The 2007 Nobel Prize in literature was a “bloody disaster” for Lessing, she recently told the BBC. This curious work—half fiction, half memoir, hampered by slapdash prose and an unfocused organization ...

Heller McAlpin reviews books for a variety of publications, including Newsday and the Boston Globe. DORIS LESSING has never been one to shy from bold moves. She married early to escape her overbearing ...

In Tricia Romano’s “The Freaks Came Out to Write,” an editor sums it up: “We were such a weird animal. We weren’t apples or oranges. We were like a kumquat.” ...

In a short explanation included in her latest book, Nobel Prize winner Doris Lessing notes that "even alert offspring or children may miss gold" when writing about their parents. But in Alfred And ...

In 1920s Rhodesia, leopards and snakes roamed the bush. Yet for 6-year-old Doris Lessing, this inhospitable environment offered a welcome refuge from her parents: Alfred, a soldier whose leg had been ...