Here is Italo Calvino paying homage to his literary influences and tracing the evolution of his signature style. Here are his reminiscences of Italy’s antifascist resistance and the frenzy of politics and ideas of the postwar era. The longest and most delightfully revealing section of the book is Calvino’s diary of his travels in the United States in 1959 and 1960, which show him marveling at color TV, wrinkling his nose at the Beats, and reeling at the outpouring of racial hatred attending a civil rights demonstration in Alabama. Overflowing with insight and amusement, Hermit in Paris is an invaluable addition to the Calvino legacy.

    Combining philosophical argument with amusing anecdotes and lyrical desriptive passages, they record the great French writer's sense of isolation and alienation from a world which he felt had rejected his work. As he wanders around Paris, gazing at plants and day-dreaming, Rousseau looks back over his life in order to justify his actions and to elaborate on his ideal of a well-structured society fit for the noble and solitary natural man.

    Like moths of great promise, they were drawn to her well-lighted bookstore and warm hearth on the Left Bank. Shakespeare and Company evokes the zeitgeist of an era through its revealing glimpses of James Joyce, Ernest Hemingway, Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Andre Gide, Ezra Pound, Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, D. H. Lawrence, and others already famous or soon to be. In his introduction to this new edition, James Laughlin recalls his friendship with Sylvia Beach. Like her bookstore, his publishing house, New Directions, is considered a cultural touchstone.

    When they fall in love with the village of La Montagne Noire, they find themselves buying a fixer-upper and starting all over again-but this time, in French McAdams recounts their mishaps and misadventures with humor, capturing the essence of French village life, the awkwardness of being foreigners in a close-knit town, the couple's hilarious linguistic pratfalls, and how the mammoth undertaking that threatens to tear their new marriage apart ultimately brings them closer together and helps them find a place in the community they have grown to love.

    Prince was a legend of artistry and individuality, a man who lived for his music and positioned himself outside the confines of the recording industry. News of his untimely passing shocked and shattered his millions of fans. Filled with rare and carefully curated photos of Prince from all stages of his career, this visually stunning unofficial music biography tells Prince s story through conversations that journalist (and Prince fanatic) Mobeen Azhar had with the people who knew him best friends, musicians, artists, and members of his inner circle many speaking out about the great artist for the first time. These firsthand accounts paint a more personal picture of Prince than any seen before, and, along with the images, pay homage to the originality, musical genius, glamour, and sex appeal that Prince embodied."

    A wonderful read.' - Kevin Hand, BBC London. You’re in Greece and are given a €20 note with an email address scribbled on it. What would you do:1. Spend it? 2. Slip the suspect counterfeit bill into an enemy’s birthday card?3. Send an email, hoping it will lead to you finding everlasting love? Brad, a hopeless romantic, chose the latter.Two years later, his love life remains a disaster and his career is misfiring. As he’s about to walk Spain’s fabled Camino de Santiago to ponder some profound life changes, Brad receives a reply. Incredibly, it’s from a woman who lives on the 1000-year-old pilgrim path, far away from where the money first crossed his palm. She invites him to sleep… ‘on her house’. Hiking nine hundred kilometres on the Road to Santiago to a blind date with the mystery €20 woman, he discovers the utopia of his fantasies, befriends a Hungarian who speaks English in song titles and has his raison d’être revealed to him by a barefoot Mayan mystic. Will he meet his happily-ever-after too? Buy this pacy, exuberant, laugh-out-loud travelogue laced with tips for fellow pilgrims to find out...

    He both dreaded and yearned for a change from the preceding 20 years of "continual motion." Bogarde sought "a place of my own" and found it in a dilapidated farmhouse in the south of France. He writes eloquently of the dual struggle he faced--first dealing with years of neglect to the house and the land; second, with the awful fear that he had made a frightful error. Finally, we share his success in creating a real home, a sanctuary of simplicity and quiet ease where he intends to stay for good. "Bogarde's rare talent for giving resonance to both the small and large moments of life makes this a singularly rich and satisfying memoir." (Publisher's Source)

    S. Naipaul is an intimate record of a literary mentorship that traces the growth of both writers' careers and explores the unique effect each had on the other. Built around exotic landscapes, anecdotes that are revealing, humorous, and melancholy, and three decades of mutual history, this is a personal account of how one develops as a writer and how a friendship waxes and wanes between two men who have set themselves on the perilous journey of a writing life.

    But Vladimir Nabokov, who came to America fleeing the Nazis, came to think of his time here as the richest of his life. Indeed, Nabokov was not only happiest here, but his best work flowed from his response to this exotic land.Robert Roper fills out this period in the writer's life with charm and insight--covering Nabokov's critical friendship with Edmund Wilson, his time at Cornell, his role at Harvard's Museum of Comparative Zoology. But Nabokov in America finds its narrative heart in his serial sojourns into the wilds of the West, undertaken with his wife, Vera, and their son over more than a decade. Nabokov covered more than 200,000 miles as he indulged his other passion: butterfly collecting. Roper has mined fresh sources to bring detail to these journeys, and traces their significant influence in Nabokov's work: on two-lane highways and in late-'40s motels and cafés, we feel Lolita draw near, and understand Nabokov's seductive familiarity with the American mundane. Nabokov in America is also a love letter to U.S. literature, in Nabokov's broad embrace of it from Melville to the Beats. Reading Roper, we feel anew the mountain breezes and the miles logged, the rich learning and the Romantic mind behind some of Nabokov's most beloved books.

    The brilliance of her two novels and her poetry belies the quiet, truthful girl who often lived in the shadow of her more outgoing sisters. Yet her writing was the most revolutionary of all the Brontës, pushing the boundaries of what was acceptable. This revealing new biography opens Anne’s most private life to a new audience, and includes unpublished letters from Anne to the family to which she was governess as well as first publication of a controversial image that could be the only photograph of the three Brontë sisters.

    A writer, comedian, and journalist, Groskop studied the language obsessively starting at age 11, and spent every vacation in France, desperate to escape her Englishness and to have some French chic rub off on her. In Au Revoir, Tristesse, Groskop mixes literary history and memoir to explore how the classics of French literature can infuse our lives with joie de vivre and teach us how to say goodbye to sadness. From the frothy hedonism of Colette and the wit of Cyrano de Bergerac to the intoxicating universe of Marguerite Duras and the heady passions of Les Liaisons dangereuses, this is a love letter to great French writers. With chapters on Marcel Proust, Victor Hugo, Gustave Flaubert, Stendhal, Honoré de Balzac, Albert Camus, and of course Françoise Sagan, this is a delectable read for book lovers everywhere.

    Lee is well known as a major figure in the Civil War. However, by removing Lee from the delimiting frame of the Civil War and placing him in the context of the Republic's total history, Dowdey shows the "eternal relevance" of this tragic figure to the American heritage. With access to hundreds of personal letters, Dowdey brings fresh insights into Lee's background and personal relationships and examines the factors which made Lee that rare specimen, “a complete person.” In tracing Lee's reluctant involvement in the sectional conflict, Dowdey shows that he was essentially a peacemaker, very advanced in his disbelief in war as a resolution.Lee had never led troops in combat until suddenly given command of a demoralized, hodgepodge force under siege from McClellan in front of Richmond. In a detailed study of Lee's growth in the mastery of the techniques of war, he shows his early mistakes, the nature of his seemingly intuitive powers, the limitations imposed by his personal character and physical decline, and the effect of this character on the men with whom he created a legendary army. It was after the fighting was over that Dowdey believes Lee made his most significant and neglected achievement. As a symbol of the defeated people, he rose above all hostilities and, in the wreckage of his own fortunes, advocated rebuilding a New South, for which he set the example with his progressive program in education. The essence of Lee's tragedy was the futility of his efforts toward the harmonious restoration of the Republic with the dissensions of the past forgotten.Skyhorse Publishing, along with our Arcade, Good Books, Sports Publishing, and Yucca imprints, is proud to publish a broad range of biographies, autobiographies, and memoirs. Our list includes biographies on well-known historical figures like Benjamin Franklin, Nelson Mandela, and Alexander Graham Bell, as well as villains from history, such as Heinrich Himmler, John Wayne Gacy, and O. J. Simpson. We have also published survivor stories of World War II, memoirs about overcoming adversity, first-hand tales of adventure, and much more. While not every title we publish becomes a New York Times bestseller or a national bestseller, we are committed to books on subjects that are sometimes overlooked and to authors whose work might not otherwise find a home.

    Behind Edith Wharton, there was Anna Bahlmann—her governess turned literary secretary, and her mothering, nurturing friend. When at the age of forty-five, Edith falls passionately in love with a dashing younger journalist, Morton Fullerton, and is at last opened to the world of the sensual, it threatens everything certain in her life but especially her abiding friendship with Anna. As Edith’s marriage crumbles and Anna’s disapproval threatens to shatter their lifelong bond, the women must face the fragility at the heart of all friendships. Told through the points of view of both women, The Age of Desire takes us on a vivid journey through Wharton’s early Gilded Age world: Paris with its glamorous literary salons and dark secret cafés, the Whartons’ elegant house in Lenox, Massachusetts, and Henry James’s manse in Rye, England. Edith’s real letters and intimate diary entries are woven throughout the book. The Age of Desire brings to life one of literature’s most beloved writers, whose own story was as complex and nuanced as that of any of the heroines she created.

    Each essay charts some experience or remembrance of the past through the sieve of Tony Judt s prodigious mind. His youthful love of a particular London bus route evolves into a reflection on public civility and interwar urban planning. Memories of the 1968 student riots of Paris meander through the divergent sex politics of Europe, before concluding that his generation was a revolutionary generation, but missed the revolution. A series of road trips across America lead not just to an appreciation of American history, but to an eventual acquisition of citizenship. Foods and trains and long-lost smells all compete for Judt s attention; but for us, he has forged his reflections into an elegant arc of analysis. All as simply and beautifully arranged as a Swiss chalet—a reassuring refuge deep in the mountains of memory.

    in 1946 and during a longer stay in Brazil, Uruguay, Argentina and Chile in 1949 periods of stress and hectic public appearances, when he was tired, nervous, ill and vulnerable. If these journals were not by Camus, they might be regarded as "meaningless bits and pieces" (his own description) that do not merit publication. But 27 years after his death, almost anything from his pen possesses value for students of French literature. Since many of these fragments later turned up in his published writings, their major interest stems from the fact that they show how Camus passed from rough notes to a finished work. The introduction was written by the author's longtime editor at Gallimard.