Lyndall Gordon, author of the 'sensational' new biography of Emily Dickinson, LIVES LIKE LOADED GUNS, will feature in the closing event of the 'My Emily Dickinson' series in New York, reading and discussing her favourite Emily Dickinson poems alongside Joyce Carol Oates. The series of events, co-sponsored by the New York Botanical Garden and the Poetry Society of America, runs alongside the 'Emily Dickinson's Garden: The Poetry of Flowers' exhibition at the Botanical Garden. This appearance comes ahead of an event featuring Lyndall Gordon at the Southbank Centre on 7 July as part of the London Literature Festival.

LIVES LIKE LOADED GUNS was published by Virago in the UK on 4 February 2010 to a fanfare of amazing reviews. It was 'book of the week' in The Times, Guardian, Sunday Telegraph and Mail on Sunday and is already attracting praise in the US ahead of its release by Viking on June 10, with starred reviews in both Publishers Weekly and Booklist. Donna Seaman in Booklist said: 'With one stroke, Gordon recasts Dickinson's entire oeuvre...A jolting and utterly intriguing watershed achievement.' The title is also sold in Italy to Fazi Editore and in Spain to Edhasa, who have also bought rights to Lyndall Gordon's biographies of Charlotte Bronte and Virginia Woolf.
 

Lyndall Gordon is the author of eight previous books, including biographies of Virginia Woolf, Charlotte Bronte, Mary Wollstonecraft, T. S. Eliot and Henry James. She won the James Tait Black Prize for A WRITER'S LIFE and the Cheltenham Prize for Literature with A PASSIONATE LIFE. VINDICATION: A Life of Mary Wollstonecraft was also longlisted for the 2005 Samuel Johnson Prize for Non-Fiction. She lives and works in Oxford, where she is Senior Research Fellow at St Hilda's College.

For more information on the Poetry Society of America's Emily Dickinson programme click here and for more on the Emily Dickinson exhibition at the New York Botanical Garden here

Tickets for Lyndall Gordon's event at the London Literature Festival at the Southbank Centre can be bought here 

Praise for LIVES LIKE LOADED GUNS:

'This book is unforcedly and powerfully original.'   
-- Caroline Moore, 'Book of the Week', Sunday Telegraph
 
'This biography is not about taking sides, nor does it claim "truth" in any absolute way. Its questioning intelligence is a real pleasure and, as always with Gordon, the writing flows. It is a biography that compels without being sensational, quite a feat considering the material, with its twists, curves, lies, deliberate distortions and well-intentioned concealments.'   
-- Jeanette Winterson, 'Book of the Week', The Times

'Gordon is a very measured biographer, not given to haphazard speculation, and her theory...does seem to hold water.'
-- Craig Brown, 'Book of the Week', Mail on Sunday

'Oxford professor Lyndall Gordon brings the advantage of distance and a fresh and tough-minded perspective to her fascinating study. Combining information from biographies and library archives, and paying careful attention to material that has been overlooked or overshadowed, Gordon also considers the afterlife of Dickinson's poetry. She offers clear and boldly original answers to the "unanswered questions" of Dickinson's life...[Gordon's] book, by clearing away much that is speculative, projected, or contentious about the life, will open the way for new approaches to the woman she calls "the poet next door".'
-- Elaine Showalter, 'Book of the Week', Guardian

'Lyndall Gordon has opened the way to an entirely new reading of Dickinson's life with this brilliant tale of turbulence both on and off the page.'
-- Claire Harman, Literary Review

'The feisty force-field of Emily Dickinson's true genius greets the reader face to face in Gordon's masterpiece. This riveting tour de force doesn't merely add to existing Emily Dickinson scholarship, it blows it apart.'
--Karen V. Kukil, Curator of the Sylvia Plath & Virginia Woolf collections at Smith College and editor of the UNABRIDGED JOURNALS OF SYLVIA PLATH