As a writer, Ann Patchett knows what the outcome of her fiction will be. Life, however, often takes turns we do not see coming. Patchett ponders this truth as she explores family, friendship, marriage, failure, success, and what it all means. Ranging from the personal - her portrait of the three men she called her fathers; unexpectedly falling into a life-changing friendship with Tom Hanks; how to answer when someone asks why you don't have children...

'This is the Story of a Happy Marriage' is a combination of literature and memoir revealing the big experiences and little moments that shaped Ann Patchett as a daughter, wife, friend and writer. Here, Ann Patchett shares entertaining and moving stories about her tumultuous childhood, her painful early divorce, the excitement of selling her first book, driving a Winnebago from Montana to Yellowstone Park, her joyous discovery of opera, training for...

Made famous by the great success of her psychological thrillers, 'The Talented Mr Ripley' and 'Strangers on a Train', Patricia Highsmith is lauded as one of the great modern writers. The triangular relationship between Highsmith's lesbianism, her fraught personality - by parts self-destructive and malicious - and her fiction has been largely avoided by other biographers. She was openly lesbian and would, in modern times, be venerated as a radical...

A major new biography on an increasingly important American literary icon. Having spoken with people close to Bukowski, and with a full examination of Bukowski's extensive writings, Barry Miles has written the definitive story of the man dubbed the 'laureate of American low-life'.

From his desks in Ravello and the Hollywood Hills, Gore Vidal travels in memory through the arenas of literature, television, film, theatre, politics, and international society, where he has cut a broad swathe, recounting achievements and defeats, friends and enemies made.

This is a quick-reference guide to authors and their works. It covers over 25000 works of British, American and European literature from 1475 to the present, with entries listed by authors and by titles.

The world of Raymond Chandler is shrouded in secrets and half-truths as deep and deceptive as anything in his magisterial novels. This biography demonstrates Chandler's restless private life, exploring his depressive and obsessive attitude toward his craft, his infidelity, alcoholism and suicidal tendencies.

In Notes From a Small Island, Bryson, who moved to England from the USA seventeen years ago and settled in North Yorkshire with his family, turns an affectionate but ironic eye on his adopted country.

At seventeen, Susanna Moore left her home in Hawai'i, with no money, no belongings and no prospects. But in Philadelphia, an unexpected gift of four trunks of beautiful clothes allowed her to assume the first of many disguises. Working at Bergdorf's, she refines her observational instincts. Modelling at a boat trade show, she dresses as 'Miss Aluminium', her arms chafed by silver sequins. Living in 1960s Los Angeles, she meets Joan Didion and Audrey...

Norman Mailer was one of the most famous writers of his generation. People who had never read a word that he wrote knew who he was because of his fame as a novelist or journalist, or his notoriety because of his womanising, his rivalries with other writers, his appearances on television, his political outspokenness and his prominence as a leading intellectual of his era. A provocative chronicler of the second half of the 20th century, both as a journalist...