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Mark Twain, Alice Walker, Haruki Murakami, Ursula K. Le Guin-this volume celebrates 45 famous authors who have shared their homes and hearts with furry feline friends. The photographs and stories in Writers and Their Cats capture the special bond between wordsmith and mouser. From the six-toed kitties who still inhabit the Ernest Hemingway Home and Museum in Florida to the mewling muses of mystery writer Lilian Jackson Braun, cats are clearly, in the words of Gloria Steinem, "a writer´s most logical and agreeable companion."

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"Writers seem to be inordinately fond of cats - and cats, for that matter, of writers. Perhaps it´s their mutual attraction to a creature that seems just as solitary and meditative as they are. In a new book, Writers and Their Cats, the phenomenon is pictured in purr-fect detail. There´s Hemingway with his cat, Cristobal Colón, pawing away at the typewriter keys, or Mark Twain, holding just one of his 30 cats. The love affair crosses genre, style and era, too: Neil Gaiman, Marlon James, Gloria Steinem, Edith Sitwell and Allen Ginsberg are just some of the nearly 50 writers pictured. Shown here is a very young Sylvia Plath with her kitten, Daddy, later the title of one of her most famous poems. Plath also adopted a cat, which she named Nijinsky, after the Russian ballet dancer, "because of his graceful movements". Daily Telegraph

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