Biographies & True Stories

What draws us to the beauty of a peacock, the flight of an eagle, or the song of a nightingale? Why are birds so significant in our lives and our sense of the world? And what do our ways of thinking about and experiencing birds tell us about ourselves?...

An authoritative and comprehensive intellectual biography of the author of the Divine Comedy. For all that has been written about the author of the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (1265-1321) remains the best guide to his own life and work...

Displayed on European stages from 1810 to 1815 as the Hottentot Venus, Sara Baartman was one of the most famous women of her day, and also one of the least known. As the Hottentot Venus, she was seen by Westerners as alluring and primitive, a reflection...

Bestselling novelist Alexander McCall Smith's charming account of how the poet W. H. Auden has helped guide his life - and how he might guide yours tooWhen facing a moral dilemma, Isabel Dalhousie - Edinburgh philosopher, amateur detective, and...

An essential introduction to Josephus's momentous war narrativeThe Jewish War is Josephus's superbly evocative account of the Jewish revolt against Rome, which was crushed in 70 CE with the siege of Jerusalem and the destruction of the Temple. Martin...

This is the first of seven volumes of a translation of the Valmiki Ramayana, the great Sanskrit epic of the life of Rama, ideal man and incarnation of the great god Visnu. This renowned work of ancient India has profoundly affected the literature, art,...

In 2006, Sanaz Fotouhi, a young woman in her twenties, travels to Afghanistan with her partner to make a filmSeven years and four trips later their feature documentary Love Marriage in Kabul wins awards and the hearts of audiences in Australia and around...

An anthology of writing produced by Indigenous creatives from Western Sydney that has been praised by ArtsHub as 'a light shone on First Nations writers'.Blacklight: Ten Years of First Nations Storytelling is a definitive anthology of...

Stories for Ways and Means features original "grown up" story collaborations by some of this era's most compelling storytellers from the worlds of music and contemporary art.Ten years ago Jeff Antebi, the founder of music publisher Waxploitation, had an...

A 2024 Philip K. Dick Award Finalist The stunning, new collection from the Ugandan master of Africanfuturism.A young teen, haunted by the ghost of his father, takes it upon himself to save his brother and his people from a warlord's marauding army. A...

The music's still playing, fifty years on...It is 1965, and John, Paul, George and Ringo have lost themselves. Beatlemania is at its peak and the boys are overwhelmed by screaming fans, more money than they can count, and fame beyond their...

The love affair between two of the Victorian era's most famous poets is one of passion, tragedy, illness, and ultimately, endurance. Collected here for the first time in print are their 573 love letters, which capture their courtship, their blossoming...

Upon publication, "Don't Panic" quickly established itself as the definitive companion to "Adams" and "The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy". This edition comes up-to-date, covering the movie, "And Another Thing" by Eoin Colfer and the build up to the...

In the Clearances of the 19th century, crofts once the mainstay of Highland life in Scotland were swept away as the land was put over to sheep grazing. Many of the people of the Highlands and islands of Scotland were forced from their homes by landowners...

A Man of Letters traces the life, career, and commentaries on controversial issues of Thomas Sowell over a period of more than four decades through his letters to and from family, friends, and public figures ranging from Milton Friedman to Clarence...

A real classic among Highland books, A Croft in the Hills captures, in simple, moving descriptions, what it was really like trying to make a living out of a hill croft fifty years ago. A couple and their young daughter, fresh from city life, immerse...

The controversial anti-secrecy organization WikiLeaks made headlines around the world when it released hundreds of thousands of classified U.S. government documents in 2010. Allowed advance access, The New York Times sorted, searched, and analyzed these...

The Grand Array is a stunning collection of 18 essays by widely acclaimed poet Pattiann Rogers. Written over a span of 25 years, in these essays Rogers daringly lays out the essential unity of science, spirituality, the arts, and our sensual experience...

An insider's account of gay high society in pre-Stonewall New York City-now back in print!Young, intelligent, and handsome, Alan Helms left a brutal midwestern childhood for New York City in 1955. Denied a Rhodes scholarship because of his sexual...

In an era of stark racial injustice, Aaron Dixon dedicated his life to revolution, founding the Seattle chapter of the Black Panther Party in 1968 at age nineteen. In My People Are Rising, he traces the course of his own radicalization, and that of a...

"You have a unique viewpoint from which to write about Jack as no one else has or could write. I feel very deeply that this book must be written. And no one else, I repeat, can write it."-William S. BurroughsEdie Parker was eighteen years old when she...

Immortalized as Dean Moriarty by Jack Kerouac in his epic novel, On the Road, Neal Cassady was infamous for his unstoppable energy and his overwhelming charm, his savvy hustle and his devil-may-care attitude. A treasured friend and traveling companion of...

I feel that I have been sleeping all my life and I have woken up and opened my eyes to the world. A beautiful world! But impossible to live in. These are the words of fifteen-year-old Hadiya, blogging from the city of Mosul, Iraq, to let the world know...

In this new interpretation of the life and work of the American poet, short-story writer and novelist "Charles Bukowski", David Stephen Calonne examines Bukowski's writings, colourful life and the desperate conditions of his lifestyle, looking at the...

In this riveting account of Biggie's remarkable life, hip hop journalist Cheo Hodari Coker tells the story you've never heard about the dramatic, tension filled world of Biggie, Tupac, Puff Daddy, and Suge Knight, tracing their friendships and feuds from...

Everyone's favorite Dirty Old Man returns with a new volume of uncollected work. Charles Bukowski (19201994), one of the most outrageous figures of twentieth-century American literature, was so prolific that many significant pieces never found their way...

In the colorful tradition of Orwell and Hemingway, Maugham and Theroux, Jerry Hopkins recalls his first decade as a Bangkok expatriate by profiling twenty-five of the city's most unforgettable characters. Among them are the man thought to be the model...

The Living Dead 2 has more of what zombie fans hunger for - more scares, more action, more... brains! Experience the indispensable series that defines the very best in zombie literature with original stories by Kelley Armstrong, Karina Sumner-Smith,...

The perfect keg. Filled with perfect beer. A symphony of flavors in the mouth. The right blend of sweet and bitter. The fluid in that keg represents a year's work. Actually brewing it took a few weeks. But to make it truly the perfect keg, Ian Coutts had...

For the past 50 years, Martin Duberman's ground- breaking historical, biographical and memoir writings have established him as a pre-eminent public intellectual. Duberman is best known for his provocative books about the gay rights movement, as well as...

In this fascinating and lyrical book, the seemingly disparate but equally marvelous worlds of the circus and the medical amphitheater meet in characters ranging from the sword swallowers and women who lunched on hardware to the sensitive, bullied boy who...

This collection of writings from Lafcadio Hearn paints a rare and fascinating picture of pre-modern Japan.Over a century after his death, author, translator, and educator Lafcadio Hearn remains one of the best-known Westerners ever to make Japan his home...

This collection of mystery and horror stories is regarded as Japan's answer to Edgar Allan Poe.Japanese Tales of Mystery & Imagination, the first volume of its kind translated into English, is written with the quick tempo of the West but rich with...

A finalist for the 36th annual Amazon.ca First Novel Award!Five siblings, all haunted by the death of a brother in their youth. One winter day, when another of them will be taken by cancer.Guddy is struggling to fly across the continent in a snowstorm to...

In Paris and London, the crowds hailed him as the man who had conquered Napoleon, as the liberator of Europe, and as a benevolent, enlightened monarch. At home he came to be feared as a reactionary, oppressive autocrat in a country where millions of...

With Bukowski, the votes are still coming in. There seems to be no middle ground-people seem either to love him or hate him. Tales of his own life and doings are as wild and weird as the very stories he writes. In a sense, Bukowski was a legend in his...

Donald Allen, the late great editor of the Evergreen Review at Grove Press and editor of the seminal anthology The New American Poetry, first met Jack Kerouac in 1956 when he and Allen Ginsberg came to visit at his West Village apartment. At the time,...

Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal and Novak Djokovic are the top-ranked tennis players today, with multiple Grand Slams to their credit. But how do today's champions compare with those of earlier eras? From William Renshaw and the Doherty brothers to big Bill...

In 1965, Graham Greene joined journalist Bernard Diederich in the Dominican Republic to embark on a tour of its border with Haiti, then ruled by 'Papa Doc' Duvalier. They were accompanied by an activist priest, Jean-Claude Bajeux...

Botchan is the youngest son in a middle class Tokyo family. His elder brother is the obvious favorite of both parents and Botchan grows up demanding attention for himself-and succeeding only through a series of misdeeds. Following the early death of his...

In the baking heat of February 1973, wearing a purple nylon bodyshirt and an expression of confidence that belied his nerves, Ned Manning faced down a classroom full of kids in Tenterfield in remote NSW. It was the start of many years of teaching, by...

Harry Vanda and George Young put Friday on our minds, triggered Easyfever with the Easybeats, and harnessed the raw energy and power of Aussie pub rock to make superstars of AC/DC, Rose Tattoo, and the Angels. The day Vanda and Young met at Sydney's...

Centuries before Shakespeare, Murasaki Shikibu's "The Tale of Genji" was already acknowledged as a classic of Japanese literature and the past century has seen this book gain worldwide acceptance as not only the...

'I put some rissoles in sandwiches for you two. Dig in.' Lynchy grabbed two and handed me one. We bit into them while sipping our SodaStream-manufactured soft drink. A rush came over me as I tasted the spice-free rissole bursting across my taste buds. It...

A thrilling story of the Monkey King & his epic quest - to redeem himself. He & his trusted friends face fantastic foes, demons & monsters during their amazing adventures travelling to the Western paradise. No matter what obstacle was put...

Japanese Proverbs is filled with universal truths ('Fall down seven times, get up eight') as well as uniquely Japanese sayings and folk wisdom ('Even a one-inch insect has a half-inch soul') which may seem cryptic and difficult to understand until you...

The first compilation of Bruce Lee photographs published in association with the Bruce Lee estate. This book reveals the full range of Lee's talents. It includes rare photos spanning from his early stage career in Hong Kong to his...

The Romance of the Three Kingdoms is Lo Kuan-chung's retelling of the events attending the fall of the Han Dynasty in 220 A.D., one of the most tumultuous and fascinating periods in Chinese history. It is an epic saga of brotherhood and rivalry, of...