Series: Writers on Writers

In this book, novelist Colm Tóibín offers a deeply personal introduction to the work and life of one of his most important literary influences, the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Ranging across her poetry, prose, letters, and biography, Tóibín creates a vivid picture of Bishop while also revealing how her work has helped shape his sensibility as a novelist and how...

In this book, novelist Colm Tóibín offers a deeply personal introduction to the work and life of one of his most important literary influences, the American poet Elizabeth Bishop. Ranging across her poetry, prose, letters, and biography, Tóibín creates a vivid picture of Bishop while also revealing how her work has helped shape his sensibility as a novelist and how...

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 too When facing a moral dilemma, Isabel Dalhousie - Edinburgh philosopher, amateur detective, and title character of a series of novels by best-selling author Alexander McCall Smith - often refers to the great twentieth-century...

Czesław Miłosz (1911–2004) was a giant of twentieth-century literature, not least because he lived through and wrote about many of the most extreme events of that extreme century, from the world wars and the Holocaust to the Cold War. Over a seven-decade career, he produced an important body of poetry, fiction, and nonfiction, including classics such as The Captive Mind,...

The Tablet, Best Books of the Year Open Magazine's Best Books of 2020 A vivid and original account of one of Ireland's greatest poets by an acclaimed Irish historian and literary biographer The most important Irish poet of the postwar era, Seamus Heaney rose to prominence as his native Northern Ireland descended into sectarian violence. A national figure at a...

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 too When facing a moral dilemma, Isabel Dalhousie - Edinburgh philosopher, amateur detective, and title character of a series of novels by bestselling author Alexander McCall Smith - often refers to the great twentieth-century...