Few poets have led lives as tempestuous as that of Vladimir Mayakovsky. Born in 1893 and dead by his own hand in 1930, Mayakovsky packed his thirty-six years with drama, politics, passion, and – most important – poetry. An enthusiastic supporter of t...

In 1959, at the age of twenty-one, Max Starkloff was in a car accident that left him paralyzed from the neck down. His doctors doubted he would live longer than a few days, and, if he survived, the hope for his quality of life would be minimal. How d...

Born in 1945 in the Assamese town of Jorhat, Tesmula Ao lost both her parents in quick succession when she was young. Left to fend for themselves, she and her five siblings ran wild, skipping school and wandering the streets. But when the authorities...

Before Doppler radar and broadcast weather reports, Spanish-born Benito Vines (1837-1893) spent decades observing the skies at Belen Observatory in colonial Cuba, routinely issuing weather reports and forecasts to local newspapers. And before storm t...

In this powerful memoir, philosopher Karyn L. Freedman travels back to a Paris night in 1990 when she was twenty-two and, in one violent hour, her life was changed forever by a brutal rape".One Hour in Paris" takes the reader on a harrowing yet inspi...

In 1946, at age twenty-two, Beate Sirota Gordon helped to draft the new postwar Japanese Constitution".The Only Woman in the Room" chronicles how a daughter of Russian Jews became the youngest woman to aid in the rushed, secret drafting of a constitu...

Swedish missionary Albin Johnson arrived in Alaska just before the turn of the twentieth century, thousands of miles from home and with just two weeks' worth of English classes under his belt. While he intended to work among the Tlingit tribes of Yak...

"Mies van der Rohe: A Critical Biography" is a major rewriting and expansion of Franz Schulze's acclaimed 1985 biography, the first full treatment of the master German-American modern architect. Co-authored with architect Edward Windhorst, this thoro...

"Ghost Image" is made up of sixty-three short essays – meditations, memories, fantasies, and stories bordering on prose poems – and not a single image. Herve Guibert's brief, literary rumination on photography was written in response to Roland Barthe...

"This book is the record of a struggle between two temperaments, two consciousnesses and almost two epochs". ‌ That's how Edmund Gosse opened "Father and Son", the classic 1907 book about his relationship with his father. Seth Lerer's "Prospero's Son...