Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Books & Reading

For More Than Forty Years, the acclaimed Paris Review interviews have been collected in the Writers at Work series. The Modern Library relaunches the series with the first of its specialized collections -- interviews with sixteen women novelists, poets, and playwrights, all offering rich commentary on the art of writing and on the opportunities and challenges a woman writer faces in contemporary society.

33,000 PAGES
44 MILLION WORDS
10 BILLION YEARS OF HISTORY
1 OBSESSED MAN

To fill the ever-widening gaps in his Ivy League education, A.J. Jacobs sets for himself the daunting task of reading all thirty-two volumes of the Encyclopaedia Britannica. His wife, Julie, tells him it's a waste of time, his friends believe he is losing his mind, and...

The forerunner of today's book clubs, nineteenth-century literary societies provided a lively social and intellectual forum where people could gather and discuss books, cultural affairs, and current events. In Come, bright Improvement Heather Murray explores the literary societies of Ontario between 1820 and 1900 - some of which are still in existence today - and examines the extent to which they mirrored or challenged contemporary social, political, and intellectual trends.

Based on a wealth of original research with periodicals and local archival materials, Murray traces...

Erasmus' Familiar Colloquies grew from a small collection of phrases, sentences, and snatches of dialogue written in Paris about 1497 to help his private pupils improve their command of Latin. Twenty years later the material was published by Johann Froben (Basel 1518). It was an immediate success and was reprinted thirty times in the next four years. For the edition of March 1522 Erasmus began to add fully developed dialogues, and a book designed to improve boys' use of Latin (and their deportment) soon became a work of literature for adults, although it retained traces of its...

Examining nine Asian Canadian and Asian American narratives, Eleanor Ty explores how authors empower themselves, represent differences, and re-script their identities as 'visible minorities' within the ideological, imaginative, and discursive space given to them by dominant culture. In various ways, Asian North Americans negotiate daily with 'birthmarks, ' their shared physical features marking them legally, socially, and culturally as visible outsiders, and paradoxically, as invisible to mainstream history and culture.

Ty argues that writers such as Denise Chong, Shirley Geok-lin...

Examining nine Asian Canadian and Asian American narratives, Eleanor Ty explores how authors empower themselves, represent differences, and re-script their identities as 'visible minorities' within the ideological, imaginative, and discursive space given to them by dominant culture. In various ways, Asian North Americans negotiate daily with 'birthmarks, ' their shared physical features marking them legally, socially, and culturally as visible outsiders, and paradoxically, as invisible to mainstream history and culture.

Ty argues that writers such as Denise Chong, Shirley Geok-lin...

Biography was Samuel Johnson's favorite among literary genres, and his Lives of the Poets is often regarded as the capstone of his career. The central place of biography in his oeuvre is explored in this collection of nine original essays by leading Johnson scholars. Varied in their focus and approach, the essays range from a philosophical overview of Johnson's notion of the relation between life and art, to a detailed reading of the Life of Milton, to a speculation on the value of the Lives in the classroom.

Emerging clearly in the essays are the dual concerns...

On a December day in 1885, Bill Barnes, a journeyman from the New York World, and Joe McCann, representing the New York Herald, faced off in a match race of Swifts, compositors who set type by hand, individually, letter by letter, with incredible accuracy and speed. McCann got off to a slow start, but at the end of the four-hour race, he joined shopfloor legends Clinton -The Kid- DeJarnatt and the -Velocipede- George Arensberg as a working-class hero. It was not the last race of its kind between Swifts, but already looming were changes both social and technological that would cause these...

New in paperback.

Of related interest:
A History of Writing in Japan, by Christopher Seeley