilgrim, hisnewest and most ambitious novel yet, has gone like a bullet to the upperechelons of all the Canadian lists. Findley fans are out in full force, and manywill be looking for another Findley fix. Inside Memory: Pages from a Writer sNotebook will satisfy the craving with equally wonderful doses of memories, love and laughter.Now repackaged in the popular new PerennialCanada imprint, InsideMemory invites the reader to share Findley s life and work. Drawing fromhis personal journal entries and eclectic reflections, recollections and even anout-take from one of his early novels, the award-winning author shares hisextraordinary life with his readers.From his early days as an actor in London s West End, through to histransition to a writer, Findley entertains with the fascinating people and reallife settings that have shaped his life. At the same time, he reveals thecreative landscape of his mind and his work, a journey that shows how memoryinforms and infuses every aspect of his books. Above all, Findley tells greatstories, showing once again that he is a true master of his craft." ...Show more

Lions and Shadows: An Education in the Twenties by Christopher Isherwood

$12.00 NZD

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

Fairburn by Denys Trussell

$35.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Literature | Reading Level: very good

Southern Selves - From Mark Twain and Eudora Welty to Maya Angelou and Kaye Gibbons A Collection of Autobiographical Writing by James Watkins

$14.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Series: Vintage Original Ser. | Reading Level: very good

The memoirist seek to capture not just a self but an entire world, and in this marvelous anthology thirty-one of the South's finest writers-writers like Kaye Gibbons and Reynolds Price, Eudora Welty and Harry Crews, Richard Wright and Dorothy Allison-make their intensely personal contributions to a vibr ant collective picture of southern life. In the hands of these superb artists, the South's rich tradition of storytelling is brilliantly revealed. Whether slave or master, intellectual or "redneck," each voice in this moving and unforgettable collection is proof that southern literature richly deserves its reputation for irreverent humor, exquisite language, a feeling for place, and an undying, often heartbreaking sense of the past. ...Show more

Parisian Lives by Deirdre Bair

$18.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Reading Level: very good

Award-winning biographer Deirdre Bair explores her fifteen remarkable years in Paris with Samuel Beckett and Simone de Beauvoir, painting intimate new portraits of two literary giants. In 1971 Deirdre Bair was a journalist and recently minted PhD who managed to secure access to Nobel Prize-winning autho r Samuel Beckett. He agreed that she could write his biography despite never having written - or even read - a biography herself. The next seven years of intimate conversations, intercontinental research, and peculiar cat-and-mouse games resulted in Samuel Beckett: A Biography, which went on to win the National Book Award and propel Deirdre to her next subject: Simone de Beauvoir. The catch? De Beauvoir and Beckett despised each other - and lived essentially on the same street. While quite literally dodging one subject or the other, and sometimes hiding out in the backrooms of the great cafes of Paris, Bair learned that what works in terms of process for one biography rarely applies to the next. Her seven-year relationship with the domineering and difficult de Beauvoir required a radical change in approach, yielding another groundbreaking literary profile.Drawing on Bair's extensive notes from the period, including never-before-told anecdotes and details that were considered impossible to publish at the time, Parisian Lives is full of personality and warmth and gives us an entirely new window on the all-too-human side of these legendary thinkers. ...Show more

The Paper Nautilus by Michael Jackson

$16.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Fiction | Reading Level: very good

The Paper Nautilus is about loss the forms it takes, how we go on living in the face of it, and the mysterious ways that new life and new beginnings are born of brokenness. The paper nautilus provides a vivid image of this interplay of death and rebirth since, for new life to begin, the angelically beau tiful but fragile shell that sustained a former life must be shattered. Michael Jackson has recourse to his ethnographic fieldwork among the Kuranko of Sierra Leone, as well as autobiography and fiction, in exploring his theme. This book crosses and blends genres most engagingly. Beginning as a series of essays, it gradually morphs into a mesmerising work of the imagination in which the boundary between author and other becomes blurred, and the line between fact and fiction erased. ...Show more

Willa Cather: A Life Saved Up by Hermione Lee

$12.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Reading Level: very good

A biography of Willa Cather (1873-1947), who spent years working as a journalist, teacher and editor of a New York magazine whose deepest feelings were directed towards women. Her friendships from Sarah Orne Jewett and Dorothy Canfield to Stephen Tennant and Yehudi Menuhin were important to her yet as s he became more famous she withdrew increasingly from the modern world she disliked. Willa Cather's fiction charts new, female versions of epic pioneering heroism and the extraordinary cultural encounters of the New World history. This major reinterpretation of Cather's work explores that American context and those traditions but finds a strange and disconcerting Cather a writer of split identities, sexual conflict, dramatic energies and stoic fatalism. The author has written books on Elizabeth Bowen, Virginia Woolf and Philip Roth and The Short Stories of Willa Cather . ...Show more

A Memoir of Jane Austen by her nephew by J. E. Austen-Leigh

$14.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Reading Level: very good

Ways of Escape by Graham Greene

$20.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Reading Level: very good

With superb skill and feeling, Graham Greene retraces the experiences and encounters of his extraordinary life. His restlessness is legendary; as if seeking out danger, Greene travelled to Haiti during the nightmare rule of Papa Doc, Vietnam in the last days of the French, Kenya during the Mau Mau rebel lion. With ironic delight he recalls his time in the British Secret Service in Africa, and his brief involvement in Hollywood. He writes, as only he can, about people and places, about faith, doubt, fear and, not least, the trials and craft of writing. ...Show more

To the Is-Land: An Autobiography by Janet Frame

$35.00 NZD

Category: New Zealand Literature | Reading Level: very good

The first part of Janet Frame's three-volume autobiography, this text chronicles her childhood and adolescence, spent in a materially poor but intellectually intense railway family in the 1920s and 1930s.

Flaws in the Glass - A Self-Portrait by Patrick White

$20.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Reading Level: very good

The appearance of this self-portrait by Patrick White is a literary event for which his readers and admirers have long hoped. He explains how on the very rare occasions when he re-reads a passage from one of his books, he recognizes very little of the self he knows. This 'unknown' is the man who intervi ewers and visiting students expect to find, but 'unable to produce him', he prefers to remain private - or as private as anyone who has been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature can ever be. But in this book is the self Patrick White does recognize, the one he sees reflected in the glass. It is a remarkable book. In a shifting sequence we learn of youth in Australia; the 'expensive prison', his English boarding school; Cambridge with holiday trips to Germany; London in the Blitz; RAF wartime intelligence and compensations of life in Australia. There are journeys to cities and landscapes round the world which take on more reality than places one has actually visited. He tells us whom he has loved and hated and of his opinions - political and literary. He introduces us to a host of characters from Australian cousins to Stravinsky and Queen Elizabeth - and of course to Manoly Lascaris, who in 1942 'became the central mandala in my life's hitherto messy design.' He describes what he sees in the glass's reflection with such power that it seems no artist can have attempted or executed a self-portrait so lifelike before. ...Show more

A Wodehouse Handbook Volume One: The World of Wodehouse by N.T.P. Murphy

$16.00 NZD

Category: Literary biography | Reading Level: very good

In 1981, Norman Murphy caused a minor stir in literary circles when he published In Search of Blandings, which demonstrated that many of P.G. Wodehouse's legendary characters and settings were based on fact. In the two volumes of A Wodehouse Handbook, he reveals his findings across a wider field - the w orld that Wodehouse lived in and the sources of the many quotations and references Wodehouse used so brilliantly. In Volume 1, he tells us of Winston Churchill's first public speech; of Sam Goldwyn's typhoon that outdid Nature; how Clement Atlee made his first social protest; how the Gibson Girls kept England in suspense; of the longest golf hole ever played; and of the lady who flew the Atlantic without a map. We learn that immersion in the swimming pool (with all your clothes on) was not uncommon in a certain London club and that the home of Jeeves's Junior Ganymede is still to be found in Mayfair. The recipe for Green Swizzles is revealed at last - and a distant Wodehouse relation has provided an astonishing origin for the fabled "Buck-U-Uppo". Based on more than twenty years of searching though biographies, memoirs, obituaries and newspaper reports, Norman Murphy's discoveries encompass English and American social history from the Victorian era to the space race. He demonstrates conclusively that the world P.G. Wodehouse described was real enough. What Wodehouse did was to show the funny side of it. ...Show more