A handsome and informative book featuring Welty among her peers in painting, photography, and other arts during the 1930s

And glance. Van Vechten's style combines his own interpretive ideas with a deep empathy for the humanity of his sitters. Through his eyes we gain fresh insights into the personal and cultural vitality of an increasingly distant age.

A combination of contemporary watercolors by Marlene McLoughlin and nature writing by the 19th-century French naturalist Jean-Henri Fabre. McLoughlin's watercolors vary from detailed illustrations of Fabre's subjects--birds, insects, flowers --to landscapes showing the France in which Fabre worked. Fabre's writing is similarly varied: at one moment he is giving vivid descriptions of eggs and fungi, at the next he is telling stories about his grandmother or his theories on heredity. Fabre's writings are excerpts from his 1879 Souvenirs Entomologiques. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

'Fear makes me a writer, fear and a lack of confidence' Charles Bukowski chronicled the seedy underside of the city in which he spent most of his life, Los Angeles. His heroes were the panhandlers and hustlers, the drunks and the hookers, his beat the racetracks and strip joints and his inspiration a series of dead-end jobs in warehouses, offices and factories. It was in the evenings that he would put on a classical record, open a beer and begin to type... Brought up by a violent father, Bukowski suffered childhood beatings before developing horrific acne and withdrawing into a moody adolescence. Much of his young life epitomised the style of the Beat generation - riding Greyhound buses, bumming around and drinking himself into a stupor. During his lifetime he published more than forty-five books of poetry and prose, including the novels Post Office, Factotum, Women and Pulp. His novels sold millions of copies worldwide in dozens of languages. In this definitive biography Barry Miles, celebrated author of Jack Kerouac: King of the Beats, turns his attention to the exploits of this hard-drinking, belligerent wild man of literature.