Lewis' The Chronicles of Narnia. Enchanted by its fantastic world as a child, prominent critic Laura Miller returns to the series as an adult to uncover the source of these small books' mysterious power by looking at their creator, Clive Staples Lewis. What she discovers is not the familiar, idealized image of the author, but a more interesting and ambiguous truth: Lewis's tragic and troubled childhood, his unconventional love life, and his intense but ultimately doomed friendship with J.R.R. Tolkien.Finally reclaiming Narnia "for the rest of us," Miller casts the Chronicles as a profoundly literary creation, and the portal to a life-long adventure in books, art, and the imagination.

    The dos and don'ts of travelling and staying in Iceland. Five chapters with multiple tips in each one explain what is expected of you as a traveller - as well as some bonus tips on what you can do.

    Betsy Burton, owner of The King's English bookstore in Salt Lake City, has been a bookseller for nearly thirty years, and a passionate book lover all her life.

    To save her from living alone with a difficult father, her older sister sends her a one-way plane ticket to leave New Jersey. Landing in San Francisco, she is thrust into a lifestyle way beyond what she is ready for, and that challenges all previous notions of how one behaves. It is 1963, and we are brought along as Ilene becomes immersed in the unfolding of the sixties during the earliest days of sexual freedom, psychedelic drugs, the jazz scene, and rock ’n’ roll. This is a deeply personal story of how one young woman manages to survive and even to thrive in the face of the whirlwind of experiences coming at her. It is filled with a rich tapestry of moments that run the gamut from the sublime to the ridiculous, and everything in between.

     A must-have for every fan of literature, Booked inspires readers to follow in their favorite characters footsteps by visiting the real-life locations portrayed in beloved novels including the Monroeville, Alabama courthouse in To Kill a Mockingbird, Chatsworth House, the inspiration for Pemberley in Pride and Prejudice, and the Kyoto Bridge from Memoirs of a Geisha. The full-color photographs throughout reveal the settings readers have imagined again and again in their favorite books. Organized by regions all around the world, author Richard Kreitner explains the importance of each literary landmark including the connection to the author and novel, cultural significance, historical information, and little-known facts about the location. He also includes travel advice like addresses and must-see spots.Booked features special sections on cities that inspired countless literary works like a round of locations in Brooklyn from Betty Smith's iconic A Tree Grows in Brooklyn to Jonathan Lethem's Motherless Brooklyn and a look at the New Orleans of Tennessee Williams and Anne Rice. Locations include:Central Park, NYC (The Catcher in the Rye, JD Salinger)Forks, Washington (Twilight, Stephanie Meyer)Prince Edward Island, Canada (Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery)Kingston Penitentiary, Ontario (Alias Grace, Margaret Atwood)Holcomb, Kansas (In Cold Blood, Truman Capote)London, England (White Teeth, Zadie Smith)Paris, France (Hunchback of Notre Dame, Victor Hugo)Segovia, Spain, (For Whom the Bell Tolls, Ernest Hemingway)Umuofia, Nigeria (Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe)Kyoto, Japan (Memoirs of a Geisha, Arthur Golden)Cartagena, Colombia (One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel Garcia Marquez)

    A companion to TIME's multi-platform documentary, the book includes 15 first person deep-dives into the lives of influential women such as General Lori Robinson, the first woman to lead troops into combat, Kathryn Sullivan, the first woman to walk in space, and Aretha Franklin, the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Many others, including Oprah Winfrey, Madeline Albright, and Sheryl Sandburg offer their own personal reflections, thematic quotes and perspectives on balance, perseverance and strength.Each first-person piece or quote is accompanied by a distinctive portrait by photographer Luisa Dorr ― set up and taken on her iPhone. Others included in this unforgettable volume: Serena Williams, Ellen Degeneres, Loretta Lynch, Shonda Rimes, Nancy Pelosi, Rita Moreno, Cindy Sherman and Mo’Ne Davis.With a stirring introduction by Nancy Gibbs, herself a pioneer as the first female editor of TIME magazine, this is an inspirational book for all women and men.

     At the time of his incarceration, Kitchin, a Finnish citizen, was working in Russia as a representative for an American firm. He was arrested by the Soviet secret police (known as the OGPU at the time), charged with violating an obscure regulation, held in prison, and then sent to a labor camp located in northern Russia where he describes the brutalities he endured and witnessed. He had the good fortune after a time to be assigned clerical work in the office of the penal camp administration. This undoubtedly saved his life and it also gave him a unique opportunity to observe the inner workings of the OGPU organization. As a citizen of Finland, his case was a matter of concern to the Finnish government, whose efforts finally obtained for him permission to leave Soviet Russia. His physical condition after four horrible years was dire. A year and a half were spent in convalescing, and another year in preparing his notes and writing this memoir of his experiences. Prisoner of the OGBU is one of the only first-hand authentic accounts of the penal camps of the Far North, and it is still relevant today in understanding and studying that brutal period of history. ‘This for the market of Escape from the Soviets, and others of the sort, an account of the piled-up horrors of a prison camp of the Soviet Secret Police. Kitchin was a representative of Finnish interests, and got caught on a technicality and sent for four horrible years to the far north. First hand data of Soviet methods and inefficiencies, of the regime and a revealing picture of behind the scenes, of incredible brutalities. Well done and thrillingly absorbing reading.’ – Kirkus Reviews

    Central to his book is a powerful evocation of the lives of women – both scientific and literary.‘If our world is to be saved, we must understand it both scientifically and imaginatively’. So writes biographer Richard Holmes in This Long Pursuit, a kaleidoscope of stories and meditations in which he revisits two hundred working notebooks, and celebrates his beloved art of biography, calling it the vital ‘handshake across time, cultures, beliefs, disciplines and genders.Ranging widely over art, science and poetry, Holmes confesses to a lifetime’s obsession with his Romantic subjects – a pursuit or pilgrimage of the heart that takes him across three centuries, through much of Europe and into the lively company of many earlier biographers.Central to this quest is a powerful and tender evocation of the lives of women, both scientific and literary – some well-known and some almost lost: Margaret Cavendish, Mary Somerville, Germaine de Staël, Mary Wollstonecraft and the Dutch intellectual, Zèlide.The book also reviews the controversial reputations of some favourite Romantic figures: the love-stunned Keats, the water-logged poet Shelley, the chocolate-box painter Thomas Lawrence, the opium-soaked genius Coleridge, and the mad-visionary bard, William Blake.The diversity of Holmes’s material is testimony to his empathy, his erudition and his enquiring spirit; and also sometimes to his mischief. He offers a unique insider’s account of a biographer at work: travelling, teaching, researching, fantasising, forgetting, and even ballooning. From this great chronicler of the Romantics now comes a chronicle of himself and his intellectual passions. This Long Pursuit contains his most personal and seductive writing.

    Lewis's classic analysis springs from the conviction that literature exists for the joy of the reader and that books should be judged by the kind of reading they invite. Crucial to his notion of judging literature is a commitment to laying aside expectations and values extraneous to the work, in order to approach it with an open mind.

    That was on his first day at the front.Thrown into an open field to face German tanks and artillery fire, with only rifles and machine guns to defend themselves with, almost 2,000 men of his regiment were wiped out in only six days at the Eastern Front. At this rate, Ivan struggled to comprehend how he would survive the hundreds of battles that lay before him, with death seeming to be the only certainty.In his raw and trenchant memoir, Ivan recounts the terror and despair faced by a Red Army soldier on the Eastern Front.He has no sympathy for Stalin and his incompetent commanders, who sought awards and recognition at the expense of their soldiers’ lives. He simply wanted to serve his country.It is rare to find first-hand accounts of the Great Patriotic War from Red Army soldiers, as many did not survive to tell the tale. For the first time, Ivan reveals his gripping recollections of battles, times, places, and people encountered throughout World War II, from when he was drafted in 1941 until their victory in 1945.These recollections he dared not put on paper until 1992.

    From early obsessions with the March sisters to her later idolization of Sylvia Plath, Ellis evaluates how her heroines stack up today. And, just as she excavates the stories of her favorite characters, Ellis also shares a frank, often humorous account of her own life growing up in a tight-knit Iraqi Jewish community in London. Here a life-long reader explores how heroines shape all our lives.

    Historian Victor Brooks argues that 1944 was, in effect, “the longest year” for Americans of that era, both in terms of casualties and in deciding the outcome of war itself.Brooks also argues that only the particular war events of 1944 could have produced the “reshuffling” of the cards of life that, in essence, changed the rules for most of the 140 million Americans in some fashion. Rather than focusing on military battles and strategy alone, the author chronicles the year as a microcosm of disparate military, political, and civilian events that came together to define a specific moment in time.As war was raging in Europe, Americans on the home front continued to cope (with some prospering). As US forces launched an offensive against the Japanese in the Mariana Islands and Palau, folks at home enjoyed morale-boosting movies and songs such as "To Have and Have Not" and “G.I. Jive.” And as American troops invaded the island of Leyte—launching the largest naval battle during the war—President Franklin D. Roosevelt and Thomas E. Dewey were in the home stretch leading up to the election of 1944.It has been said that the arc of history is long. Throughout American history, however, some years have been truly momentous. The Longest Year makes the case that 1944 was one such year.Skyhorse Publishing, as well as our Arcade imprint, are proud to publish a broad range of books for readers interested in history--books about World War II, the Third Reich, Hitler and his henchmen, the JFK assassination, conspiracies, the American Civil War, the American Revolution, gladiators, Vikings, ancient Rome, medieval times, the old West, 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.

    In his monthly column "Stuff I've Been Reading", Nick Hornby lists the books he's purchased and the books he's read that month—they almost never overlap—and briefly discusses the books he's actually read. The Polysyllabic Spree includes selected passages from the novels, biographies, collections of poetry, and comics discussed in the column.

    But here is the secret world of the index: an unsung but extraordinary everyday tool, with an illustrious but little-known history.Charting its curious path from the monasteries and universities of thirteenth-century Europe to Silicon Valley in the twenty-first, Dennis Duncan reveals how the index has saved heretics from the stake, kept politicians from high office, and made us all into the readers we are today. We follow it through German print shops and Enlightenment coffee houses, novelists’ living rooms and university laboratories, encountering emperors and popes, philosophers and prime ministers, poets, librarians, and—of course—indexers along the way. Duncan reveals the vast role of the index in our evolving literary and intellectual culture, and he shows that in the Age of Search we are all index-rakers at heart.

    James Joyce’s big blue book, Ulysses, ushered in the modernist era and changed the novel for all time. But the genius of Ulysses was also its danger: it omitted absolutely nothing. All of the minutiae of Leopold Bloom’s day, including its unspeakable details, unfold with careful precision in its pages. The New York Society for the Suppression of Vice immediately banned the novel as "obscene, lewd, and lascivious.” Joyce, along with some of the most important publishers and writers of his era, had to fight for years to win the freedom to publish it. The Most Dangerous Book tells the remarkable story surrounding Ulysses, from the first stirrings of Joyce’s inspiration in 1904 to its landmark federal obscenity trial in 1933.   Literary historian Kevin Birmingham follows Joyce’s years as a young writer, his feverish work on his literary masterpiece, and his ardent love affair with Nora Barnacle, the model for Molly Bloom. Joyce and Nora socialized with literary greats like Ezra Pound, Ernest Hemingway, T. S. Eliot and Sylvia Beach. Their support helped Joyce fight an array of anti-vice crusaders while his book was disguised and smuggled, pirated and burned in the United States and Britain. The long struggle for publication added to the growing pressures of Joyce’s deteriorating eyesight, finances and home life.   Salvation finally came from the partnership of Bennett Cerf, the cofounder of Random House, and Morris Ernst, a dogged civil liberties lawyer and founder of the ACLU. With their stewardship, the case ultimately rested on the literary merit of Joyce’s master work. The sixty-year-old judicial practices governing obscenity in the United States were overturned because a federal judge could get inside Molly Bloom’s head.   Birmingham’s archival work brings to light new information about both Joyce and the story surrounding Ulysses. Written for ardent Joyceans as well as novices who want to get to the heart of the greatest novel of the twentieth century, The Most Dangerous Book is a gripping examination of how the world came to say yes to Ulysses.