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On the Wilder Shores of Love: A Bohemian Life
by Lesley Blanch Georgia de ChamberetMost famous for The Wilder Shores of Love, her book about four women travellers, Lesley Blanch was a scholarly romantic and a bold writer. Her lifelong passion was for Russia, the Balkans and the Middle East. At heart a nomad, she spent the greater part of her life travelling the remote areas her books record so vividly.Edited by her goddaughter Georgia de Chamberet, who was working with her in her centenary year, this book collects together the story of Blanch's marriage, previously published only in French; a selection of her journalism which brings to life the artistic melting pot that was London between the wars; and a selection of her most evocative travel pieces.Illustrated with photos alongside a selection of line drawings by Lesley Blanch
Hand to Mouth: The Truth About Being Poor in a Wealthy World
by Linda TiradoLinda Tirado knows from experience what it is to be poor, to struggle to make ends meet. She has worked all hours as a food service worker in a chain restaurant to support her young family. She knows what it's like to have problems you wish you could fix, but no money, energy or resources to fix them, and no hope of getting any.In 2013, an essay on the everyday realities of poverty that Tirado wrote and posted online was read and shared around the world. In Hand to Mouth, she gives a searing, witty and clear-eyed insider account of being poor in the world's richest nation. She looks at how ordinary people fall or are born into the poverty trap, explains why the poor don't always behave in the way the middle classes think they should, and makes an urgent call for us all to understand and meet the challenges they face.
All Joy and No Fun: The Paradox of Modern Parenthood
by Jennifer SeniorAward-winning journalist Jennifer Senior tries to tackle the issue of the effects of children on their parents, isolating and analyzing the many ways in which children reshape their parents' lives, whether it's their marriages, their jobs, their habits, their hobbies, their friendships, or their internal senses of self. She argues that changes in the last half-century have radically altered the roles of today's mothers and fathers, making their mandates at once more complex and far less clear.Recruiting from a wide variety of sources - in history, sociology, economics, psychology, philosophy, and anthropology - she dissects both the timeless strains of parenting and the ones that are brand new, and then brings her research to life in the homes of ordinary parents around the country. The result is an unforgettable series of family portraits, starting with parents of young children and progressing to parents of teens. Through lively and accessible storytelling, Senior follows these mothers and fathers as they wrestle with some of parenthood's deepest vexations - and luxuriate in some of its finest rewards.All Joy and No Fun makes us reconsider some of our culture's most basic beliefs about parenthood, all while illuminating the profound ways children deepen and add purpose to our lives. All Joy and No Fun is original and essential reading for mothers and fathers of today - and tomorrow.
You Play The Girl: On Playboy Bunnies, Princesses, Trainwrecks and Other Man-Made Women
by Carina ChocanoWe all know who The Girl is. She holds The Hero's hand as he runs through the Pyramids, chasing robots. Or she nags him, or foils him, plays the uptight straight man to his charming loser. She's idealised, degraded, dismissed, objectified and almost always dehumanised. How do we process these insidious portrayals, and how do they shape our sense of who we are and what we can become? Part memoir, part cultural commentary, part call to arms to women everywhere, You Play The Girl flips the perspective on the past thirty-five years in pop culture - from the progressive 70s, through the backlash 80s, the triumphalist 90s and the pornified 'bro culture' of the early twenty-first century - providing a firsthand chronicle of the experience of growing up inside this funhouse. Always incisive, Chocano brilliantly shows that our identities are more iterative than we think, and certainly more complex than anything we see on any kind of screen.
Mossy Trotter (Vmc Ser. #2110)
by Elizabeth Taylor'It's always a treat to read Elizabeth Taylor. Mossy Trotter is a real gem. A delightfully mischievous boy living in those long-ago halcyon days when children played out all day, roaming commons, scavenging on rubbish tips and stamping in newly-laid tar' JACQUELINE WILSON'We - that is, Herbert and I - want you, Mossy, to be our page-boy,' Miss Silkin said, staring hard at Mossy again, as if she were trying to imagine him dressed up, and with his hair combed.Mossy went very red, and nearly choked on a piece of cake, and Selwyn laughed, and went on laughing, as if he had just heard the funniest joke of all his life. They both knew what being a page-boy meant. One of the boys at school - one of the very youngest ones - had had to be one, wearing velvet trousers and a frilled blouse.'When Mossy moves to the country, life is full of delights - trees to climb, woods to explore and, best of all, the marvellous dump to rummage through. But every now and then his happiness is disturbed - chiefly by his mother's meddling friend, Miss Silkin. And a dreaded event casts a shadow over even the sunniest of days - being a page-boy at her wedding. In her only children's book, Elizabeth Taylor perfectly captures the temptations, confusion and terrors of a mischievous boy, and just how illogical, frustrating and inconsistent adults are!
Mossy Trotter (Virago Modern Classics #360)
by Elizabeth Taylor'It's always a treat to read Elizabeth Taylor. Mossy Trotter is a real gem. A delightfully mischievous boy living in those long-ago halcyon days when children played out all day, roaming commons, scavenging on rubbish tips and stamping in newly-laid tar' JACQUELINE WILSON'We - that is, Herbert and I - want you, Mossy, to be our page-boy,' Miss Silkin said, staring hard at Mossy again, as if she were trying to imagine him dressed up, and with his hair combed.Mossy went very red, and nearly choked on a piece of cake, and Selwyn laughed, and went on laughing, as if he had just heard the funniest joke of all his life. They both knew what being a page-boy meant. One of the boys at school - one of the very youngest ones - had had to be one, wearing velvet trousers and a frilled blouse.'When Mossy moves to the country, life is full of delights - trees to climb, woods to explore and, best of all, the marvellous dump to rummage through. But every now and then his happiness is disturbed - chiefly by his mother's meddling friend, Miss Silkin. And a dreaded event casts a shadow over even the sunniest of days - being a page-boy at her wedding. In her only children's book, Elizabeth Taylor perfectly captures the temptations, confusion and terrors of a mischievous boy, and just how illogical, frustrating and inconsistent adults are!
True To Both My Selves
by Katrin FitzherbertTRUE TO BOTH MY SELVES is an extraordinary account of a childhood disjointed by country and by war. Curiously mirroring her English grandmother, who married a German hairdresser in London and was then expelled to Germany following the First World War, Katrin Fitzherbert was born in Germany in 1936 and lived under Hitler's regime until, at the age of eleven, she was suddenly 'repatriated' to an England she had never known. There she had to forget her German father and the German language. This is the story of three generations of remarkable women, and their struggle for survival and integrity as individuals in times divided by war.
Darling Days: A New York City Childhood
by iO Tillett WrightI WAS BORN, SEPTEMBER 1985, IN THE VORTEX OF THE LOWER EAST SIDE OF NEW YORK: THERE WERE FEW RULES OF LIFE AND ZERO CONTRAINTS ON BEHAVIOUR. IF YOU WERE NOT ECCENTRIC, YOU WERE WEIRD.It was a tenement building at the centre of the drug-addled, punk-edged, permanent riot that was iO's corner of the Lower East Side of New York City in the '80s and 90's. There iO grew up - or rather scrabbled up - under the broken wing of a fiercely protective, yet wildly negligent mother.Rhonna was a showgirl, actress, dancer, poet. A widow by police murder, she was also an addict. She doted and obsessed over iO, yet lacked an understanding that a child needs food and sleep and safety.Unfolding in animated, crystalline prose, an emotionally raw, devastatingly powerful memoir of one young person's extraordinary coming of age - a tale of gender and identity, freedom and addiction, rebellion and survival in the 1980s and 1990s, when punk poverty, heroin and art collided in the urban bohemia of New York's Lower East Side.Darling Days is also a provocative examination of culture and identity, of the instincts that shape us and the norms that deform us, and of the courage and resilience of a child listening closely to their deepest self. When a group of boys refuse to let the six-year-old play ball, iO instantly adopts a new persona, becoming a boy named Ricky, a choice the parents support and celebrate. It is the start of a profound exploration of gender and identity through the tenderest years, and the beginning of a life invented and reinvented at every step.Alternating between the harrowing and the hilarious, Darling Days is the candid, tough, and stirring memoir of a young person in search of an authentic self as family and home life devolve into chaos until iO escapes to Germany and then England to become an amazingly talented, exciting, edgy artist and wonderful writer.
Adeline: A Novel Of Virginia Woolf
by Norah VincentOn 18 April 1941, twenty-two days after Virginia Woolf went for a walk near her weekend house in Sussex and never returned, her body was reclaimed from the River Ouse. Norah Vincent's ADELINE reimagines the events that brought Woolf to the riverbank, offering us a denouement worthy of its protagonist. With poetic precision and psychological acuity, Vincent channels Virginia and Leonard Woolf, T. S. and Vivienne Eliot, Lytton Strachey and Dora Carrington, laying bare their genius and their blind spots, their achievements and their failings, from the inside out. And haunting every page is Adeline, the name given to Virginia Stephen at birth, which becomes the source of Virginia's greatest consolation, and her greatest torment. Intellectually and emotionally disarming, ADELINE - a vibrant portrait of Woolf and her social circle, the infamous Bloomsbury Group, and a window into the darkness that both inspired and doomed them all - is a masterpiece in its own right by one of our most brilliant and daring writers.
Aunt Sass: Christmas Stories (Virago Modern Classics #387)
by P. L. Travers OBEIn the 1940s, P. L. Travers wrote three stories, which she gave as Christmas gifts to friends. One was 'Aunt Sass', based on Travers's great aunt - the real-life inspiration for Mary Poppins. Now, for the first time, they are available to a wider readership. Printed on board, with beautiful illustrations, this will be the perfect gift book for Christmas.Friends come in many guises. In these autobiographical stories, three characters - an eccentric great aunt, a Chinese cook and a foul-mouthed ex-jockey - assert a lifelong influence on the narrator, as she looks back over her childhood. Much like Mary Poppins, each comes into the child's life just when she needs them most. And each, however unlikely, becomes a friend and a champion to the young girl. Charming, tender and moving, these stories, which were given to the author's friends as Christmas gifts, contain all the hallmarks you'd expect from such a magical writer. And best of all, you will meet the woman who was the inspiration for Mary Poppins.
The Fox at the Manger
by P. L. TraversFor the first time since the war, the Christmas peal is ringing at St Paul's Cathedral. There is joy. There is new hope. It is Christmas Eve, the carol service has ended, and a woman with three small boys leaves the cathedral, the children swooping like pigeons. 'Why weren't there any wild animals at the crib? Haven't they got something to give?' asked one of the children.And I heard myself say, 'Yes, they have.'Was it true, what I told them? Did I dream it? Where it came from I do not know but I seemed to remember every word, just as if I had heard it . . .Outside the cathedral, the children are told the nativity story from a unique perspective: that of a fox. Despite the scorn of the other animals, he enters the stable to offer the child a gift that only he can give.
The Fox at the Manger (Virago Modern Classics #389)
by P. L. Travers OBEFor the first time since the war, the Christmas peal is ringing at St Paul's Cathedral. There is joy. There is new hope. It is Christmas Eve, the carol service has ended, and a woman with three small boys leaves the cathedral, the children swooping like pigeons. 'Why weren't there any wild animals at the crib? Haven't they got something to give?' asked one of the children.And I heard myself say, 'Yes, they have.'Was it true, what I told them? Did I dream it? Where it came from I do not know but I seemed to remember every word, just as if I had heard it . . .Outside the cathedral, the children are told the nativity story from a unique perspective: that of a fox. Despite the scorn of the other animals, he enters the stable to offer the child a gift that only he can give.
I Go by Sea, I Go by Land (Virago Modern Classics #388)
by P. L. Travers OBE'James and I stayed on at home and everything was quiet and sunny and we got to thinking the war would never come after all . . . Just when we were so sure nothing would happen, the German plane came over. It came over one night at one o'clock in the morning and the sound was quite different from an English plane and we all woke up. You could hear it drumming and drumming like a big bee in a flower, buroom, buroom, buroom, round and round in the air above the house. Then suddenly there were five loud explosions. After that there was a terrible silence and I knew that Father and Mother were looking at each other in the darkness and I felt myself getting small and tight inside. Then Father said quietly, "Meg, they must go!"'Now I am going to write a Diary because we are going to America because of the War. It has just been decided. I will write down everything about it because we shall be so much older when we come back that I will never remember it if I do not. So this is the beginning. Oh, please let us come back soon, please.'This is the fictional diary of Sabrina Lind, an eleven-year-old English girl who, with her little brother James, is sent on the long voyage across the sea to her aunt in America.
Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life
by Lyndall GordonThis prize-winning biography, newly revised, sees Virginia Woolf as she saw herself. The first to set out the private life behind the well-known facts of her public career, A Writer's Life rocks back and forth between memories and art to reveal an explorer of 'the infinite oddity of the human position'. Instead of the doom-and-death often imposed on women of genius, here is the robust walker and seeker for what was fertile in her intimacies, in women's nature, and in resistance to power. This edition brings out her ideas for biography itself: to fall on a life 'like a roll of heavy waters... laying bare the pebbles on the shore of the soul'.
Virginia Woolf: A Writer's Life
by Lyndall GordonThis prize-winning biography, newly revised, sees Virginia Woolf as she saw herself. The first to set out the private life behind the well-known facts of her public career, A Writer's Life rocks back and forth between memories and art to reveal an explorer of 'the infinite oddity of the human position'. Instead of the doom-and-death often imposed on women of genius, here is the robust walker and seeker for what was fertile in her intimacies, in women's nature, and in resistance to power. This edition brings out her ideas for biography itself: to fall on a life 'like a roll of heavy waters... laying bare the pebbles on the shore of the soul'.
Shared Lives: Growing Up in 50s Cape Town
by Lyndall GordonLyndall Gordon, the acclaimed biographer of T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, grew up in Cape Town, South Africa in the 1950s. This intimate and moving memoir is the story of Rosie, Ellie, and Romy- her closest friends from childhood until their early deaths.Daughters of Jewish immigrants, these girls grew into adulthood together, shaped by their parents' and grandparents' Eastern European heritages, the stifling atmosphere of their proper girls' school, South Africa's politics, and the intense pressure within their bourgeois milieu for early marriage. Though miles distanced them as they grew older and went off to New York, Oxford and Paris, their bonds of friendship remained strong, separated only by their untimely deaths.
Shared Lives: Growing Up in 50s Cape Town
by Lyndall GordonLyndall Gordon, the acclaimed biographer of T.S. Eliot and Virginia Woolf, grew up in Cape Town, South Africa in the 1950s. This intimate and moving memoir is the story of Rosie, Ellie, and Romy- her closest friends from childhood until their early deaths.Daughters of Jewish immigrants, these girls grew into adulthood together, shaped by their parents' and grandparents' Eastern European heritages, the stifling atmosphere of their proper girls' school, South Africa's politics, and the intense pressure within their bourgeois milieu for early marriage. Though miles distanced them as they grew older and went off to New York, Oxford and Paris, their bonds of friendship remained strong, separated only by their untimely deaths.
Vindication: A Life Of Mary
by Lyndall GordonIn this stunning new biography of the eighteenth-century writer Mary Wollstonecraft, Lyndall Gordon explores the life of a woman often criticised by biographers, historians and feminists alike. Gordon challenges such slanders, and portrays instead the genius of this extraordinary woman. The two-generation approach to her life examines not only Wollstonecraft herself, but also her effect on her daughters and heirs (Mary Shelley, Fanny Imlay, Claire Clairmont and Margaret Mount Cashell), and the ways in which they carried her influence into subsequent generations.Gordon takes stock of Wollstonecraft's life in accord with her own values rather than through the reputation history has given her. The author looks at her important relationships with Gilbert Imlay and William Godwin, and her ideas about issues such as the problems of communication between the sexes and parenthood. Through this brilliant study, Gordon, the author of biographies of Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Brontë among others, successfully reinterprets Mary Wollstonecraft for the twenty-first century.
Vindication: A Life Of Mary
by Lyndall GordonIn this stunning new biography of the eighteenth-century writer Mary Wollstonecraft, Lyndall Gordon explores the life of a woman often criticised by biographers, historians and feminists alike. Gordon challenges such slanders, and portrays instead the genius of this extraordinary woman. The two-generation approach to her life examines not only Wollstonecraft herself, but also her effect on her daughters and heirs (Mary Shelley, Fanny Imlay, Claire Clairmont and Margaret Mount Cashell), and the ways in which they carried her influence into subsequent generations.Gordon takes stock of Wollstonecraft's life in accord with her own values rather than through the reputation history has given her. The author looks at her important relationships with Gilbert Imlay and William Godwin, and her ideas about issues such as the problems of communication between the sexes and parenthood. Through this brilliant study, Gordon, the author of biographies of Virginia Woolf and Charlotte Brontë among others, successfully reinterprets Mary Wollstonecraft for the twenty-first century.
Now and Again
by Charlotte RoganA gripping novel about what happens when one woman stands up for her beliefs <P><P>From the author of The Lifeboat and Now and Again 'Dazzling' - The Sunday Times 'All the ingredients of a tense thriller' - Red For Maggie Rayburn, wife, mother and secretary at a munitions plant, life is pleasant, predictable and secure. When she finds proof of a high-level cover-up on her boss's desk, she impulsively takes it, turning her world upside down. Propelled by a desire to do good - and a new-found taste for excitement - Maggie starts to see injustice everywhere. Soon, her bottom drawer is filled with 'evidence', her town has turned against her, and she must decide how far she will go for the truth.
Novel On Yellow Paper (Virago Modern Classics Ser. #2128)
by Stevie SmithStevie's alter ego Pompey is young, in love and working as a secretary for the magnificent Sir Phoebus Ullwater. In between making coffee and typing letters for Sir Phoebus, Pompey scribbles down - on yellow office paper - her quirky thoughts. Her flights of imagination take in Euripedes, sex education, Nazi Germany and the Catholic Church, shattering conventions in their wake.
Novel On Yellow Paper (Virago Modern Classics #343)
by Stevie SmithStevie's alter ego Pompey is young, in love and working as a secretary for the magnificent Sir Phoebus Ullwater. In between making coffee and typing letters for Sir Phoebus, Pompey scribbles down - on yellow office paper - her quirky thoughts. Her flights of imagination take in Euripedes, sex education, Nazi Germany and the Catholic Church, shattering conventions in their wake.
The Holiday (Virago Modern Classics Ser. #2334)
by Stevie SmithCelia works at the Ministry in the post-war England of 1949 and lives in a London suburb. Witty, fragile, quixotic, Celia is preoccupied with love - for her friends, her colleagues, her relations, and especially for her adored cousin Casmilus, with whom she goes on holiday to visit Uncle Heber, the vicar. Here they talk endlessly, argue, eat, tell stories, love and hate - moments of wild humour alternating with waves of melancholy as Celia ponders obsessively on the inevitable pain of love. In everything she wrote, Stevie Smith captured the paradox of pain in all human affections - nowhere more so than in this wry, strongly autobiographical tale.
The Holiday (Virago Modern Classics #345)
by Stevie SmithCelia works at the Ministry in the post-war England of 1949 and lives in a London suburb. Witty, fragile, quixotic, Celia is preoccupied with love - for her friends, her colleagues, her relations, and especially for her adored cousin Casmilus, with whom she goes on holiday to visit Uncle Heber, the vicar. Here they talk endlessly, argue, eat, tell stories, love and hate - moments of wild humour alternating with waves of melancholy as Celia ponders obsessively on the inevitable pain of love. In everything she wrote, Stevie Smith captured the paradox of pain in all human affections - nowhere more so than in this wry, strongly autobiographical tale.
Over The Frontier (Virago Modern Classics Ser.)
by Stevie SmithIt is 1936. Pompey Casmilus (the heroine of Smith's debut, Novel on Yellow Paper) lives in London with her beloved Aunt, bothered by the menace of German militarism, bothered too by the humbug which confronts it, bothered most of all by her hopeless love affair with Freddy. Its ending plunges Pompey into melancholy; six months of rest and recuperation are prescribed and Pompey goes to Schloss Tilssen on the northern German border, only to fall in with a strange band of conspirators: the plum-coloured Mrs Pouncer, the absent-minded Colonel Peck and the dashing Major Tom Satterthwaite, whom Pompey comes to love.How Pompey gets into uniform and becomes a spy is only one of the astounding events in this extraordinary novel which, on a serious level, is also about a powerful investigation of power and cruelty in a world preparing for war.