The definitive biography of the representative writer of our age Although Franz Kafka (1883–1924) completed only a small number of works in his lifetime, perhaps no other author has had a greater influence on twentieth-century consciousness. This engrossing biography of the Czech novelist and short-story writer emphasizes the cultural and historical contexts of his fiction and focuses for the first time on his complex relationship with his father. Nicholas Murray paints a picture of Kafka’s German-speaking Jewish family and the Prague mercantile bourgeoisie to which they belonged. He describes Kafka’s demanding professional career, his ill health, and the constantly receding prospects of a marriage he craved. He analyzes Kafka’s poor relationship with his father, Hermann, which found its most eloquent expression in Kafka’s story “The Judgement,” about a father who condemns his son to death by drowning. And he asserts that the unsettling flavor of Kafka’s books—stories suffused with guilt and frustration—derives from his sense of living in a mysteriously antagonistic world, of being a criminal without having knowingly committed a crime. Compelling and empathetic, this book sheds new light on a man of unique genius and on his enigmatic works.

Kafka: A Biography

Biographies & Memoirs

Murray, Nicholas

Arts & Literature

Yale University Press

Years of research inform a definitive study of Victorian poet Matthew Arnold, the author of "Dover Beach," chronicling the life and work of the masterful writer, devoted family man, and impassioned critic of Victorian materialism.

A Life of Matthew Arnold

St Martins Pr

World Enough and Time: The Life of Andrew Marvell

Literature & Fiction

British & Irish

When Aldous Huxley died on November 22, 1963, on the same day that John F. Kennedy was assassinated, he was widely considered to be one of the most intelligent and wide-ranging English writers of the twentieth century. Associated in the public mind with his dystopian satire, Brave New World, and experimentation with drugs that preceded the psychedelic, a term he invented, era of the 1960s, Huxley seemed to embody the condition of twentieth-century man in his restless curiosity, his search for meaning in a post-religious age, and his concern about the misuses of science and the future of the planet. But Huxley was born when Queen Victoria was on the British throne. He was the grandson of the great Victorian scientist Thomas Henry Huxley “Darwin’s bulldog,” and the great-nephew of the great poet and critic Matthew Arnold. Exiled in the Californian sun, he never ceased to think of himself as part of a tradition that could be traced back to the Victorian public intellectuals. This biography of Huxley---the first in thirty years---draws on a substantial amount of unpublished material, as well as numerous interviews with his family and friends. It is a portrait of a daring and iconoclastic novelist; a man hampered by semi-blindness, who spent a restless life in search of personal enlightenment. Nicholas Murray charts Huxley’s Bloomsbury years, his surprising and complex relationship with D. H. Lawrence, and his emigration to America in the late 1930s, where he pursued a career as a screenwriter while continuing his fascination with mysticism and religion. Huxley’s private life was also unconventional, and this book reveals for the first time the extraordinary story of the ménage à trois including Huxley, his remarkable wife, Maria, and the Bloomsbury socialite and mistress of Clive Bell, Mary Hutchinson. Huxley emerges from this new biography as one of the most intriguing and complex figures of twentieth-century English writing---novelist, poet, biographer, philosopher, social and political thinker. In an era of intense specialization he remained a free-ranging thinker, unconfined by conventional categories, concerned to communicate his insights in ordinary language---a very English intellectual.

Aldous Huxley: A Biography

Thomas Dunne Books

Shipped from UK, please allow 10 to 21 business days for arrival. Good, World enough and time: the life of Andrew Marvell. 294p, [8]p of plates : ill, ports ; 24cm.. Very good reading copy, sound and clean; good dust jacket, with slight tear on back and residue of a small label on fronmt . . .

Andrew Marvell: World Enough and Time

London: Little, Brown

At the height of the British Empire, countless travellers set off to explore the globe, at the very same moment that the phenomenon of mass tourism was being launched by a certain Mr Thomas Cook. Their reasons for leaving Britain were many and various. They were searching for knowledge, for adventure, for fame, for exotic animals to kill. Some hoped to be the first to stamp their mark upon a lake, a river source or an unknown inland sea, while others dreamed of finding untold natural riches or ancient works of art. Some were soldiers, sailors, spies, scholars or scientists, and some wished to convert the heathen and spread their religion. And some travelled, as people have always done, for no reason at all except the sheer marvellous enjoyment of it. Drawing on the travellers' own unique and colourful accounts, from Livingstone and Stanley in Africa, Darwin aboard the Beagle and Richard Francis Burton on the road to Mecca to less well-known but equally intrepid explorers, A CORKSCREW IS MOST USEFUL is a fascinating odyssey.

A Corkscrew Is Most Useful

Travel

Travel Writing

Little,Brown & Co

The son of biologist T.H. Huxley, Aldous Huxley had a privileged background and was educated at Eton and Oxford despite an eye infection that left him nearly blind. Having learned braille, his eyesight then improved enough for him to start writing and by the 1920s he had become a fashionable figure, producing witty and dari

Aldous Huxley

A biography of the Victorian poet and critic Matthew Arnold, often treated as an unfashionable figure.

Life of Matthew Arnold

Saint Martin's Press, LLC

Kafka

This gripping biography of the great Czech novelist, diarist and short story writer chronicles Kafka's entire (if tragically curtailed) life (1883-1924), but it focuses upon the writer's relationship to his father and his inheritance as a member of the Jewish mercantile bourgeoisie in Prague. Born into a German-speaking Jewish family, Kafka was a subject of the Austro-Hungarian empire until 1919 yet through his work he is one of the most modern of writers. While previous works have concentrated on Kafka and his women, Nicholas Murray will concentrate on his extraordinary relationship with his father which found its most eloquent literary expression in the story 'The Judgement' written in 1912 when Kafka was twenty-nine:in a reverse Oedipal move, the father condemns his son to death by drowning. This work is essential for an understanding of the intensely private and complex Kafka and the kind of writer he turned out to be - the creator in THE CASTLE, THE TRIAL and METAMORPHOSIS (the dazzling short story whose hero wakes up to find himself transformed into a giant insect) of some of the defining literature of the 20th century.

ABACUS +

In the early 19th century there was a huge surge forward in travel of all kinds. Queen Victoria's accession in 1837 came barely a year after John Murray's first guidebook was published. Then in 1838 Bradshaw's famous portable railway timetable appeared. In 1841 Thomas Cook, the world's first travel agent, organised its first tour (from London to Leicester and back by train). The age of mass tourism had arrived. Side by side with it another phenomenom began to develop: exploration to wilder shores and uncharted lands. This is the focus of Nicholas Murray's fascinating book which draws upon the extraordinary stories of Livingstone's journey across Africa; Burton and Speke reaching Lake Tanganyika; John Stuart crossing Australia from south to north; Livingstone reaching the Zambezi; Richard Burton's travels across Arabia, and countless others' extraordinary and brave expeditions.

A Corkscrew Is Most Useful: The Travellers of Empire

Little, Brown Book Group

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