Though Stalin spared the life of Boris Pasternak—whose novel-in-progress, Doctor Zhivago, was suspected of being anti-Soviet—he persecuted Boris’s mistress, typist, and literary muse, Olga Ivinskaya. Boris’s affair with Olga devastated the straitlaced Pasternaks, and they were keen to disavow Olga’s role in Boris’s writing process. Twice Olga was sentenced to work in Siberian labor camps, where she was interrogated about the book Boris was writing, but she refused to betray the man she loved. When Olga was released from the gulags, she assumed that Boris would leave his wife for her but, trapped by his family’s expectations and his own weak will, he never did. Drawing on previously neglected family sources and original interviews, Anna Pasternak explores this hidden act of moral compromise by her great-uncle, and restores to history the passionate affair that inspired and animated Doctor Zhivago. Devastated that Olga suffered on his behalf and frustrated that he could not match her loyalty to him, Boris instead channeled his thwarted passion for Olga into the love story in Doctor Zhivago. Filled with the rich detail of Boris’s secret life, Lara unearths a moving love story of courage, loyalty, suffering, drama, and loss, and casts a new light on the legacy of Doctor Zhivago.

    Best known as the lead singer and enigmatic front man, songwriter, bassist of The Church, Steve has experienced both amazing international success and all the excesses that go with it, as well as a well known heroin addiction that delivered some very dark times. The Church has been a significant and constant influence on the Australian music industry and readers will be keen to hear from one of the industry's most successful, creative and long-standing key protagonists. Kilbey is Australian rock and roll royalty and for the first time this is his story. Come inside the world of Steve Kilbey singer songwriter and bassist of one of Australia's best loved bands, The Church. From his migrant ten pound pom childhood through his adolescence growing up during the advent of The Beatles, Dylan and The Stones to his early adventures in garage bands and neighbourhood jams. His misadventures with a full time job and a 9 to 5 life and wild adventures with The Church as they conquer Australia and then the world. The tours. The records. The women. And then the heroin addiction which enslaved him for ten long years. Then the two sets of twins he fathers along the way and branching off into acting, painting and writing. From snowy Sweden to a cell in New York City, from Ipanema beach to Bondi, Kilbey stumbles through his surrrealistic life as an idiot savant that will make you smile as well as want to kick him up the arse. After coming out the other side his tale is simply too good not to be told. Narrated with unusual and often pristine clarity we and with much focus on his considerable musical talent.

    She suffered through two divorces, a string of painful affairs, a lifelong problem with alcohol, and several suicide attempts. In this lively, absorbing biography, Marion Meade illuminates both the dark side of Parker and her days of wicked wittiness at the Algonquin Round Table with the likes of Robert Benchley, George Kaufman, and Harold Ross, and in Hollywood with S.J. Perelman, William Faulkner, and Lillian Hellman. At the dazzling center of it all, Meade gives us the flamboyant, self-destructive, and brilliant Dorothy Parker.This edition features a new afterword by Marion Meade.

    You've shrunk six centimetres, you only weigh 45 kilos yet you're still beautiful, graceful and desirable' – so begins André Gorz's 'open love letter' to the woman he has lived with for 58 years and who lies dying next to him.As one of France's leading post-war philosophers, André Gorz wrote many influential books, but nothing he wrote will be read as widely or remembered as long as this simple, passionate, beautiful letter to his dying wife.In a bittersweet postscript a year after Letter to D was published, a note pinned to the door for the cleaning lady marked the final chapter in an extraordinary love story. André Gorz and his terminally ill wife, Dorine, were found lying peacefully side by side, having taken their lives together. They simply could not live without one another.An international bestseller, Letter to D is the ultimate love story – and all the more poignant because it's true.

    Here men from all walks of life don the garb of their fantasies and act them out: a man from the gas company wears the robe and mitre of a bishop; another customer becomes a flagellant judge, and still another a victorious general, while a bank clerk defiles the Virgin mary. These costumed diversions take place while outside a revolution rages on which has isolated the brothel from the rest of the rebel-controlled city. In a stunning series of macabre, climactic scenes, Genet presents his caustic view of man and society.

    The woman is no one in particular, a "she," a warm, moist body with a beating heart-the enigma of Other. Skilled in the mechanics of sex, he desires through her to penetrate a different mystery: he wants to learn love. It isn't a matter of will, she tells him. Still, he wants to learn to try . . .This beautifully wrought erotic novel is an extended haiku on the meaning of love, "perhaps a sudden lapse in the logic of the universe," and of its absence, "the malady of death." "The whole tragedy of the inability to love is in this work, thanks to Duras' unparalleled art of reinventing the most familiar words, of weighing their meaning." - Le Monde; "Deceptively simple and Racinian in its purity, condensed to the essential." - Translation Review.

    . .''Teach me my God and King . . .'George Herbert wrote, but never published, some of the very greatest English poetry, recording in an astonishing variety of forms his inner experiences of grief, recovery, hope, despair, anger, fulfilment and - above all else - love.He was born in 1593 and died at the age of 39 in 1633, before the clouds of civil war gathered, his family aristocratic and his upbringing privileged. He showed worldly ambition and seemed sure of high public office and a career at court, but then for a time 'lost himself in a humble way', devoting himself to the restoration of the church at Leighton Bromswold in Buckinghamshire and then to his parish of Bemerton, three miles from Salisbury, whose cathedral music he called 'my heaven on earth'. When in the year of his death his friend Nicholas Ferrar, leader of the quasi-monastic community at Little Gidding, published Herbert's poems under the title The Temple, his fame was quickly established.Because he published no English poems during his lifetime, and dating most of them exactly is impossible, writing Herbert's biography is an unusual challenge. In this book John Drury sets the poetry in the whole context of the poet's life and times, so that the reader can understand the frame of mind and kind of society which produced it, and depth can be added to the narrative of Herbert's life. (T.S. Eliot: 'What we can confidently believe is that every poem in the book [The Temple] is in tune to the poet's experience.') His Herbert is not the saintly figure who has come down to us from John Aubrey, but a man torn for much of his life between worldly ambition and the spiritual life shown to us so clearly through his writings. The result is the most satisfying biography of this exceptional English poet yet written.

    Tableaux Parisiens condemns the crushing effects of urban planning on a city's soul and praises the city's anti-heroes including the deranged and derelict. Le Vin centers on the search for oblivion in drink and drugs. The many kinds of love that lie outside traditional morality is the focus of Fleurs du Mal while rebellion is at the heart of Révolte.

    Book and CDs work beautifully together, kindling deeper appreciation for the transmuting power of poetry, a practice of discipline, skill, and magic." - BOOKLIST ..".The prose comes to life when read aloud, especially when you hear James Joyce read it himself." NPR's ALL THINGS CONSIDERED host Jacki Lyden "This tome is a reminder how the human spirit is capable of finding an outlet in oppressive times, how poetry can help explain why we do what we do as a thinking people...Certainly, in our struggle to make sense out of what we do not understand, Poetry Speaks Expanded helps on so many levels." Carol Hoenig, THE HUFFINGTON POST ..".[A] bountiful experience: there is the thrill of discovery and re-discovery as with any good anthology, with an added emphasis on the poets' personalities and growth" John Hammond, SAN ANTONIO EXPRESS-NEWS "[An] accessible, beautifully executed collection guaranteed to offer poetry fans a memorable reading and listening experience" WORDCANDY.NET ..".[A]s I savored these beautiful poems, it reminded me of French poet Charles Baudelaire who wrote, 'Any man can go without food for two days - but not without poetry.'" - Norm Goldman, BOOKPLEASURES.COM "Light[s] up a reader's eyes." - Frank Wilson, PHILADELPHIA INQUIRER Hear And Read All Of These Poets (And More)244 Poems Included In The Book107 Poems Read By The Poets Themselves On 3 Audio CDs Robert Graves, E. E. Cummings, Walt Whitman, Ezra Pound, William Butler Yeats, Gertrude Stein, Carl Sandburg, James Joyce, William Carlos Williams, Ted Hughes, Robinson Jeffers, Philip Larkin, Wallace Stevens, Louise Bogan, Melvin B. Tolson, Laura (Riding) Jackson, Ogden Nash, W. H. Auden, Louis MacNeice, Allen Ginsberg Theodore Roethke, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Hayden, Robert Frost, Muriel Rukeyser, Gwendolyn Brooks, Randall Jarrell, Jack Kerouac, John Berryman, Dylan Thomas, Robert Lowell, Robert Browning, Robert Duncan, May Swenson, John Crowe Ransom Poetry Speaks Expanded is a fusion of the poet's words with the poet's voice, including text and recordings of nearly 50 of the greatest poets who ever lived, ranging from Walt Whitman, Robert Frost, James Joyce and T. S. Eliot to Langston Hughes, Jack Kerouac, Sylvia Plath, Ted Hughes and Gwendolyn Brooks. "This book has the potential to draw more readers to poetry than any collection in years."-PUBLISHERS WEEKLY, STARRED REVIEW "Readers and listeners are guaranteed to hear poems in a new way after spending time with this book and CD set."-LIBRARY JOURNAL, STARRED REVIEW "Superb, accessible....A unique and essential purchase"-SCHOOL LIBRARY JOURNAL Poetry--For the first time ever, James Joyce reads "Anna Livia Plurabelle" from Finnegans Wake alongside the original text from the book--T. S. Eliot reading "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock"--Sylvia Plath's anger and raw emotion as she reads "Daddy" and "Lady Lazarus"--Jack Kerouac reading from "MacDougal Street Blues," accompanied by Steve Allen on piano--May Swenson rehearsing "The Watch" prior to a reading--H. D. reading a part of "Helen in Egypt" from a rare recording made shortly before her death--Ted Hughes reading "February 17" during a BBC interview--A never-before-published recording of Alfred, Lord Tennyson reading "The Charge of the Light Brigade"--W. B. Yeats explaining his reading style and why he chooses to read that way--Robert Frost reading "The Road Not Taken" and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" Essays Written By Today's Most Influential Poets, Including: W. S. Merwin on Robert Graves, Seamus Heaney on W. B. Yeats, Paul Muldoon on James Joyce, Robert Pinsky on William Carlos Williams, Sonia Sanchez on Gwendolyn Brooks, Galway Kinnell on Walt Whitman, Rita Dove on Melvin B. Tolson, Jorie Graham on Elizabeth Bishop and Al Young on Langston Hughes "The most ambitious, innovative poetry project to be published in years."-QUALITY PAPERBACK BOOK CLUB A Book Sense Top-10 Selection

    Janet Malcolm brings her shrewd intelligence to bear on the legend of Sylvia Plath and the wildly productive industry of Plath biographies. Features a new Afterword by Malcolm.

    The letters are addressed mainly to her mother, with whom she had an extremely close and confiding relationship, but there are also some to her brother Warren and her benefactress Mrs Prouty. Plath's energy, enthusiasm and her passionate tackling of life burst onto these pages, providing us with a vivid and intimate portrait of a woman who has come to be regarded as one of the greatest of twentieth-century poets. In addition to her capacity for domestic and writerly happiness, however, these letters also hint at Plath's potential for deep despair, which reached its crisis when she holed up in a London flat for the terrible winter of 1963.

    Replacing the slim volume which introduced Stevie Smith to American readers, New Selected Poems is chronologically arranged and contains 165 poems along with many of the author's doodles.

    "Nick Demske writes from culture like the Hollywood version of a rebellious slave, the role shredding off him, culture's synthetic exemplary tales shredding and piling up on the floor of the projector room."—Joyelle McSweeneyHis name is "a transcendant uber-obsenity that can be understood universally by speakers of any language."

    

    Mohi symbolises ""the hurting"" and Kabir is all about ""the healing"" that comes after it. A book written and illustrated by author,which is for everyone. for those who believe in love and compassion and for those who don't. Those who have healed and those who are still in process. Those who aren't able to move on and those who have successfully done it. It is for feminists, the activists, the believers, the gender norm shatterers.It is a gift, a book on its journey to make difference in it's reader's life.