After their parents divorced in the 1970s, Andre Dubus III and his three siblings grew up with their exhausted working mother in a depressed Massachusetts mill town saturated with …
On 3 January 1882, Oscar Wilde, a twenty-seven-year-old "genius"—by his own reckoning—arrived in New York. The Dublin-born Oxford man had made a spectacle of himself in London with …
Two years before her death in 2005, Mary Lee Settle sat down "to trace the way that led me into the writer I have been for fifty years." The result is this memoir, which picks up …
Easy Rawlins, a tough World War II veteran and detective is hired by a financier and gangster to locate Daphne Monet, a search that leads him from elegant board meetings to the …
In this perceptive book, John Pfordresher shares the enthralling story of how Charlotte Brontë wrote her masterpiece and why she tried so vehemently to disown it. What few people …
Uncle Tom's Cabin is likely the most influential novel ever written by an American. In a fitting tribute to the two hundredth anniversary of Harriet Beecher Stowe's birth, Bancroft …
All her life, May Sarton carried on a voluminous private correspondence—with family, friends, and lovers. From the beginning, as these remarkable letters show, the essence of an …
David Mikics has been hailed by Harold Bloom as one of our finest literary critics. In this fresh and revealing book, he examines Saul Bellow’s work through the real-life …
In her admired works of fiction, Ann Hood explores the transformative power of literature. Now, with warmth and honesty, Hood reveals the personal story behind these works of …
Kafka's Last Trial begins with Kafka's last instruction to his closest friend, Max Brod: to destroy all his remaining papers upon his death. But when the moment arrived in 1924, …
