Cleopatra: A Life

The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer brings to life the most intriguing woman in the history of the world: Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt.Her palace shimmered with onyx, garnets, and gold, but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Above all else, Cleopatra was a shrewd strategist and an ingenious negotiator.Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. She was married twice, each time to a brother. She waged a brutal civil war against the first when both were teenagers. She poisoned the second. Ultimately she dispensed with an ambitious sister as well; incest and assassination were family specialties. Cleopatra appears to have had sex with only two men. They happen, however, to have been Julius Caesar and Mark Antony, among the most prominent Romans of the day. Both were married to other women. Cleopatra had a child with Caesar and--after his murder--three more with his protégé. Already she was the wealthiest ruler in the Mediterranean; the relationship with Antony confirmed her status as the most influential woman of the age. The two would together attempt to forge a new empire, in an alliance that spelled their ends. Cleopatra has lodged herself in our imaginations ever since.Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Shakespeare and Shaw put words in her mouth. Michelangelo, Tiepolo, and Elizabeth Taylor put a face to her name. Along the way, Cleopatra's supple personality and the drama of her circumstances have been lost. In a masterly return to the classical sources, Stacy Schiff here boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order. Rich in detail, epic in scope, Schiff 's is a luminous, deeply original reconstruction of a dazzling life.

Biographies & Memoirs

STACY SCHIFF

Community & Culture

BOOKS ON TAPE]

The Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Cleopatra, the #1 national bestseller, unpacks the mystery of the Salem Witch Trials. It began in 1692, over an exceptionally raw Massachusetts winter, when a minister's daughter began to scream and convulse. It ended less than a year later, but not before 19 men and women had been hanged and an elderly man crushed to death. The panic spread quickly, involving the most educated men and prominent politicians in the colony. Neighbors accused neighbors, parents and children each other. Aside from suffrage, the Salem Witch Trials represent the only moment when women played the central role in American history. In curious ways, the trials would shape the future republic. As psychologically thrilling as it is historically seminal, THE WITCHES is Stacy Schiff's account of this fantastical story-the first great American mystery unveiled fully for the first time by one of our most acclaimed historians.

The Witches: Salem, 1692 (SIGNED)

Little. Brown and Company

* 'Two fascinating lives for the price of one' Sunday Telegraph *At once a love story, a portrait of a marriage and an answer to a riddle, VERA (MRS VLADIMIR NABOKOV) explores a remarkable literary partnership - that of a woman who devoted her life to her husband's art and a man who dedicated his volumes to his wife. Open a work of Nabokov's, and there is Vera on the dedication page, front and centre. But search for her elsewhere, and the woman to whom the author of LOLITA was married for fifty-two years, who carried on his correspondence in his name, fades from view.' "Without my wife," Nabokov once remarked, "I wouldn't have written a single novel". Schiff's work boldly and brilliantly illuminates how complex was this deceptively simple statement. A superb portrait' Chicago Tribune'Vera has met her match in Stacy Schiff, whose biography is a model of subtle, searching and elegant scholarship' Daily Telegraph'Following Schiff's bold, patient construction of Vera from the fiction (of all kinds) with which she surrounded herself approaches the delight of reading a Nabokovian fiction' Spectator

Vera (Mrs.Vladimir Nabokov)

Arts & Literature

Picador

In 1925 Vera and Vladimir Nabokov, both Russian refugees, married in Berlin. His family was ruined and hers was about to be. From that year they were inseparable. Friends, colleagues, relatives and publishers all agreed he would have been nowhere without her. Even when the marriage nearly foundered due to another woman, Nabakov wrote to his wife daily. She attended her husband's lectures replacing him when he was sick, drive the Buick in which he write Lolita and saved the manuscript several times from burning. She negotiated his contracts, corrected her husband's stories in German, his memoir in French and his poetry in Italian and translated "Pale Fire" into Russian when she was in her 80s. Yet at the same time she tried to erase herself from the public record: for several years she answered her husband's letters under an assumed name and she demanded that her husband's biographers ignore the vital role she played in his life and work. For Nabakov himself her influence was undeniable, he lit up around her and the two acted as if they were a pair of children hiding their secrets from the rest of the world. He wrote his novels for himself first, second for Vera and third for no one at all.

Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)

Pan Books, Ltd.

Vera

Random House]

Vera [Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov]

Vintage

This is an account of the life of the eccentric Antoine de Saint-Exupery. Born in 1900 of impoverished aristocracy, he swiftly developed a mania for aviation, despite his chaotic mind and total technological incompetence. He flew reconnaisance missions in the war and wrote strange books, including the classic children's story "The Little Prince", between theatrically-executed airplane crashes. He died in the air in 1944, and his brief life instantly acquired mythical status.

Saint-Exupery

Chatto&Windus

Dr. Franklin Goes to France, How America Was Born in Monarchist Europe

Bloomsbury Publishing Plc.

Cleopatra's palace shimmered with onyx and gold but was richer still in political and sexual intrigue. Though her life spanned fewer than forty years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world. Famous long before she was notorious, Cleopatra has gone down in history for all the wrong reasons. Stacy Schiff boldly separates fact from fiction to rescue the magnetic queen whose death ushered in a new world order, a generation before the birth of Christ. Rich in detail, epic in scope, Schiff's is a luminous reconstruction of a dazzling life.

Virgin Publishing

A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America

A Pulitzer Prize-winning Author A Book-of-the-Month Club and History Book Club Selection "In December 1776, a small boat delivered an old man to France." So begins a dazzling narrative account of Benjamin Franklin's French mission. He was seventy years old, without any diplomatic training, and possessed of the most rudimentary French. He succeeded brilliantly. Stacy Schiff offers an utterly fresh and thrilling account of Franklin's Parisian adventure and America's debut on the world stage.

Thorndike Press

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by STACY SCHIFF. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by STACY SCHIFF

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by STACY SCHIFF. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Cleopatra: A Life

The Witches: Salem, 1692 (SIGNED)

Vera (Mrs.Vladimir Nabokov)

Vera (Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov)

Vera

Vera [Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov]

Saint-Exupery

Dr. Franklin Goes to France, How America Was Born in Monarchist Europe

Cleopatra: A Life

A Great Improvisation: Franklin, France, and the Birth of America