The Shadow in the Garden
A Biographer's Tale
$99.50
- Hardcover
400 pages
- Release Date
26 February 2018
Summary
The biographer - so often in the shadows, kibbitzing, casting doubt, proving facts - here comes to the stage.
James Atlas takes us back to his childhood in suburban Chicago, where he fell in love with literature and, early on, found in himself the impulse to study writers’ lives. We meet Richard Ellmann, the great biographer of James Joyce and Atlas’s professor during a transformative year at Oxford. We get to know the author’s first subject, the “self-doomed” poet Delmore Schwartz; a…
Book Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781472153135 |
|---|---|
| ISBN-10: | 1472153138 |
| Author: | James Atlas |
| Publisher: | Little, Brown Book Group |
| Imprint: | Corsair |
| Format: | Hardcover |
| Number of Pages: | 400 |
| Release Date: | 26 February 2018 |
| Weight: | 786g |
| Dimensions: | 163mm x 243mm x 33mm |
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Critics Review
(An) unfailingly acute memoir of the biographer’s art… entertainingly unique in its particulars - and an inspiration for compulsive biographers everywhere
The biographer slips into another’s skin; he is meant to assume someone else’s unconscious. The idea is to know his subject better than that subject knows himself. By definition, the biographer erases himself in the process.
Writing of and around his books, Atlas triumphantly returns that fugitive figure - part sleuth, part scholar, part analyst, part medium, an emissary between worlds - to the page. The result is a sparkling, lyrical, tender, and unexpectedly suspenseful take on a life in literature. “There is no such thing as Biography School,” Atlas laments at one juncture. There is now. - Stacy SchiffAbout The Author
James Atlas
JAMES ATLAS is the author of Bellow: A Biography, Delmore Schwartz: The Life of an American Poet, which was nominated for the National Book Award, and the memoir My Life in the Middle Ages. The founder of the Lipper/Viking Penguin Lives series and a longtime contributor to The New Yorker, he was an editor at The New York Times Magazine for many years. His work has appeared in The New York Times Book Review, The New York Review of Books, London Review of Books, Vanity Fair, and many journals. He lives in New York City.
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