England, in the mid-1950s. Meg Bailey has always aspired to live a respectable life. With her best friend, Roxane, she moves from secondary school to a preppy art college in Oxford. Under the watchful eye of Roxane's mother, Mrs. Wheeler, the two girls flourish in Oxfordian society. But Meg constantly longs for more. Not content to stay in Oxford, she finds a job in London. Roxane stays behind and marries Dick, a man of Mrs. Wheeler's choosing.As Meg's independence grows, Dick suddenly appears in London for work. Representing a connection to her past, Meg and Dick's friendship flourishes, blurring the lines of loyalty between what is and what was in a way that changes life for these three friends forever.As sharp and startling now as when it was written, Don't Look at Me Like That is an unflinching and candid book of love and betrayal that encapsulates Diana Athill's gift of storytelling at its finest.

"What a feast. Diana's work compels me. . . . She's got her teeth into life!"—Alice MunroDiana Athill is one of our great women of letters. The renowned editor of V. S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys, and many others, she is also a celebrated memoirist whose Somewhere Towards the End was a New York Times bestseller and a National Book Critics Circle Award winner. For thirty years, Athill corresponded with the American poet Edward Field, freely sharing jokes, pleasures, and pains with her old friend. Letters to a Friend is an epistolary memoir that describes a warm, decades-long friendship. Written with intimacy and spontaneity, candor and grace, it is perhaps more revealing than any of her celebrated books.Edited, selected, and introduced by Athill, and annotated with her own delightful notes, this collection—rich with Athill's characteristic wit, humor, elegance, and honesty—reveals a sharply intelligent woman with a keen eye for the...

For nearly five decades Diana Athill edited (nursed, coerced, coaxed) some of the most celebrated writers in the English language, among them V. S. Naipaul, Philip Roth, Mordecai Richler, and Norman Mailer. A founding editor of the prestigious publishing house André Deutsch Ltd., Athill takes us on a guided tour through the corridors of literary London, offering a keenly observed, devilishly funny, and always compassionate insider's portrait of the glories and pitfalls of making books.Stet is spiced with candid insights about the type of people who make brilliant writers and ingenious publishers, and the idiosyncrasies of both. It brims with Athill's memories of serving as confidante, midwife, and sometime therapist to great literary figures: “Nobody who has read Jean Rhys' first four novels can suppose that she was good at life; but no one who never met her could know how very bad she was at it"; “It was my job to listen to [Naipaul's] unhappiness and...

Diana Athill made her reputation as a writer with the candour of her memoirs, now aged ninety, and freed from any inhibitions that even she may once have had, she reflects frankly on the losses and occasionally the gains that old age brings, and on the wisdom and fortitude required to face death. This is a lively narrative of events, lovers and friendships: the people and experiences that have taught her to regret very little, to resist despondency and to question the beliefs and customs of her own generation.

A classic memoir by the author of the New York Times bestseller Somewhere Towards the End.When Diana Athill met the man she calls Didi, she fell in love instantly and out of love just as fast. Didi's quirks, which at first appeared so charming and sweet, soon revealed a darker side—he was a gambler, a drinker, and a womanizer, impossible to live with but impossible to ignore. After a Funeral explores the years of their friendship; a period that culminated in Didi's suicide (in Athill's apartment). This bravura work "gives a new dimension to honesty, a new comprehension to love" (Vogue).

A recently discovered gem from the bestselling author of Somewhere Towards the End, A Florence Diary is the charming and vivacious account of Athill's travels to post-war Florence.

A luminous, wise, and joyful insight into what really matters at the end of a long life, from the beloved author of the award-winning Somewhere Towards the End.What will you remember if you live to be 100?Diana Athill charmed readers with her prize-winning memoir Somewhere Towards the End, which transformed her into an unexpected literary star. Now, on the eve of her ninety-eighth birthday, Athill has written a sequel every bit as unsentimental, candid, and beguiling as her most beloved work.Writing from her cozy room in Highgate, London, Diana begins to reflect on the things that matter after a lifetime of remarkable experiences, and the memories that have risen to the surface and sustain her in her very old age."My two valuable lessons are: avoid romanticism and abhor possessiveness," she writes. In warm, engaging prose she describes the bucolic pleasures of her grandmother's garden and the wonders of traveling as a young woman in Europe after the...

A classic memoir by the author of the New York Times bestseller Somewhere Towards the End.As a young woman, Diana Athill was engaged to an air force pilot—Instead of a Letter tells how he broke off the engagement, married someone else, and, worst of all, died overseas before she could confront or forgive him. Evoking perfectly the picturesque country setting of her youth, this fearless and profoundly honest story of love and modern womanhood marks the beginning of Athill's brilliant literary career.

"I can remember in detail being hit by my first story one January morning in 1958." So begins literary legend Diana Athill in the preface to Midsummer Night in the Workhouse, a long-overdue collection of her short fiction, originally published in the 1950s to the 1970s. In unsentimental though often touching prose, Athill's young women anticipate, enjoy, or just miss out on brief sexual encounters with men met on trains, at parties - just about anywhere they can. A cheating wife, back with her boring husband, is wracked with agonizing love for the unavailable partner of her brief fling; a writer seeks inspiration at a writers' retreat whilst avoiding the group seducer's invitation; a wife's party flirtations propel her possessive husband into another woman's bed; two fun-loving women face a sinister sexual assault during a Greek holiday; a teenager experiences enraptured detachment during her first kiss. Beautifully written, perceptive, touching, and funny...