Sophie Taeuber-Arp was a quiet innovator whose fame has too often been yoked to that of her husband, Jean Arp. Over time, however, she has slowly come to be seen as one of the foremost abstract artists and designers of the twentieth century. The Swis...

In this historical narrative, Swedish novelist Agneta Pleijel follows the lives of two ancestors, a sister and brother, each of whom played a role in the cultural life of Stockholm in the 19th century. Using old letters, records, and stories passed d...

A film-centric portrait of the extraordinarily gifted movie director whose decades – long influence on American popular culture is unprecedented. "Everything about me is in my films", Steven Spielberg has said. Taking this as a key to understanding t...

Geoffrey Studdert Kennedy became one of the most famous army chaplains of the First World War, earning the nickname "Woodbine Willie" because of his habit of giving out both cigarettes and bibles to the men at the front. During the war he also earned...

Izrael Zachariah Deutsch was born on March 15, 1934, in Komjata, Czechoslovakia. The second youngest child, Izrael lived a bucolic existence with nine brothers and sisters on a farm, differing from them only in that he was deaf. When he was six, his...

On 11 April 1942, a stricken Short Stirling Royal Air Force bomber crashes into fields to the east of Godmanchester in Cambridgeshire, England. Hours earlier the commitment and skill of the crew had been tested to the limit confronting the formidable...

A dazzling translation by Lydia Davis of the first volume of Michel Leiris's masterwork, perhaps the most important French autobiographical enterprise of the twentieth century. Michel Leiris, a French intellectual whose literary works inspired high...

The second volume of Michel Leiris's hugely influential four-volume autobiographical essay, available to English-language readers in a brilliant and sensitive translation by Lydia Davis. One of the most versatile and beloved French intellectuals of...

In this heartfelt memoir, Maria Wallisfurth recounts the lives of her deaf parents in Germany from the turn of the twentieth century through the 1930s. Her mother, Maria Giefer, was born in 1897 and her father, Wilhelm Sistermann, was born in 1896. T...

In his best-selling autobiography, Albert Speer, Minister of Armaments and chief architect of Nazi Germany, repeatedly insisted he knew nothing of the genocidal crimes of Hitler's Third Reich. In this revealing new biography, author Martin Kitchen di...