Showing titles in Art & Literature

This Is the Story of a Happy Marriage is an irresistible blend of literature and memoir revealing the big experiences and little moments that shaped Ann Patchett as a daughter, wife, friend and writer. Here, Ann Patchett shares entertaining and moving stories about her tumultuous childhood, her painful early divorce, the excitement of selling her first book, driving a Winnebago from Montana to Yellowstone Park, her joyous discovery of opera, scaling a six-foot wall in order to join the Los Angeles Police Department and more.

When the Rosens moved to New Rochelle, in 1973, Jonathan Rosen and Michael Laudor became inseparable. Both children of professors, the boys were best friends and fierce rivals who soon followed each other to Yale University. Michael blazed through Yale in three years, graduating summa cum laude and landing a top-flight consulting job. Then one day, Jonathan received a devastating call: Michael had suffered a psychotic break and was in the locked ward of a psychiatric hospital. Diagnosed with schizophrenia, Michael was still in hospital when he learned he'd been accepted to Yale Law School.

In 1963, Annie Ernaux, 23 and unattached, realizes she is pregnant. Shame arises in her like a plague: Understanding that her pregnancy will mark her and her family as social failures, she knows she cannot keep the child. In a France where abortion was illegal, she attempted, in vain, to self-administer the abortion with a knitting needle. Fearful and desperate, she finally located an abortionist and ended up in a hospital emergency ward where she nearly died. In Happening, Ernaux sifts through her memories and her journal entries dating from those days.

Award-winning British playwright, composer and screenwriter Leo Butler looks back over 25 of writing for the stage and his extensive experience teaching and mentoring emerging playwrights. With honesty and humour, Leo Butler shares his experiences from his working-class upbringing in Sheffield, including his disastrous state education, his years on the dole, to his breakthrough into the professional theatre industry.

“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.

"The heartrending story of a two people, a marriage, and a century from the author of A Suitable Boy. . . . “[A] thoughtful, evocative, moving book.”—Jonathan Yardley, Washington Post Book World Two Lives is an extraordinary tapestry of India, the Third Reich and the Second World War...

Following the release of the fifth instalment in the Robert Langdon series, Dan Brown talks to Audible about his long-standing passion for music and modern art and how it contributed towards the creation of Origin. In Origin, listeners will be reunited with the amiable and courageous Robert Langdon as he travels around Spain in search of answers to the most important existential questions of our time.

MT, as he is popularly known, is one of the most illustrious writers and film-makers from modern Kerala. His life’s work has won him the Jnanpith Award, the Sahitya Akademi Award, the National Film Award and the Padma Bhushan, among others. MT grew up in the village of Kudallur in Kerala and...

In this book, C.S. Lewis tells of his search for joy, a spiritual journey that led him from the Christianity of his early youth into atheism and then back to Christianity.

20 September. Have a notion for a radio series - Awkward Conversations. Enough Said is Alan Bennett's fourth collection of diaries and prose. Covering the turbulent years 2016 to 2024, the diaries take us through lockdown, Brexit, the reign of Johnson, the rise of Trump and the death of the...

From Leonardo Da Vinci to John Dee and Comenius, from George Eliot to Oliver Sacks and Susan Sontag, polymaths have moved the frontiers of knowledge in countless ways. But history can be unkind to scholars with such encyclopaedic interests. All too often these individuals are remembered for just one part of their valuable achievements. In this engaging, erudite account, renowned cultural historian Peter Burke argues for a more rounded view. 

A haunting meditation on love, loss, companionship, and finding one’s way through the dark, Raymond Carver’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is one of the most important and influential short story collections in contemporary literature. In his entry in the esteemed Bookmarked series, acclaimed author Brian Evenson offers his personal and literary take on this classic Carver collection.

Tantalizing, eye-opening, and witty, Watching Porn is a provocative book about an average girl’s foray into the porn industry and the people who make it what it is, both in front of and behind the camera.

Agatha Christie’s ‘most absorbing mystery’ – her own autobiography. Over the three decades since her death on 12 January 1976, many of Agatha Christie’s readers and reviewers have maintained that her most compelling book is probably still her least well-known. Her candid Autobiography...

We all carry people inside our heads - actors, leaders, writers, people out of history or fiction, met or unmet, who sometimes seem closer to us than people we know. In The Man Within My Head, Pico Iyer sets out to unravel the mysterious closeness he has always felt with the English writer Graham Greene; he examines Greene’s obsessions, his elusiveness, his penchant for mystery.

A moving and illuminating memoir about the life of world-famous author and historian Iris ChangIris Chang's best-selling book, The Rape of Nanking, forever changed the way we view the Second World War in Asia. It all began with a photo of a river choked with the bodies of hundreds of Chinese civilians that shock Iris to her core. Who were these people? Why had this happened and how could their story have been lost to history? She could not shake that image from her head.

Richard Ellmann has revised and expanded his definitive work on Joyce's life to include newly discovered primary material, including details of a failed love affair, a limerick about Samuel Beckett, a dream notebook, previously unknown letters, and much more.

Brought to you by Penguin. FROM THE BEST SELLING AUTHOR OF THE EMPTY RAINCOAT AND UNDERSTANDING ORGANISATIONS. Over a span of seven decades, Charles Handy was, variously, a businessman, a writer, a philanthropist and a philosopher. Not even a stroke as he approached the age of 90 dimmed his...

A candid look at the who's who of the last 50 years of fashion and proof that fact is always devilishly more fascinating than fiction. André Leon Talley's engaging and detailed memoir is his story of surviving and thriving in the notoriously cutthroat fashion industry amidst racism, homophobia and other challenges to become one of the most legendary voices and faces in fashion journalism.

This definitive biography of Anna Wintour chronicles the steep climb of an ambitious young woman who would, with singular and legendary focus, become the most powerful woman in media.