Goldwin Smith

#2

1977

Shakespeare has been the lodestar of English literature, not only to our finest biographers & critics but to our greatest imaginative writers as well. Oscar Wilde, Mark Twain & James Joyce have all written of the man— as enigma, ancestor or phantom. In Shakespeare Burgess, whose Nothing Like the Sun Harold Bloom called "the only successful novel ever written about Shakespeare," takes up that daunting challenge once again, reimagining the actual world of Shakespeare the author, actor & man. Burgess is mindful of the few facts we have about Shakespeare & handles them with great dexterity. But this isn't a mere recounting of facts. It's an attempt by one virtuoso writer to capture the likeness of the supreme virtuoso, to locate him exactly & take his measure. It's also an attempt to present him —as only a gifted professional writer can —as a working writer among others, a man of his time in his own milieu. Shakespeare the Elizabethan upstart? Literary genius without peer? The representative man? The actor among actors, businessman among businessmen? What Burgess so skillfully gets across —alongside what he calls "the main facts about the life & society from which the poems & plays arose"— is a genuine feel for who Shakespeare was & where he was. In the end, Burgess claims for himself the right of every Shakespeare-lover: "to paint his own portrait of the man."

#3

Indiana , 1818. Moonlight falls through the dense woods that surround a one-room cabin, where a nine-year-old Abraham Lincoln kneels at his suffering mother's bedside. She's been stricken with something the old-timers call "Milk Sickness.""My baby boy..." she whispers before dying. Only later will the grieving Abe learn that his mother's fatal affliction was actually the work of a vampire. When the truth becomes known to young Lincoln , he writes in his journal, "henceforth my life shall be one of rigorous study and devotion. I shall become a master of mind and body. And this mastery shall have but one purpose..." Gifted with his legendary height, strength, and skill with an ax, Abe sets out on a path of vengeance that will lead him all the way to the White House. While Abraham Lincoln is widely lauded for saving a Union and freeing millions of slaves, his valiant fight against the forces of the undead has remained in the shadows for hundreds of years. That is, until Seth Grahame-Smith stumbled upon The Secret Journal of Abraham Lincoln, and became the first living person to lay eyes on it in more than 140 years. Using the journal as his guide and writing in the grand biographical style of Doris Kearns Goodwin and David McCullough, Seth has reconstructed the true life story of our greatest president for the first time-all while revealing the hidden history behind the Civil War and uncovering the role vampires played in the birth, growth, and near-death of our nation.