Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Intimate Memories offers the brilliantly edited memoirs of one woman’s rebellion against “the whole ghastly social structure” under which the United States had been buried since the Victorian era. Luhan fled the Gilded Age prison of the upper classes to lead a life of notoriety among Europe and America’s leading artists, writers, and social visionaries—among them D. H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, and John Reed. Intimate Memories details Luhan’s assemblage of a series of utopian domains aimed at curing the malaise of the modern age and shows Luhan not just as a visionary hostess but as a talented and important writer.

Mabel Dodge Luhan’s Intimate Memories offers the brilliantly edited memoirs of one woman’s rebellion against “the whole ghastly social structure” under which the United States had been buried since the Victorian era. Luhan fled the Gilded Age prison of the upper classes to lead a life of notoriety among Europe and America’s leading artists, writers, and social visionaries—among them D. H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, and John Reed. Intimate Memories details Luhan’s assemblage of a series of utopian domains aimed at curing the malaise of the modern age and shows Luhan not just as a visionary hostess but as a talented and important writer.

In the decades following his death, many of those who knew James Dean best––actors, directors, friends, lovers (both men and women), photographers, and Hollywood columnists––shared stories of their first-person experiences with him in interviews and in the articles and autobiographies they wrote. Their recollections of Dean became lost in fragile back issues of movie magazines and newspapers and in out-of-print books that are extremely hard to find. Until now. The Real James Dean is the first book of its kind: a rich collection spanning six decades of writing in which many of the people whose lives were touched by Dean recall their indelible experiences with him in their own words. Here are the memorable personal accounts of Dean from his high school and college drama teachers; the girl he almost married; costars like Rock Hudson, Natalie Wood, Jim Backus, and Raymond Massey; directors Elia Kazan, Nicholas Ray, and George Stevens; entertainer Eartha Kitt; gossip queen Hedda Hopper; the passenger who accompanied Dean on his final, fatal road trip; and a host of his other friends and colleagues.

Internationally known as a writer, hostess, and patron of the arts of the twentieth century, Mabel Dodge Luhan (1879–1962) is not known for her experiences with venereal disease, unmentioned in her four-volume published memoir. Making the suppressed portions of Luhan’s memoirs available for the first time, well-known biographer and cultural critic Lois Rudnick examines Luhan’s life through the lenses of venereal disease, psychoanalysis, and sexology. She shows us a mover and shaker of the modern world whose struggles with identity, sexuality, and manic depression speak to the lives of many women of her era. Restricted at the behest of her family until the year 2000, Rudnick’s edition of these remarkable documents represents the culmination of more than thirty-five years of study of Luhan’s life, writings, lovers, friends, and Luhan’s social and cultural milieus in Italy, New York, and New Mexico. They open up new pathways to understanding late Victorian and early modern American and European cultures in the person of a complex woman who led a life filled with immense passion and pain.

From the author of The Class of 1846: “A swift-paced narrative of Lincoln’s pre-presidential life.” —The Washington Post Book World How did Abraham Lincoln, long held as a paragon of presidential bravery and principled politics, find his way to the White House? How did he become the one man great enough to risk the fate of the nation on the well-worn but cast-off notion that all men are created equal? Here, award-winning historian John C. Waugh takes readers on Lincoln’s road to the Civil War. From his first public rejection of slavery to his secret arrival in the capital, from his stunning debates with Stephen Douglas to his contemplative moments considering the state of the country he loved, Waugh shows us America as Lincoln saw and described it. Much of this wonderful story is told by Lincoln himself, detailing through his own writing his emergence onto the political scene and the evolution of his beliefs about the Union, the Constitution, democracy, slavery, and civil war. Waugh sets Lincoln’s path in new relief by letting the great man tell his own story, at a depth that brings us ever closer to understanding this mysterious, complicated, and truly great man. “Lively prose backed with solid research.” —Publishers Weekly “[Waugh’s] judicious use of the historical record and his dramatic prose make for an enjoyable read.” —Kirkus Reviews

WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE One of the New York Times’s 100 Best Books of the 21st Century Shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize Considered by many to be the iconic French memoirist's defining work and a breakout bestseller when published in France in 2008 The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present—even projections into the future—photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from 6 decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective. On its 2008 publication in France, The Years came as a surprise. Though Ernaux had for years been hailed as a beloved, bestselling and award-winning author, The Years was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir "written" by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the "I" for the "we" (or "they", or "one") as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents' generation ceased to exist. She writes of her parents' generation (and could be writing of her own book): "From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the "we" and impersonal pronouns." Co-winner of the 2018 French-American Foundation Translation Prize in Nonfiction Winner of the 2017 Marguerite Yourcenar Prize for her entire body of work Winner of the 2016 Strega European Prize