"Nowatari Rui has long been the subject of her husband's novels, depicted as a pure woman who takes great pleasure in sex. With her privacy and identity continually stripped away, she has come to be seen by society first and foremost as the inspiration for her husband's art. When a decade's worth of frustrations reaches its boiling point, Rui consumes a bowl of seeds, and buds and roots begin to sprout all over her body. Instead of taking her to a...

Savage Beauty is the portrait of a passionate, fearless woman who obsessed America even as she tormented herself.

If F. Scott Fitzgerald was the hero of the Jazz Age, Edna St. Vincent Millay, as flamboyant in her love affairs as she was in her art, was its heroine. A winner of the Pulitzer Prize, Millay was dazzling in the performance of herself. Her voice was likened to an instrument of seduction, and her impact on crowds and on men was

...

Interviews with the poet, actress, and playwright share her views on her life, her career, her approach to writing, and the Civil Rights movement.

"Since her death in 1979, Elizabeth Bishop, who published only one hundred poems in her lifetime, has become one of America's best-loved poets. And yet -- painfully shy and living out of public view in Key West and Brazil, among other hideaways -- she has never been seen so fully as a woman and an artist. Megan Marshall makes incisive and moving use of a newly discovered cache of Bishop's letters -- to her psychiatrist and to three of her lovers --...

This [book offers] the gripping story of a woman and poet of great feeling struggling to find a language to describe the country in which she finds herself. It also offers a rich and complex portrait of early America, the Puritans, and the trials and values whose legacy continues to shape our country to the present day.-Dust jacket.

The author of 78 mystery novels, 19 plays, and 100 short stories - translated into 44 languages worldwide - as well as three books of poetry, six romance novels, and two nonfiction works, Agatha Christie is the 20th century's most published writer. Only the works of Shakespeare and the Bible have outsold her own. For the legion of Christie's devoted fans as well as for newcomers to her canon, Agatha Christie A to Z is a richly detailed companion to...