Would-be romance writer Bailey York was a woman who'd already failed twice at love. As far as she was concerned, men were wonderful to read, and to write, about, but that was as close as she wanted to get. Which was probably why she had such difficulty creating a hero. She needed a real-life model, she finally decided. And she found one. Parker Davidson was everything a hero should be. Compellingly attractive. Forceful and determined, yet capable...

"W.B. Yeats--Twentieth Century Magus is a comprehensive study of his magical practices and beliefs. Yeats moved through many different phases of spiritual development, believing that his life was an intellectual, spiritual, and artistic quest--a quest greatly influenced by Celtic lore, Theosophy, Golden Dawn ceremonial magic, Swedenborg's metaphysics, the works of Jacob Boehme, and Neo-Platonism. For Yeats, writing poetry was an act of divine possession,...

The first biography to be aimed at the general reader as much as at students and historians, No Ordinary Man is a fascinating study of the life and work of Miguel de Cervantes (1547-1616), the writer known as the "Spanish Shakespeare" and author of the timeless classic Don Quixote. A renaissance man in all senses of the term, Cervantes was, in his time, an adventurer, spy, soldier, hostage, and creator of the first European novel. This biography is...

This book offers an intimate and intriguing account of Jane Austen's relations, from 1704, when her great-grandmother was left a widow with six children to support, through to 1870, and the destinies of her many nephews and nieces. Drawing extensively on letters and memoirs written by the Austen family over a period of 150 years, this book traces the development of the family from vigorous Georgian opportunism to respectable Victorian gentility.--Provided...

"An obscure writer disappears, a typescript is found. Is it fiction, perhaps the author's last novel, or something far stranger?"--

William Donaldson reveals all in a frank and often scurrilous memoir where past and present collide in a hilarious vision of his extraordinary life. The author charts his course from his public school childhood, through production of the celebrated 1960s satire Beyond the Fringe, a riotous lifestyle in the company of pop stars, actors, models, and sundry celebs--sometimes in a brothel in which he lived for a time in Chelsea--literary success and on...

"For a decade--from 1973 to 1982--John Gardner was one of America's most famous writers and certainly its most flamboyantly opinionated. His 1973 novel, The Sunlight Dialogues, was on the New York Times bestseller list for fourteen weeks. Once in the limelight, he picked public fights with his peers, John Barth, Joseph Heller, and Norman Mailer among them, and wrote five more bestsellers. Gardner's personal life was as chaotic as his writing life...

Fiction often imitates real-life. That was certainly the case for Oscar Wilde. This book is part biography, part critical study. It examines all of Wilde's published and unpublished work to see what was happening in her life that she might have used as inspiration for her fiction. HistoryCaps is an imprint of BookCaps Study Guides. With each book, a brief period of history is recapped. We publish a wide array of topics (from baseball and music to...

Eric McCormick was, from about 1940 until his death in 1995, one of New Zealand's most distinguished writers and scholars. He pioneered the appreciation and study of the painter Francis Hodgkins, and he wrote several biographies. The autobiographical fragments collected here have been edited to make a coherent volume, tracing his origins in Taihape, to school and university in Wellington, to schoolteaching in Nelson, to Cambridge and through his wartime...

Collects the best of the author's essays from five decades of the "Irish Times" to reflect a changing culture as well as her observations on such topics as the royal wedding, waitressing, and boring airline companions.