Showing titles in Art & Literature

A brilliant biography of one of India’s greatest poets Mirza Mohammad Asadullah Khan Ghalib began writing poetry in Persian at the age of nine and the pre-eminent poet of the time, Mir, predicted a great future for the precocious genius when he was shown his verse. But success and material...

In her spare, stark style, Annie Ernaux documents the desires and indignities of a human heart ensnared in an all-consuming passion. Blurring the line between fact and fiction, an unnamed narrator attempts to plot the emotional and physical course of her two-year relationship with a married foreigner where every word, event, and person either provides a connection with her beloved or is subject to her cold indifference. With courage and exactitude, she seeks the truth behind an existence lived entirely for someone else, and, in the pieces of its aftermath, she is able to find it. 

Ruskin Bond is eighty-nine years old: long past sixty, the age at which one becomes a senior citizen; also the age around which it is said one should think of retiring from active life. As the years go by, his contentment with living the life he has chosen--keeping to himself, with his family...

When Jeanette Winterson left home at 16 because she was in love with a woman, Mrs. Winterson asked her: "Why be happy when you could be normal?" This book is the story of a life's work to find happiness. It is the story of how the painful past returned to haunt Jeanette's later life, and send her on a journey into madness and out again, in search of her real mother. It is also a book about other people's stories, showing how fiction and poetry can form a string of guiding lights, a life raft which supports us when we are sinking.

Norah Vincent became an instant media sensation with the publication of Self-Made Man, her take on just how hard it is to be a man, even in a man’s world. Following in the tradition of John Howard Griffin (Black Like Me), Vincent spent a year and a half disguised as her male alter ego, Ned, exploring what men are like when women aren’t around. As Ned, she joined a bowling team, took a high-octane sales job, went on dates with women (and men), visited strip clubs, and even managed to infiltrate a monastery and a men’s therapy group.

In this, the first prose history in European civilization, Herodotus describes the growth of the Persian Empire with force, authority, and style. Perhaps most famously, the book tells the heroic tale of the Greeks' resistance to the vast invading force assembled by Xerxes, king of Persia. Here are not only the great battles - Marathon, Thermopylae, and Salamis - but also penetrating human insight and a powerful sense of epic destiny at work.

Saadat Hasan Manto (1912-1955) was an established Urdu short story writer and a rising screenwriter in Bombay at the time of India's partition in 1947, and he is perhaps best known for the short stories he wrote following his migration to Lahore in newly formed Pakistan. Ayesha Jalal draws on Manto's stories, sketches, and essays, as well as a trove of his private letters, to present an intimate history of partition and its devastating toll.

In 1900, an 18-year-old Spaniard named Pablo Picasso made his first trip to Paris. It was in this glittering capital of the international art world that, after suffering years of poverty and neglect, he emerged as the leader of a bohemian band of painters, sculptors, and poets. Fueled by opium and alcohol, inspired by raucous late-night conversations at the Lapin Agile cabaret, Picasso and his friends resolved to shake up the world.

Joining us in the Audible Studios to talk about his 13th novel, The Golden House, is critically acclaimed British-Indian novelist and writer Sir Salman Rushdie. Born in Bombay, British India, Salman Rushdie has become literary nobility, lauded for his ability to combine magical realism with historical fiction, focusing on the connections between Eastern and Western civilisations.

What is the role of the writer? Prophet? High priest of art? Court jester? Or witness to the real world? Looking back on her own childhood and writing career, Margaret Atwood examines the metaphors which writers of fiction and poetry have used to explain - or excuse! - their activities, looking at what costumes they have assumed, what roles they have chosen to play. In her final chapter she takes up the challenge of the title: if a writer is to be seen as "gifted", who is doing the giving and what are the terms of the gift?

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER ‘Utterly fascinating’ NEW YORK TIMES ‘An act of intimate storytelling’ VOGUE ‘A profound, rich document’ NEW STATESMAN A deeply moving, newly discovered journal from one of America’s most iconic writers, Joan Didion, the author of The Year of...

In Zero, science journalist Charles Seife follows this innocent-looking number from its birth as an Eastern philosophical concept to its struggle for acceptance in Europe, its rise and transcendence in the West, and its ever-present threat to modern physics. 

अपनी कहानी सुनाना मेरे लिए उतना आसान नहीं होगा, क्योंकि पिछली ज़िंदगी के कई ऐसे पीड़ादायक प्रसंगों/अनुभवों को दोबारा झेलने के लिए ख़ुद को तैयार करना पड़ेगा जिन्हें मैं भुला चुका था या कम-से-कम भुला देने की कोशिश करता रहा था। सच कहूँ तो उनमें से कई बातों का ज़िक्र तो मैंने अपने निहायत क़रीबी जनों से भी नहीं किया है।

In this long-awaited and candid memoir, Hitchens re-traces the footsteps of his life to date, from his childhood in Portsmouth, with his adoring, tragic mother and reserved Naval officer father; to his life in Washington DC, the base from which from he would launch fierce attacks on tyranny of all kinds. Along the way, he recalls the girls, boys and booze; the friendships and the feuds; the grand struggles and lost causes; and the mistakes and misgivings that have characterised his life.

In Traversal, Maria Popova traverses the border between life and death, chance and choice, chemistry and consciousness: what makes a body a person? What makes a planet a world? How do we safeguard our love of truth from our lust for power? What slakes our longings and what redeems our losses?...

Most noted for her work on erotic intelligence and her expertise on issues of infidelity, Esther Perel covers all in her frank and refreshing Audible Audio Shows series, which began in 2017 and listens in on couples talking through their problems in Esther’s therapy room. Esther Perel talks to us about the making of her podcast series with Audible, what she hopes listeners can gain from the intimate discussions and what she learns from her clients.

The author and former politician Jeffrey Archer has been writing for over 40 years, is published in 97 countries and in more than 33 languages. He joins Robin Morgan in the Audible Studios to talk about This Was a Man, the final novel in his best-selling Clifton Chronicles series.

Artist. Public intellectual. Political activist. James Baldwin was all of these and more. Raised in the slums of Depression-era Harlem in New York City, Baldwin would become an author and activist of international renown—one whose legacy has continued long beyond his death in 1987. Who was James Baldwin? How did he become the master of multiple literary genres and a champion for some of the era’s most notable political and social causes? And how is his influence still being felt today?

सोचती हूँ- खुद के तखैयुल से, अपने देश से, अपने देश के लोगों से, और तमाम दुनिया के लोगों से- यानी खुदा की तखलीफ से, मेरी मुहब्बत का गुनाह सचमुच बहुत बड़ा है, बहुत संगीन....

It all started with a book that made me curious. When rare books dealer Rebecca Romney found an emerald clothbound edition of Evelina by Frances Burney, she was happy to discover that she'd stumbled across a novel by one of Jane Austen's favourite authors. Inspired by the connection between the...