{"title":"Penguin Illustrated Lives S","description":null,"products":[{"product_id":"franz-kafka-book-jeremy-adler-9780140299182","title":"Franz Kafka","description":"\"Penguin Illustrated Lives\" is a series of photographic biographies that offers a fresh, intimate portrait of some of our favourite writers. An incisive, lively text is accompanied by over 100 evocative images, many in colour and some previously unpublished, which depict the author's world - family, friends and artistic circle together with original book jackets, letters and other ephemera. Franz Kafka's name has become synonymous with the dark side of modernity. Born into a Jewish family in Prague in 1883, Kafka grew up amidst the social and political turmoil of the \"fin de siecle\". His writing reflects these tensions as well as his own tortured emotional life. But it is Kafka's ability to transform his \"dream-like inner life\" into the language of the everyday and, at the same time, portray the terror facing the individual in a hostile, indifferent world that makes his work still speak to us today.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49592921686289,"sku":"GOR002354344","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0140299181.jpg?v=1750694092"},{"product_id":"samuel-beckett-book-gerry-dukes-9780140294705","title":"Samuel Beckett","description":"\"Penguin Illustrated Lives\" is a series of photographic biographies that offers a fresh, intimate portrait of some of our favourite writers. An incisive, lively text is accompanied by over 100 evocative images, many in colour and some previously unpublished, which depict the author's world - family, friends and artistic circle together with original book jackets, letters and other ephemera. Samuel Beckett was perhaps the most unconventional playwright of the 20th century. His plays broke all the rules by dispensing with traditional concepts of plot, scene and character, concentrating instead on the experience of the drama itself. An intensely private man, Beckett's work was profoundly influenced by his relationship with his mother and what he called her \"savage loving\", and by the tensions and hypocrisies of his divided country. 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An incisive, lively text is accompanied by over 100 evocative images, many in colour and some previously unpublished, which depict the author's world - family, friends and artistic circle together with original book jackets, letters and other ephemera. History seemed to pursue Vladimir Nabokov. In the Russian Revolution of 1917 and the Second World War he lost his homeland, social position and family, and was even compelled to abandon his own language. In 1955, by then an American citizen, he published \"Lolita\", which caused a sensation and established his reputation as a strikingly original writer of English. Despite the shadow of exile, Nabokov's work exudes a tremendous vivacity and joy. Even at its darkest it has an inventiveness and a richness of perception that has rarely been surpassed.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50406930448657,"sku":"GOR002046127","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0140293515.jpg?v=1751322468"},{"product_id":"f-scott-fitzgerald-book-ruth-prigozy-9780140295252","title":"F. Scott Fitzgerald","description":"The life of F. Scott Fitzgerald reads like one of his own novels: his life seems golden but beneath the surface lies alcoholism, debt, insecurity and the mental instability of his faithless wife Zelda. 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