The first comprehensive biography of Isak Dinesen in any language. The author draws on diaries, correspondence, frist drafts, unpublished early notebooks and childhood plays, as well as on interviews with family and friends, to narrate the remarkable life of this intensely individual and courageous woman.

Isak Dinesen: Life of Karen Blixen

Mystery, Thriller & Suspense

Thurman, Judith

Thrillers & Suspense

Littlehampton Book Services Ltd.

Winner of the National Book Award
A brilliant literary portrait, Isak Dinesen remains the only comprehensive biography of one of the greatest storytellers of our time. Her magnificent memoir, Out of Africa, established Isak Dinesen 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.

Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

Picador

Cleopatra's Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire

A New York Times Notable Book of 2007 Cleopatra's Nose is an exuberant gathering of essays and profiles, representing twenty years of Judith Thurman's writing, particularly her fascination with human vanity, femininity, and "women's work"--a term that, in her definition, encompasses haute couture, literature, and ruling empires. The subjects are varied--Cleopatra, Jackie Kennedy, Anne Frank; tofu, performance art, pornography--but as a whole these essays hint at the central preoccupations of a uniquely inquisitive mind.

Literature & Fiction

Essays & Correspondence

The first comprehensive biography of Dinesen provides a definitive portrait of the life, literary career, and art of the eminent woman writer

St Martins Pr

Isak Dinesen

St.Martin's Press

A dazzling biography of the French literary superstar Colette, who is also the subject of a major motion picture. “A fine and intelligent biography of Colette, with her long tumultuous life and the great body of her work scrupulously considered and presented with style.”—The New York Times Book Review (Editors’ Choice) NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST • WINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK AWARD • NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD Having spent her childhood in the shadow of an overpowering mother, Colette escaped at age twenty into a turbulent marriage with the sexy, unscrupulous Willy—a literary charlatan who took credit for her bestselling Claudine novels. Weary of Willy’s sexual domination, Colette pursued an extremely public lesbian love affair with a niece of Napoleon’s. At forty, she gave birth to a daughter who bored her, at forty-seven she seduced her teenage stepson, and in her seventies she contributed to the pro-Nazi press during the Occupation, even though her beloved third husband, a Jew, had been arrested by the Gestapo. And all the while, this incomparable woman poured forth a torrent of masterpieces, including Gigi, Sido, Cheri, and Break of Day. Judith Thurman, author of the National Book Award-winning biography of Isak Dinesen, portrays Colette as a thoroughly modern woman: frank in her desires, fierce in her passions, forever reinventing herself. Rich with delicious gossip and intimate revelations, shimmering with grace and intelligence, Secrets of the Flesh is one of the great biographies of our time. Chosen as one of the Best Books of the Year by The Village Voice and Newsday “[Colette] has been the subject of . . . a half-dozen significant biographies over the past thirty years. Yet this one by Judith Thurman will be hard to top. . . . Its prose is smoothly urbane, at times aphoristic, always captivating.”—The Washington Post Book World “It will stand as literature in its own right.”—Richard Bernstein, The New York Times “[An] essential biography by a stylish writer of great sympathetic understanding and intellectual authority.”—Philip Roth

Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

Random House Publishing Group

Cleopatra's Nose is an exuberant gathering of essays and profiles representing twenty years of Judith Thurman's celebrated writing, particularly her fascination with human vanity, femininity, and "women's work"--from haute couture to literature to commanding empires. The subjects are iconic (Jackie, the Brontës, Toni Morrison, Anne Frank) and multifarious (tofu and performance art, pornography and platform shoes, kimonos and bulimia); all inspire dazzling displays of craft, wit, penetration, and intelligence. Here we find explorations of voracity: hunger for sex, food, experience, and transcendence; see how writers from Flaubert to Nadine Gordimer have engaged with history; meet eminent Victorians and the greats of fashion. Whether reporting on hairstyles, strolling the halls of power, or deftly unpacking novels and their writers, Thurman never fails to provoke, inspire, captivate, and enlighten. Cleopatra's Nose is an embarrassment of riches from one of our great literary journalists.

Farrar. Straus and Giroux

About the Author\nJudith Thurmanis the author of Cleopatra’s Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire; Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller, winner of the National Book Award for Autobiography/Biography; and Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette. A staff writer at The New Yorker, she lives in New York City.\nA collection of essays from Judith Thurman, National Book Award-winning writer and New Yorker staff writer.\nJudith Thurman, a prolific staff writer at The New Yorker for more than two decades, has gathered a selection of her essays and profiles in A Left-Handed Woman. They consider our culture in all its guises: literature, history, politics, gender, fashion, and art, though their paramount subject is the human condition.\nThurman is one of the preeminent essayists of our time―“a master of vivisection,” as Kathryn Harrison wrote in The New York Times. “When she’s done with a subject, it’s still living, mystery intact.”

A Left-Handed Woman: Essays

Arts & Photography

History & Criticism

1999 National Book Award nominee! In 1900, a provincial beauty best known as the child bride of a famous Parisian rake captivated the Belle Epoque by writing a story that invented the modern teenage girl. It was the first in a series of wildly popular but also critically acclaimed novels that, combined with a flamboyant career on the stage, made this former country girl the first authentic superstar of the century. But for all her celebrity as one of France's greatest and most notorious novelists and personalities, Sidonie-Gabrielle Colette was a profoundly reticent and self-suspicious creature who fiercely resists being known. Now, following her acclaimed life of Isak Dinesen, winner of the 1983 National Book Award for biography, Judith Thurman gives us an incomparably nuanced and revealing portrait of the elusive woman, the prodigious writer, and the revered but misunderstood idol. Having spent her village childhood in the shadow of a queenly, possessive mother who taught her the value of resilience, Colette would go on to embody the image of the modern woman. At twenty, she marries the canny but unscrupulous Willy, who not only takes the credit -- and the royalties -- for her best-selling Claudine novels, but also keeps her enthralled in more primal ways. In 1908, she divorces her Pygmalion and pursues the most public of her many affairs with women. At forty, she gives birth to her only and much-neglected child. Her second marriage, to her daughter's father -- a brilliant, predatory, patrician journalist and politician -- falters, then fails. At forty-seven, she seduces her adolescent stepson. At menopause, she rediscovers her mother. At fifty-two, she embarks upon a torrid adventure with a much younger man that blooms -- against all expectations -- into the serene and enduring mutual devotion she has yearned for but has never known. This third husband, Maurice Goudeket, also becomes the source of her worst anguish when he is arrested by the Gestapo during the Occupation. As Colette redefines the conventions of loving and aging, she continues to live and write with Olympian vitality. Her principal subject is the bonds of love; her one true faith the consoling power of sensual pleasure. She opens a beauty institute and does makeovers in a lab coat; she produces a body of incisive journalism; she writes enchanting gems like Gigi and Sido, and provocative masterpieces like Cheri, Break of Day, The Ripening Seed, and The Pure and the Impure. Her wartime work remains the most controversial part of her legacy, and Thurman addresses the troubling questions it raises with a typically lucid and tenacious intelligence. Drawing upon a rich mine of new documents, candid interviews, and unpublished letters, Secrets of the Flesh evokes Colette in the fullness of her contradictions. A work of penetrating psychological insight, historical perspective, and literary discernment, superbly written, it is sure to reanimate our appreciation of its iconic subject.

Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette

KNOPF

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

Books by Thurman, Judith

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

Isak Dinesen: Life of Karen Blixen

Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller

Cleopatra's Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire

Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller

Isak Dinesen

Isak Dinesen: The Life of a Storyteller

Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette (Ballantine Reader's Circle)

Cleopatra's Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire

A Left-Handed Woman: Essays

Secrets of the Flesh: A Life of Colette