Βιογραφία

One day in 1925 a friend asked A. J. A. Symons if he had read Fr. Rolfe's Hadrian the Seventh. He hadn't, but soon did, and found himself entranced by the novel―"a masterpiece"―and no less fascinated by the mysterious person of its all-but-forgotten creator. The Quest for Corvo is a hilarious and heartbreaking portrait of the strange Frederick Rolfe, self-appointed Baron Corvo, an artist, writer, and frustrated aspirant to the priesthood with a bottomless talent for self-destruction. But this singular work, subtitled "an experiment in biography," is also a remarkable self-portrait, a study of the obsession and sympathy that inspires the biographer's art.

Radclyffe Hall was born in 1880 in Bournemouth in a house inappropriately named 'Sunny Lawn'. Her mother drank gin in an attempt to terminate the pregnancy, and her father fled the family home. At the mercy of a violent mother and sexually abusive stepfather, her life changed when at the age of eighteen she inherited her father's estate of GBP100,000.

She was free to travel, pursue women and write - most notably The Well of Loneliness, her famous novel about 'congenital inverts', which was declared 'inherently obscene' by the Home Secretary and banned. In this brilliantly written, witty and satirical biography Diana Souhami brings a fresh and irreverent eye to the life of this intriguing and troubled woman.

Winner of the 2020 Prix du Meilleur Livre Etranger, France's best foreign book of the year. 'Astounding' Sebastian Barry 'A masterpiece' Ayad Akhtar 'This little book is ruminative, humane, and gorgeously precise'Jonathan Lethem In this genre-defying book, best-selling memoirist and critic Daniel Mendelsohn explores the mysterious links between the randomness of the lives we lead and the artfulness of the stories we tell. Combining memoir, biography, history, and literary criticism, Three Rings weaves together the stories of three exiled writers who turned to the classics of the past to create masterpieces of their own-works that pondered the nature of narrative itself. Erich Auerbach, the Jewish philologist who fled Hitler's Germany and wrote his classic study of Western literature, Mimesis, in Istanbul. Francois Fenelon, the seventeenth-century French archbishop whose ingenious sequel to the Odyssey,The Adventures of Telemachus - a veiled critique of the Sun King and the best-selling book in Europe for one hundred years - resulted in his banishment. And the German novelist W. G. Sebald, self-exiled to England, whose distinctively meandering narratives explore Odyssean themes of displacement, nostalgia, and separation from home. Intertwined with these tales of exile and artistic crisis is an account of Mendelsohn's struggles to write two of his own books-a family saga of the Holocaust and a memoir about reading the Odyssey with his elderly father-that are haunted by tales of oppression and wandering. As Three Rings moves to its startling conclusion, a climactic revelation about the way in which the lives of its three heroes were linked across borders, languages, and centuries forces the reader to reconsider the relationship between narrative and history, art and life.

From the author of the magnificent, award-winning novels GILEAD, HOME and LILA comes this wonderful, heart-warming collection of essays about reading.

'Grace and intelligence ...[her work] defines universal truths about what it means to be human' Barack Obama

Marilynne Robinson is not only a writer of sharp, subtly moving fiction, but also a rigorous thinker and incisive essayist. In this luminous collection she returns to the themes which have preoccupied her bestselling novels: the place literature has in life, the role of faith in modern living, the contradictions inherent in human nature. Clear-eyed and forceful as ever, Robinson demonstrates once again why she is regarded as one of our best-loved writers.

ΣΥΖΗΤΗΣΕΙΣ ΚΑΙ ΠΟΡΤΡΑΙΤΑ

Αν κάποιος σε ρωτήσει ποτέ πώς ήμουν, πώς πραγματικά ήταν η Μέριλιν Μονρόε – λοιπόν, τι θα του απαντούσες;

Τον Απρίλιο του 1955, ο Τρούμαν Καπότε και η Μέριλιν Μονρόε συναντιούνται στην κηδεία μιας παλιάς ηθοποιού και βγαίνουν οι δυο τους για μια μεγάλη βόλτα στη Νέα Υόρκη. Δεκαεφτά χρόνια αργότερα, ο συγγραφέας συνομιλεί στις φυλακές του Σαν Κουέντιν με τον Μπομπ Μποσολέιγ, τον άνθρωπο που για χάρη του η Σάρον Τέιτ και άλλοι τέσσερις αθώοι δολοφονήθηκαν από την οικογένεια Μάνσον. Και στο κλείσιμο της δεκαετίας του ’70 ο Καπότε ζει μια αξέχαστη εμπειρία συνοδεύοντας μια θρησκευόμενη μαύρη καθαρίστρια που διώχνει τα βάρη της ζωής με τη βοήθεια της μαριχουάνας.

Τρεις πολύ διαφορετικές συνομιλίες και τρεις από τις πιο ξεχωριστές συγγραφικές στιγμές του Τρούμαν Καπότε, που εντυπώνονται απευθείας στο μυαλό σαν εμπιστευτικός ψίθυρος σε μια κατάμεστη αίθουσα.