Historian Patenaude, a lecturer at Stanford, concentrates on the period from 1937, when Trotsky arrived in Mexico, to his assassination in 1940, painting a vivid portrait of Lenin's former right-hand man: his stormy relations with his flamboyant Mexican champion (and later enemy), artist Diego Rivera; his dealings with his American supporters; and the relentless efforts of Stalin's GPU to kill him.

"Legend tells of a Golden Age, 'when the valleys and mountains were not constrained by walls. When men would come and go as they pleased...' But those days are long gone.The kingdom has been stricken by famine and is plagued by the corruption of the lords of the court. When the old king dies, his daughter, Tilda, prepares to take the throne and succeed him. With the support of the wise Tankred and the loyal Bertil, her closest counselors and friends,...

Part incisive new biography of Freud, part group biography of the extraordinary friends who saved his life, this riveting story shows how a group of those closest to Freud persuaded him to escape to London following the German annexation of Austria. In March 1938 Hitler absorbed the country of Austria into the Third Reich. Many Jews had already fled, but Sigmund Freud -- eighty-one years old and ill with cancer -- was unconvinced that his life was...

In 1890, the thirty-year-old Chekhov, already knowing that he was ill with tuberculosis, undertook an arduous eleven-week journey from Moscow across Siberia to the penal colony on the island of Sakhalin. Now collected here in one volume are the fully annotated translations of his impressions of his trip through Siberia, and the account of his three-month sojourn on Sakhalin Island, together with author's notes, extracts from Chekhov's letters to relatives...

"Acclaimed historical novelist Vanessa Riley is back with another novel based on the life of an extraordinary Black woman from history: Haiti's Queen Marie-Louise Coidavid, who escaped a coup in Haiti to set up her own royal court in Italy during the Regency era, where she became a popular member of royal European society"-- 1810. Marie-Louise Christophe is crowned queen as her husband, Henry I, rules over the newly liberated Kingdom of Hayti in...

"In the late 1930s, civil war gripped Spain. When General Franco and his Fascists succeed in overthrowing the government, hundreds of thousands are forced to flee in a treacherous journey over the mountains to the French border. Among them is Roser, a pregnant young widow, who finds her life irreversibly intertwined with that of Victor Dalmau, an army doctor and the brother of her deceased love. In order to survive, the two must unite in a marriage...

"The review in the Paris Times in November 1928 is rapturous in its praise of Lucia Joyce's skill and artistry as a dancer. The family has made their home in Paris--where the latest ideas in art, music, and literature converge. Acolytes regularly visit the Joyce apartment to pay homage to Ireland's exiled literary genius. Among them is a tall, thin young man named Samuel Beckett--a fellow Irish expat who idolizes Joyce and with whom Lucia becomes...

"I don't know how it happened, but I ended up being the writer in my family," Jorge Argueta says in his poetic memoir. He wrote his first lines as an adolescent, though he didn't know what the words meant or that it was poetry. "But now I see that in putting down those words, I was stepping into a huge world, much bigger than my own: beautiful and mysterious, full of profound joy and infinite possibilities." In this moving, bilingual collection, renowned...