Literary Criticism - General

It's the summer of 1979. A fifteen-year-old boy listens to WNEW on the radio in his bedroom in Brooklyn. A monotone voice (it's the singer's) announces into dead air in between songs "The Talking Heads have a new album, it's called Fear of Music"...

A moving reflection on a subject that touches us all, by the bestselling author of Claire of the Sea LightEdwidge Danticat's The Art of Death: Writing the Final Story is at once a personal account of her mother dying from cancer and a deeply...

Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich of Russia (1878-1918) was born the youngest son of Tsar Alexander III, ruler of the mightiest empire on earth. Upon the premature death of his elder brother Grand Duke George in 1899, Michael was thrust into the spotlight as the...

Alaska's perch at the geographic corner of civilization isn't all wilderness and reality TV. There's a darker side too. Above the 49th parallel some of the nation's highest rates of alcoholism, suicide, and violent crime can be found. While it can easy to write...

In a volume that has become a standard text in Irish studies and serves as a course-friendly alternative to the Field Day anthology, editors Maureen O'Rourke Murphy and James MacKillop survey thirteen centuries of Irish literature, including Old Irish epic and lyric poetry, Irish...

What can books do for us? Is reading useful? Is it therapeutic? Canit make us happy? Can it provide us with the spiritual resourcesnecessary to shield ourselves from adversity? Can literature beprescribed? Does it benefit both body and soul? Science increasinglyacknowledges the benefits of...

Literary Nonfiction. Women's Studies. Memoir. Cultural Criticism. In THE WORD PRETTY Elisa Gabbert brings together humor and observational intelligence to create a roving and curious series of lyrical essays on writing, reading, and living. Combining elements of criticism, meditation, and personal essay, this book...

"Books differ from all other propaganda media... because one single book can significantly change the reader's attitude and action to an extent unmatched by the impact of any other single medium... this is, of course, not true of all books at all times and...

b 'in this life, even if you don't ask for much you still end up with bugger all!' /b In a run-down quarter of Paris, Gervaise Macquart struggles to earn a living and support her family. She earns a pittance washing other people's dirty...

"A Meteor of Intelligent Substance" "Something was Missing in our Culture, and Here It Is" "Liberties sure is needed in these times."In a short time since its launch, Liberties - A Journal of Culture and Politics, a quarterly, has become essential reading for those...

An elegant introduction to one of America's most complex and influential writers. From his childhood in a family of leading American intellectuals through his mature life as a major American man of letters, Henry James (1843-1916) created a unique body of fiction that represents...

Graywolf reissues one of its most successful essay collections with two new essays and a new foreword by Charles Baxter As much a rumination on the state of literature as a technical manual for aspiring writers, Burning Down the House has been enjoyed by...

The Tempest is one of the most suggestive, yet most elusive of all Shakespeare's plays, and has provoked a wide range of critical interpretations. It is a magical romance, yet deeply and problematically embedded in seventeenth-century debates about authority and power. In this updated...

Time Regained, the final volume of In Search of Lost Time, begins in the bleak and uncertain years of World War I. Years later, after the war's end, Proust's narrator returns to Paris and reflects on time, reality, jealousy, artistic creation, and the raw...

A selection of essays on writing and reading by the master short-fiction writer Lydia Davis Lydia Davis is a writer whose originality, influence, and wit are beyond compare. Jonathan Franzen has called her "a magician of self-consciousness," while Rick Moody hails her as the...

This book is about the tension between how singular the manifestation of love is and what we assume, often wrongly, about the idea of togetherness. To know the difference means to know the heart of the other. To know the heart of man is,...

Literary Nonfiction. Translated by Lindsay Turner. Ryoko Sekiguchi's THE PRESENT VOICE is a series of meditations on the voice, the body, media, mortality, and loss timely and important for our moment of exile, global displacement, and social distance.Author: Ryoko SekiguchiISBN-10: 1734691115ISBN-13: 9781734691115Publisher: Threadsuns PressLanguage:...

Focusing on immigration, colonialism, and the death of the speaker's infant daughter, Proof of Stake: An Elegy, Charles Valle's debut collection, details how "[t]here is an emotional debt accrued/ In grief, compounded daily by wordless songs." "It's 2019 and there's a man who wants...

A year into the global pandemic, Gene Fendt repositions the attention of the Western world on a literary classic that bears a vital perspective. Presently, civilization cannot allow itself to think about being better. First it has to survive. Referencing Thomas Merton's claim that...

A collection of pieces on politically engaged fiction of Sartre's day, including works by Andr Gorz and Paul Nizan. 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...

Literary Nonfiction. Thomas Pynchon's cult detective novel, Inherent Vice, depicts drug-addled private investigator Doc Sportello, a leftover of 1960s idealism, on an errant quest to decipher the disappearance of a real estate tycoon. As in his other books, Pynchon imagines a counterforce of marginalized...

Ways of Seeing is a key art-historical work that continues to provoke widespread debate. It is comprised of seven different essays, three of which are pictorial and the other containing texts and images. Berger first examines the relationship between seeing and knowing, discussing how...

The past is what happened. History is what we remember and write about that past, the narratives we craft to make sense out of our memories and their sources. But what does it mean to look at the past and to remember that "nothing...

'The wise writer, I think, writes for the youth of his own generation, the critic of the next, and the schoolmasters of ever afterward.' Following the education and young life of Amory Blaine, from indulged only child to disillusioned war veteran, This Side of...

Literary Nonfiction. This is an intimate, stunning look at the torturous relationship of two writers: Marjorie Worthington and William Seabrook. A renowned writer on the exotic and the occult, Seabrook was an extraordinary figure from the 1920s to the 1940s who traveled widely and...

Winner of the American Sociological Association's Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award (1999)Winner of the Jessie Bernard Award for Feminist Sociology (1993)In this collection of essays, sociologist Dorothy E. Smith develops a method for analyzing how women (and men) view contemporary society from specific gendered...

Author: Gertrude SteinISBN-10: 0679724648ISBN-13: 9780679724643Publisher: VintageLanguage: EnglishPublished: 03/17/1990Pages: 736Format: PaperbackWeight: 1.18lbsSize: 8.06h x 5.26w x 1.21d

"Bob Cover was and remains the dominant voice of his generation among legal scholars. These essays, each one magnificent in itself, are, when taken together, even more important. The wisdom they impart is forever." --Guido Calabresi, Dean and Sterling Professor of Law, Yale University...

The "Guermantes Way," in this the third volume of In Search of Lost Time, refers to the path that leads to the Duc and Duchess de Guermantes's ch teau near Combray. It also represents the narrator's passage into the rarefied "social kaleidoscope" of the...

A wide-ranging and refreshingly up-to-date anthology of primary readings, Critical Theory: A Reader for Literary and Cultural Studies, edited by Robert Dale Parker, presents a provocative mix of contemporary and classic essays in critical theory. From the foundational ideas of Marx and Freud to...

A collection of meditations like polished stones -- painstakingly worded, tough-minded, yet partial to mystery, and peerless when it comes to injecting larger resonances into the natural world. -- Kirkus ReviewsHere, in this compelling assembly of writings, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard explores the...

SLIM CONFESSIONS is an image-text about digital intimacy and visceral material. A work of autotheory, the book lays in parallel the history of slime as a vehicle for horror and entertainment with personal encounters with quotidian slime in the human and animal worlds. At...

Literary Nonfiction. Art. In Satires, the Roman poet Horace poses the question: What forbids us to tell the truth, laughing? Why not approach teaching art history the same way? What forbids us from comparing Egyptian Triad sculptures to the music videos of Houston rapper...

What does it mean today to experience a work of art? Where can we turn in search of the genuine, the sincere, the truly accomplished? And even if we were to find them, would we know how to acknowledge their value? The essays in...

Naguib Mahfouz's haunting novella of post-revolutionary Egypt combines a vivid pychological portrait of an anguished man with the suspense and rapid pace of a detective story.After four years in prison, the skilled young thief Said Mahran emerges bent on revenge. He finds a world...

The study of Paul and his letters can be exciting, challenging, and life-changing, but only if it is done well and only if students achieve more than a basic familiarity with the subject. This is exactly what Pauline experts Bruce W. Longenecker and Todd...

Humans have long turned to gardens--both real and imaginary--for sanctuary from the frenzy and tumult that surrounds them. Those gardens may be as far away from everyday reality as Gilgamesh's garden of the gods or as near as our own backyard, but in their...

A meditation on the meaning of text-image collaboration, from the author of Sprawl and Margaret the FirstAuthor Danielle Dutton's A Picture Held Us Captive asks what it means for a writer to work "with" someone or something else--to make art in dialogue with an...

A window onto one of the most consequential friendships in philosophical history, that of Sartre and Camus--and on its end. 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...

'This is, in fact, not what you were looking for; but it's much more interesting' Terry Pratchett Much loved for its wit and wisdom since 1870, Brewer's Dictionary of Phrase and Fable takes you on a captivating adventure through its trademark blend of language,...

A brief, powerful analysis of three major twentieth-century writers: Dos Passos, Nabokov, and Faulkner. 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...

What is the origin of music? In the last few decades this centuries-old puzzle has been reinvigorated by new archaeological evidence and developments in the fields of cognitive science, linguistics, and evolutionary theory. In this path-breaking book, renowned musicologist Gary Tomlinson draws from these...

A reissue, with a new introduction by Fl穗euse author Lauren Elkin, of Martha Gellhorn's enduring collection of war reportage, The Face of WarAuthor: Martha GellhornISBN-10: 0802128742ISBN-13: 9780802128744Publisher: Grove PressLanguage: EnglishPublished: 10/16/2018Pages: 352Format: PaperbackWeight: 0.95lbsSize: 8.20h x 5.40w x 1.60d

In June 1929, the distinguished poet Robinson Jeffers--along with his wife Una and their twelve-year-old twin sons Donnan and Garth--set sail for Ireland, their first stop on a seven-month journey throughout the British Isles. During extended stays in Ireland, Scotland, and England, all four...

Although its early films featured racial caricatures and exclusively Caucasian heroines, Disney has, in recent years, become more multicultural in its filmic fare and its image. From Aladdin and Pocahontas to the Asian American boy Russell in Up, from the first African American princess...

A personal glimpse into the life of writer, journalist, war correspondent, adventurer Ernest Hemingway, ranging from experiences in the Spanish Civil War and World War II to his passion for bullfighting and first safari in Africa. Spanning the years 1920 to 1956, this priceless...

First published in 1919, Within a Budding Grove was awarded the Prix Goncourt, bringing the author immediate fame. In this second volume of In Search of Lost Time, the narrator turns from the childhood reminiscences of Swann's Way to memories of his adolescence. Having...

Considered one of the most important works of one of France's foremost philosophers, and long-awaited in English, The Logic of Sense begins with an extended exegesis of Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland. Considering stoicism, language, games, sexuality, schizophrenia, and literature, Deleuze determines the status...

By turns, an elegy, a celebration, and a social history, The Last Fine Time is a tour de force of lyrical style. Verlyn Klinkenborg chronicles the life of a family-owned restaurant in Buffalo, New York, from its days as a prewar Polish tavern to...

A major contribution to the growing body of Tolkien scholarship With the release of Peter Jackson's The Lord of the Rings movie trilogy and forthcoming film version of The Hobbit, J. R. R. Tolkien's popularity has never been higher. In Green Suns and Fa...