Virginia Woolf
1996 · 944 pages
Lee refuses the fragile madwoman of legend and gives back a working writer: funny, ambitious, hard on her friends. She holds the breakdowns and the novels together and lets neither explain the other.
★ 5.3
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Coleridge
Early Visions
1989 · 622 pages
The finest modern life of a poet. Holmes walks Coleridge's roads and brings him back talking, from "The Ancient Mariner" and Wordsworth's company to the laudanum and the sailing for Malta.
★ 5.4
James Joyce
1959 · 887 pages
The novelist Anthony Burgess called this the greatest literary biography of the century. Ellmann reconstructs Joyce day by day, the debts and the eye operations and the exact Dublin talk that became Ulysses.
★ 6.8