Into the Open is a philosophical and literary inquiry into the deeper meanings of genius. What precisely do we mean when we describe someone this way? What legacy do we invoke when we apply this term?
To address this question, Benjamin Taylor here explores how three great minds--Walter Pater, Paul Valry, and Sigmund Freud--viewed a figure widely considered the first great modern genius, Leonardo da Vinci. For each of these great thinkers, Da Vinci is of central importance because for each the received idea of genius has ceased to be a romantic certitude or sacred truth and...
Into the Open is a philosophical and literary inquiry into the deeper meanings of genius. What precisely do we mean when we describe someone...
"I hungrily read the book through in three nights, as though I'd stumbled upon a lost Bellow masterpiece only recently unearthed." -Philip Roth
A literary milestone in its own right, this selection of correspondence connects us as never before to one of the greatest writers of our time. Saul Bellow was winner of the Pulitzer Prize, three National Book Awards, and the Nobel Prize in Literature. He also wrote marvelously acute, unsparing, tender, ferocious, hilarious, and wise letters throughout his long life (1915-2005). Including letters to William Faulkner, John Cheever, Ralph Ellison,...
"I hungrily read the book through in three nights, as though I'd stumbled upon a lost Bellow masterpiece only recently unearthed." -Philip Roth
A lively, elegantly concise historic tour of Italy's city by the bay
An invaluable addition to the art of literary travel writing, Naples Declared presents an informative and compulsively readable account of three thousand years of Naples history. From the catacombs of San Gennaro to the luminous paintings of Caravaggio to the ruins of Pompeii in nearby Campania, renowned author Benjamin Taylor takes readers on a stroll around the city Italians lovingly call Il Cratere. Gracefully written and full of good humor, wisdom, and amusing anecdotes, Naples Declared is a...
A lively, elegantly concise historic tour of Italy's city by the bay
An invaluable addition to the art of literary travel writing, ...
An arresting new study of the life, times, and achievement of one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century
"Taylor's endeavor is not to explain the life by the novel or the novel by the life but to show how different events, different emotional upheavals, fired Proust's imagination and, albeit sometimes completely transformed, appeared in his work. The result is a very subtle, thought-provoking book."--Anka Muhlstein, author of Balzac's Omelette and Monsieur Proust's Library
Marcel Proust came into his own as a novelist...
An arresting new study of the life, times, and achievement of one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century
The principal object of this Foreword is to inform the expert Folkloreist and the case-hardened Mythologist (comparative or otherwise) that the following pages are intended for those who, being neither expert nor case-hardened, come under that gracious and catholic term-general reader. The writer addresses not the scholiast, but the ordinary person who likes to read about what he has not time to study. Notice: This Book is published by Historical Books Limited (www.publicdomain.org.uk) as a Public Domain Book, if you have any inquiries, requests or need any help you can just send an email to...
The principal object of this Foreword is to inform the expert Folkloreist and the case-hardened Mythologist (comparative or otherwise) that the follow...
