It brings together a combination of Yeats's poetry and prose - all the major poems, complemented by plays, critical writings, and letters - to give the essence of his work and thinking. W. B. Yeats was born in 1865, only 38 years after the death of William Blake, and died in 1939, the contemporary of Ezra Pound and James Joyce. His career crossed two centuries, and this volume represents the full range of his achievement, from the Romantic early poems of Crossways and the symbolist masterpiece The Wind Among the Reeds to his last poems. Myth and folk-tale influence both his poems and his plays, represented here by Cathleen ni Houlihan and Deirdre among others. The importance of the spirit world to his life and work is evident in his critical essays and occult writings, and the anthology also contains political speeches, autobiographical writings, and a selection of his letters.

    Spanning two alphabetically arranged volumes, these commentaries reveal how the songs came to be and the people who inspired them: his devoted parents, Mary and Jim; his songwriting partner, John Lennon; his “Golden Earth Girl,” Linda Eastman; his wife, Nancy McCartney; and even Queen Elizabeth, among many others. Here are the origins of “Let It Be,” “Lovely Rita,” “Yesterday,” and “Mull of Kintyre,” as well as McCartney’s literary influences, including Shakespeare, Lewis Carroll, and Alan Durband, his high-school English teacher.With images from McCartney’s personal archives—handwritten texts, paintings, and photographs, hundreds previously unseen—The Lyrics, spanning sixty-four years, becomes the definitive literary and visual record of one of the greatest songwriters of all time.

    Wilde's views of life and art are illustrated through the use of Platonic dialogue where the character Vivian takes on the persona of Wilde. Wilde's goal is to subvert the norm by reversing its values. Wilde suggests to us that society is wrong, not him. Calling on diverse examples – from Ancient Greek sculpture to contemporary paintings – Oscar Wilde’s brilliant essay creates a witty, paradoxical world in which the only Art worth loving is that built on complete untruths.

    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.

    Covering 1907 to 1933, his eyewitness account provides a portrait of a country in constant flux: from the rise of the First Corps, the right-wing voluntary military force set up in 1918 to suppress Communism and precursor to the Nazi storm troopers, to the Hitler Youth movement; from the apocalyptic year of 1923 when inflation crippled the country to Hitler's rise to power. This fascinating personal history elucidates how the average German grappled with a rapidly changing society, while chronicling day-to-day changes in attitudes, beliefs, politics, and prejudices.

    For Nora, the simple fact of her German citizenship bound her to the Holocaust and its unspeakable atrocities and left her without a sense of cultural belonging. Yet Nora knew little about her own family’s involvement in the war: though all four grandparents lived through the war, they never spoke of it.In her late thirties, after twelve years in the US, Krug realizes that living abroad has only intensified her need to ask the questions she didn’t dare to as a child and young adult. Returning to Germany, she visits archives, conducts research, and interviews family members, uncovering in the process the stories of her maternal grandfather, a driving teacher in Karlsruhe during the war, and her father’s brother Franz-Karl, who died as a teenage SS soldier in Italy. Her quest, spanning continents and generations, pieces together her family’s troubling story and reflects on what it means to be a German of her generation.

    For two years he recorded travels, observations, and meditations on art and life as he moved across America and down to Mexico and back. In 1957, Kerouac sat down with the fifteen handwritten sketch notebooks he had accumulated and typed them into a manuscript called Book of Sketches; he included a handful of new sketches he had written that year. Published now for the first time, and with an introduction by George Condo, Book of Sketches offers an intimate glimpse of Kerouac at a key period of his literary career.

    Madcap but sincere, pulsating with strong social and philosophical undercurrents, his irreverent classics have introduced countless readers to hitchhiking cowgirls, born-again monkeys, a philosophizing can of beans, exiled royalty, and problematic redheads.In Tibetan Peach Pie, Robbins turns that unparalleled literary sensibility inward, weaving together stories of his unconventional life–from his Appalachian childhood to his globe-trotting adventures–told in his unique voice, which combines the sweet and sly, the spiritual and earthy. The grandchild of Baptist preachers, Robbins would become, over the course of half a century, a poet interruptus, a soldier, a meteorologist, a radio DJ, an art-critic-turned-psychedelic-journeyman, a world-famous novelist, and a counterculture hero, leading a life as unlikely, magical, and bizarre as those of his quixotic characters.Robbins offers intimate snapshots of Appalachia during the Great Depression, the West Coast during the sixties' psychedelic revolution, international roving before Homeland Security monitored our travels, and New York publishing when it still relied on trees.Written with the big-hearted comedy and mesmerizing linguistic invention for which Robbins is known, Tibetan Peach Pie is an invitation into the private world of a literary legend.

    

    Proper hard bastards, wannabe villains and cockney wide boys everywhere you went, all looking to make their mark. With trouble at home and more at school, Danny Dyer didn't have many options. He was a rascal, running with a tough crowd, getting himself into scrapes with the Old Bill, on the verge of becoming just another nobody. Until he started to act.It came naturally to him. He landed role after role, working with big stars, making a name for himself. And then came Human Traffic, and his career went into overdrive. Fame opened doors into the best clubs, the best booze and even better drugs. But with the highs came the lows, and as the drinks flowed, the work dried up. Shut out of an industry that didn't understand him, that heard his reputation before bothering with his talent, he had no choice but to turn it around and sort himself out. This is the real story - straight up.Funny, honest, full of swagger, and jammed full of antics and anecdotes, this memoir tears it up proper and delivers on every page.

    Honest, funny, and full of warmth, Herron s tales, each inspired by something she knit or something knit for her, will speak to anyone who has ever picked up a pair of needles. From her very first sweater (a hilarious disaster, to say the least) to the yellow afghan that caused a breakup (and, ultimately, a breakthrough), every piece has a moving story behind it. This beautifully crafted and candid collection is perfect for the knitter who loves to read and the reader who loves to knit.

    In a book which uniquely captures 1950's America, Brainard constructs the story of his life through a series of brief entries, each beginning with the words "I remember", and continues with observations about family, film stars, lust, and the astonishing New York culture into which he moved to from Tulsa at the age of 18.

    Rich with references ranging from Goethe's Werther to Winnicott, from Plato to Proust, from Baudelaire to Schubert, A Lover's Discourse artfully draws a portrait in which every reader will find echoes of themselves.

    His uniquely stylish films, with their designer violence, exuberant black humour and rapid-fire, tough-guy dialogue, have won him worldwide critical acclaim and rock star status. Tarantino is walking, talking, Oscar-winning proof that you can break the rules and still triumph over Hollywood. This roller coaster ride through Quentin Tarantino's life and work is based on over 100 in-depth interviews with friends, colleagues and family and was written with the invaluable support of Quentin's mother, Connie. Perceptive and compelling, Quentin Tarantino: Shooting From The Hip penetrates the eccentric world of Hollywood's hottest movie director. It is essential reading for everyone wanting to understand Tarantino the man, and the phenomenon.