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The Stephen King Companion: Four Decades of Fear from the Master of Horror
By George Beahm. 2015
The Stephen King Companion is an authoritative look at horror author King's personal life and professional career, from Carrie to…
The Bazaar of Bad Dreams. King expert George Beahm, who has published extensively about Maine's main author, is your seasoned guide to the imaginative world of Stephen King, covering his varied and prodigious output: juvenalia, short fiction, limited edition books, bestselling novels, and film adaptations. The book is also profusely illustrated with nearly 200 photos, color illustrations by celebrated "Dark Tower" artist Michael Whelan, and black-and-white drawings by Maine artist Glenn Chadbourne.Supplemented with interviews with friends, colleagues, and mentors who knew King well, this book looks at his formative years in Durham, when he began writing fiction as a young teen, his college years in the turbulent sixties, his struggles with early poverty, working full-time as an English teacher while writing part-time, the long road to the publication of his first novel, Carrie, and the dozens of bestselling books and major screen adaptations that followed.For fans old and new, The Stephen King Companion is a comprehensive look at America's best-loved bogeyman.Young Romantics: The Shelleys, Byron, and Other Tangled Lives
By Daisy Hay. 2010
Young Romantics tells the story of the interlinked lives of the young English Romantic poets from an entirely fresh perspective—celebrating…
their extreme youth and outsize yearning for friendship as well as their individuality and political radicalism. The book focuses on the network of writers and readers who gathered around Percy Bysshe Shelley and the campaigning journalist Leigh Hunt. They included Lord Byron, John Keats, and Mary Shelley, as well as a host of fascinating lesser-known figures: Mary Shelley's stepsister and Byron's mistress, Claire Clairmont; Hunt's botanist sister-in-law, Elizabeth Kent; the musician Vincent Novello; the painters Benjamin Haydon and Joseph Severn; and writers such as Charles and Mary Lamb, Thomas Love Peacock, and William Hazlitt. They were characterized by talent, idealism, and youthful ardor, and these qualities shaped and informed their politically oppositional stances—as did their chaotic family arrangements, which often left the young women, despite their talents, facing the consequences of the men's philosophies.In Young Romantics, Daisy Hay follows the group's exploits, from its inception in Hunt's prison cell in 1813 to its disintegration after Shelley's premature death in 1822. It is an enthralling tale of love, betrayal, sacrifice, and friendship, all of which were played out against a background of political turbulence and intense literary creativity.Founding Grammars: How Early America's War Over Words Shaped Today's Language
By Rosemarie Ostler. 2015
Who decided not to split infinitives? With whom should we take issue if in fact, we wish to boldly write…
what no grammarian hath writ before? In Founding Grammars, Rosemarie Ostler delves into the roots of our grammar obsession to answer these questions and many more. Standard grammar and accurate spelling are widely considered hallmarks of a good education, but their exact definitions are much more contentious - capable of inciting a full-blown grammar war at the splice of a comma, battles readily visible in the media and online in the comments of blogs and chat rooms. With an accessible and enthusiastic journalistic approach, Ostler considers these grammatical shibboleths, tracing current debates back to America's earliest days, an era when most families owned only two books - the Bible and a grammar primer. Along the way, she investigates colorful historical characters on both sides of the grammar debate in her efforts to unmask the origins of contemporary speech. Linguistic founding fathers like Noah Webster, Tory expatriate Lindley Murray, and post-Civil War literary critic Richard Grant White,all play a featured role in creating the rules we've come to use, and occasionally discard, throughout the years. Founding Grammars is for curious readers who want to know where grammar rules have come from, where they've been, and where they might go next.Character: The History of a Cultural Obsession
By Marjorie Garber. 2020
What is “character”?Since at least Aristotle’s time, philosophers, theologians, moralists, artists, and scientists have pondered the enigma of human character.…
In its oldest usage, “character” derives from a word for engraving or stamping, yet over time, it has come to mean a moral idea, a type, a literary persona, and a physical or physiological manifestation observable in works of art and scientific experiments. It is an essential term in drama and the focus of self-help books. In Character: The History of a Cultural Obsession, Marjorie Garber points out that character seems more relevant than ever today, omnipresent in discussions of politics, ethics, gender, morality, and the psyche. References to character flaws, character issues, and character assassination and allegations of “bad” and “good” character are inescapable in the media and in contemporary political debates. What connection does “character” in this moral or ethical sense have with the concept of a character in a novel or a play? Do our notions about fictional characters catalyze our ideas about moral character? Can character be “formed” or taught in schools, in scouting, in the home? From Plutarch to John Stuart Mill, from Shakespeare to Darwin, from Theophrastus to Freud, from nineteenth-century phrenology to twenty-first-century brain scans, the search for the sources and components of human character still preoccupies us. Today, with the meaning and the value of this term in question, no issue is more important, and no topic more vital, surprising, and fascinating. With her distinctive verve, humor, and vast erudition, Marjorie Garber explores the stakes of these conflations, confusions, and heritages, from ancient Greece to the present day.The Wound and the Bow contains seven essays by "The greatest literary critic of the twentieth century.” -New York magazine.Combining…
biographical and critical sketches, Edmund Wilson writes brilliantly on a wide-range of authors including Dickens, Kipling, Edith Wharton, Ernest Hemingway, Joyce, Jacques Casanova, and Sophocles. "In the best tradition of literary criticism… combines exact information with shrewd and searching penetration into the personal life of the artist."-The New York TimesVita Sackville-West: Selected Writings
By Vita Sackville-West. 2003
Aristocrat, novelist, essayist, traveler, and lover of Virginia Woolf, Vita Sackville-West lived a fascinating and daring life on the periphery…
of the Bloomsbury circle. She wrote in an astounding variety of genres, including travel narrative, historical and literary studies, poetry, fiction, and essays, and is probably best known or her novels, The Edwardians and All Passion Spent, and incomparable writings about English country houses and gardens. Here, for the first time, is an anthology that represents the full expanse of her interests and styles. Over half of the works, including intimate diaries and a dream notebook, have never been published. Edited by a foremost expert on the Bloomsbury circle, Vita Sackville-West: Selected Writings provides the best and most accessible introduction to this unique writer.English Literary Renaissance, volume 54 number 2 (Spring 2024)
By English Literary Renaissance. 2024
This is volume 54 issue 2 of English Literary Renaissance. English Literary Renaissance (ELR) is a leading journal for new…
research in Tudor and Stuart literature, including the Sidneys, Spenser, Shakespeare, Jonson, Donne, Milton, and their many contemporaries. In addition to critical work, ELR also publishes review essays and occasional editions of short significant manuscripts, such as letters, legal documents with literary relevance, and poetry.Dictionary of the Undoing
By John Freeman. 2019
For John Freeman—literary critic, essayist, editor, poet, “one of the preeminent book people of our time” (Dave Eggers)—it is the…
rare moment when words are not enough. But in the wake of the election of 2016, words felt useless, even indulgent. Action was the only reasonable response. He took to the streets in protest, and the sense of community and collective conviction felt right. But the assaults continued—on citizens’ rights and long-held compacts, on the core principles of our culture and civilization, and on our language itself. Words seemed to be losing the meanings they once had and Freeman was compelled to return to their defense. The result is his Dictionary of the Undoing.From A to Z, “Agitate” to “Zygote,” Freeman assembled the words that felt most essential, most potent, and began to build a case for their renewed power and authority, each word building on the last. The message that emerged was not to retreat behind books, but to emphatically engage in the public sphere, to redefine what it means to be a literary citizen.With an afterword by Valeria Luiselli, Dictionary of the Undoing is a necessary, resounding cri de coeur in defense of language, meaning, and our ability to imagine, describe, and build a better world.Salinger: A Biography
By Paul Alexander. 1999
J.D. Salinger was one of the twentieth century's greatest writers. He was also one of its most elusive. After making…
his mark on the American literary scene, Salinger retreated to a small town in New Hampshire where he hoped to hide his life away from the world. With dogged determination, however, journalist and biographer Paul Alexander captured Salinger's story in this, the only complete biography of Holden Caulfield's creator published to date. Using the archives at Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Columbia, NYU and the New York Public Library as well as research in New York and New Hampshire, Alexander has created a great biography of Salinger that's further enriched by interviews with some of the greatest literary figures of our time: George Plimpton, Gay Talese, Ian Hamilton, Harold Bloom, Roger Angell, A. Scott Berg, Robert Giroux, Ved Mehta, Gordon Lish and Tom Wolfe."A riveting memoir of years of living dangerously."—Kirkus ReviewsFor the countless readers who have admired Philip Caputo's classic memoir of…
Vietnam, A Rumor of War, here is his powerful recounting of his life and adventures, updated with a foreword that assesses the state of the world and the journalist's art. As a journalist, Caputo has covered many of the world's troubles, and in Means of Escape, he tells the reader in moving and clear-eyed prose how he made himself into a writer, traveler, and observer with the nerve to put himself at the center of the world's conflicts. As a young reporter he investigated the Mafia in Chicago, earning acclaim as well as threats against his safety. Later, he rode camels through the desert and enjoyed Bedouin hospitality, was kidnapped and held captive by Islamic extremists, and was targeted and hit by sniper fire in Beirut, with memories of Vietnam never far from the surface. And after it all, he went into Afghanistan. Caputo's goal has always been to bear witness to the crimes, ambitions, fears, ferocities, and hopes of humanity. With Means of Escape, he has done so."Something Urgent I Have to Say to You": The Life and Works of William Carlos Williams
By Herbert Leibowitz. 2011
Herbert Leibowitz's "Something Urgent I Have to Say to You" provides a new perspective on the life and poetry of…
the doctor poet William Carlos Williams, a key American writer who led one of the more eventful literary lives of the twentieth century. Friends with most of the contemporary innovators of his era-Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and Louis Zukofsky, among others-Williams made a radical break with the modernist tradition by seeking to invent an entirely fresh and singularly American poetic, whose subject matter derived from the everyday lives of the citizens and poor immigrant communities of northern New Jersey. His poems mirrored both the conflicts of his own life and the convulsions that afflicted American society-two world wars, a rampaging flu pan-demic, and the Great Depression.Leibowitz's biography offers a compelling description of the work that inspired a seminal, controversial movement in American verse, as well as a rounded portrait of a complicated man: pugnacious and kindly, ambitious and insecure, self-critical and imaginative. "Something Urgent I Have to Say to You" is both a long-overdue assessment of a major American writer and an entertaining examination of the twentieth-century avant-garde art and poetry scene, with its memorable cast of eccentric pioneers, including Marcel Duchamp, Man Ray, Marianne Moore, and Gertrude Stein.The Book Collectors: A Band of Syrian Rebels and the Stories That Carried Them Through a War
By Delphine Minoui. 2016
A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR: NPR"An urgent and compelling account of great bravery and passion." —Susan OrleanAward-winning journalist Delphine…
Minoui recounts the true story of a band of young rebels, a besieged Syrian town, and an underground library built from the rubble of warReading is an act of resistance.Daraya is a town outside Damascus, the very spot where the Syrian Civil War began. Long a site of peacefulresistance to the Assad regimes, Daraya fell under siege in 2012. For four years, no one entered or left, and aid was blocked. Every single day, bombs fell on this place—a place of homes and families, schools and children, now emptied and broken into bits.And then a group searching for survivors stumbled upon a cache of books in the rubble. In a week, they had six thousand volumes; in a month, fifteen thousand. A sanctuary was born: a library where people could escape the blockade, a paper fortress to protect their humanity.The library offered a marvelous range of books—from Arabic poetry to American self-help, Shakespearean plays to stories of war in other times and places. The visitors shared photos and tales of their lives before the war, planned how to build a democracy, and tended the roots of their community despite shell-shocked soil. In the midst of the siege, the journalist Delphine Minoui tracked down one of the library’s founders, twenty-three-year-old Ahmad. Over text messages, WhatsApp, and Facebook, Minoui came to know the young men who gathered in the library, exchanged ideas, learned English, and imagined how to shape the future, even as bombs kept falling from above. By telling their stories, Minoui makes a far-off, complicated war immediate and reveals these young men to be everyday heroes as inspiring as the books they read. The Book Collectors is a testament to their bravery and a celebration of the power of words.Dear Fahrenheit 451: Love and Heartbreak in the Stacks
By Annie Spence. 2018
A librarian's laugh-out-loud funny, deeply moving collection of love letters and breakup notes to the books in her life.If you…
love to read, and presumably you do since you’ve picked up this book (!), you know that some books affect you so profoundly they forever change the way you think about the world. Some books, on the other hand, disappoint you so much you want to throw them against the wall. Either way, it’s clear that a book can be your new soul mate or the bad relationship you need to end. In Dear Fahrenheit 451, librarian Annie Spence has crafted love letters and breakup notes to the iconic and eclectic books she has encountered over the years. From breaking up with The Giving Tree (a dysfunctional relationship book if ever there was one), to her love letter to The Time Traveler’s Wife (a novel less about time travel and more about the life of a marriage, with all of its ups and downs), Spence will make you think of old favorites in a new way. Filled with suggested reading lists, Spence’s take on classic and contemporary books is very much like the best of literature—sometimes laugh-out-loud funny, sometimes surprisingly poignant, and filled with universal truths. A celebration of reading, Dear Fahrenheit 451 is for anyone who loves nothing more than curling up with a good book…and another, and another, and another!Talking to Strangers: Selected Essays, Prefaces, and Other Writings, 1967–2017
By Paul Auster. 2019
Includes new early writings: &“This vibrant collection fully displays Auster&’s wit and humanity . . . a fascinating glimpse into the mind of…
a celebrated author.&” —Publishers Weekly (starred review) Beginning with a short philosophical meditation written when he was twenty and concluding with nine political pieces that take on such issues as homelessness, 9/11, and the link between soccer and war, the forty-four pieces gathered in this volume offer a wide-ranging view of celebrated novelist Paul Auster&’s thoughts on a multitude of classic and contemporary writers, the high-wire exploits of Philippe Petit, how to improve life in New York City (in collaboration with visual artist Sophie Calle), and the long road he has traveled with his beloved manual typewriter. While writing for the New York Review of Books and other publications in the mid-1970s, young poet Auster gained recognition as an astute literary critic with essays on Laura Riding, John Ashbery, Samuel Beckett, Franz Kafka, Paul Celan, and others. By the late seventies and early eighties, as the poet was transforming himself into a novelist, he maintained an active double life by continuing his work as a translator and editing the groundbreaking anthology The Random House Book of Twentieth-Century Poetry. His prefaces to some of these books are included in Talking to Strangers, among them a heart-wrenching account of Stéphane Mallarmé&’s response to the death of his eight-year-old son, Anatole. In recent years, Auster explored the work of American artists spanning periods and disciplines: the notebooks of Nathaniel Hawthorne, the films of Jim Jarmusch, the writings of painter-collagist-illustrator Joe Brainard, and the three-hit shutout thrown by journeyman right-hander Terry Leach of the Mets. Also included here are several rediscovered works originally delivered in public: a 1982 lecture on Edgar Allan Poe, a 1999 blast against New York mayor Rudolph Giuliani, and one of the funniest introductions a poetry reading ever heard in the state of New Jersey. A collection of soaring intelligence and deepest humanity including never-before-published material, Talking to Strangers is an essential book by &“the most distinguished American writer of [his] generation . . . indeed its only author . . . with any claim to greatness&” (The Spectator).Age of Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction
By David G. Hartwell. 1984
Age of Wonders: Exploring the World of Science Fiction gives an insider's view of the strange and wonderful world of…
science fiction, by one of the most respected editors in the field, David G. Hartwell (1941-2016).David G. Hartwell edited science fiction and fantasy for over twenty years. In that time, he worked with acclaimed and popular writers such as Robert A. Heinlein, Poul Anderson, Frank Herbert, Roger Zelazny, Robert Silverberg, Gene Wolfe, Nancy Kress, L.E. Modesitt, Terry Bisson, Lisa Goldstein, and Philip Jose Farmer, and discovered hot new talents like Kathleen Ann Goonan and Patrick O'Leary. Now in Age of Wonder, Hartwell describes the field he loved, worked in, and shaped as editor, critic, and anthologist.Like those other American art forms, jazz, comics, and rock 'n' roll, science fiction is the product of a rich and fascinating subculture. Age of Wonder is a fascinating tour of the origins, history, and culture of the science fiction world, written with insight and genuine affection for this wonder-filled literature, and addressed to newcomers and longtime SF readers alike.Age of Wonder remains "the landmark work" Roger Zelazny called the first edition. The book contains sections that offer advice on teaching courses in science fiction, disquisitions on the controversial subgenre of hard SF, and practical explanations of the economics of publishing science fiction and fantasy. Age of Wonder still lives up to Hugo and Nebula Award winner Vonda McIntyre's description: "An entertaining and provocative book that will inspire discussion and argument for years to come."At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.As any reader of Jo Walton's Among Others might guess, Walton is both an inveterate reader of SF and fantasy,…
and a chronic re-reader of books. In 2008, then-new science-fiction mega-site Tor.com asked Walton to blog regularly about her re-reading—about all kinds of older fantasy and SF, ranging from acknowledged classics, to guilty pleasures, to forgotten oddities and gems. These posts have consistently been among the most popular features of Tor.com. Now this volumes presents a selection of the best of them, ranging from short essays to long reassessments of some of the field's most ambitious series.Among Walton's many subjects here are the Zones of Thought novels of Vernor Vinge; the question of what genre readers mean by "mainstream"; the underappreciated SF adventures of C. J. Cherryh; the field's many approaches to time travel; the masterful science fiction of Samuel R. Delany; Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children; the early Hainish novels of Ursula K. Le Guin; and a Robert A. Heinlein novel you have most certainly never read. Over 130 essays in all, What Makes This Book So Great is an immensely readable, engaging collection of provocative, opinionated thoughts about past and present-day fantasy and science fiction, from one of our best writers. At the Publisher's request, this title is being sold without Digital Rights Management Software (DRM) applied.Noch Zukunft haben: Zum Werk Karoline von Günderrodes (Neue Romantikforschung #5)
By Frederike Middelhoff, Martina Wernli. 2024
Die literatur- und kulturwissenschaftliche Forschung zu Karoline von Günderrode (1780–1806) setzt seit gut zwei Jahrzehnten neue Akzente. Das Werk der…
Autorin wird in diesem Zuge als singulärer Beitrag zur Literatur-, Kultur- und Geistesgeschichte der Romantik profiliert, während der ‚Mythos Günderrode‘, der sich auf Leben, Lieben und vor allem Ableben der Autorin konzentriert, fundamental hinterfragt wird. Der vorliegende Band schließt an diese Re-Lektüren und neuen Perspektiven an. Er präsentiert wichtige Untersuchungen zu bislang wenig beleuchteten Facetten von Günderrodes Texten, die u.a. Poetologie, Ästhetik sowie ideengeschichtliche oder politische Aspekte umfassen, und legt zudem eine kommentierte Auswahl bislang kaum bekannter Briefe der Autorin in Transkription und Abbildung vor.From one of the most brilliant writers and thinkers of the twentieth century comes a collection of "passionate, probing, controversial"…
essays (The Atlantic) on topics ranging from race relations in the United States to the role of the writer in society.Told with Baldwin's characteristically unflinching honesty, this &“splendid book&” (The New York Times) offers illuminating, deeply felt essays along with personal accounts of Richard Wright, Norman Mailer and other writers. &“James Baldwin is a skillful writer, a man of fine intelligence and a true companion in the desire to make life human. To take a cue from his title, we had better learn his name.&” —The New York TimesThe Cross of Redemption: Uncollected Writings (Vintage International Ser.)
By James Baldwin. 2010
From one of the most brilliant and provocative literary figures of the past century—a collection of essays, articles, reviews, and…
interviews that have never before been gathered in a single volume.&“An absorbing portrait of Baldwin&’s time—and of him.&” —New York Review of BooksJames Baldwin was an American literary master, renowned for his fierce engagement with issues haunting our common history. In The Cross of Redemption we have Baldwin discoursing on, among other subjects, the possibility of an African-American president and what it might mean; the hypocrisy of American religious fundamentalism; the black church in America; the trials and tribulations of black nationalism; anti-Semitism; the blues and boxing; Russian literary masters; and the role of the writer in our society.Prophetic and bracing, The Cross of Redemption is a welcome and important addition to the works of a cosmopolitan and canonical American writer who still has much to teach us about race, democracy, and personal and national identity. As Michael Ondaatje has remarked, &“If van Gogh was our nineteenth-century artist-saint, Baldwin [was] our twentieth-century one.&”The thirteenth-century poet Gonzalo de Berceo is the first named author of Old Spanish letters and the most prolific contributor…
to the emergence of the body of learned vernacular verse known as the mester de clerecía. In the Doorway of All Worlds focuses on the four hagiographies Berceo produced as a unified body of poetic expression and world-building. Robin M. Bower traces the poet’s intricate juxtaposition of contraries to shed light on a poetic world that will innovate a deceptively simple poetic vernacular and elevate its capacity to express nuance, power, and mystery. The book examines the entanglements that bind formal and lexical choices, the inscription of performance sites and audiences, and problematic source authority. It argues that Berceo’s elaboration of a poetic vernacular was wholly enmeshed in the immediate human, experiential world and the diverse cultural, religious, linguistic, and literary contexts that framed it. The book also highlights how Berceo invented a literary vernacular that befits the spoken idiom not only for the crafting of learned fictions, but for giving linguistic shape to the ineffable. In the Doorway of All Worlds ultimately reveals how Berceo freed the meanings trapped in relics, shrines, and the impenetrable texts from which he translated the saints to circulate in a new time.