In this unforgettable book, the award-winning writer, during his recovery after a life-threatening heart surgery, reflected on his many losses and accomplishments, and on all that remained to be done, sharing his aspirations for his writings and his hope that he made the world a better place.

Only a few popular autobiographies existed before philosopher, author, and composer Jean-Jacques Rousseau published his Confessions. Rousseau wrote treatises on education and politics as well as novels and operas, and as one of the most influential and controversial of the Enlightenment thinkers, he inspired the leaders of the French Revolution. His memoir is regarded as the first modern autobiography, in which the writer defined his life mainly in...

A scandalously talented stage performer, a practiced seductress of both men and women, and the flamboyant author of some of the greatest works of twentieth-century literature, Colette was our first true superstar. Now, in Judith Thurman's Secrets of the Flesh, Colette at last has a biography worthy of her dazzling reputation.

Having spent her childhood in the shadow of an overpowering mother, Colette escaped at age twenty into a turbulent marriage...

In this revelatory biography of Jean Genet, we have the first full-scale life of one of the great -- and controversial -- figures of twentieth-century literature. Edmund White shows us the writer in all his permutations: poet, dandy, homosexual, thief; a 'thug of genius', as Simone de Beauvoir called him.

Moving from Genet's illegitimate birth in 1910 to his foster childhood in a farming village in central France, Edmund White explores the...

This translation first appeared in a privately printed edition in 1904 (the translator remains anonymous). With an Introduction by Derek Matravers. When it was first published in 1781, The Confessions scandalised Europe with its emotional honesty and frank treatment of the author's sexual and intellectual development. Since then, it has had a more profound impact on European thought. Rousseau left posterity a model of the reflective life - the solitary,...

After marrying 'Willy', a successful Parisian writer, Colette is transplanted to the intellectual and artistic splendor of Paris. Willy convinces Colette to ghostwrite a semi-autobiographical novel about a witty and brazen country girl named Claudine, sparking a bestseller and a cultural sensation, inspiring additional Claudine novels. Colette's fight over creative ownership and gender roles drives her to overcome societal constraints, revolutionizing...

“A book that will leave no one indifferent, and no one affected in quite the same way.” —New York Times

A superb autobiography by one of the great literary figures of the twentieth century

Simone de Beauvoir's Memoirs of a Dutiful Daughter offers an intimate picture of growing up in a bourgeois French family, rebelling as an adolescent against the conventional expectations of her

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"[Elie Wiesel] taught at Boston University for nearly four decades, and with this book, Ariel Burger--devoted protégé, apprentice, and friend--takes us into the sacred space of Wiesel's classroom. There, Wiesel challenged his students to explore moral complexity and to resist the dangerous lure of absolutes. In bringing together never-before-recounted moments between Wiesel and his students, Witness serves as a moral education in and of itself--a...