Search Results: Biography/Memoir from Lightholder Books

All Said and Done by Simone de Beauvoir. 1974 Putnam, first U.S. edition, 463 Pages. This is the last installment of de Beauvoir's autobiography, covering the last ten years of her life.

Condition: VG/VG. Some fading to jacket spine, shelf wear.

"My life: it is both intimately known and remote; it defines me and yet I stand outside it."

Aphra Behn by V. Sackville-West. 1927 Gerald Howe, first edition, 92 pages. Part of the Representative Women series edited by Francis Birrell: "The series will give in biographical form a picture of female accomplishment throughout the ages." Includes a newspaper clipping of a correction that Sackville-West sent into the Times in 1961 about an article they ran on Aprha Behn. Sackville-West was a British novelist and biographer, companion and lover to Virginia Woolf, and accomplished gardener.
Condition: Good. Shelf wear, missing DJ, owner name on first page.
"But let us say straight away that Aphra Behn is no Shakespeare, the smallest clue to the detail of whose life would be precious and worth pursuing."

A Cadre School Life: Six Chapters by Yang Jiang. Translation by Geremie Barme with the assistance of Bennett Lee. 1984 Joint Publishing, first U.S. edition, 91 pages. Jiang was a scholar and translator, most notably of the definitive translation of Don Quixote in China, which at the time landed her in Henan to be "reformed through labor" during the Cultural Revolution. A Cadre School Life was her acclaimed memoir of those years. According to the New York Times: "Avoiding the melodramatic tone of many other memoirs of the turbulent Cultural Revolution, she relied on understated, sometimes wry prose to recount everyday life at the "cadre school" for purged officials and scholars: digging a well, tending to her vegetable plot, befriending a puppy. Her tone turned stoic, however, in recalling the suicide of her son-in-law, who had been subjected to constant criticism from his peers for showing reactionary tendencies." Jiang was 70 when her memoir was published.
Condition: VG. Some creasing to pages
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A Lover's Discourse by Roland Barthes. Translated by Richard Howard. 1978 Hill and Wang, first U.S. edition, 234 pages. Barthes was a French philosopher, theorist, critic, and intellectual, who died in 1980 by laundry truck. According to the Washington Post: "In "A Lover's Discourse," he wrote that his investigation of love and desire "has been restored to its fundamental person, the I, in order to stage an utterance, not an analysis."" The Lover's Discourse was also heavily featured in Jeffrey Eugenedies's The Marriage Plot as the main accessory for the David Foster Wallace character.
Condition: Jacket in good condition, chip and browning, book in VG condition, some bumps
"Another day, in the rain, we're waiting for the boat at the lake; from happiness, this time, the same outburst of annihilation sweeps through me."

Left of Karl Marx: The Political Life of Black Communist Claudia Jones by Carole Boyce Davies. 2008 Duke University Press, paperback edition, 311 pages. Jones was a "pioneering Afro-Caribbean radical intellectual, dedicated communist, and feminist," who was exiled to the UK in 1955 after a stint in federal prison. Here Boyce brings her biography to life.
Condition: Like new.
"Thus, one cannot locate all intellectual activity within the academy only, particularly when there exists (and existed) a Marxist tradition of the development of working-class intellectuals for whom the study of political theory and its praxis was critical."

Marmalade Me by Jill Johnston. 1971 first Dutton Paperback Original, 316 pages. Johnston started as a dance critic, but over the course of fifteen years, her column for the Village Voice veered toward the experimental and poetic, a perfect artifact for the time and place. Those columns are collected here.

Condition: Good+. Cover darkened, wear along spine, remainder mark, pen marks on first page, rest of book clean and bright.

"I just don't know what to do; I am falling apart."

The Prime of Life by Simone de Beauvoir. 1962 World Publishing Company, first U.S. edition, 479 pages. The second installment of de Beauvoir's lifelong autobiography project, this volume covers her move to Paris, meeting Sartre, and developing as a writer.

Condition: VG/G. Some wear to jacket, boards bowed a bit, pages clean.

"To have a door I could shut was still the height of bliss for me."

Seven Winters and Afterthoughts: Memories of a Dublin Childhood and Pieces on Writing by Elizabeth Bowen. 1962 Knopf, first thus, 273 pages. Bowen was an acclaimed Irish British novelist most known for Last September, and Death of the Heart. She was interested stifled lives, and expertly portrayed wartime London in Heat of the Day. Seven Winters details Bowen's first seven years in Ireland, and Afterthoughts takes on Eudora Welty, Virginia Woolf, and more.
Condition: Jacket in VG condition with chips to the spine, book in VG condition, some wearing to boards, tanning to endpapers.
"I was content, however, not to intrude on angels by seeing one."