The Pulitzer Prize-winning biographer brings to life the most intriguing woman in the history of the world: Cleopatra, the last queen of Egypt. Though her life spanned fewer than 40 years, it reshaped the contours of the ancient world.

"In December 1776, a small boat delivered an old man to France." So begins a dazzling narrative account of Benjamin Franklin's French mission, the most exacting–and momentous–eight years of his life.
When Franklin embarked, the colonies were without money, munitions, gunpowder or common cause; like all adolescents, they were to discover that there was a difference between declaring independence and achieving it. To close that gap Franklin...

Winner of the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for Biography and hailed by critics as both "monumental" (Boston Globe) and "utterly romantic" (New York magazine), Stacy Schiff's Véra, the story of Mrs. Vladimir Nabokov, brings to shimmering life one of the greatest literary love stories of our time. Vladimir Nabokov—the émigré author of Lolita, Pale Fire, and Speak, Memory—wrote his books first for himself, second for his wife Véra, and third

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