Literary London


Book Description

Literary London is a snappy and informative guide, showing just why - as another famous local writer put it - he who is tired of London is tired of life.




London: An Illustrated Literary Companion


Book Description

London: An Illustrated Literary Companion, compiled by Rosemary Gray, captures the varying moods of the great city over recent centuries, through diary entries, with quotations, poems, essays and extracts from great works written in its honour. It is beautifully illustrated with drawings and engravings from distinguished artists, including Gustave Doré, George Cruikshank, James McNeill Whistler and Hugh Thomson, and contains contemporary prints and photographs. Designed to appeal to the booklover, the Macmillan Collector's Library is a series of beautiful gift editions of much loved classic titles. Macmillan Collector's Library are books to love and treasure.




Mad Mary Lamb


Book Description

After killing her mother with a carving knife, Mary Lamb spent the rest of her life in and out of madhouses; yet the crime and its aftermath opened up a new life. Freed to read extensively, she discovered her talent for writing and, with her brother, the essayist Charles Lamb, collaborated on the famous Tales from Shakespeare. This narrative of a nearly forgotten woman is a tapestry of insights into creativity and madness, the changing lives of women, and the redemptive power of the written word.




London


Book Description

"This anthology features a wide-ranging collection of poems and scenes from novels that stretch from the fifteenth century to the present day. From well-known texts to others that are less familiar, here is London brought to life through the words of many of the greatest writers in the English language."--Page 4 of cover.




Literary London


Book Description




Writers' London


Book Description

- Explore the city that inspired some of the greatest writers in history- Discover the contemporary writers still making London a literary capital today- The perfect gift for anglophiles, bibliophiles, and wanderers- Part of a new series exploring London culture, joined by Vinyl London, Rock 'n' Roll London, Art London and London Peculiars"When one is tired of London, one is tired of life." - Samuel Johnson London has long been a center of the literary world. From Shakespeare to Amis, Byron to Blake, Plath, Thomas, Christie and Rowling; many of the greatest names in literature have made this metropolis their home. Writers' London guides the reader through homes, bookshops, pubs and cemeteries, in search of where literary greats loved and lost, drank and died. Discover the Islington building where Joe Orton was murdered by his lover, the Soho pub where Dylan Thomas left his manuscript, the Chelsea hotel where Oscar Wilde was arrested, and the Bank of England where Kenneth Graham was shot at (and missed) three times. Gathering hundreds of famous and less-well-known anecdotes, this meticulously researched volume will entertain any lover of literature.




Beer in the Snooker Club


Book Description

Waguih Ghali was raised in Cairo but spent much of his adult life studying and working in Europe. In Beer in the Snooker Club, Ghali chronicles the lives of Cairo's upper crust who, after the fall of King Farouk, are thoroughly unprepared to change its neo-feudal ways. Beer in the Snooker Club was the only book written by Ghali before his suicide in 1968. "Ghali's novel reproduces a cultural state of shock with great accuracy and great humor."–James Marcus of The Nation




Conversations with Friends


Book Description

NOW A HULU ORIGINAL SERIES • From the New York Times bestselling author of Normal People . . . “[A] cult-hit . . . [a] sharply realistic comedy of adultery and friendship.”—Entertainment Weekly SALLY ROONEY NAMED TO THE TIME 100 NEXT LIST • WINNER OF THE SUNDAY TIMES (UK) YOUNG WRITER OF THE YEAR AWARD • ONE OF BUZZFEED’S BEST BOOKS OF THE DECADE • ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Vogue, Slate • ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: Elle Frances is a coolheaded and darkly observant young woman, vaguely pursuing a career in writing while studying in Dublin. Her best friend is the beautiful and endlessly self-possessed Bobbi. At a local poetry performance one night, they meet a well-known photographer, and as the girls are then gradually drawn into her world, Frances is reluctantly impressed by the older woman’s sophisticated home and handsome husband, Nick. But however amusing Frances and Nick’s flirtation seems at first, it begins to give way to a strange—and then painful—intimacy. Written with gemlike precision and marked by a sly sense of humor, Conversations with Friends is wonderfully alive to the pleasures and dangers of youth, and the messy edges of female friendship. SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL DUBLIN LITERARY AWARD “Sharp, funny, thought-provoking . . . a really great portrait of two young women as they’re figuring out how to be adults.”—Celeste Ng, Late Night with Seth Meyers Podcast “The dialogue is superb, as are the insights about communicating in the age of electronic devices. Rooney has a magical ability to write scenes of such verisimilitude that even when little happens they’re suspenseful.”—Curtis Sittenfeld, The Week “Rooney has the gift of imbuing everyday life with a sense of high stakes . . . a novel of delicious frictions.”—New York “A writer of rare confidence, with a lucid, exacting style . . . One wonderful aspect of Rooney’s consistently wonderful novel is the fierce clarity with which she examines the self-delusion that so often festers alongside presumed self-knowledge. . . . But Rooney’s natural power is as a psychological portraitist. She is acute and sophisticated about the workings of innocence; the protagonist of this novel about growing up has no idea just how much of it she has left to do.”—Alexandra Schwartz, The New Yorker “This book. This book. I read it in one day. I hear I’m not alone.”—Sarah Jessica Parker (Instagram)




The Literary Psychogeography of London


Book Description

This Pivot book examines literary elements of urban topography that have animated Alan Moore, Peter Ackroyd, and Iain Sinclair’s respective representations of London-ness. Ann Tso argues these authors write London “psychogeographically” to deconstruct popular visions of London with colonial and neoliberal undertones. Moore’s psychogeography consists of bird’s-eye views that reveal the brute force threatening to unravel Londonscape from within; Ackroyd’s aims to detect London sensuously, since every new awareness recalls an otherworldly London; Sinclair’s conjures up a narrative consciousness made erratic by London’s disunified landscape. Drawing together the dystopian, the phenomenological, and the postcolonial, Tso explores how these texts characterize “London-ness” as estranging.




London Booksellers and American Customers


Book Description

In 1994, James Raven encountered a letterbook from the Charleston Library Society detailing the ordering, processing, and shipping of texts from London booksellers to their American customers. The 120 letters, covering the period 1758-1811, provided unique material for understanding the business of London booksellers (for whom very little correspondence has survived) and Raven decided to publish an annotated edition of the letters. The letterbook, reproduced in its entirety, forms an appendix to the present volume, but Raven's study has blossomed from a relatively narrow examination of booksellers and their customers to a larger exploration of the role of books and institutions such as the Library Society in the formation of elite cultural identity on the fringes of empire. As a result, this meticulously researched book has much to offer scholars of gentry culture and community in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world as well as historians of the book--Publisher's Description.