Harpercollins. 05/01/2000. Illustrated. 406 pgs. Biographer Ellie Connor travels to a small East Texas town to research the life of a female blues singer who disappeared without a trace four decades ago. But Ellie has a nonprofessional motive, too. She herself is searching for her roots, and the only clue she has is a post card that her absentee mother once sent her from that very same East Texas town. As Ellie searches for clues to the past, she meets Blue--a psychologically damaged but seductive man who makes it difficult for her to keep her mind on her work. Originally published at $6.99 You save 72% off the cover price!

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McGraw-Hill. 06/01/1973. This novel takes place during World War II. Leni Pfeiffer is German, and her secret lover is a Soviet prisoner of war; the relationship is both sustaining and threatening. Her story is told--to an anonymous author/investigator--by people ("informants") who know her, and a complete portrait emerges, not only of Leni but of German life under the Nazis--one of Böll's recurring themes. Originally published at $8.95 You save 78% off the cover price!

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Penguin USA. 01/01/1988. In volume three of Auster's "New York Trilogy," the narrator searches for Fanshawe, his closest friend, who has vanished, leaving him a series of unpublished manuscripts, his wife, and his small son. Fanshawe is found, but the mystery of the meaning of his life and of the writer's vocation remain. Originally published at $8.95 You save 89% off the cover price!

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Farrar Straus & Giroux. 09/01/2003. 384 pgs. Malamud's novel is a penetrating study of a celebrated middle-aged biographer who, in the process of writing the lives of others, has lost track of the reality of his own. Originally published at $15.00 You save 87% off the cover price!

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Penguin USA. 05/01/2001. Reissue. 233 pgs. In Saul Bellow's memoir-like and highly autobiographical novel, Abe Ravelstein is a well-known and highly respected professor of political philosophy--a character based on Bellow's good friend, the late Allan Bloom of the University of Chicago. Before Ravelstein dies from AIDS, he asks his friend Chick--a Bellowish novelist--to write his biography. The task poses problems for Chick until he himself comes harrowingly close to death. Then he loses his writer's block and composes the book that is RAVELSTEIN. A New York Times Notable Book for the year 2000. Originally published at $14.00 You save 86% off the cover price!

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Univ of Chicago Pr. 08/01/2001. 321 pgs. Jackson Payne was one of the great be-bop tenor sax players; he was also a dope addict and sometime criminal who died mysteriously. A musicology professor, Charles Quinlan, who is writing Payne's biography, becomes immersed in his project, neglecting his family and his students in an increasingly obsessive quest for the truth of Payne's life. Originally published at $15.00 You save 90% off the cover price!

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Penguin USA. 05/01/2003. Reprint. 320 pgs. An American graduate student who wishes to write the life of a prominent Uruguayan writer named Jules Gund goes to Gund's home town to talk to the family about his project. His arrival and the subsequent events change the lives of everyone involved. Originally published at $14.00 You save 88% off the cover price!

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Random House Inc. 05/01/2002. Reprint. Drawing freely on the original TODAY show of '50s TV, Wetherell's novel brings to life the early days of television in this novel about a popular morning host who is killed by his announcer onscreen. Originally published at $14.00 You save 93% off the cover price!

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W W Norton & Co Inc. 10/01/2000. 338 pgs. A biographer of the great Lord Nelson routinely reenacts the admiral's life as part of his immersion in his subject. When he happens on an incident in Nelson's life that is horrifying in its cruelty, he must revise his methods and, in fact, his own life. Originally published at $14.00 You save 93% off the cover price!

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Houghton Mifflin. 05/01/2001. 424 pgs. The narrator of Theroux's novel, a failed writer, manages a rundown hotel in Hawaii for a flamboyant character named Buddy Hamstra. The hotel--and in fact the entire city--seems to be people entirely by eccentrics, including a lawyer made melancholy by his wealth, a woman obsessed with her gay son, and--perhaps oddest of all--Leon Edel, the biographer of Henry James. A New York Times Notable Book for 2001. Originally published at $26.00 You save 92% off the cover price!

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Harpercollins. 11/01/1999. 479 pgs. Rebecca Bennett is writing the biography of Dame Tilda Franklin, and finding strange parallels to her own life. The project also involves her in a 40-year-old unsolved murder mystery. Originally published at $14.00 You save 93% off the cover price!

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Consortium Book Sales & Dist. 04/01/1997. 297 pgs. A college professor copes not only with her husband's infidelity, her own affair with an abusive colleague, the troubled lives of her students, and the frustrations of an academic career, but with the ghost of her Irish grandfather who wants her to write his biography. Originally published at $24.95 You save 96% off the cover price!

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Pub Group West. 02/01/2003. 432 pgs. In this tongue-in-cheek and very postmodern novel, Danny Levitan is writing a biography of his old pal, the famous writer Arthur Ziff (somewhat reminiscent of Philip Roth), who is famous not only for his books but for his varied and energetic sex life. Originally published at $25.00 You save 96% off the cover price!

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Mid List Pr. 03/01/1997. 254 pgs. The first novel by poet Alfred Corn is about a New York writer, Avery Walsh, whose lover has just died of AIDS. In London to research a book about Colley Cibber, the 18th-century playwright, he both tries to forget their life together and is inexorably drawn to remembering it. After he falls in love with an Irish ex-junkie, who becomes involved in a violent incident on a trip to Ireland, Avery decides that he must return home. Originally published at $24.00 You save 92% off the cover price!

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Lightning Source Inc. 11/01/2001. 224 pgs. As an adolescent, Neil Pritchard meets and becomes infatuated with the celebrated composer Euan Bone--an idyllic period that comes crashing to a devastating end. Years later, as an adult, Neil is writing Bone's biography, and must grapple with the problem of whether or not to reveal what only he knows about his former mentor. This novel won the prestigious Saltire Award for Scottish Book of the Year in 2000. Originally published at $28.00 You save 96% off the cover price!

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Consortium Book Sales & Dist. 11/01/2002. 320 pgs. First published in 1978, this novel, celebrated in Greece as a great modern work, is about a biographer writing a book about the eponymous Glafkos Thrassakis, a Greek writer--a book commissioned by Thrassakis's ex-lover, a Danish countess. As he embarks on his research, the biographer finds that everything known about Thrassakis's life is a deception, including the official story of his death. No, he wasn't eaten by cannibals in New Guinea.... Originally published at $24.95 You save 96% off the cover price!

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Harpercollins. 11/01/2004. Reprint. 369 pgs. Frances Trollope, mother of the novelist Anthony Trollope, was a writer herself--a hack who wrote strictly for money, and whose most famous book was DOMESTIC MANNERS OF THE AMERICANS, which was not exactly a rave review of the country where she spent four years in the 1830s trying to make her fortune. In this novel, Frances (nicknamed Fanny) is writing a biography of a friend of hers--another Fanny, a wealthy woman with a radical utopian social agenda and a tendency toward affairs with famous men, Lafayette and Jefferson among them. As Fanny T. writes about the increasingly destructive and oblivious Fanny W., her narrative turns more and more inward, until in the end her "biography" becomes the self-revealing story of an original and determined character--herself. Originally published at $13.95 You save 93% off the cover price!

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St Martins Pr. 09/01/2003. 240 pgs. The narrator of this sort-of biography of Howard Hughes blithely mixes fact and fiction to create a portrait of an aviator and womanizer--and also of himself as tortured Hughes admirer as he researches and writes his book and, simultaneously, deteriorates mentally. Originally published at $14.95 You save 90% off the cover price!

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Harpercollins. 04/01/2005. Reprint. 292 pgs. A woman obsessed with mystery writers becomes an amateur sleuth in this debut by art critic Susan Kandel. Ex-New Jersey beauty queen and vintage clothing maven Cece Caruso makes her living by writing bios of mystery writers. During her research for a bio on lawyer/writer Erle Stanley Gardner, creator of Perry Mason, she discovers an old, unanswered letter from a convicted murderer, begging Gardner for help in proving his innocence. When Cece decides to track down the true killer herself, what appeared to be a cold case heats up quickly and puts Cece in danger. Originally published at $6.99 You save 86% off the cover price!

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Simon & Schuster. 02/01/2004. 320 pgs. After a traumatic accident, O'Leary Montagu travels to the little Irish town of Kilbrack, setting of his favorite book, a memoir by a woman named Nancy Valentine whose biography he aims to research. Among the characters he encounters there are the beautiful Livia, who wants only to enter the convent--but whose mother wants her to marry Montagu. In the midst of the turmoil that is Kilbrack, Montagu is forced to ask himself if Nancy Valentine was what she seemed. Originally published at $14.00 You save 91% off the cover price!

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