Literary Criticism - General

In a lucid, brilliant work of nonfiction, Larry McMurtry has written a family portrait that also serves as a larger portrait of Texas itself, as it was and as it has become. Using an essay by the German literary critic Walter Benjamin that he...

Fiction imagines for us a stopping point from which life can be seen as intelligible, asserts Joan Silber in The Art of Time in Fiction. The end point of a story determines its meaning, and one of the main tasks a writer faces is...

An in-depth analysis of two of Sartre's contemporaries, Bataille and Blanchot. Iconic French novelist, playwright, and essayist Jean-Paul Sartre is widely recognized as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and his work has remained relevant and thought-provoking through the decades....

Essays about baseball's past, present, and future--and the wisdom of Ichiro SuzukiThe Only Way Is the Steady Way is a baseball memoir in scorecards and baseball cards, a recollection of the game's biggest stars and outlandish personalities, and introspective letters to a legendary player....

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER - We all have dreams--things we fantasize about doing and generally never get around to. This is the story of Azar Nafisi's dream and of the nightmare that made it come true. For two years before she left Iran...

Ernest Hemingway's classic exploration of the history and pageantry of bullfighting, and the deeper themes of cowardice, bravery, sport and tragedy that it inspires. Still considered one of the best books ever written about bullfighting, Death in the Afternoon reflects Hemingway's belief that bullfighting...

Essays and stories on fashion, art, and culture in the New York of the 2010s.We were supposed to meet Rose McGowan at Caf d'Alsace after the party, but she cancelled at the last minute. I saw on Twitter that she had been hit with...

In this uniquely interdisciplinary work, Lisa Lowe examines the relationships between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas in the late eighteenth- and early nineteenth- centuries, exploring the links between colonialism, slavery, imperial trades and Western liberalism. Reading across archives, canons, and continents, Lowe connects...

Henry Wiggen, hero of The Southpaw and the best-known fictional baseball player in America, is back again, throwing a baseball "with his arm and his brain and his memory and his bluff for the sake of his pocket and his family." More than a...

Bulgaria, 1934. A young man is murdered by the local fascists. His brother, Khristo Stoianev, is recruited into the NKVD, the Soviet secret intelligence service, and sent to Spain to serve in its civil war. Warned that he is about to become a victim...

Leads scholars and anyone who cares about the humanities into more effectively analyzing the fate of the humanities and digging into the very idea of the humanities as a way to find meaning and coherence in the world. The humanities, considered by many as...

Honour Earth Mother is an inspiring reminder of the affection and reverence that the Native peoples of North America have had for the land. For Native peoples the earth was special, the dwelling place of manitous and spirits and the repository of the bones...

Cooking As Though You Might Cook Again invites us to cook with our senses and to work with the passage of time. Licht's lyrical recipes turn our attention away from strict measurements, and remind us of the pleasures and the importance of working with...

In Reading Backwards Richard B. Hays maps the shocking ways the four Gospel writers interpreted Israel's Scripture to craft their literary witnesses to the Church's one Christ. The Gospels' scriptural imagination discovered inside the long tradition of a resilient Jewish monotheism a novel and...

Novelist Donald Newlove (1928-2021) contemplates how alcoholism has affected the lives and work of other writers, as well as himself.". . . a passionate blend: part autobiography, part confessional, part sketches of famous alcoholic writers and part sermon on the dangers of 'Drunkspeare' ....

Set in Africa, it is the story of Dinesen's years in Africa--together with Shadows on the Grass.Author: Isak DinesenISBN-10: 0679724753ISBN-13: 9780679724759Publisher: VintageLanguage: EnglishPublished: 10/23/1989Pages: 480Format: PaperbackWeight: 1.05lbsSize: 8.00h x 5.20w x 1.00d

The story of the infamous murder and robbery of Lewiston merchant Lloyd Magruder and his companions during the 1860s gold rush is legendary in Montana, Idaho, and Washington. Ladd Hamilton constructs a compelling account of the destruction of Magruder's pack train while traveling on...

The only work of its kind to survive from classical antiquity, the Library of Apollodorus is a unique guide to Greek mythology, from the origins of the universe to the Trojan War. Apollodorus' Library has been used as a source book by classicists from...

The words and emotions of this classic tale are brought to life with exceptionally detailed illustrations that re-create the look and atmosphere of 19th-century London. Illustrations.Author: Charles DickensISBN-10: 1551114763ISBN-13: 9781551114767Publisher: Broadview Press IncLanguage: EnglishPublished: 03/12/2003Pages: 239Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.60lbsSize: 8.40h x 5.50w x 0.60d

Riding five horses and leading five more, three young New York men, their guide, and a camp cook entered the untamed vastness of the Bitteroot Mountains. They expected the trip to be the adventure of a lifetime, but it was already September. As the...

Social worker Jack Trimpey's major breakthrough in recovering from substance addiction is an unprecedented process that is fully explained in Rational Recovery, your first step towards freedom.For those who are looking to make an extreme change in their lives, Rational Recovery is a proven...

Gitanjali is a collection of poems by the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore. Tagore received the Nobel Prize for Literature, largely for the book. It is part of the UNESCO Collection of Representative Works. Its central theme is devotion & motto is 'I am here...

In her short lifetime, Flannery O'Connor became one of the most distinctive American writers of the twentieth century. By birth a native of Georgia and a Roman Catholic, O'Connor depicts, in all its comic and horrendous incongruity, the limits of worldly wisdom and the...

A career-spanning collection of Marguerite Duras's genre-bending essays that Kirkus calls "a luminous, erudite exploration of the self and art." In her nonfiction as well as her fiction, Marguerite Duras's curiosity was endless, her intellect voracious. Within a single essay she might roam from...

Charles Baxter inaugurates The Art of, a new series on the craft of writing, with the wit and intelligence he brought to his celebrated book Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction. Fiction writer and essayist Charles Baxter's The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot...

J.M. Barrie's classic tale of the "boy who would not grow up" Peter Pan originally appeared as a baby living a magical life among birds and fairies in J.M. Barrie's sequence of stories, Peter Pan in Kensington Gardens. His later role as flying boy...

This compact, one-semester introduction to the Bible prepares students to begin reading the biblical text as Christian Scripture, focusing on the meaning of Scripture for the church. The editors and contributors--experienced teachers with expertise in different parts of the Bible--orient students to the whole...

A lyrical, genre-bending coming-of-age tale featuring a queer, Black, Guyanese American woman who, while seeking to define her own place in the world, negotiates an estranged relationship with her father.Author: Arisa WhiteISBN-10: 1936767619ISBN-13: 9781936767618Publisher: Augury BooksLanguage: EnglishPublished: 03/01/2021Pages: 138Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.40lbsSize: 8.50h x 5.50w...

An obituarist opens his archive to celebrate the obscure and the eccentric.In Doomed and Famous, an obituarist opens his archive in celebration of the most marginal and improbable characters, creating a meta-fiction of extinction and obscurity. For many decades Adrian Dannatt tracked and dredged...

Rachel Isaacson, spirited, otherworldly and haunted, is born into a rigidly Old World family in New York's Lower East Side. Hungry for independence, Rachel enters a marriage of convenience with violent consequences. Across the Atlantic, storyteller, fiddler and cliff climber Ciaran McMurrough is raised...

The Library of America presents for the first time in one volume Steinbeck's early writings, which expressed his abiding concerns for community, social justice, and the elemental connection between nature and human society. In prose that blends the vernacular and the incantatory, the local...

This remarkable and monumental book at last provides a comprehensive answer to the age-old riddle of whether there are only a small number of 'basic stories' in the world. Using a wealth of examples, from ancient myths and folk tales via the plays and...

Seminal essays on loneliness, living in New York, friendship, feminism, and writing from nonfiction master Vivian Gornick Vivian Gornick's Approaching Eye Level is a brave collection of personal essays that finds a quintessentially contemporary woman (urban, single, feminist) trying to observe herself and the...

"PEN has been instrumental in defending truth and facts. In fact, no other organization has done more to inoculate Americans against disinformation. No other organization has done more to protect the voices that the forces of racism and hatred seek to silence." --Stephen King...

There are the acknowledged classics of world literature: the canonical works assigned in schools, topping every must-read list . . . and then there are the B-Sides. These are the books that slipped through the cracks, went unread, missed their rightful appointment with posterity....

Film Manifestos and Global Cinema Cultures is the first book to collect manifestoes from the global history of cinema, providing the first historical and theoretical account of the role played by film manifestos in filmmaking and film culture. Focusing equally on political and aesthetic...

Sodom and Gomorrah opens a new phase of In Search of Lost Time. While watching the pollination of the Duchess de Guer-mantes's orchid, the narrator secretly observes a sexual encounter between two men. "Flower and plant have no conscious will," Samuel Beckett wrote of...

In an era of climate change, deforestation, melting ice caps, poisoned environments, and species loss, many people are turning to the power of the arts and humanities for sustainable solutions to global ecological problems. Introduction to the Environmental Humanities offers a practical and accessible...

From public radio This American Life contributor and self-described "history nerd" Sarah Vowell comes a collection of humorous and personal essays investigating American history, pop culture and Buffy the Vampire Slayer.In this insightful and funny collection of personal stories Vowell travels through the American...

Why do lovers of J.R.R. Tolkien's LORD OF THE RINGS trilogy return to it again and again through their lives? Why does each rereading seem more nourishing? FRODO'S WOUND is a collection of essays that approaches these questions from various angles. It argues that...

Published in a bilingual English and Spanish edition. Winner of the 2018 Lambda Literary Award for Best LGBTQ Anthology. 2017 Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Winner for LGBT Nonfiction. CUﾉNTAMELO! began as a cover story for SF Weekly, and, eventually in 2014 with...

I Found God in Me is the first womanist biblical hermeneutics reader. In it readers have access, in one volume, to articles on womanist interpretative theories and theology as well as cutting-edge womanist readings of biblical texts by womanist biblical scholars. This book is...

Goddess of the Americas is a brilliant essay collection and an impassioned, unorthodox celebration of the Virgin of Guadalupe: mother goddess, patron saint of Mexico, protector of the downtrodden, who made her first appearance on American soil in 1531. Through a variety of forms...

When it comes to historical violence and contemporary inequality, none of us are completely innocent. We may not be direct agents of harm, but we may still contribute to, inhabit, or benefit from regimes of domination that we neither set up nor control. Arguing...

Winner of the Booker Prize. An insightful and thrilling novel about the British Empire in India during the Great Mutiny of 1857, as seen through the eyes of a young, love-struck idealist. India, 1857--the year of the Great Mutiny, when Muslim soldiers turned in...

"Bordo's sharp reading of Boleyniana and her clear affection for this proud, unusual woman make this an entertaining, provocative read."--Boston Globe Part biography, part cultural history, The Creation of Anne Boleyn is a reconstruction of Boleyn's life and an illuminating look at her very...

Postmodernism has become the buzzword of contemporary society over the last decade. But how can it be defined? In this highly readable introduction the mysteries of this most elusive of concepts are unraveled, casting a critical light upon the way we live now, from...

Marshall McLuhan was the greatest prophet of the digital age. In the 1960s, McLuhan, a Canadian literary theorist reared on Elizabethan satire and the labyrinthine novels of James Joyce, turned his attention toward the budding and befuddling electronic age. Like most prophets, McLuhan became...

American Indian Stories, first published in 1921, is a collection of childhood stories, allegorical fiction, and an essay. One of the most famous Sioux writers and activists of the modern era, Zitkala-Sa (Gertrude Bonnin) recalled legends and tales from oral tradition and used experiences...

James Joyce is one of the greatest writers in English. His first book, A Portrait of the Artist as A Young Man laid down the template for the Coming of Age novel, while his collection of short stories, Dubliners, is of perennial interest. His...