In The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, master anthologist John Gross brings together a delectable smorgasbord of literary tales, offering striking new insight into some of the most important writers in history. Many of the anecdotes here are funny, others are touching, outrageous, sinister, inspiring, or downright weird. They show writers from Chaucer to Bob Dylan acting both unpredictably and deeply in character. The range is wide--this is a book which finds room for Milton and Shakespeare, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, Kurt Vonnegut and P. G. Wodehouse, Chinua Achebe and Salman...

Parodies come in all shapes and sizes. There are broad parodies and subtle parodies, ingenious imitations and knockabout spoofs, scornful lampoons and affectionate pastiches. All these varieties, and many others, appear in this delightful anthology, which has been hailed as "delightful" (Wall Street Journal), "enjoyable" (The New Yorker), and "sparkling" (The Financial Times). The classics of the genre are all here, but so are scores of lesser known but scarcely less brilliant works. At every stage there are surprises. Proust visits Chelsea, Yeats re-writes "Old King Cole," Harry Potter...

The essay is one of the richest of literary forms. Its most obvious characteristics are freedom, informality, and the personal touch--though it can also find room for poetry, satire, fantasy, and sustained argument.
All these qualities, and many others, are on display in The Oxford Book of Essays. The most wide-ranging collection of its kind to appear for many years, it includes 140 essays by 120 writers: classics, curiosities, meditations, diversions, old favorites, recent examples that deserve to be better known. A particularly welcome feature is the amount of space allotted to American...

From limericks to social satire, The Oxford Book of Comic Verse offers a remarkable collection of outstanding light poetry. John Gross has brought together the finest writers in the history of the English language - from Chaucer and Skelton to Shakespeare and Swift, Lord Byron to Robert Browning, Emily Dickinson to John Updike, as well as witty song lyrics from such artists as Irving Berlin and Cole Porter - offering delightful examples of their comic verse. Drawing on many different types of verse, including epigrams, street ballads, advertising jingles, clerihew, music-hall lyrics, and the...

Parodies come in all shapes and sizes. There are broad parodies and subtle parodies, ingenious imitations and knockabout spoofs, scornful lampoons and affectionate pastiches. All these varieties, and many others, appear in this delightful anthology, which has been hailed as "delightful" (Wall Street Journal), "enjoyable" (The New Yorker), and "sparkling" (The Financial Times). The classics of the genre are all here, but so are scores of lesser known but scarcely less brilliant works. At every stage there are surprises. Proust visits Chelsea, Yeats re-writes "Old King Cole," Harry Potter...