Ira Nadel – författare

'Every generalisation that we settled forty years ago, is abandoned' As a journalist, historian and novelist born into a family that included two past presidents of the United States, Henry Adams was constantly focused on the American experiment. An immediate bestseller awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1919, his The Education of Henry Adams (1918) recounts his own and the country's education from 1838, the year of his birth, to 1905, incorporating the Civil War, capitalist expansion and the growth of the United States as a world power. Exploring America as both a success and a failure, contradiction was the very impetus that compelled Adams to write the Education, in which he was also able to voice his deep scepticism about mankind's power to control the direction of history. Written with immense wit and irony, reassembling the past while glimpsing the future, Adams's vision expresses what Henry James declared the `complex fate' to be an American, and remains one of the most compelling works of American autobiography today. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

This new biography of famed American novelist Philip Roth offers a full account of his development as a writer.Philip Roth was much more than a Jewish writer from Newark, as this new biography reveals. His life encompassed writing some of the most original novels in American literature, publishing censored writers from Eastern Europe, surviving less than satisfactory marriages, and developing friendships with a number of the most important writers of his time from Primo Levi and Milan Kundera to Isaac Bashevis Singer, Saul Bellow and Edna O'Brien. The winner of a Pulitzer Prize, National Book Award, and the Man Booker International Prize, Roth maintained a remarkable productivity throughout a career that spanned almost fifty years, creating 31 works. But beneath the success was illness, angst, and anxiety often masked from his readers. This biography, drawing on archives, interviews and his books, delves into the shaded world of Philip Roth to identify the ghosts, the character, and even identity of the man.

"The story of Stoppard's life is a compelling one and it is laid out with extraordinary detail in this first major biography" - Evening Standard Double Act is the first major biography of one of the world's celebrated most writers, From his early theatrical success as the youngest playwright ever produced at the National Theatre, to his Academy Award for Shakespeare in Love, Tom Stoppard's work is renowned for its dazzling wit, invention and box-office appeal. But his real life is a more complicated affair still; and this acclaimed and authoritative book reveals the remarkable private story of a man who from childhood had to invent his own personality, and whose multi-layered dramas reflect the enduring contradictions of his life."An impressive biography ...it makes a good story out of that most unpromising subject, an unqualified and extended triumph." Spectator "Appealingly embellished with Stoppard's shrewd witticisms about his work and full of keen perceptions of its own, Double Act offers an exhaustive and enlightening overview of a singular talent that is happiest when expressing itself in dual ways."Sunday Times "Nadel is excellent at providing an exposition of Stoppard's ideas and the wider social context in which he lives." Independent on Sunday "A searching biography of this mercurial writer ...Nadel builds an engrossing picture of someone in continual self-reinvention." Jewish Chronicle "Stoppard's playwriting career, unsurprisingly, constitutes the largest component of the biography, and the production details, gossip and contractual facts make for fascinating reading." Irish Times "If the genius of Nadel's subject lies in paradox, it also needs genius to turn that paradox into an event. This book is one, and a palpable hit." Good Book Guide "Essential reading for all students of theatre." Hampstead & Highgate

Russia haunted the British cultural imagination throughout the 20th century – whether as a romantic source of literary and political inspiration or as a warning of creeping totalitarianism. In this new book, Ira Nadel, charts the story of that influence through the work of some of the key figures in British literature across the century, including Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham, Jane Harrison, Virginia Woolf, and H.G. Wells. Framed by the story of two romantic encounters, between Walter Benjamin and the actress Asja Lacis in Moscow in 1926 and between Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova in 1945, Love and Russian Literature casts a vivid new light on the ways in which responses to Russia shaped the history of British modernism.

Russia haunted the British cultural imagination throughout the 20th century – whether as a romantic source of literary and political inspiration or as a warning of creeping totalitarianism. In this new book, Ira Nadel, charts the story of that influence through the work of some of the key figures in British literature across the century, including Joseph Conrad, Somerset Maugham, Jane Harrison, Virginia Woolf, and H.G. Wells. Framed by the story of two romantic encounters, between Walter Benjamin and the actress Asja Lacis in Moscow in 1926 and between Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova in 1945, Love and Russian Literature casts a vivid new light on the ways in which responses to Russia shaped the history of British modernism.

A compelling quest to locate a history and poetics of the American sentence, this book applies four stages of communication to the story of American writing - the sermon, the telegraph, the newspaper and the screen - to ask what is an American sentence and how has it changed?While sentences have become the subject of their own form, literary histories, cultural narratives, and personal writings have not centred on the sentence as a singular object. There is no history of the sentence. This book addresses that absence, reviewing American style through American literary history for evolutionary moments in the development of the American sentence from the Puritans to the present day.Reading sentences from writers as diverse as Benjamin Franklin, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Lydia Davis, Cormac McCarthy and Colson Whitehead, we find ourselves asking if a poetics of the American sentence actually exists, whether good sentences are the reason we read, and what the future of the American sentence might be.

A compelling quest to locate a history and poetics of the American sentence, this book applies four stages of communication to the story of American writing - the sermon, the telegraph, the newspaper and the screen - to ask what is an American sentence and how has it changed?While sentences have become the subject of their own form, literary histories, cultural narratives, and personal writings have not centred on the sentence as a singular object. There is no history of the sentence. This book addresses that absence, reviewing American style through American literary history for evolutionary moments in the development of the American sentence from the Puritans to the present day.Reading sentences from writers as diverse as Benjamin Franklin, Henry James, Gertrude Stein, Lydia Davis, Cormac McCarthy and Colson Whitehead, we find ourselves asking if a poetics of the American sentence actually exists, whether good sentences are the reason we read, and what the future of the American sentence might be.

David Mamet has been described as the greatest living American playwright of his generation and the quintessential American writer for his work as author, essayist, playwright and screenwriter. His works are known for their clever and terse dialogue and have earned him a Pulitzer Prize for Glengarry Glen Ross and Oscar nominations for House of Games as well as The Spanish Prisoner, Wag the Dog, and The Verdict. This comprehensive biography represents a landmark study of one of the great writers and directors of our time. Detailing Mamet's ideas on writing, acting and directing, Nadel provides an insightful and authoritative guide to the genesis, text and productions of many of his plays and screenplays. Beginning with his Chicago origins, the work goes on to cover Mamet's relationship to Judaism, his reputation for machismo, as well as discussions of and excerpts from early plays and stories that have never before been referenced in print. Also included are interviews with key actors and directors such as William H. Macy, Mike Nussbaum, Robert Brustein, and Neil Pepe.

The Business of Ballet: Diaghilev’s Ballets Russes between Profit and the Avant-garde explores how a remarkable, internationally recognized ballet company, the Ballets Russes, was able to survive for twenty years without stable funding. Focusing on Ballets Russes’s founder, Serge Diaghilev, and his talent for discovering monies through an uncanny ability to secure funds from aristocrats, industrialists, artists, and swindlers, Ira Nadel offers new insight into the financial life of modern ballet. Throughout [his] analysis, Nadel reveals that Diaghilev was able to attract not only financial support but also the most innovative artistic and musical talents and choreographers of the period, who collectively changed the nature of ballet from the conventional to the contemporary. Through it all, Diaghilev never sacrificed the essential Russianness of his enterprise, transforming Russian traditions by incorporating new and original musical and choreographic stagings. In doing so, Nadel argues, Diaghilev’s Ballet Russes revised the idea of ballet as an art form, causing audiences throughout Europe and North America to riot and artists to create revolutionary compositions in art and music.