Books Reading category: 2844 books

Is there anything that Martin Amis can’t write about? In this virtuosic, career-spanning collection he takes on James Joyce and Elvis Presley, Nabokov and English football, Jane Austen and Penthouse Forum, William Burroughs and Hillary Clinton. But above all, Amis is concerned with literature, and...

Autobiographical impostures, once they come to light, appear to us as outrageous, scandalous. They confuse lived and textual identity (the person in the world and the character in the text) and call into question what we believe, what we doubt, and how we receive information. In the process, they...

“Fearless, illuminating” criticism from a New York Times–bestselling author and legendary teacher, “proving . . . that true art is moral and not trivial” (Los Angeles Times). Novelist John Gardner’s thesis in On Moral Fiction is simple: “True art is by its nature moral.” It...

Baker muses on the creative process via his obsession with John Updike.

**A COMPREHENSIVE GUIDE TO STEPHEN KING'S BESTSELLING DARK TOWER SERIES. “A valuable tool for exploring the series. Both newcomers and frequent visitors to Mid-World will be informed and delighted.”—Stephen King** The story of Roland Deschain of Gilead, the last gunslinger, and...

Winner of the 2019 International Standing Conference for the History of Education's First Book Award Drawing on a rich array of archival sources and historical detail, The Politics of 1930s British Literature tells the story of a school-minded decade and illuminates new readings of the politics...

Those who read by candlelight in centuries past left us an embarrassment of riches in stories of ghosts, werewolves, and other spooks, of lost loves and lost worlds, and of the then new world of science. This book, with its one hundred spoiler-free reviews, is your guide to many of those old tales....

Dopo tre anni 'Curarsi con i libri' torna con una nuova edizione accresciuta con oltre sessanta rimedi inediti e tanti nuovi titoli usciti negli ultimi anni. Un libro di medicina molto speciale, un vero e proprio breviario di terapie romanzesche, antibiotici narrativi, medicamenti di carta e inchiostro,...

Hamlet's Castle is both a theoretical and a practical examination of the interactions that take place in a literary classroom. The book traces the source of literature's power to the relationship between its illusional quality and its abstract meaning and relates these elements to the process by which...

In American Trajectories Warner Berthoff argues that even in the broadest cultural and historical perspective, imaginative literature (like all the arts) is a matter of individual signatures and differences. He also puts forth that there are recognizable patterns and continuities marking off what...

For 2,500 years literature has been condemned in the name of authority, truth, morality and society. But in making explicit what a society expects from literature, anti-literary discourse paradoxically asserts the validity of what it wishes to deny. The threat to literature’s continued existence, William Marx writes, is not hatred but indifference.

In this characteristically concise, witty, and lucid book, Terry Eagleton turns his attention to the questions we should ask about literature, but rarely do. What is literature? Can we even speak of "literature" at all? What do different literary theories tell us about what texts mean and do? In throwing...

G. K. Chesterton’s hilarious defense . . . of just about anything In this hodgepodge of early musings, a young G. K. Chesterton operates under the conceit that many objects in the human purview—ranging from the humdrum and mundane to the outright ridiculous—could use the advocacy of...

Phyllis Webb is a poet around whom archetypes tend to cluster: the reclusive artist; the distraught, borderline suicidal Sapphic woman poet. While on the surface she seems supremely disinterested in the public sphere, argues Stephen Collis in this celebration of her work, Webb is no domestic, as a creator or a critic. Her work sweeps across politics, philosophy, and economics.