Showing titles in Art & Literature

The Beekeeper of Aleppo tells the story of Nuri, a beekeeper, and Afra an artist, who are warmly surrounded by friends and family in the beautiful city of Aleppo in Syria. Their world changes in an instant when war destroys everything they've known and loved and serves them unendurable heartbreak. In this interview we spoke about Lefteri's experiences in refugee camps in Athens, how these weighed on her, and thus her motivations for writing The Beekeeper of Aleppo. We also spoke about learning about beekeeping, PTSD and asylum.

Speak, Memory, first published in 1951 as Conclusive Evidence and then assiduously revised in 1966, is an elegant and rich evocation of Nabokov’s life and times, even as it offers incisive insights into his major works, including Lolita, Pnin, Despair, The Gift, The Real Life of Sebastian Knight, and The Luhzin Defense.

Dahl has been contributing editor at Men’s Vogue, Conde Nast Traveller and British Vogue. Her literary career began in 2003, when she released her first book, an illustrated novella which became a Times best seller, titled The Man with the Dancing Eyes. She has gone on to release cookery books, including Miss Dahl’s Voluptuous Delights, and cookery shows. Dahl, married to jazz singer Jamie Cullum, has two children and lives in Buckinghamshire. Her newest book is her first for children and is titled Madame Badobedah.

The audio edition of On the Grand Trunk Road is finally available, revised and updated with new material. Focusing on Coll's journeys in conflict-ridden India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Sri Lanka, Nepal, and Afghanistan as a bureau chief for The Washington Post, On the Grand Trunk Road reveals a little-seen area of the world where violence, corruption, and greed have had devastating effects on South Asians from all walks of life.

Wilbur Smith has lived an incredible life of adventure, and now he shares the extraordinary true stories that have inspired his fiction. From being attacked by lions to close encounters with deadly reef sharks, from getting lost in the African bush without water to crawling the precarious tunnels of gold mines, from marlin fishing with Lee Marvin to near death from crash-landing a Cessna airplane, from brutal school days to redemption through writing and falling in love, Wilbur Smith tells us the intimate stories of his life that have been the raw material for his fiction.

Prisoner FF8282 gazes out from confinement on what he deems must be a glorious summer’s day, rays of sunlight bursting through the barred windows of his cell. Within the thick prison walls separating society from its dangerous criminals, a multitude of harrowing fates unfold, seldomly explored by the public. First-time offenders thrown in cells with hardened criminals, several inmates becoming heroin addicts and a system riddled with flaws. However, even in prison the sunlight cannot be kept out.

“I don’t want to be remembered for One Hundred Years of Solitude or for the Nobel Prize, but rather for my journalism,” Gabriel García Márquez said in the final years of his life. And while some of his journalistic writings have been made available over the years, this is the first volume to gather a representative selection from across the first four decades of his career - years during which he worked as a full-time, often muckraking, and controversial journalist, even as he penned the fiction that would bring him the Nobel Prize in 1982.

We have all seen, whether live, in photographs or on postcards, some of Claude Monet's legendary water lily paintings. They are in museums all over the world and are among the most beloved works of art of the past century. Yet, ironically, these soothing images were created amid terrible personal turmoil and sadness.

Dr. Johnson may have been correct in saying that “Rousseau was a very bad man,” but none can argue that his ideas are among the most influential in all of world history. It was Rousseau, the father of the romantic movement, who was responsible for introducing at least two modern day thoughts that pervade academia. The Confessions is Rousseau’s landmark autobiography. Both brilliant and flawed, it is nonetheless beautifully written and remains one of the most moving human documents in all of literature.

Translating Myself and Others is a collection of candid and disarmingly personal essays by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, who reflects on her emerging identity as a translator as well as a writer in two languages. With subtlety and emotional immediacy, Lahiri draws on Ovid's myth of Echo and Narcissus to explore the distinction between writing and translating, and provides a close reading of passages from Aristotle's Poetics to talk more broadly about writing, desire, and freedom.

Vincent Van Gogh arrived in the French capital on the last day of February 1886, a month short of his thirty-third birthday. He was a man beaten down by life, half-starved, and nearly broken psychologically. He was saved by his brother Theo, who provided him with room, board, and, most crucially, emotional support while he attempted to master the difficult craft of painting. Thus far, Vincent's crude scenes of peasant life rendered in murky shades of brown and gray were both hackneyed and amateurish.

A.K. Ramanujan (1929-1993), one of India's finest poets, translators, folklorists, essayists and scholars of the twentieth century, is a stalwart in India's literary history. His translations of ancient Tamil and medieval Kannada poetry, as well as of UR Ananthamurthy's novel Samskara, are...

Drawing together a fascinating body of writing from over 14 years of work, Figures in a Landscape ranges from profiles of cultural icons (Oliver Sacks, Elizabeth Taylor, Robin Williams) to intimate personal remembrances, from thrilling adventures in Africa to literary writings from Theroux's rich and expansive personal reading. Collectively these pieces offer a fascinating portrait of the author himself, his extraordinary life and his restless and ever-curious mind.

"The best thing Mr. Ebert has ever written." - Janet Maslin, New York Times "To make ourselves unhappy is where all crime starts. We must try to contribute joy to the world. That is true no matter what our problems, our health, our circumstances. We must try. I didn't always know this, and am...

In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six of America's finest writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. All six of these men were alcoholics, and the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to A Moveable Feast.

Ila Arun burst into public view with the controversial song from Khal Nayak (1993), Choli Ke Peechhey. But several years before that, she was already well known for her contribution to Rajasthani folk music.Mumbai soon became her home, and it was in this city of glamour that Ila made a name for...

Joining us at Audible is Hollie McNish, the Ted Hughes Award-winning author and poet. Her latest collection, Slug, covers topics from birth to death, sex to sexism and many other everyday challenges we face in the 21st century. We'll be talking to Hollie McNish about her approach to poetry, what she’s most looking forward to about her next gig, and how she has come to feel comfortable discussing things that no one else does.

Joining us at Audible Studios is James Windust, writer, public speaker and model. Windust graduated from UCA Epsom with a degree in fashion management and marketing and within six months of their graduation was named as one of London's 1,000 most influential people by The Evening Standard. Windust is a freelance writer and has written pieces for British GQ, Gay Times, The Independent and many more. As well as being a writer, Windust is also a public speaker and has spoken at events for Tommy Hilfiger and TEDxLondonWomen.

Joining us in the Audible Studios to talk about her book Wally Funk’s Race for Space is science writer and broadcaster Sue Nelson. Wally Funk was one of the 13 members of the 1961 Women in Space Programme. The female aviation pioneer also became the first female air safety investigator for the NTSB and the first civilian flight instructor at Fort Sill, with over 19,000 flight hours. Sue Nelson, former BBC science correspondent and Radio 4 presenter, documents Wally’s extraordinary life in her new book, Wally Funk’s Race for Space, published in 2018.

American Libraries editor in chief Leonard Kniffel offers a compelling collection of interviews with prominent figures--all of whom have special connections to libraries. From President Barack Obama to actress Julie Andrews; from basketball star Kareem Abdul-Jabbar to former First Lady and librarian Laura Bush and many others, stars of literature, politics, entertainment, and the public arena speak with Kniffel about the ways libraries have been critical in their lives.