The strange-but-true tales of the rumors, idiosyncrasies, and feuds of literary legends—including Agatha Christie, F. Scott Fitzgerald, William Shakespeare, and more This fascinating—and shocking!—tour through the lives of classic literature icons is the perfect stocking stuffer for book lovers and fans of little-known history. With outrageous and uncensored profiles of everyone from William Shakespeare to Thomas Pynchon, Secret Lives of Great Authors tackles all the tough questions your high school teachers were afraid to ask: What’s the deal with Lewis Carroll and little girls? Is it true that J. D. Salinger drank his own urine? How many women—and men—did Lord Byron actually sleep with? And why was Ayn Rand such a big fan of Charlie’s Angels? Classic literature was never this much fun in school! Authors included: William Shakespeare Lord Byron Honoré de Balzac Edgar Allan Poe Charles Dickens The Brontë Sisters Henry David Thoreau Walt Whitman Leo Tolstoy Emily Dickinson Lewis Carroll Louisa May Alcott Mark Twain Oscar Wilde Arthur Conan Doyle W.B. Yeats H.G. Wells Gertrude Stein Jack London Virginia Woolf James Joyce Franz Kafka T.S. Eliot Agatha Christie J.R.R. Tolkien F. Scott Fitzgerald William Faulkner Ernest Hemingway Ayn Rand Jean-Paul Sartre Richard Wright William Burroughs Carson McCullers J.D. Salinger Jack Kerouac Kurt Vonnegut Toni Morrison Sylvia Plath Thomas Pynchon

Strange-but-true tales of murderers, adulterers, drug addicts, and other literary legends. With outrageous and uncensored profiles of everyone from William Shakespeare to Thomas Pynchon, "Secret Lives of Great Authors "tackles all the tough questions your high school teachers were afraid to ask: What's the deal with Lewis Carroll and little girls? Is it true that J. D. Salinger drank his own urine? How many women--and men--did Lord Byron actually sleep with? And why was Ayn Rand such a big fan of Charlie's Angels? Classic literature was never this much fun in school!

Faux Queen: A Life in Drag is the memoir of a ballet-obsessed girl who moves to San Francisco from the suburbs and finds her people at the drag club. It joyously chronicles Monique Jenkinson’s creation of her drag persona Fauxnique, the people and cultural practices that crash her identity into being, her journey through one of the most experimental moments in queer cultural history, and her rise through the nightlife underground to become the first cisgender woman crowned as a major pageant-winning drag queen. Jenkinson finds authenticity through the glee of drag artifice and articulation through the immediacy of performing bodies. She pens a valentine to gay men and their culture while relaying the making of an open-minded feminist and queer ally. Faux Queen finds deep healing in irreverence and posits that it might be possible for us to come together in fabulous difference on the dance floor.

This title focuses on the behaviors necessary to succeed in the dog-eat-dog world of fiction writing by asking successful authors how they practice their craft. Readers will learn how to adopt those habits on their quest to become novelists. The book will inspire, nourish, and provide the needed kick in the pants to turn the wannabes into doers! The 101 Habits of Highly Successful Novelists is full of "aha" experiences as the reader uncovers the collected wisdom from the cream of today’s fiction writers.

This eleventh edition was developed during the encyclopaedia's transition from a British to an American publication. Some of its articles were written by the best-known scholars of the time and it is considered to be a landmark encyclopaedia for scholarship and literary style.