Literaturoznawstwo

Agnes's Final Afternoon imitates the protagonist of Milan Kundera's novel Immortality on the last afternoon of her life. Like all readers of fiction, Agnes steps out of the world of planned routes, responsibilities, and social self and gives herself up to the discovery of a new landscape, an experience that will transform her. Francois Ricard's essay enters into the writings of Milan Kundera in much the same way. The landscape he explores includes a chain of ten novels, composed between 1959 and 1999, and two books containing one of the most lucid reflections on the...

As pastors of one of New York City's largest churches, Reverend Floyd Flake and his wife, Reverend M. Elaine McCollins Flake, are frequently sought after by those in need of guidance. Throughout their ministry, the Flakes have drawn from a distinguished array of stories, letters, hymns, narratives, and poems -- from James Baldwin and Maya Angelou to Arthur Ashe and Colin Powell -- to inspire families to live ethically in an often unethical world. Now, with Practical Virtues, they've gathered their favorites into a single, indispensable collection, paired with spiritual exercises...

Over the course of sixty years, Alfred Kazin's writings confronted virtually all of our major imaginative writers, from Emerson to Emily Dickinson to James Wright and Joyce Carol Oates -- including such unexpected figures as Lincoln, William James, and Thorstein Veblen. This son of Russian Jews wrote out of the tensions of the outsider and the astute, outspoken leftist -- or, as he put it, "the bitter patriotism of loving what one knows." Editor Ted Solotaroff hasselected material from Kazin's three classic memoirs to accompany his critical writings. Alfred Kazin's America...

Poker is much more than just a popular game. It is a world unto itself, populated with a multitude of colorful characters: professionals and amateurs, hustlers and dreamers. This royal flush of a collection brings together short stories, essays, poems, and excerpts from novels by a host of renowned writers -- from the Wild West to present day -- who have mined their personal experience of the game. Entertaining and enlightening, you'll want to ante up for Read 'Em and Weep.

With pieces by ...

Nelson Algren
Andy Bellin
Anthony Holden
Katy...

From the acclaimed bestselling author of Sushi for Beginners and Angels comes a collection of personal essays on shopping, writing, moviemaking, motherhood and all the assorted calamities involved in being a savvy woman in the new millennium.

Her novels are read and adored by millions around the world, and with Under the Duvet, Marian Keyes tackles the world of nonfiction. These are her collected pieces: regular bulletins from the woman writing under the covers.

Marian loves shoes and her LTFs (Long-Term Friends), hates realtors and lost luggage, and...

A verse translation of the first great narrative poem in the English language that captures the feeling and tone of the original.

Inspired by a landmark exhibition mounted by the British Museum in 1963 to celebrate five eventful centuries of the printed word, Nicholas A. Basbanes offers a lively consideration of writings that have -made things happen- in the world, works that have both nudged the course of history and fired the imagination of countless influential people.

In his fifth work to examine a specific aspect of book culture, Basbanes also asks what we can know about such figures as John Milton, Edward Gibbon, John Locke, Isaac Newton, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Adams, Frederick Douglass,...

A paperback original, Bloom's stand-alone introduction to The Best Poems of the English Language.

A notable feature of Harold Bloom's poetry anthology The Best Poems English Language is his lengthy introductory essay, here reprinted as a separate book. For the first time Bloom gives his readers an elegant guide to reading poetry--a master critic's distillation of a lifetime of teaching and criticism. He tackles such subjects as poetic voice, the nature of metaphor and allusion, and the nature of poetic value itself. Bloom writes -the work of great poetry is to aid...

Long before there were creative-writing workshops and degrees, how did aspiring writers learn to write? By reading the work of their predecessors and contemporaries, says Francine Prose.

In Reading Like a Writer, Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters. She reads the work of the very best writers—Dostoyevsky, Flaubert, Kafka, Austen, Dickens, Woolf, Chekhov—and discovers why their work has endured. She takes pleasure in the long and magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of...

For more than 150 years, academics have questioned how William Shakespeare of Stratford--a man with limited schooling who apparently never traveled abroad--wrote such a rich body of work said to draw on the largest vocabulary of any writer in the English language. Motivated by scholarship, Shakespeare historian Brenda James set out to uncover the truth behind literature's greatest mystery.

The Truth Will Out is the culmination of James's search, a book five years in the making that details the intensive research, painstaking deciphering, and remarkable historical detection...

Traditionally, women share their secrets with their hairdressers. But what about their manicurists, masseurs, chi gong teachers, and tattoo artists? In Damage Control, women wax poetic about the experts and gurus who help them love themselves, sharing stories of everything from friendships born in the make-up chair to the utter dismay of a truly horrible haircut.

Minnie Driver finally meets a Frenchman who understands her hair . . . and tries to teach her not to hate it.

Marian Keyes remembers the blow-dry that pushed her over the edge.

Francesca Lia Block tells...

During a period of twenty years--from his start as a young writer for H. L. Mencken's classic pulp magazine The Black Mask in the early 1930s, through the publication of his novels The Big Sleep and Farewell, My Lovely, to his career as a Hollywood screenwriter in the 1940s--Raymond Chandler kept a series of private notebooks.

Drawn from those journals, The Notebooks of Raymond Chandler offers an intimate view of the writer at work, revealing early ideas, descriptions, and anecdotes that would later be used in The Long Goodbye, The Blue...