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Biography

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A Moveable Feast

'If you are lucky enough to have lived in Paris as a young man, then wherever you go for the rest of your life, it stays with you, for Paris is a moveable feast.' Hemingway's memories of his life as an unknown writer living in Paris in the 1920s are deeply personal, warmly affectionate and full of wit. Looking back not only at his own much younger self, but also at the other writers who shared Paris with him - literary 'stars' like James Joyce, Wyndham Lewis, Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, Ezra Pound and Gertrude Stein - he recalls the time when, poor, happy and writing in cafes, he discovered his vocation.

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Miracles of Life: Shanghai to Shepperton : an Autobiography

J. G. Ballard has been, for over fifty years, one of this country's most significant writers. Beginning with the events that inspired his classic novel, 'Empire of the Sun', in this revelatory autobiography he charts the course of his astonishing life. Beginning with his early childhood spent exploring the vibrant surroundings of pre-war Shanghai, Ballard charts the course of his remarkable life from the deprivations and unexpected freedoms of the Lunghua Camp to his return to a Britain physically and psychologically crippled by war. He explores his subsequent involvement in the dramatic social changes of the 1960s, and the adjustments to life following the premature death of his wife. In prose displaying his characteristic precision and eye for detail, Ballard recounts the experiences which would fundamentally shape his writing, while simultaneously providing an striking social analysis of the fragmented post-war Britain that lies behind so many of his novels. 'Miracles of Life' is an utterly captivating account of an extraordinary writer's extraordinary life.

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Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance

The son of a black African father and a white American mother, Obama was only two years old when his father walked out on the family. Many years later, Obama receives a phone call from Nairobi: his father is dead. This sudden news inspires an emotional odyssey for Obama, determined to learn the truth of his father's life and reconcile his divided inheritance. Written at the age of thirty-three, "Dreams from my Father" is an unforgettable read. It illuminates not only Obama's journey, but also our universal desire to understand our history, and what makes us the people we are.

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Gabriel Garcia Marquez: A Life

Central concerns will be the rags to riches element of Garcia Marquez's story, the tension in his life between celebrity and literary quality, between politics and writing; and between power, solitude and love; the contrast between his Caribbean background and the gloomier authoritarianism of highland Bogota; and his conscious but nonetheless extraordinary turn away from Macondo, magical realism and "One Hundred Years of Solitude" after those interlinked phenomena had brought him fame and unimagined wealth. Martin is considered by Garcia Marquez to be his 'official' biographer and he has met the novelist and conducted interviews with him at regular intervals throughout the 15-year research period.He has also interviewed at least 300 other persons, including Fidel Castro, Felipe Gonzalez, several presidents of Colombia, writers like Carlos Fuentes, Mario Vargas Llosa and Alvaro Mutis, the author's wife and sons, his mother, his brothers and sisters, his literary agent and translators, and most of his best friends and professional collaborators (as well as some detractors). This biography is not only based on Martin's unique experience of Garcia Marquez and his milieux over the last two decades but also on a wealth of sources, which it will be extremely difficult, if not impossible, for any other biographer to replicate.

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Burning the Days

This brilliant memoir brings to life an entire era through the sensibility of one of America's finest authors. Recollecting fifty years of love, desire and friendship, "Burning the Days" traces the life of a singular man, who starts out in Manhattan and comes of age in the skies over Korea, before reinventing himself as a writer in the New York of the 1960s. It features - in Salter's uniquely beautiful style - some of the most evocative pages about flying ever written, together with portraits of the actors, directors and authors who influenced him. This is a book that through its sheer sensual force not only recollects the past, but reclaims it."

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The Periodic Table (Penguin Modern Classics)

A chemist by training, Primo Levi became one of the supreme witnesses to twentieth-century atrocity. In these haunting reflections inspired by the elements of the periodic table, he ranges from young love to political savagery; from the inert gas argon - and 'inert' relatives like the uncle who stayed in bed for twenty-two years - to life-giving carbon. 'Iron' honours the mountain-climbing resistance hero who put iron in Levi's student soul, 'Cerium' recalls the improvised cigarette lighters which saved his life in Auschwitz, while 'Vanadium' describes an eerie post-war correspondence with the man who had been his 'boss' there. All are written with characteristically understated eloquence and shot through with deep humanity.

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The Stranger from Paradise: A Biography of William Blake (Paul Mellon Centre for Studies)

This illustrated biography of William Blake, the great English artist, poet and mystic, seeks to encompass virtually everything that is known of his life and times. Often invoking the words of Blake's own contemporaries, G.E. Bentley describes the struggles of Blake's youth, his gradual embrace of the power of the spirit and visionary art and literature, and the serenity he achieved in his old age.

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Autobiographies (Collected Works of W. B. Yeats)

Contains six autobiographical essays chronicling Yeat's first fifty-eight years, exploring connections between his life and work.

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Muriel Spark: The Biography

Born in 1918 into a working-class Edinburgh family, Muriel Spark ended as the epitome of literary chic, one of the great writers of the twentieth century. It is a Cinderella story, the first thirty-nine years of which she presented in her autobiography, CURRICULUM VITAE (1992), politely blurring the intensity of her darker moments: her relations with her brother, mother, son, husband; a terrifying period of hallucinations and subsequent depression; and the disastrously misplaced love she had felt for two men she had wanted to marry, Howard Sergeant and Derek Stanford. Aged nineteen, Spark left Scotland to marry in Southern Rhodesia, escaping back to Britain on a troopship in 1944 after her divorce. Her son returned in 1945 to be brought up by her parents in Edinburgh while she established herself as a poet and critic in London. After becoming a Roman Catholic in 1954, she began a novel, THE COMFORTERS (1957), and with MEMENTO MORI, THE BALLAD OF PECKAM RYE and THE BACHELORS rose rapidly into the literary stratosphere. THE PRIME OF MISS JEAN BRODIE (1961), with its adaptation into a successful stage-play and film, marked her full translation into international celebrity and from that point she went to live first in New York, then Rome, and finally Tuscany where for over thirty years, until her death in 2006, she shared a house with her companion, the artist Penelope Jardine. In 1992 Spark invited Martin Stannard to write her biography, offering interviews and full access to her papers. The result is a compelling portrait of an extraordinary life.

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With Borges

In 1964, a blind writer approached a sixteen-year old bookstore clerk in Buenos Aires and asked if the latter would be interested in a part-time job reading aloud. The boy accepted, and for the following four years read to him, three to four times a week, from books by Kipling, Stevenson, Henry James and many others. The writer was Jorge Luis Borges, one of the finest literary minds in any era in any country; the boy (who did not consider himself especially privileged at the time) was Alberto Manguel, who would become internationally acclaimed as a prolific novelist, essayist, editor and bibliophile in his own right, intimately bound up himself with the pleasures of literature and of reading. In this slender volume, Manguel recalls those long-ago evenings when he would climb six flights of stairs to visit a darkened apartment (where the great man lived with his aged mother), which 'seemed to exist outside time'. Despite the urging of his aunt, who recognised the extraordinary opportunity to draw close to a living legend, Manguel took no notes during these sessions because he felt too 'contented': 'the conversations with Borges were what, in my mind, conversations should always be about: about books and about the clockwork of books, and about the discovery of writers I had not read before, and about ideas that had not occurred to me.' Part memoir, part biography, and all celebration of the living quality of literature, Manguel's reflections on the works of Borges and of the writers he admired form a portrait in mosaic of this enigmatic figure, and describe an important stage in the formation of a world-class reader.