{"title":"Benjamin Moser","description":"\u003cp\u003eExplore the profound and insightful works of Benjamin Moser, celebrated biographer and literary critic. Delve into the lives of great writers with his meticulously researched and deeply engaging books. Start your reading journey here.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"why-this-world-book-benjamin-moser-9781846147814","title":"Why This World","description":"'Glamorous, cultured, moody, Lispector is an emblematic twentieth-century artist who belongs in the same pantheon as Kafka and Joyce. Benjamin Moser has brought to life her essentially tragic nature in all its complexity' Edmund White  'That rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf,' Clarice Lispector was one of the twentieth century's most extraordinary modernist writers.  The brilliant, beautiful and enigmatic daughter of Russian-Jewish émigrés, she achieved instant celebrity at the age of twenty-three with her debut novel Near to the Wild Heart, and became a literary icon in Latin America.  In Why This World Benjamin Moser unravels the turbulent life of an elusive genius: her birth in the nightmarish landscape of postwar Ukraine, her long exile in Brazil, her stormy personal life, her fierce talent, and how she transformed her struggles into a universally resonant art.  'One of the twentieth century's most mysterious writers is finally revealed in all her  vibrant colours'  Orhan Pamuk  'A smart, passionate portrait of a truly remarkable writer'  Jonathan Franzen       'As Moser begins to unpeel the layers of her complicated life, Why This World sucks you into its subject's strange vortex' Dwight Garner, The New York Times","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49539918561553,"sku":"GOR005710028","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49738161553681,"sku":"NGR9781846147814","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50049889337617,"sku":"GOR008707614","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1846147816.jpg?v=1751346073"},{"product_id":"upside-down-world-book-benjamin-moser-9780241586457","title":"The Upside-Down World","description":"The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer turns his eye to the seventeenth-century Dutch Golden Age    Twenty years ago, Benjamin Moser followed a love affair to an ancient Dutch town. In order to make sense of this new place, he threw himself into the Dutch museums. Soon, he found himself unearthing the strange, inspiring and sometimes terrifying stories of the artists who shaped one of the most luminous moments in the history of human creativity, the Dutch Golden Age.  As he explored the hidden world of the Dutch Masters (and one Mistress), Moser met a crowd of fascinating personalities: the stormy Rembrandt, the intimate Ter Borch, the mysterious Vermeer. Through their art, he got to know their country, too: from Pieter Saenredam's translucent churches to Paulus Potter's muddy barnyards, and from Pieter de Hooch's cozy hearths to Jacob van Ruisdael's tragic trees. Over the years, Moser found himself on increasingly intimate terms with these centuries-dead artists, and found that they, too, were struggling with the same questions he was. Why do we make art? What is art, anyway - and what is an artist? What does it mean to succeed as an artist, and what does it mean to fail?  The Upside-Down World is an invitation to ask these questions, and to turn them on their heads: to look, and then to look again. It is a brilliant, colourful and learned book for anyone, whether lifelong scholar or curious tourist, who has ever felt the lure of the Dutch galleries. 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Her brilliant mind, political activism and striking image made her an emblem of the seductions - and the dangers - of the twentieth-century world.  Her writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, Fascism and Freudianism, Communism and Americanism, reflected the conflicted meanings of a most conflicted word: modernity. She was there when the Cuban Revolution began and the Berlin Wall came down, in Vietnam under American bombardment, in wartime Israel. Sontag tells these stories and examines the work upon which her reputation was based, exploring the private woman hidden behind the formidable public face.  Drawing on hundreds of interviews conducted from Maui to Stockholm and from Manhattan to Sarajevo - and featuring nearly one hundred images, many never seen before - Sontag is the first book based on the writer's restricted archives, and on access to many people who have never before spoken about her, including Annie Leibovitz. 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Mythologized and misunderstood, lauded and loathed, a girl from the suburbs who became a proud symbol of cosmopolitanism, Sontag left a legacy of writing on art and politics, feminism and homosexuality, celebrity and style, medicine and drugs, radicalism and Fascism and Freudianism and Communism and Americanism, that forms an indispensable key to modern culture. She was there when the Cuban Revolution began, and when the Berlin Wall came down; in Vietnam under American bombardment, in wartime Israel, in besieged Sarajevo. She was in New York when artists tried to resist the tug of money--and when many gave in. No writer negotiated as many worlds; no serious writer had as many glamorous lovers. Sontag tells these stories and examines the work upon which her reputation was based. It explores the agonizing insecurity behind the formidable public face: the broken relationships, the struggles with her sexuality, that animated--and undermined--her writing. And it shows her attempts to respond to the cruelties and absurdities of a country that had lost its way, and her conviction that fidelity to high culture was an activism of its own. \u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eUtilizing hundreds of interviews conducted from Maui to Stockholm and from London to Sarajevo--and featuring nearly one hundred images--Sontag is the first book based on the writer's restricted archives, and on access to many people who have never before spoken about Sontag, including Annie Leibovitz. 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Now, after years of research on three continents, drawing on previously unknown manuscripts and dozens of interviews, Benjamin Moser demonstrates how Lispector's development as a writer was directly connected to the story of her turbulent life. Born in the nightmarish landscape of post World War I Ukraine, Clarice became, virtually from adolescence, a person whose beauty, genius, and eccentricity intrigued Brazil. \"Why This World\" tells how this precocious girl, through long exile abroad and difficult personal struggles, matured into a great writer, and asserts, for the first time, the deep roots in the Jewish mystical tradition that make her the true heir to Kafka as well as the unlikely author of perhaps the greatest spiritual autobiography of the twentieth century. From Chechelnik to Recife, from Naples and Bern to Washington and Rio de Janeiro, \"Why This World\" strips away the mythology surrounding this extraordinary figure and shows how Clarice Lispector transformed one woman's struggles into a universally resonant art.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50100467630353,"sku":"GOR004100664","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ LIKE_NEW \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":52177812095249,"sku":"GOR014499465","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":53026653634833,"sku":"GOR009362740","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1906598428.jpg?v=1779530141"},{"product_id":"why-this-world-book-benjamin-moser-9780199895823","title":"Why This World","description":"\"That rare person who looked like Marlene Dietrich and wrote like Virginia Woolf,\" Clarice Lispector is one of the most popular but least understood of Latin American writers. 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