Cursed [VO]

** WINNER OF THE L.A. TIMES BOOK PRIZE FOR BIOGRAPHY **American writer Stephen Crane died in 1900 at the age of 28. In his short, intense life, this burning boy wrote a masterpiece, The Red Badge of Courage, as well as other novels, short stories, and dispatches from the front of two wars. His adventurous life took him to the Wild West, Mexico, then to Cuba during the Spanish American War - dodging bullets which killed those around him, and suffering shipwreck on his way home.Fleeing America because of a scandalous love affair, his last 18 months were spent in Britain where he became a close friends of H.G. Wells, Henry James and, especially, Joseph Conrad.Auster 's intention is to restore Crane to the pantheon of Modernist 20th century authors such as Conrad.Through Auster's skill as a novelist, Crane leaps off the page, and into the reader's heart.

The poems in Sylvia Plath's Ariel, including many of her best-known such as 'Lady Lazarus', 'Daddy', 'Edge' and 'Paralytic', were all written between the publication in 1960 of Plath's first book, The Colossus, and her death in 1963.'If the poems are despairing, vengeful and destructive, they are at the same time tender, open to things, and also unusually clever, sardonic, hardminded . . . They are works of great artistic purity and, despite all the nihilism, great generosity . . . the book is a major literary event.' A. Alvarez in the ObserverThis beautifully designed edition forms part of a series with five other cherished poets, including Wendy Cope, Don Paterson, Philip Larkin, Simon Armitage and Alice Oswald.

The Journals of Sylvia Plath offers an intimate portrait of the author of the extraordinary poems for which Plath is so widely loved, but it is also characterized by a prose of vigorous immediacy which places it alongside The Bell Jar as a work of literature. These exact and complete transcriptions of the journals kept by Plath for the last twelve years of her life - covering her marriage to Ted Hughes and her struggle with depression - are a key source for the poems which make up her collections Ariel and The Colossus.'Everything that passes before her eyes travels down from brain to pen with shattering clarity - 1950s New England, pre-co-ed Cambridge, pre-mass tourism Benidorm, where she and Hughes honeymooned, the birth of her son Nicholas in Devon in 1962. These and other passages are so graphic that you look up from the page surprised to find yourself back in the here and now . . . The struggle of self with self makes the Journals compelling and unique.' John Carey, Sunday Times