Literaturoznawstwo

A Gate Enables passage between what is inside and what is outside, and the connection poetry forges between inner and outer lives is the fundamental theme of these nine essays.

Nine Gates begins with a close examination of the roots of poetic craft in "the mind of concentration" and concludes by exploring the writer's role in creating a sense of community that is open, inclusive and able to bind the individual and the whole in a way that allows each full self-expression. in between, Nine Gates illumines the nature of originality, translation, the various strategies...

Poetry has the power to move and challenge the reader. It can intensify or even celebrate misery, be cynical or wry, or just laugh outright in an outrageous way. Poetry is as serious and antic as life, and yet reading modern poetry can be shocking to our sense of what language is or must be.

In A Grain of Poetry, Herbert Kohl presents a series of guideposts to help everyone read poetry and discover those poems that inform and inspire them. In clear, direct language, he covers all of the essential-but often unchartedpaths to understanding poetry: form and structure, line breaks and...

Mark Twain was a figure larger than fife: massive in talent, eruptive in temperament, unpredictable in his actions. He crafted stories of heroism, adventure, tragedy, and comedy that reflected the changing America of the time, and he tells his own story--which includes sixteen pages of photos--with the same flair he brought to...

A delightful excursion through the Yiddish language, the culture it defines and serves, and the fine art of complaint

Throughout history, Jews around the world have had plenty of reasons to lament. And for a thousand years, they've had the perfect language for it. Rich in color, expressiveness, and complexity, Yiddish has proven incredibly useful and durable. Its wonderful phrases and idioms impeccably reflect the mind-set that has enabled the Jews of Europe to survive a millennium of unrelenting persecution . . . and enables them to kvetch about it

Michael...

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...

William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of wild supposition arranged around scant facts. With a steady hand and his trademark wit, Bill Bryson sorts through this colorful muddle to reveal the man himself.

Bryson documents the efforts of earlier scholars, from today's most respected academics to eccentrics like Delia Bacon, an American who developed a firm but unsubstantiated conviction that her namesake, Francis Bacon, was the true author of Shakespeare's plays....

A distinctive collection of more than 90 effective poetry-writing exercises combined with corresponding essays to inspire writers of all levels.

The classic reference work--an invaluable sourcebook for poets and readers