Writing lays bare the soul. All serious writers know that each word reveals something significant about themselves, granting outsiders a glimpse at their most cherished beliefs and foundational convictions. In this series of intimate reflections on life and writing, critically acclaimed and best-selling novelist Bret Lott explores the author's craft through five letters covering a range of fascinating topics, from exploring the value of literary fiction to discussing the humility of Flannery O'Connor. In the final and longest letter, Lott contemplates the death of his father and his struggle to convey his complicated thoughts and inexplicable emotions in words. Intensely personal and yet universally relatable, this powerful collection of essays will encourage and enrich writers and aspiring writers everywhere.

"This insight into one of mankind's favorite artists traces the magic and melancholy of Vincent Van Gogh. Out of Vincent's letters to his brother Theo, as collected by Irving Stone, we have selected an exciting and sensitive series of quotations. The quotations in My Life & Love Are One revolve around three themes -love, art and turmoil. Centered around emotion and creation, Vincent's writing and philosophy is as expressive as his art. Whether it's soft and swirling, or rash and profound, the transformation of his thoughts into words colors empty pages with the brightest and darkest moments of his life." -- from Introduction.

In the age of Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp, and email, personal letters seem somehow out of date, or at least far from most people's everyday experience. This book is a rare and unique collection of letters personally written by Osho to participants from his early meditation events. These are not letters to people and their personalities, these are letters to our souls. Osho addresses essential issues and concerns that arise on the path of meditation and self-discovery. The letters are encouragements to continue the process of meditation, and address subjects like Self-Acceptance, Wisdom, Consciousness, The Quest for Life, A Life of Freedom, Earth Is Our Home, Dropping Fear!, Dealing with Anger, Rebellion, and many more in a direct and penetratingly personal way. Osho explains this about the value of writing letters: "If I write anything, I write letters, because a letter is as good as something that is spoken. It is addressed. I have not written anything except letters, because to me they are a manner of speaking. The other is always there before me when I write a letter." The OSHO works consist almost exclusively of the spoken word, addressed directly to individual people or larger audiences. These talks were recorded and then transcribed and published as books. This book represents one of the rare exceptions in the collected works of Osho, in which his written personal letters are published. Each one of these letters is like an condensed Osho Talk in haiku form. He would meet with these correspondents time and again at his meditation camps or while staying in their homes. This volume is a selection of his replies to their letters, queries, and calls for help. His words are intimate, incisive, poetic, playful, and loving. His encouragement to his correspondents to keep going on their chosen path of meditation and awareness while living, loving, and working in the ordinary world – to keep their flame of commitment burning brightly when he is not physically present – can inspire whomever opens this book.

“ I mean to live and die by my own mind,” Zora Neale Hurston told the writer Countee Cullen. Arriving in Harlem in 1925 with little more than a dollar to her name, Hurston rose to become one of the central figures of the Harlem Renaissance, only to die in obscurity. Not until the 1970s was she rediscovered by Alice Walker and other admirers. Although Hurston has entered the pantheon as one of the most influential American writers of the 20th century, the true nature of her personality has proven elusive. Now, a brilliant, complicated and utterly arresting woman emerges from this landmark book. Carla Kaplan, a noted Hurston scholar, has found hundreds of revealing, previously unpublished letters for this definitive collection; she also provides extensive and illuminating commentary on Hurston’s life and work, as well as an annotated glossary of the organizations and personalities that were important to it. From her enrollment at Baltimore’s Morgan Academy in 1917, to correspondence with Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Langston Hughes, Dorothy West and Alain Locke, to a final query letter to her publishers in 1959, Hurston’s spirited correspondence offers an invaluable portrait of a remarkable, irrepressible talent.

The tumultuous life of the Austrian writer best known for "The Radetzky March" is described through letters that recall his father's and wife's mental illnesses, numerous mistresses, and travel to Paris.

"A wonderful collection that gives Mozart a voice as a son, husband, brother and friend." —New York Times Book Review "Mozart's honesty, his awareness of his own genius and his contempt for authority all shine out from these letters."—Sunday Times (London). " In Mozart's Letters, Mozart's Life, Robert Spaethling presents "Mozart in all the rawness of his driving energies" (Spectator), preserved in the "zany, often angry effervescence" of his writing (Observer). Where other translators have ignored Mozart's atrocious spelling and tempered his foul language, "Robert Spaethling's new translations are lively and racy, and do justice to Mozart's restlessly inventive mind" (Daily Mail). Carefully selected and meticulously annotated, this collection of letters "should be on the shelves of every music lover" (BBC Music Magazine).

A comprehensive and moving biography of Max Jacob, a brilliant cubist poet who lived at the margins of fame. Though less of a household name than his contemporaries in early twentieth century Paris, Jewish homosexual poet Max Jacob was Pablo Picasso’s initiator into French culture, Guillaume Apollinaire’s guide out of the haze of symbolism, and Jean Cocteau’s loyal friend. As Picasso reinvented painting, Jacob helped to reinvent poetry with compressed, hard-edged prose poems and synapse-skipping verse lyrics, the product of a complex amalgamation of Jewish, Breton, Parisian, and Roman Catholic influences. In Max Jacob, the poet’s life plays out against the vivid backdrop of bohemian Paris from the turn of the twentieth century through the divisions of World War II. Acclaimed poet Rosanna Warren transports us to Picasso’s ramshackle studio in Montmartre, where Cubism was born; introduces the artists gathered at a seedy bar on the left bank, where Max would often hold court; and offers a front-row seat to the artistic squabbles that shaped the Modernist movement. Jacob’s complex understanding of faith, art, and sexuality animates this sweeping work. In 1909, he saw a vision of Christ in his shabby room in Montmartre, and in 1915 he converted formally from Judaism to Catholicism—with Picasso as his godfather. In his later years, Jacob split his time between Paris and the monastery of Benoît-sur-Loire. In February 1944, he was arrested by the Gestapo and sent to Drancy, where he would die a few days later. More than thirty years in the making, this landmark biography offers a compelling, tragic portrait of Jacob as a man and as an artist alongside a rich study of his groundbreaking poetry—in Warren’s own stunning translations. Max Jacob is a nuanced, deeply researched, and essential contribution to Modernist scholarship.