Biography

Stefan Zweig was already an émigré-driven from a Europe torn apart by brutality and totalitarianism-when he found, in a damp cellar, a copy of Michel de Montaigne's Essais. Montaigne would become Zweig's last great occupation, helping him make sense of his own life and his obsessions-with personal freedom, with the sanctity of the individual. Through his writings on suicide, he would also, finally, lead Zweig to his death. With the intense psychological acuity and elegant prose so characteristic of Zweig's fiction, this account of Montaigne's life asks how we ought to think, and how to live. It is an intense and wonderful insight into both subject and biographer.

We are never closer to life than when we brush up against the possibility of death. I Am, I Am, I Am is Maggie O'Farrell's astonishing memoir of the near-death experiences that have punctuated and defined her life. The childhood illness that left her bedridden for a year, which she was not expected to survive. A teenage yearning to escape that nearly ended in disaster. An encounter with a disturbed man on a remote path. And, most terrifying of all, an ongoing, daily struggle to protect her daughter—for whom this book was written—from a condition that leaves her unimaginably vulnerable to life's myriad dangers. Seventeen discrete encounters with Maggie at different ages, in different locations, reveal a whole life in a series of tense, visceral snapshots. In taut prose that vibrates with electricity and restrained emotion, O'Farrell captures the perils running just beneath the surface, and illuminates the preciousness, beauty, and mysteries of life itself.

Ao dobrar os sessenta anos, J. Rentes de Carvalho decidiu começar a escrever um diário. O espaço físico é o de sempre: Portugal, Holanda, Trás-os-Montes, Amsterdão—e aquele destino que ocupou grande parte da sua vida: regressar e partir, estar num lado e viver no outro, visitando permanentemente a pátria mesmo quando está longe dela. Isto permite-nos acompanhar o trajeto de um dos escritores portugueses mais singulares do nosso tempo. Acolhido com grande entusiasmo na Holanda entre leitores e críticos, premiado em Portugal, Tempo Contado - um fascinante diário escrito nos anos de 1994 e 1995 - matiza o relato factual com o estilo da melhor ficção do autor de Ernestina ou de A Amante Holandesa.