BIOGRAPHY

Azar Nafisi, author of the beloved international bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran, now gives us a stunning personal story of growing up in a family in Iran, with moving memories of her life lived in thrall to a powerful and difficult mother, set against the background of Iran during a time of revolution and change. In this beautiful memoir, a gifted storyteller once again uses her own life to transform the way we see the world and "reminds us of why we read in the first place." -Newsday

Since V. S. Naipaul left his Caribbean birthplace at the age of seventeen, his improbable life has followed the global movement of peoples, whose preeminent literary chronicler he has become. In The World Is What It Is, Patrick French offers the first authoritative biography of the controversial Nobel laureate, whose only stated ambition was greatness as a writer, in pursuit of which goal nothing else was sacred. "This must be the frankest authorized biography of anyone alive and in possession of their senses," says Ian Jack, The Guardian.

Artist Art Spiegelman's new book traces his evolution from a Mad comics-obsessed boy in Rego Park, Queens, to a neurotic adult examining the effect of his parents' memories of Auschwitz on his own son. This book also presents a facsimile of Breakdowns, the long-sought-after collection of his comics of the 1970s, the book that triggers these memories. Breakdowns established the mode of formally sophisticated comics that transformed the medium. Pulling all this together is an illustrated essay that looks back at the 1960s as Spiegelman pushes sixty, and explains the obsessions that brought these works into being.

One of the central relationships in the Beat scene was the long-lasting friendship of Allen Ginsberg and Gary Snyder. Beginning in 1956 and continuing through 1991, the two men exchanged more than 850 letters. Bill Morgan, Ginsberg's biographer and an important editor of his papers, has selected the most significant correspondence from this long friendship. The letters themselves paint the biographical and poetic portraits of two of America's most important-and most fascinating-poets.