"From Richard Zacks, bestselling author of The Pirate Hunter and Island of Vice, a rich and lively account of Mark Twain's late-life adventures abroad In 1895, at age sixty, Mark Twain was dead broke and miserable--his recent novels had been critical and commercial failures, and he was bankrupted by his inexplicable decision to run a publishing company. His wife made him promise to pay every debt back in full, so Twain embarked on an around-the-world...

"In this breathtaking memoir, First Person Female, New York Times bestseller Maria Flook gives a simmering account of her coming of age as a novelist. With unreserved honesty and comic detours, Flook maps her literary career, book after book. She reveals literary connections that were blurred and transformed by sexual liaisons, including an illicit affair with her longtime New York editor. With shocking glimpses of her secret life, her frank vision...

In 1971 Jay Parini was an aspiring poet and graduate student of literature at University of St Andrews in Scotland; he was also in flight from being drafted into service in the Vietnam War. One day his friend and mentor, Alastair Reid, asked Jay if he could play host for a "visiting Latin American writer" while he attended to business in London. He agreed -- and that "writer" turned out to be the blind and aged and eccentric master of literary compression...