In this illuminating memoir, Sylvie Weil reflects on her famed philosopher aunt Simone and mathematician father André, using family correspondence and conversations to paint the most intimate portrait of Simone Weil in print.
Lionel Trilling was one of the twentieth century's most widely read and influential American literary critics. Mark Krupnick traces Trilling’s career from the 1920s through the 1970s, following the shifting intellectual and ideological currents in his thought. Krupnick places Trilling’s criticism and fiction in the context of his New York intellectual group, illuminating the connection between Trilling’s preoccupation with self-definition and his struggle to achieve a cultural overview in a period marked by contradictions, polarizations, and reversals. He provides not only the best single assessment of Trilling but also an incisive history of American literary criticism through the mid-twentieth century.
Franz Kafka, the Eternal Son: A Biography is an exhaustive literary biography of one of the twentieth century’s most iconic and admired writers. The book expertly traces the connections between Kafka’s life and surroundings and his literary output.
The first major study in English of Vasily Zhukovsky (1783–1852)—poet, translator of German romantic verse, and mentor of Pushkin—this book brings overdue attention to an important figure in Russian literary and cultural history.
Elizabeth Maslen’s excellent biography offers a fresh look at the intersection of Jameson’s life and work and the way these intersected with figures from Rebecca West to Arthur Koeslter to Czeslaw Milosz.
Susan Sontag (1933–2004) was one of America’s first celebrity intellectuals. In the first biography to be published since her death, Daniel Schreiber portrays a glamorous woman full of contradictions and inner conflicts, whose life mirrored the cultural upheavals of her time.
Leopold Tyrmand, a Polish Jew who survived World War II by working in Germany under a false identity, would go on to live and write under Poland’s Communist regime for twenty years before emigrating to the West, where he continued to express his deeply felt anti-Communist views. Diary 1954—written after the independent weekly paper that employed him was closed for refusing to mourn Stalin’s death—is an account of daily life in Communist Poland. Like Czesław Miłosz, Václav Havel, and other dissidents who described the absurdities of Soviet-backed regimes, Tyrmand exposes the lies—big and small—that the regimes employed to stay in power.
Notes on Fishing was Sergei Aksakov's first book and Russia's first angling treatise. It presents a Russian gentleman's observations on the fishing tackle, angling techniques, and fish species he came to know during five decades of adventure-filled fishing in the vast Russian steppe and the environs of Moscow. But it is goes beyond a mere discourse on angling, offering philosophical, literary, linguistic, ethnographic, biological, and conservationist observations. Aksakov has imbued his notes with a deep fondness for the land and an expertly conveyed atmosphere of personal and national nostalgia.
One of nineteenth-century Russia's finest prose writers, Sergei Timofeevich Aksakov's Notes of a Provincial Wildfowler is companion to his popular Notes on Fishing and a classic of nature writing.
Born in 1918 into a working-class Edinburgh family, Muriel Spark became the epitome of literary chic and one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Her autobiography, Curriculum Vitae: A Volume of Autobiography, recorded her early years but politely blurred her darker moments: troubled relations with her family, a terrifying period of hallucinations, and disastrous affairs with the men she loved. Spark gave Martin Stannard full access to her papers. He interviewed her many times as well as speaking to her colleagues, friends, and family members.
