A collection of memoirs and essays.

Christened Reginald Dwight, he was a shy boy with Buddy Holly glasses who grew up in the London suburb of Pinner and dreamed of becoming a pop star. By the age of twenty-three he was performing his first gig in America, facing an astonished audience in his bright yellow dungarees, a star-spangled T-shirt, and boots with wings. Elton John had arrived and the music world would never be the same...

Boris Pasternak did not keep diaries. He was not satisfied with their unformed chaos, characteristic of records kept for themselves. Letters took over their function, in which the personality of the poet and the features of his many-sided creativity were fully manifested. But first of all, this is the most important biographical document that reflected the stages of Pasternak’s life and the...

The 'Kamasutra of the scribe' is the intellectual autobiography of Alexander Genis. And also - love correspondence with your library. Considering reading to be 'everyday life of happiness', the author shares it with passion with everyone who is ready to listen to the intense dialogue of the seasoned scribe with his favorite books. enjoyment. '' Alexander Genis

Introduction written by Steven Cohen. Vladimir Bukharin, brother of the famous Nikolai, was one of of the first Red Directors of Soviet industry and was active in the textile industry. Shortly after his brother's trial, Vladimir was arrested in 1938 and served in labor camps and exile for 18 years. In 1961 he was finally rehabilitated and lived the rest of his days in Moscow.

Nelson Mandela was one of the great moral and political leaders of his time: an international hero whose lifelong dedication to the fight against racial oppression in South Africa won him the Nobel Peace Prize and the presidency of his country. After his triumphant release in 1990 from more than a quarter-century of imprisonment, Mandela was at the center of the most compelling and inspiring...

Harriet Jacobs (1813-1897) was an African-American writer who escaped from slavery and was later freed. She became an abolitionist and reformer. Jacobs wrote an autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, published in 1861 under the pseudonym Linda Brent. It was a reworking of the genres of slave narrative and sentimental novel, and was one of the first books to address the...

In «Der Lärm des Lebens» erzählt Jörg Hartmann auf hinreißende Weise seine Geschichte und die seiner Eltern und Großeltern. Es ist eine Liebeserklärung an die Kraft der Familie - und an den Ruhrpott. Ob es um die Situation seiner gehörlosen Großeltern im Nationalsozialismus geht, die Lebensklugheit seiner Mutter, die für kurze Zeit eine Pommesbude betrieb, die Demenzerkrankung seines Vaters,...

Diary of Volodymyr Vakulenko-K. — painful and true records that the writer kept from the beginning of the full-scale invasion and during the occupation of Izyum and his native village of Kapitolivka in Kharkiv Oblast. Until the abduction by the Rashists, the inevitability of which he was aware of, as well as the fact that he had little chance of survival - because he is Ukrainian, because he...

On February 24, 2022, the writer Andrii Kurkov did not write anything. And in the next few days too. An ethnic Russian who had spent his whole life in Kyiv faced the same danger as other Ukrainians. Because in his worldview, behavior and attitude to reality, the worldview and behavior of the Ukrainian Cossacks of the 16th century prevails, when Ukraine was not yet part of the Russian Empire,...