Marcel Proust was a French novelist, critic, and essayist best known for his monumental novel In Search of Lost Time. Sodome et Gomorrhe, sometimes translated as Cities of the Plain, was originally published in two volumes. It was the last volume over which Proust supervised publication before his death in November 1922. The publication of the remaining volumes was carried out by his brother, R... Read More
The Prisoner, also translated as The Captive, is the first volume of the section within In Search of Lost Time known as the Albertine novel. The name "Albertine" first appears in Proust's notebooks in 1913. The material in volumes 5 and 6 were developed during the hiatus between the publication of volumes 1 and 2 and they are a departure of the original three-volume series originally planned by... Read More
Arthur Evelyn St. John Waugh was an English writer of novels, biographies, and travel books. He is recognised as one of the great prose stylists of the English language in the 20th century. Evelyn Waugh’s most famous works include the early satires Decline and Fall and A Handful of Dust, the novel Brideshead Revisited, and the Second World War trilogy Sword of Honour. Waugh’s novels, although t... Read More
Masha Gessen is a Russian-American journalist and author. Gessen has written extensively on LGBT rights. Described as "Russia's leading LGBT rights activist," she has said that for many years she was "probably the only publicly out gay person in the whole country." Words Will Break Cement: The Passion of Pussy Riot is an account of the Pussy Riot protest, the ensuing global support movement, an... Read More
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was an American poet, philosopher and writer. He is considered to be one of the leading figures of both the Beat Generation during the 1950s and the counterculture that soon followed. Listen online to free English audiobook "Reading at the Poetry Center, San Francisco State University” on our website to experience Allen Ginsberg’s poetry. Ginsberg grew up in Paterson, New... Read More
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, to a high school teacher father who published poetry and a Russian-born mother who retained her communist roots. Both her sympathy for the labour class and her gradual mental decay deeply affected Ginsberg in his youth. Intending to study law, Ginsberg enrolled at Columbia University in 1943, but he soon turned to literature, taking classes f... Read More
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, to a high school teacher father who published poetry and a Russian-born mother who retained her communist roots. Ginsberg's willingness to talk about taboo subjects made him a controversial figure during the conservative 1950s and a significant figure in the 1960s. In the mid-1950s, no reputable publishing company would even consider publishi... Read More
Irwin Allen Ginsberg was born in Newark, New Jersey, to a high school teacher father who published poetry and a Russian-born mother who retained her communist roots. Ginsberg’s public breakthrough came in San Francisco, in 1955, when he read the first part of “Howl” before an audience as part of an event that launched the San Francisco Poetry Renaissance. Ginsberg was a practicing Buddhist who... Read More
Howl, Ginsberg’s first published book, laments what he believed to have been the destruction by the insanity of the “best minds of the generation.” The inspiration for "Howl" was Ginsberg's friend, Carl Solomon, and "Howl" is dedicated to him. Solomon was a Dada and Surrealism enthusiast who suffered bouts of clinical depression. Solomon wanted to commit suicide, but he thought a form of suicid... Read More