Literary collections / Letters

Out of Silence: A Pianist's Yearbook

by Susan Tomes

Out of Silence' is a diary of a year in Susan Tomes's life as a performer. Taking as its inspiration Schumann's remark that 'I am affected by everything that goes on in the world, and I think it all over in...

Dear Dorothy: Letters from Nicolas Slonimsky to Dorothy Adlow

by Nicolas Slonimsky & Electra Slonimsky Yourke

In the mid-twentieth century renowned musicologist, conductor, and lexicographer Nicolas Slonimsky traveled to cities throughout the world to play and conduct music of the American avant-garde. From trips to...

The Odd Couple: The Curious Friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin

by Richard Bradford

Kingsley Amis was a mimic, jester, father, husband, atheist, pseudo-socialist and clubland Tory boozer with a limitless taste for adultery; Philip Larkin a glum misanthrope who lived in self-imposed solitude....

The Synge Letters: Bishop Edward Synge to His Daughter Alicia, Roscommon to Dublin 1746-1752

by Marie-Louise Legg

Edward Synge wrote 221 letters to Alicia, his daughter, betweeen May and October of 1746 to 1752. He was an adoring though not uncritical father, advising, gossiping and instructing her from his country estate....

The Diaries of Lady Anne Clifford

by Lady Anne Clifford & D J H Clifford

This book vividly documents both the great and the trivial events in the long life of Lady Anne Clifford. They cover her life from her childhood days, when she witnessed the funeral of Queen Elizabeth I, to...

This Is Not How I Imagined It To Be

by Veronica Villano

Veronica Villano was born, an Italian in England, twenty nine years after Gli Azzurri’s second World Cup triumph and fifteen years before their third. She’s still lives here now, five years after their fourth...

To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections

by Jacob Taubes, Keith Tribe & Michael Grimshaw

A philosopher, rabbi, religious historian, and Gnostic, Jacob Taubes was for many years a correspondent and interlocutor of Carl Schmitt (1888–1985), a German jurist, philosopher, political theorist, law professor—and...

German Students' War Letters

by Philipp Witkop, A. F. Wedd & Jay Winter

"I can't describe my frame of mind that afternoon. Not for a moment did I feel any fear of death; one simply abandons oneself to fate."—Karl Aldag, killed at Fromelles, France, age 26

Italo Calvino: Letters, 1941-1985

by Italo Calvino, Martin McLaughlin & Michael Wood

This is the first collection in English of the extraordinary letters of one of the great writers of the twentieth century. Italy's most important postwar novelist, Italo Calvino (1923-1985) achieved worldwide...

Letters to a Young Poet

by RainerMaria Rilke & Charlie Louth

Rilke's powerfully touching letters to an aspiring young poet, now available in a beautiful hardcover Penguin edition

At the start of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of letters...

Selected Letters of William Styron

by William Styron, Rose Styron & R. Blakeslee Gilpin

In 1950, at the age of twenty-four, William Clark Styron, Jr., wrote to his mentor, Professor William Blackburn of Duke University. The young writer was struggling with his first novel, Lie Down in Darkness,...

Public Enemies: Dueling Writers Take On Each Other and the World

by Bernard-Henri Levy & Michel Houellebecq

The international publishing sensation is now available in the United States—two brilliant, controversial authors confront each other and their enemies in an unforgettable exchange of letters.

In one corner,...

Distant Intimacy: A Friendship in the Age of the Internet

by Frederic Raphael

This delightful book of writer-to-writer correspondence joins a full shelf of volumes in the genre, yet it is perhaps the first set of such letters ever transacted via the Internet. Also unusual, at least...

Letters from the Earth

by Mark Twain

"I have told you nothing about man that is not true." You must pardon me if I repeat that remark now and then in these letters; I want you to take seriously the things I am telling you, and I feel that if I...

All the Best, George Bush: My Life in Letters and Other Writings

by George H.W. Bush

Though reticent in public, George Bush openly shared his private thoughts in correspondence throughout his life. This collection of letters, diary entries, and memos is the closest we’ll ever get to an autobiography....

Here and Now: Letters (2008-2011)

by Paul Auster & J. M. Coetzee

The high-spirited correspondence between New York Times bestselling author Paul Auster and Nobel laureate J. M. Coetzee

Although Paul Auster and J. M. Coetzee had been reading each other’s books for years,...

The Love Letters of Elizabeth Barrett and Robert Browning

by Elizabeth Barrett Browning & Robert Browning

The love affair between two of the Victorian era's most famous poets is one of passion, tragedy, illness, and ultimately, endurance. Collected here for the first time in print are their 573 love letters, which...

My Dears

by Ruth Snary & Snowden Cathy

Mother and I corresponded weekly for over fifty years and thirty years ago I began to keep her letters. Recently I decided to collate some in a book so that others could share my delight in reading them. They...

Lost Son: Hermann Broch's Letters to His Son, 1925-1928

by Hermann Broch

By any measure, Hermann Broch was one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. Author of The Sleepwalkers and The Spell, he stands, together with James Joyce and Marcel Proust, at the pinnacle of literary...

Zora Neale Hurston: A Life in Letters

by Carla Phd Kaplan

“ I mean to live and die by my own mind,” Zora Neale Hurston told the writer Countee Cullen. Arriving in Harlem in 1925 with little more than a dollar to her name, Hurston rose to become one of the central...