Kategoria BISAC: Literary Criticism >> Books & Reading

The novel is alive and well, thank you very much

For the last fifteen years, whenever a novel was published, John Freeman was there to greet it. As a critic for more than two hundred newspapers worldwide, the onetime president of the National Book Critics Circle, and the former editor of Granta, he has reviewed thousands of books and interviewed scores of writers. In How to Read a Novelist, which pulls together his very best profiles (many of them new or completely rewritten for this volume) of the very best novelists of our time, he shares with us what he's...

What do we mean when we say that a novel's conclusion "feels right"? How did feeling, form, and the sense of right and wrong get mixed up, during the nineteenth century, in the experience of reading a novel? Good Form argues that Victorian readers associated the feeling of narrative form--of being pulled forward to a satisfying conclusion--with inner moral experience. Reclaiming the work of a generation of Victorian "intuitionist" philosophers who insisted that true morality consisted in being able to feel or intuit the morally good, Jesse Rosenthal shows that when Victorians...

Histories of the book often move straight from the codex to the digital screen. Left out of that familiar account are nearly 150 years of audio recordings. Recounting the fascinating history of audio-recorded literature, Matthew Rubery traces the path of innovation from Edison's recitation of "Mary Had a Little Lamb" for his tinfoil phonograph in 1877, to the first novel-length talking books made for blinded World War I veterans, to today's billion-dollar audiobook industry.

The Untold Story of the Talking Book focuses on the social impact of audiobooks, not just the...

At long last, your book is done. You've handed off the final manuscript to your editor, had your photo taken for the book jacket, and emptied your celebratory bottle of wine. Time to start on the next book? No. It's time to start planning the marketing and promotion for this one

Gary's Guide to Successful Book Signings will walk you through your launch party, book signings, talks, and conventions. It covers everything from the basics (how do you sign a book?) to the advanced (what should be in your exhibitor kit at a book show?) replete with tips, tricks, sample...

Written for and read on a computer screen, digital fiction pursues its verbal, discursive and conceptual complexity through the digital medium. It is fiction whose structure, form and meaning are dictated by the digital context in which it is produced and requires analytical approaches that are sensitive to its status as a digital artifact. "Analyzing Digital Fiction "offers a collection of pioneering analyses based on replicable methodological frameworks. Chapters include analyses of hypertext fiction, Flash fiction, Twitter fiction and videogames with approaches taken from narratology,...

Fic is a groundbreaking exploration of the history and culture of fan writing and what it means for the way we think about reading, writing, and authorship. It's a story about literature, community, and technology--about what stories are being told, who's telling them, how, and why.

With provocative discussions from both professional and fan writers, on subjects from Star Trek to The X-Files and Buffy the Vampire Slayer to Harry...

Until the close of the Second Vatican Council in 1965, the stance of the Roman Catholic Church toward the social, cultural, economic, and political developments of the twentieth century was largely antagonistic. Naturally opposed to secularization, skeptical of capitalist markets indifferent to questions of justice, confused and appalled by new forms of high and low culture, and resistant to the social and economic freedom of women in all of these ways the Catholic Church set itself up as a thoroughly anti-modern institution. Yet, in and through the period from World War I to Vatican II,...