"In the spring of 2016, through a genealogy website to which she had whimsically submitted her DNA, Dani Shapiro received the astonishing news that her beloved deceased father was not her biological father. Over the course of a single day, her entire history--the life she had lived--crumbled beneath her. In just a few hours of Internet sleuthing, she was able to piece together the story of her conception and, remarkably, find a YouTube video of her...

"The definitive biography of the world's most popular novel. Putting a century of scholarship on one of the world's most enduring popular novels into accessible, narrative form, this new approach to a classic of world literature is written for a wide general readership. Packed full of information about the book's origins and later career on stage and screen, The Novel of the Century brings to life the extraordinary story of how Victor Hugo managed...

"'I don't want you to rehabilitate me,' Philip Roth said to his only authorized biographer, Blake Bailey. 'Just make me interesting.' Granted complete independence and access, Bailey spent almost ten years poring over Roth's personal archive, interviewing his friends, lovers, and colleagues, and listening to Roth's own breathtakingly candid confessions. Cynthia Ozick, in her front-page rave for the New York Times Book Review, described Bailey's monumental...

Presents profiles of the world's greatest writers throughout history, including Geoffrey Chaucer, Mary Shelley, Thomas Hardy, William Faulkner, Maya Angelous, and Haruki Murakami.

"Paul Auster's most intimate autobiographical work to dateIn the beginning, everything was alive. The smallest objects were endowed with beating hearts. Having recalled his life through the story of his physical self in Winter Journal, internationally acclaimed novelist Paul Auster now remembers the experience of his development from within through the encounters of his interior self with the outer world in Report from the Interior. From his baby's-eye...

"An unforgettable memoir--with elements of Auntie Mame and Grey Gardens--that chronicles the world of one California family dominated by a powerhouse screenwriter"-- "'My feeling for Mike is something out of the ordinary,' Michael Frank overhears his aunt telling his mother when he is a boy of eight. 'It's stronger than I am. I cannot explain it ... I love him beyond life itself.' With this indelible bit of eavesdropping, we fall into the spellbinding...

Presents a memoir of the author's life near Dublin, a city that inspired his imagination and literary life and served as a backdrop for the dissatisfactions of adult years shaped by Dublin's cultural, political, architectural, and social history.

A former CIA officer and curator of the CIA Museum reveals the untold story of Ernest Hemingway's secret life as a spy for both the Americans and Soviets before and during World War II, and explores how his espionage activities influenced his literary work. An international cloak-and-dagger epic ranging from the Spanish Civil War to the liberation of Western Europe, wartime China, the Red Scare of Cold War America, and the Cuban Revolution, here...

"'A triumph on every level. One of the losses to literature is that Harper Lee never found a way to tell a gothic true-crime story she'd spent years researching. Casey Cep has excavated this mesmerizing story and tells it with grace and insight and a fierce fidelity to the truth.'--David Grann, best-selling author of Killers of the Flower Moon The stunning story of an Alabama serial killer and the true-crime book that Harper Lee worked on obsessively...

"A revealing biography of the influential and controversial cultural titan who embodied an era. The Tastemaker explores the many lives of Carl Van Vechten, the most influential cultural impresario of the early twentieth century: a patron and dealmaker of the Harlem Renaissance, a photographer who captured the era's icons, and a novelist who created some of the Jazz Age's most salacious stories. A close confidant of Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein,...