With empathy and compassion, Hilda Raz writes poems that span her private and public lives. Her poems explore the complexities that come with being alive in the world today.

These nuggets of wisdom are offered by an Academy Award–nominated actor (James Woods), a popular comedian (Aasif Mandvi), and a world-famous novelist (Jodi Picoult) to their sixteen-year-old selves. No matter how accomplished and confident they seem today, at sixteen, they were like the rest of us—often unsure, frequently confused, and usually in need of a little reassurance. In Dear Me, 75 celebrities, writers, musicians, athletes, and actors have written letters to their younger selves that give words of comfort, warning, humor, and advice. These letters present intimate, moving, and witty insights into some of the world’s most intriguing and admired individuals. By turns funny, surprising, raw, and uplifting, this singular collection captures the universal conditions that are youth, life, and growing up.

The Letters of Thom Gunn presents the first complete portrait of the private life, reflections, and relationships of a maverick figure in the history of British and American poetry. “I write about love, I write about friendship,” remarked Thom Gunn. “I find that they are absolutely intertwined.” These core values permeate his correspondence with friends, family, lovers, and fellow poets, and they shed new light on “one of the most singular and compelling poets in English during the past half-century” (Hugh Haughton, The Times Literary Supplement). The Letters of Thom Gunn, edited by August Kleinzahler, Michael Nott, and Clive Wilmer, reveals the evolution of Gunn’s work and illuminates the fascinating life that informed his poems: his struggle to come to terms with his mother’s suicide; settling in San Francisco and his complex relationship with England; his changing relationship with his life partner, Mike Kitay; the LSD trips that led to his celebrated collection Moly (1971); and the deaths of friends from AIDS that inspired the powerful, unsparing elegies of The Man with Night Sweats (1992).

The author, a computer science professor diagnosed with terminal cancer, explores his life, the lessons that he has learned, how he has worked to achieve his childhood dreams, and the effect of his diagnosis on him and his family.

Love letters are potent. They breathe. They speak. They can arouse, comfort, captivate. They can also cut deep. The powerful, deeply personal letters collected here reveal the painful underside of love. Witness Winston Churchill 'growl with anger to be treated with benevolent indifference' and Edith Piaf reel in the throes of a 'terrible' passion. Through the letters of literary icons Charlotte Brontë, Oscar Wilde and Virginia Woolf, Hollywood stars Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton and statesmen Henry VIII and Franklin D. Roosevelt, Yours Always offers an unusually intimate insight into the lives of such illustrious figures. Love is revealed here in its many shades of disharmony and confusion: unrequited, uncertain, imbalanced, unconventional, thwarted, failed and forbidden. Love is not always rose-tinted, and Yours Always illuminates the sorrows that can accompany falling in, falling out, and staying in love. Includes letter to and from: Charlotte Brontë, Richard Burton, Lord Byron, Winston Churchill, Marie Curie, Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Henry VIII, Ted Hughes, Graham Greene, Franz Kafka, Marilyn Monroe, Iris Murdoch, Edith Piaf, Franklin D. Roosevelt, Elizabeth Taylor, Oscar Wilde, Virginia Woolf, W.B. Yeats

Example in this ebook CHAPTER I THE WINDOW OPPOSITE On a cold, damp January evening a woman sat in the dusk of a fire-lit room gazing through the window. For half an hour she had been sitting there fidgeting impatiently with her hands and feet every few minutes, but never moving from the position she had taken up by the window. Her expectant gaze was centred on the outline of a house that stood on the opposite side of the village green at Barrowfield. From the window, or for the matter of that from the green or the road that encircled the green, little could be seen of the house, as the high ivy-topped walls which surrounded the garden guarded it jealously from prying eyes. It was only through the tall iron-rail gate set into an arch in the stone wall that you could ascertain that the house was flat-fronted and square, a house entirely covered with ivy, out from whose dark, rustling leaves many windows peered like deep-set eyes. A broad gravel path swept from the gate to a flight of white steps that led up to the front door. The garden, stretching away on either side of the path, appeared to be thick and bushy with shrubs and tall old trees. This much the woman at the window had observed from the gate, and now she was sitting—waiting. A little breeze sprang up and scurried through the ivy leaves as if it and they were whispering together about something. Although the house seemed silent, it was not deserted, for presently, as it grew darker, a light appeared in one of the lower windows and a blind was drawn—a red blind through which the light glowed, seeming to increase in strength as the house gradually faded into the dusk and was lost to sight. The woman who was watching sighed and nervously bit the nail of her thumb. "That's where she is," she muttered to herself, gazing at the red blind. At that moment the sound of wheels and jingling bells became audible, and a light flickered at the top of the main road that led down to the village from the station. The woman frowned and strained her eyes toward the dancing light on the road. It was the station cab approaching, jogging along at its usual pace, slowly but surely, with stout old Tom Bagg, the driver, snugly ensconced on the box-seat. Outside the gate of the ivy-covered house the cab came to a stand-still, and a young girl alighted. She was plainly visible as she paused beneath the street lamp outside the gate before entering the dark garden, followed by Tom Bagg much beladen and struggling with boxes. In a few minutes the old cabman came out again, and the cab jogged away back to the station. The woman who had watched all this intently then moved away from the window, and, limping slightly as she walked, made her way to the fire. Crouching down on the hearth she poked the fire into a blaze and warmed her cold hands—her eyes fixed broodingly on the leaping flames. After a while she pulled a chair toward her and sank into it—still with her eyes on the fire, lost in thought. She was aroused from her reverie by the sound of wheels and jingling bells again, heralding the return of the cab. Instantly she got up, limped back to the window, and peered out. Once more the cab stopped at the gate of the ivy-covered house, and this time two girls got out and passed through the garden gate, followed by Tom Bagg still more beladen and struggling beneath boxes and parcels and travelling rugs. The woman watched until old Tom Bagg had departed again, then she gave an odd, short laugh, and for a while stared gloomily out at the closed iron-rail gate in the wall opposite. Presently she said to herself, "Well—now we shall see!" Then she pulled down her blind. To be continue in this ebook