I love nonfiction. Sometimes I think just about everything I see in a bookstore sounds interesting in some way. I tend to choose biographies or travelogues though, when buying nonfiction. I lucked out and found Maeve Brennan: Homesick at the New Yorker on sale at Amazon. They had remaindered copies for only $7.99! This has been on my wish list for a long time. Maeve Brennan was Irish born, but lived in New York City for most of her life. She wrote short stories and wrote a column for the New Yorker. She was very pretty, and it sounds as though her short stories were critically acclaimed. According to Angela Bourke her biographer, she went from "happy Dublin childhood to Manhattan glamour, and from literary achievement to breakdown, homelessness, death--and rediscovery." I read an article about her somewhere and if I remember correctly at some point she was living in the bathroom at the New Yorker offices. I guess when I get to read this I will find out if that is true or not. I am curious now about her short stories and essays. I believe I have those books somewhere in my piles, so I will have to dig them out.
I don't know where I came across this biography. If a biography is about women and/or artists I am usually doubly intrigued. May and Amy: A True Story of Forbidden Love, and the Secret Lives of May Gaskell, Her Daughter Amy , and Sir Edward Burne-Jones--The subtitle just about says it all. Amy Gaskell was the great-aunt to the author, Josceline Dimbleby. Dimbleby found a cache of unpublished letters from Burne-Jones to May Gaskell. Amy was her daughter and apparently led a tragic life. Per the book jacket blurb: "In piecing together the eventful life of her grandmother, Dimbleby takes us through a turbulent period in history that includes the Boer War, the Great War, and the Second World War and visits to the most far-flung corners of the British Empire. The Souls-William Morris, Rudyard Kipling, and William Gladstone--all play a part in this sweeping, often funny, and sometimes tragic story."