Girl Sleuth: Nancy Drew and the Women Who Created Her

Conversations With Capote

Lawrence Grobel · 244 pages

Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World

Claire Harman · 341 pages

Part biography and part cultural history, this splendid book not only tells the captivating story of Jane Austen's life, but also her literary legacy. The slow growth of Austen's fame, the changing status of her work, and what it has stood for in English culture is a story of personal struggle and family dynamics as well as a history of critical practices and changing public tastes. Jane's Fame is

Sor Juana: Or, the Traps of Faith

Octavio Paz · 560 pages

Virginia Woolf: An Inner Life

Julia Briggs · 527 pages

Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin: Writers Running Wild in the Twenties

Marion Meade · 340 pages

In her exuberant new work, BOBBED HAIR AND BATHTUB GIN, Marion Meade presents a portrait of four extraordinary writers--Dorothy Parker, Zelda Fitzgerald, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Edna Ferber--whose loves, lives, and literary endeavors embodied the spirit of the 1920s. Capturing the jazz rhythms and desperate gaiety that defined the era, Meade gives us Parker, Fitzgerald, Millay, and Ferber, tr

Wish You Were Here: The Official Biography of Douglas Adams

Nick Webb · 370 pages

"Douglas Adams possessed one of the twentieth century's great imaginations. He was clever, funny, prescient, child-like and - to the dismay of some contemporaries - a polymath who combined intellect with a sense of wonder. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy was both intimate and cosmic, bleak and funny, frivolous yet philosophical. In 1978 it sneaked out on BBC radio, but news of it cascaded thr

For Your Eyes Only: Ian Fleming and James Bond

Ben Macintyre · 224 pages

Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales

Valerie Paradiz · 222 pages

Louisa May Alcott: The Woman Behind Little Women

Harriet Reisen · 392 pages

A biography of Louisa May Alcott (1832 - 1888) that provides a solid description of the life and thoughts of the author most famous for "Little Women" (1968).

JK Rowling: the wizard behind Harry Potter

Marc Shapiro · 127 pages

The Life You Save May Be Your Own: An American Pilgrimage

Paul Elie · 565 pages

"In the middle of the twentieth century, four American Catholics, working independently of one another, came to believe that the best way to explore the quandaries of religious faith was in writing - in works that readers of all kinds could admire. The Life You Save May Be Your Own is their story - a vivid and enthralling account of great writers and their power over us.". "Thomas Merton was a Tr

Romantic Outlaws: The Extraordinary Lives of Mary Wollstonecraft and Her Daughter Mary Shelley

Charlotte Gordon · 649 pages

"Mary Wollstonecraft (1759-1797) and her daughter Mary Shelley (1797-1851) have each been the subject of numerous biographies by top tier writers, yet no author has ever examined their lives in tandem. Perhaps this is because these two amazing women never knew each other--Wollstonecraft died of infection at the age of 38, a week after giving birth to her daughter. Nevertheless their lives were clo

The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams

Philip Zaleski, Carol Zaleski

Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises

Lesley M.M. Blume · 368 pages

"The making of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, the outsize personalities who inspired it, and the vast changes it wrought on the literary world. In the summer of 1925, Earnest Hemingway and a clique of raucous companions traveled to Pamplona, Spain, for the town's infamous running of the bulls. Then, over the next six weeks, he channeled that trip's maelstrom of drunken brawls, sexual rival

Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of a Friendship

Colin Duriez · 244 pages

Both Tolkien and C.S. Lewis are known around the world as the creators of Middle-earth and Narnia. But few of their readers and fans know about the complex friendship between Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Without the persistent encouragement of his friend, Tolkien would never have completed The Lord of the Rings. This great tale, along with the connected matter of The Silmarillion, would have remained m

Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters

Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg · 500 pages

The first collection of letters between the two leading figures of the Beat movement. Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg are the most celebrated names of the Beat Generation, linked together not only by their shared artistic sensibility but also by a deep and abiding friendship, one that colored their lives and greatly influenced their writing. Editors Bill Morgan and David Stanford shed new light on

The Peabody Sisters: Three Women Who Ignited American Romanticism

Megan Marshall · 602 pages

The Story of Charlotte's Web: E.B. White's Eccentric Life in Nature and the Birth of an American Classic

Michael Sims · 307 pages

As he was composing what was to become his most enduring book, E. B. White was obeying the maxim: "Write what you know." Helpless pigs, silly geese, clever spiders, greedy rats--White knew all of these characters in the barns and stables where he spent his favorite hours. Painfully shy his entire life, "this boy," White once wrote of himself, "felt for animals a kinship he never felt for people."

Mad World: Evelyn Waugh And The Secrets Of Brideshead

Paula Byrne · 375 pages

A terrifically engaging and original biography about one of England's greatest novelists, and the glamorous, eccentric, debauched and ultimately tragic family that provided him with the most significant friendships of his life and inspired his masterpiece, 'Brideshead Revisited'. Evelyn Waugh was already famous when 'Brideshead Revisited' was published in 1945. Written at the height of the war, th

Tolkien: Man and Myth, a Literary Life

Joseph Pearce · 242 pages

J.R.R. Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings took first place in a recent national poll to find the greatest book of the century. He may be the most popular writer of our age, but Tolkien is often misunderstood. This major new study of his life, his character and his work reveals the facts and confronts the myths. It explores the background to the man and the culture in which he wrote. Tolkien: Man and

Young Romantics: The Tangled Lives of English Poetry's Greatest Generation

Daisy Hay · 364 pages

Focuses on the network of writers and readers who gathered around Percy Bysshe Shelley and the campaigning journalist Leigh Hunt. They included Lord Byron, John Keats, and Mary Shelley, as well as a host of lesser-known figures: Mary Shelley's stepsister and Byron's mistress, Claire Clairmont; Hunt's botanist sister-in-law, Elizabeth Kent; the musician Vincent Novello; the painters Benjamin Haydon

A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-18

Joseph Loconte · 235 pages

"The untold story of how the First World War shaped the lives, faith, and writings of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis"--Amazon.com.

101 Things You Didn't Know About Jane Austen: The Truth about the World's Most Intriguing Romantic Literary Heroine

Patrice Hannon · 242 pages

Joe Gould's Teeth

Jill Lepore · 235 pages

"A "New Yorker" staff writer and Harvard historian chronicles the discovery of Joe Gould's long-lost manuscript, "The Oral History of Our Time," and of the violence, betrayals, and madness that led to its concealment,"--NoveList. From New Yorker staff writer and Harvard historian Jill Lepore, the dark, spellbinding tale of her restless search for the long-lost, longest book ever written, a centur