In Dear Friend, you must change your life, we see some of the most fascinating thinkers in history at their most private and profound, reaching out to a friend, sharing, testing, confirming discoveries about the complexity of life, how to rise above its hardships and enjoy its pleasures. We see writers embrace the roots of philosophical thought afresh, by grappling with real, lived experience, giving us unique insight into their ideas and worldviews that their more polished, public work often does not provide. We see artists sound the foundations of their artistic and moral integrity. Ranging from Seneca and Marcus Aurelius to Flora Tristan and Walter Benjamin, to Elizabeth of Bohemia and Giacomo Leopardi, to Mahatma Gandhi and Maurice Béjart, we see how the philosophical letter as a form of thinking, and thinking freely, spans across the ages and often forms some of the most interesting and lively of philosophical writings. Each letter is given a contextualising preface by an expert that brings out the reason this particular letter is a philosophical letter for life. As such, Dear Friend, you must change your life provides a unique introduction to an array of thinkers throughout history as well as an argument for philosophy as conversation, a conversation which has been ongoing for centuries.

Winner of the 2016 Marfield Prize In 1902, Rainer Maria Rilke—then a struggling poet in Germany—went to Paris to research and write a short book about the sculptor Auguste Rodin. The two were almost polar opposites: Rilke in his twenties, delicate and unknown; Rodin in his sixties, carnal and revered. Yet they fell into an instantaneous friendship. Transporting readers to early twentieth-century Paris, Rachel Corbett’s You Must Change Your Life is a vibrant portrait of Rilke and Rodin and their circle, revealing how deeply Rodin’s ideas about art and creativity influenced Rilke’s classic Letters to a Young Poet.

Essential reading for scholars, poetry lovers, and anyone with an interest in Rainer Maria Rilke, German poetry, or the creative impulse, these ten letters of correspondence between Rilke and a young aspiring poet reveal elements from the inner workings of his own poetic identity. The letters coincided with an important stage of his artistic development and readers can trace many of the themes that later emerge in his best works to these messages—Rilke himself stated these letters contained part of his creative genius.

In her first memoir, award-winning novelist Yiyun Li offers a journey of recovery through literature: a letter from a writer to like-minded readers. “A meditation on the fact that literature itself lives and gives life.”—Marilynne Robinson, author of Gilead “What a long way it is from one life to another, yet why write if not for that distance?” Startlingly original and shining with quiet wisdom, this is a luminous account of a life lived with books. Written over two years while the author battled suicidal depression, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life is a painful and yet richly affirming examination of what makes life worth living. Yiyun Li grew up in China and has spent her adult life as an immigrant in a country not her own. She has been a scientist, an author, a mother, a daughter—and through it all she has been sustained by a profound connection with the writers and books she loves. From William Trevor and Katherine Mansfield to Søren Kierkegaard and Philip Larkin, Dear Friend is a journey through the deepest themes that bind these writers together. Interweaving personal experiences with a wide-ranging homage to her most cherished literary influences, Yiyun Li confronts the two most essential questions of her identity: Why write? And why live? Praise for Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life “Li has stared in the face of much that is beautiful and ugly and treacherous and illuminating—and from her experience she has produced a nourishing exploration of the will to live willfully.”—The Washington Post “Li’s transformation into a writer . . . is nothing short of astonishing.’”—The New York Times Book Review “An arrestingly lucid, intellectually vital series of contemplations on art, identity, and depression.”—The Boston Globe “Li is an exemplary storyteller and this account of her journey back to equilibrium, assisted by her closest companion, literature, is as powerful as any of her award-winning fiction, with the dark fixture of her Beijing past at its centre.”—Financial Times “Every writer is a reader first, and Dear Friend is Li’s haunted, luminous love letter to the words that shaped her. . . . Her own prose is both lovely and opaque, fitfully illuminating a radiant landscape of the personal and profound.”—Entertainment Weekly “Yiyun Li’s prose is lean and intense, and her ideas about books and writing are wholly original.”—San Francisco Chronicle

"In 1908, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote his "Requiem for a Friend" in memory of Paula Modersohn-Becker, the German painter who had had a profound effect on him, both personally and artistically, and who had died a year earlier. Modersohn-Becker, despite being one of the great modern painters, is today remembered primarily as she is portrayed in that poem. In Dear Friend, Eric Torgersen looks at the relationship of these two great artists whose vexed seven-year friendship was extraordinarily productive for both, and offers an introduction to the life and work of Modersohn-Becker, a gifted and determined woman whose work stands comparison with that of any painter of her day." "Included in the book are sixteen illustrations as well as new translations by Torgersen of Rilke's "Requiem for a Friend" and of the love poems Rilke wrote for Becker shortly after they met. Torgersen discusses Modersohn-Becker's vital paintings, including her unfinished portrait of Rilke. He quotes extensively from the letters and journals of both figures, translating many of Rilke's into English for the first time. Finally, Torgersen addresses the unanswered question of whether the two were ever lovers, and offers new insights into Rilke's writing of "Requiem for a Friend.""--Jacket.

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • Soon to be a Hulu Original series • The internationally acclaimed author of Wild collects the best of The Rumpus's Dear Sugar advice columns plus never-before-published pieces. Rich with humor and insight—and absolute honesty—this "wise and compassionate" (New York Times Book Review) book is a balm for everything life throws our way. Life can be hard: your lover cheats on you; you lose a family member; you can’t pay the bills—and it can be great: you’ve had the hottest sex of your life; you get that plum job; you muster the courage to write your novel. Sugar—the once-anonymous online columnist at The Rumpus, now revealed as Cheryl Strayed, author of the bestselling memoir Wild—is the person thousands turn to for advice.

Never before translated into English, Rainer Maria Rilke’s fascinating Letters to a Young Painter, written toward the end of his life between 1920 and 1926, is a surprising companion to his infamous Letters to a Young Poet, earlier correspondence from 1902 to 1908. While the latter has become a global phenomenon, with millions of copies sold in many different languages, the present volume has been largely overlooked. In these eight intimate letters written to a teenage Balthus—who would go on to become one of the leading artists of his generation—Rilke describes the challenges he faced, while opening the door for the young painter to take himself and his work seriously. Rilke’s constant warmth, his ability to sense in advance his correspondent’s difficulties and propose solutions to them, and his sensitivity as a person and an artist come across in these charming and honest letters. Writing during his aged years, this volume paints a picture of the venerable poet as he faced his mortality, through the perspective of hindsight, and continued to embrace his openness towards other creative individuals. With an introduction by Rachel Corbett, author of You Must Change Your Life: The Story of Rainer Maria Rilke and Auguste Rodin (2016), this book is a must-have for Rilke’s admirers, young and old, and all aspiring artists.