Judith Thurman’s brilliant, National Book Award–winning biography of Isak Dinesen—now with a new foreword by the author A brilliant literary portrait, Isak Dinesen remains the only comprehensive biography of one of the greatest storytellers of our time. Dinesen’s magnificent memoir, Out of Africa, established her as a major twentieth-century author, who was twice nominated for the Nobel Prize. With exceptional grace, Judith Thurman’s classic work explores Dinesen’s life. Until the appearance of this book, the life and art of Isak Dinesen have been—as Dinesen herself wrote of two lovers in a tale—“a pair of locked caskets, each containing the key to the other.” Judith Thurman has provided the master key to them both.

In Out of Africa, author Isak Dinesen takes a wistful and nostalgic look back on her years living in Africa on a Kenyan coffee plantation. Recalling the lives of friends and neighbours—both African and European—Dinesen provides a first-hand perspective of colonial Africa. Through her obvious love of both the landscape and her time in Africa, Dinesen’s meditative writing style deeply reflects the themes of loss as her plantation fails and she returns to Europe. HarperTorch brings great works of non-fiction and the dramatic arts to life in digital format, upholding the highest standards in ebook production and celebrating reading in all its forms. Look for more titles in the HarperTorch collection to build your digital library.

In the classic “Babette’s Feast,” a mysterious Frenchwoman prepares sumptuous feast for a gathering of religious ascetics and, in doing so, introduces them to the true essence of grace. In “The Immortal Story,” a miserly old tea-trader living in Canton wishes for power and finds redemption as he turns an oft-told sailors’ tale into reality for a young man and woman. And in the magnificent novella Ehrengard, Dinesen tells of the powerful yet restrained rapport between a noble Wagnerian beauty and rakish artist. Hauntingly evoked and sensuously realized, the five stories read and novella collected here and have the hold of “fairy stories read in childhood . . . of dreams . . . and of our life as dreams.” (The New York Times)