Kathy Acker: the Last Interview - And Other Conversations by Kathy Acker; Amy Scholder (Editor); Douglas A. Martin (Editor)

$29.99 AUD

Category: Biography and Memoir | Series: The\Last Interview Ser.

From Acker's earliest interviews - filled with playful, evasive, and counter-intuitive responses - to the last interview before her death where she reflects on the state of American literature, these interviews capture the writer at her funny and surprising best. Another highlight includes Acker's 1997 interview with the Spice Girls on the forces of pop and feminism (which reads as if it could have been conducted with a new generation of pop star in 2018). ...Show more

Microscripts by Robert Walser & Maira Kalman

$40.95 AUD

Category: Biography and Memoir

Robert Walser wrote many of his manuscripts in a highly enigmatic, shrunken-down form. These narrow strips of paper, covered with tiny ant-like pencil markings a millimeter high, came to light only after the author's death in 1956.At first considered random restless pencil markings or a secret code, the microscripts were in time discovered to be a radically miniaturized form of antique German script: a whole story was deciphered on the back of a business card. These twenty-five short pieces address schnapps, rotten husbands, small town life, elegant jaunts, the radio, swine, jealousy, and marriage proposals. ...Show more

The Time of Our Lives by Robert Dessaix

$26.99 AUD

Category: Biography and Memoir | Reading Level: Adult

At the height of his powers in this remarkable (and often witty) book, Robert Dessaix addresses these increasingly urgent questions in inimitable prose and comes up with some surprising answers. From Java to Hobart via Berlin, Dessaix invites us to eavesdrop on his intimate, no-nonsense conversations ab out ageing with friends and chance acquaintances. Reflecting on time, religion, painting, dancing and even grandchildren, Dessaix takes us on an enlivening journey across the landscape of growing older. Riffing on writers and thinkers from Plato to Eva Hoffman, he homes in on the crucial importance of a rich inner life. The Time of Our Lives is a wise and timely exploration of not just the challenges but also the many possibilities of old age. ...Show more

THE Autobiography of Alice B. ToklasGlance at the Parisian Early 20th Century Avant-garde (One of the Greatest Nonfiction Books of the 20th Century) by Gertrude Stein

$24.99 AUD

Category: Biography and Memoir

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas is a book by Gertrude Stein, written in the guise of an autobiography authored by Alice B. Toklas. Alice was an American-born member of the Parisian avant-garde of the early 20th century, and the life partner Gertrude Stein. The book starts with Alice's days in San F rancisco, before she moved to France, then describes her moving to Paris, meeting Gertrude, and starting their life together. The book had mixed reception, both among critics and Stein's friends, but the success of it was great. Today it is ranked it as one of the 20 greatest English-language nonfiction books of the 20th century. Gertrude Stein (1874-1946) was an American novelist, poet, playwright and art collector, best known for Three Lives, The Making of Americans and Tender Buttons. Stein moved to Paris in 1903, and made France her home for the remainder of her life. Picasso and Cubism were an important influence on Stein's writing. Her works are compared to James Joyce's Ulysses and to Marcel Proust's In Search of Lost Time. ...Show more

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas by Gertrude Stein

$24.99 AUD

Category: Biography and Memoir

The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas was written in 1933 by Gertrude Stein in the guise of an autobiography authored by Alice B. Toklas, who was her lover. It is a fascinating insight into the art scene in Paris as the couple were friends with Paul Cézanne, Henri Matisse and Pablo Picasso. They begin th e war years in England but return to France, volunteering for the American Fund for the French Wounded, driving around France, helping the wounded and homeless. After the war Gertrude has an argument with T. S. Eliot after he finds one of her writings inappropriate. They become friends with Sherwood Anderson and Ernest Hemingway. It was written to make money and was indeed a commercial success. However, it attracted criticism, especially from those who appeared in the book and didn't like the way they were depicted. ...Show more

Bukowski on Bukowski - Bukowski in His Own Words by Charles Bukowski; Ricky Hollywood (Editor)

$24.99 AUD

Category: Biography and Memoir

Diamonds at the Lost and Found - A Voyage Around My Mother by Sarah Aspinall

$34.99 AUD

Category: Biography and Memoir

  Sarah Aspinall grew up in the glittering wake of her irrepressible mother Audrey. Born into poverty in 1930s Liverpool, Audrey had always known that she was destined for better things and was determined to shape that destiny for herself. From the fading seaside glamour of Southport, to New York and Hollywood, to post-war London and the stately homes of the English aristocracy, Audrey stylishly kicked down every door she encountered, on a ceaseless quest for excitement - and for love. Once Sarah was born, she became Audrey's companion on her adventures, travelling the world, scraping together an education for herself from the books found in hotels or given to her by strangers, and living on Audrey's charm as they veered from luxury to poverty - an accessory to her mother's desperate search for 'the one'. As Sarah grew older, she realised that theirs was a life hung about with mysteries. Why, for instance, had they spent ages living in a godforsaken motel in the Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina? Who was the charming Sabet Sabescue, and what was his hold over Audrey during several months in Cairo? And what on earth happened to the heirlooms that an ancient heiress, Miss Gillette, gave Sarah when they visited her in Palm Springs?  And why, when they returned to Southport was Audrey ostracised by the society she so longed to be part of? Diamonds at the Lost and Found tells the story of how Sarah eventually pulled free of her mother's gravitational pull to carve out a destiny of her own. It is a beguiling testament to dreams, defying convention and exasperated love. ...Show more

Just Ignore Him by Alan Davies

$32.99 AUD

Category: Biography and Memoir | Reading Level: near fine

The story of a life built on sand. In the rain. In this compelling memoir, comedian and actor Alan Davies recalls his boyhood with vivid insight and devastating humour. Shifting between his 1970s upbringing and his life today, Davies moves poignantly from innocence to experience to the clarity of hindsi ght, always with a keen sense of the absurd. From sibling dynamics, to his voiceless, misunderstood progression through school, sexuality and humiliating 'accidents', Davies inhabits his younger mind with spectacular accuracy, sharply evoking an era when Green Shield Stamps, Bob-a-Job week and Whizzer & Chips loomed large, a bus fare was 2p - and children had little power in the face of adult motivation. Here, there are often exquisitely tender recollections of the mother he lost at six years old, of a bereaved family struggling to find its way, and the kicks and confusion of adolescence. Through even the joyous and innocent memories, the pain of Davies's lifelong grief and profound betrayal is unfiltered, searing and beautifully articulated. Just Ignore Him is not only an autobiography, it is a testament to a survivor's resilience and courage.   ...Show more

Heart Berries - A Memoir by Terese Marie Mailhot

$22.99 AUD

Category: Biography and Memoir

*Canada Reads 2019 Longlist *National Bestseller *New York Times Bestseller *Finalist for the 2018 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize for Nonfiction *Finalist for the 2018 Governor General's Literary Awards *Longlisted for the 2019 RBC Taylor Prize *A New York Times Editor's Choice *A Globe an d Mail Best Book of 2018 *A CBC Best Book of 2018 *A Toronto Star Best Book of 2018 *A Walrus Best Book of 2018 *An NPR Best Book of 2018 *A Chatelaine Best Book of 2018 *A Bustle Best Book of 2018 *A GQ Best Book of 2018 *A Thrillist Best Book of 2018 *A Book Riot Best Book of 2018 *An Electric Lit Best Book of 2018 *An Entropy Best Book of 2018 *A Hill Times Best Book of 2018 *A BookPage Best Book of 2018 *A Library Journal Best Book of 2018 *A Goodreads Best Book of 2018 *A New York Public Library Best Book of 2018 *Named one of the most anticipated books of 2018 by: Chatelaine, Entertainment Weekly, ELLE, Cosmopolitan, Esquire, Huffington Post, B*tch, NYLON, BuzzFeed, Bustle, The Rumpus and Goodreads *Selected by Emma Watson as the Our Shared Shelf Book Club Pick for March/April 2018    Guileless and refreshingly honest, Terese Mailhot's debut memoir chronicles her struggle to balance the beauty of her Native heritage with the often desperate and chaotic reality of life on the reservation. Heart Berries is a powerful, poetic memoir of a woman's coming of age on the Seabird Island Indian Reservation in British Columbia. Having survived a profoundly dysfunctional upbringing only to find herself hospitalized and facing a dual diagnosis of Post Traumatic Stress Disorder and Bipolar II, Terese Mailhot is given a notebook and begins to write her way out of trauma. The triumphant result is Heart Berries, a memorial for Mailhot's mother, a social worker and activist who had a thing for prisoners; a story of reconciliation with her father--an abusive drunk and a brilliant artist--who was murdered under mysterious circumstances; and an elegy on how difficult it is to love someone while dragging the long shadows of shame.      Mailhot "trusts the reader to understand that memory isn't exact, but melded to imagination, pain and what we can bring ourselves to accept." Her unique and at times unsettling voice graphically illustrates her mental state. As she writes, she discovers her own true voice, seizes control of her story and, in so doing, reestablishes her connection to her family, to her people and to her place in the world. ...Show more

Suspended Passion - Interviews by Marguerite Duras; Chris Turner (Translator)

$39.99 AUD

Category: Biography and Memoir | Series: The\French List Ser.

A controversial figure of the postwar French literary and cultural scene, Marguerite Duras has exerted a powerful hold on readers around the world. This volume of interviews--hailed on its French publication as Duras's "secret confession"--offers readers a rich vein of new insight into her work, opinion s, life, and relationships. The interviews that make up the book were conducted in 1987, when Italian journalist Leopoldina Pallotta della Torre met the seventy-three-year-old Duras at her Paris flat and convinced her to sit for a series of conversations. The resulting book was published in Italian in 1989, but it somehow failed to attract a French publisher, and it was quickly forgotten. Nearly a quarter of a century later, however, the book was rediscovered and translated into French, and, it has now become a sensation. In its revealing pages, Duras speaks with extraordinary freedom about her life as a writer, her relationship to cinema, her friendship with Mitterand, her love of Chekhov and football, and, perhaps most significantly, her childhood in pre-war Vietnam, the experiences that propelled her most famous novel, The Lover. A true literary event, finally available in English, The Suspended Passion is a remarkable document of an extraordinary literary life. ...Show more

All the Young Men by Ruth Coker Burks

$32.99 AUD

Category: Biography and Memoir

'If I have one message with this book it's that we all have to care for one another. Today, not just in 1986. Life is about caring for each other, and I learned more about life from the dying than I ever learned from the living. It's in an elephant ride, it's in those wildflowers dancing on their way to the shared grave of two men in love, and it's in caring for that young man who just needed information without judgement.' In 1986, 26-year-old Ruth Corker Burks visits a friend in hospital when she notices that the door to one of the patient's rooms is painted red. The nurses are reluctant to enter, drawing straws to decide who will tend to the sick person inside. Out of impulse, Ruth herself enters the quarantined space and begins to care for the young man who cries for his mother in the last moments of his life. And in doing so, Ruth's own life changes forever. As word spreads in the community that she is the only person willing to help the young men afflicted by the growing AIDS crisis, Ruth goes from being an ordinary young mother to an accidental activist. Forging deep friendships with the men she helps, Ruth works to find them housing and jobs, and then funeral homes willing to take their bodies - often in the middle of the night. She prepares and delivers meals to 'her guys,' supplementing her own income with discarded food found in the dumpsters behind supermarkets. She defies local pastors and the medical community to store rare medications for her most urgent patients, and teaches sex education to drag queens after hours at secret bars. Emboldened by the weight of their collective pain, she fervently advocates for their safety and visibility, ultimately advising Governor Bill Clinton on the national HIV-AIDS crisis, and in doing so becomes a beacon of hope to an otherwise spurned group of ailing gay men on the fringes of society. Ruth kept her story a secret for years, fearful of repercussions within her deeply conservative community. But at a time when it's more important than ever to stand up for those who can't, Ruth has found the courage to have her voice - and the voices of those who were stigmatised, rejected and abandoned - heard. ...Show more

Plagued by Fire: The Dreams and Furies of Frank Lloyd Wright by Paul Hendrickson

$29.99 AUD

Category: Biography and Memoir

Frank Lloyd Wright has long been known as a rank egotist who held in contempt almost everything aside from his own genius. Harder to detect, but no less real, is a Wright who fully understood, and suffered from, the choices he made. This is the Wright whom Paul Hendrickson reveals in this masterful biog raphy: the Wright who was haunted by his father, about whom he told the greatest lie of his life. And this, we see, is the Wright of many other neglected aspects of his story: his close, and perhaps romantic, relationship with friend and early mentor Cecil Corwin; the eerie, unmistakable role of fires in his life; the connection between the 1921 Black Wall Street massacre in Tulsa, Oklahoma, and the murder of his mistress, her two children, and four others at his beloved Wisconsin home. In showing us Wright's facades along with their cracks, Hendrickson helps us form a fresh, deep, and more human understanding of the man. With prodigious research, unique vision, and his ability to make sense of a life in ways at once unexpected, poetic, and undeniably brilliant, he has given us the defining book on Wright. ...Show more