Kategoria BISAC: Biography & Autobiography >> Literary Figures

While traveling alone from Richmond, Virginia, to New York City, Poe disappeared for nearly a week. When seen again he was terribly drunk and nearly dead in Baltimore. In the hospital, four days later, after periods of raving delirium, he died. The immediate cause of death given was "congestion of the brain." At first no one seriously doubted that Poe died from drunken debauchery. However, Poe adherents suggested many theories of a physical nature about precipitating causes but no one has seroiusly probed the mystery of the missing week . . . until now.

In Education of a Felon, the reigning champion of prison novelists finally tells his own story. The son of an alcoholic stagehand father and a Busby Berkeley chorus girl, Bunker was--at seventeen--the youngest inmate ever in San Quentin. His hard-won experiences on L.A.'s meanest streets and in and out of prison gave him the material to write some of the grittiest and most affecting novels of our time.
From smoking a joint in the gas chamber to leaving fingerprints on a knife connected to a serial kiler, from Hollywood's steamy undersde to swimming in the Neptune pool at San...

Jean Stafford burst upon the literary scene in 1944, when, at the age of twenty-nine, she published her bestselling novel, Boston Adventure. Three years later, Life magazine hailed her as the "most brilliant of the new fiction writers." Bafflingly, for the rest of her life, Stafford would struggle--and fail--to capitalize on that early promise.

David Roberts' compelling biography examines Stafford's disastrous marriages, including her first marriage to the volatile poet Robert Lowell, which culminated for her in a lengthy stay in a psychiatric hospital. Beautiful and...

In the Autumn of 1891, Oscar Wilde set about conquering literary Paris. Gide was dazzled by the Irishman's energy and verve, but was driven to the edge of a nervous breakdown by Wilde's merciless paradoxes and questioning of religious faith. The two writers met repeatedly over the next ten years in France, Italy, and North Africa, both before and after Wilde's imprisonment. But by the time Wilde died in Paris in 1900, the tables had been turned. He was impoverished and disgraced, while Gide was well launched on a literary career that would make him the most famous French writer of his...

In the rural Australia of the fifties where John Baxter grew up, reading books was disregarded with suspicion, owning and collecting them with utter incomprehension. Despite this, by the age of eleven Baxter had 'collected' his first book - The Poems of Rupert Brooke. He'd read the volume often, but now he had to own it. This was the beginning of what would become a major collection and a lifelong obsession.

His book-hunting would take him all over the world, but his first real find was in London in 1978, when he spotted a rare copy of a Graham Greene children's book while...

A Picador Paperback Original

How do great writers do it? From James M. Cain's hard-nosed observation that "writing a novel is like working on foreign policy. There are problems to be solved. It's not all inspirational," to Joan Didion's account of how she composes a book--"I constantly retype my own sentences. Every day I go back to page one and just retype what I have. It gets me into a rhythm"--The Paris Review has elicited some of the most revelatory and revealing thoughts from the literary masters of our age. For more than half a century, the magazine has spoken...

Since The Paris Review was founded in 1953, it has given us invaluable conversations with the greatest writers of our age, vivid self-portraits that are themselves works of finely crafted literature. From William Faulkner's determination that a great novel takes "ninety-nine percent talent . . . ninety-nine percent discipline . . . ninety-nine percent work," to Gabriel Garcia Marquez's observation that "in the first paragraph, you solve most of the problems with your book," The Paris Review has elicited revelatory and revealing thoughts from our most accomplished novelists,...

The heartwarming story behind J.K. Rowling's rise to fame--and the answers to Harry Potter fans' most burning questions

Harry Potter is loved throughout the world, and so is his creator. Joanne Kathleen (J.K.) Rowling is a true wizard, a woman who has the ability to recall vividly her days as a child and capture those wild, wonderful, difficult times--an ability that helps make her creation, Harry Potter, seem so real.

In this revealing book, fans of the Harry Potter series will get to see their favorite author as they never have before. From a child with a wonderful...

The #1 New York Times Bestseller

An Entertainment Weekly Top Ten Book of the Year

Now a Major Motion Picture

Running with Scissors is the true story of a boy whose mother (a poet with delusions of Anne Sexton) gave him away to be raised by her unorthodox psychiatrist who bore a striking resemblance to Santa Claus. So at the age of twelve, Burroughs found himself amidst Victorian squalor living with the doctor's bizarre family, and befriending a...

Paul Auster's Hand to Mouth: A Chronicle of Early Failure is a fascinating and often funny memoir about his early years as a writer struggling to be published, and to make enough money to survive. Leaving high school with "itchy feet" and refusing to play it safe, Auster avoided convention and the double life of steady office employment while writing. From the streets of New York City, Dublin, and Paris to a surreal adventure in a dusty village in Mexico, Auster's account of living on next to nothing introduces an unforgettable cast of characters while examining what it means to be...