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"Ian Fleming's greatest creation, James Bond, has had an enormous and ongoing impact on our culture. What Bond represents about ideas of masculinity, the British national psyche and global politics has shifted over time, as has the interpretation of the life of his author. But Fleming himself was more mysterious and subtle than anything he wrote. Ian's childhood with his gifted brother Peter and his extraordinary mother set the pattern for his ambition...
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From internationally renowned writer and Booker Prize winner Salman Rushdie, a searing, deeply personal account of enduring--and surviving--an attempt on his life thirty years after the fatwa that was ordered against him. Speaking out for the first time, and in unforgettable detail, about the traumatic events of August 12, 2022, Salman Rushdie answers violence with art, and reminds us of the power of words to make sense of the unthinkable. Knife is...
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"Everyone knows Beatrix Potter as the creator of the Peter Rabbit stories. But before that, she was a girl of science. As a child, Beatrix collected nature specimens; as a young adult, she was an amateur mycologist presenting her research on mushrooms and other fungi to England's foremost experts. Like many women of her time, she remained unacknowledged by the scientific community, but her keen eye for observation led her to an acclaimed career as...
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With delectable prose, a sharp heroine ahead of her time, and an adventure across the English countryside in search of great food, Good Taste is the perfect historical novel for fans of Dear Mrs. Bird and The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. You can tell a lot about a person from what they like to eat... England in 1932 is in the grip of the Great Depression. Stella Douglas, author of a much-loved but not very successful biography, is...
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Barbara Pym became beloved as one of the wittiest novelists of the late twentieth century, revealing the inner workings of domestic life so brilliantly that her friend Philip Larkin announced her the era's own Jane Austen. But who was Barbara Pym and why was the life of this English writer - one of the greatest chroniclers of the human heart - so defined by rejection, both in her writing and in love? Pym lived through extraordinary times. She attended...
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"'The bisexual draft dodger living on the skids, the glamorous young widow in search of enlightenment, the skinny gamine from out of town who wants to make it in the movies...'* These are the people who inhabit Gavin Lambert's mordant portrait of Southern California at the end of the 1960s: forever swapping addresses, lovers, and dreams. They live in extraordinary, suffocating wealth; or else flirting with a Mansonesque cult; or else in a fantasy...
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An award-winning Orwellian biographer and scholar, drawing on new sources available for the first time, shows how the way we look at a writer and his canon has changed over the course of the last two decades, presenting a fresh and relevant biography seen through a post-millennial prism.
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"Tolkien described The Lord of the Rings as "a fundamentally religious and Catholic work" and declared, "I am a Christian (which can be deduced from my stories)." Yet he insisted his writings were not allegories, and Middle-earth is loved by millions who do not share his religious beliefs. How were his faith and his fiction related? Holly Ordway answers that question biographically, focusing on Tolkien's spiritual development, a dramatic story that...