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This Dark Night Emily Bronte, a Life
by Deborah Lutz
Emily Brontë was just 27 when she started writing the wayward and electric novel Wuthering Heights. Three years later, she was dead. Out of step with her own time and remembered as the strangest of the Brontë sisters, there's much that we don't know about her - most of her papers were destroyed after her death. But as Deborah Lutz explores in this, one of the first biographies of Emily in 20 years, the writing that has survived seethes with storm and strife and with the beautifully desolate landscape of Yorkshire.
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In 1984, Paul Simon was at a professional and personal low. His new marriage was failing and his career was in danger of stalling. He was forty-two, navigating a digital age, searching for inspiration in a scene driven by music videos, synthesizers, and drum machines.
Driving around that summer, a bootleg cassette of “township jive”—the street music of South Africa—kept him company. Lent to him by a friend, it reminded Simon of the sound and the joy of the early days of rock and roll. He became drawn to the idea of recording with the musicians on that tape. But South Africa was in the thrall of a racist apartheid system, and with economic and cultural boycotts in place, such an undertaking could prove daunting. He became determined to find the right conditions to allow for a collaboration.
Simon took a fateful trip to Johannesburg in 1985. It would turn out to be the first step on a musical journey that would lead him to New York, Los Angeles, Louisiana, and London, and eventually to the release of Graceland, a critical and commercial triumph, winning multiple Grammys, selling 16 million records, and spawning a five-year, worldwide tour.
Days of Miracle and Wonder is the first book to tell the full story of Graceland, offering windows into Simon’s creative process, the technical innovations that brought them to life, the people and places that made the album possible, the forces that helped the album achieve mainstream reach, and the controversies that the music raised—and which remain today. It sheds light on a rare cultural moment, when America opened its doors to the sounds and styles of Africa and other faraway lands.
This is an informed, heartfelt celebration of Simon’s magnum opus, a recording forged in a tense cultural moment, but suffused with hope, change, and a sense of global connection.
Edition Details
ISBN: 9781668206751Publisher: Atria Books
Format: hardcover
Publication Date: 2026-08-11