Showing titles in Literary History & Criticism

An intense, chilling take on life behind bars, this performance strikes a fine balance of intellectual vigor and sophistication on the one hand and so much anguished passion on the other.

Zibby Owens has become a well-known personality in the publishing world. Her infectious energy, tasteful authenticity, and smart, steadfast support of authors started in childhood, a precedent set by the profound effect books and libraries had on her own family. But after losing her closest friend on 9/11 and later becoming utterly stressed out and overwhelmed by motherhood, Zibby was forgetting what made her her. She turned to books and writing for help.

With their powerful blend of political and aesthetic concerns, Edward W. Said's writings have transformed the field of literary studies. This long-awaited collection of literary and cultural essays, the first since Harvard University Press published The World, the Text, and the Critic in 1983...

Le Guin’s sharp and witty voice is on full display in this collection of twenty-four essays, revised by the author a decade after its initial publication in 1979. The collection covers a wide range of topics and Le Guin’s origins as a writer, her advocacy for science fiction and fantasy as mediums for true literary exploration, the writing of her own major works such as A Wizard of Earthsea and The Left Hand of Darkness, and her role as a public intellectual and educator. 

Ben-Hur: A Tale of the Christ is an epic novel of revenge, redemption, and faith. Judah Ben-Hur, a Jewish prince, is falsely accused of treason and enslaved. Rising from hardship, he seeks vengeance against his betrayer but ultimately encounters the transformative power of Christ.

In The Wife of Bath, Marion Turner tells the fascinating story of where Chaucer’s favourite character came from, how she related to real medieval women, and where her many travels have taken her since the fourteenth century, from Falstaff and Molly Bloom to #MeToo and Black Lives Matter.

Every Day I Read provides many quiet moments for introspection and reflection, encourages book-lovers to explore what reading means to each of us. While this is a book about books, at its heart is an attitude to life, one outside capitalism and climbing the corporate ladder. Readers and non-readers will take away something from it, including a treasure trove of book recommendations blended seamlessly within.

From the best-selling author of The Professor and the Madman, The Map That Changed the World, and Krakatoa comes a truly wonderful celebration of the English language and of its unrivaled treasure house, the Oxford English Dictionary. Writing with marvelous brio, Winchester first serves up a...

Edited by bestselling anthologist John Joseph Adams, LIGHTSPEED is a Hugo Award-winning, critically-acclaimed digital magazine. In its pages, you'll find science fiction from near-future stories and sociological SF to far-future, star-spanning SF. Plus there's fantasy from epic sword-and-sorcery and contemporary urban tales to magical realism, science-fantasy, and folk tales. Each month, LIGHTSPEED brings you a mix of original short stories and flash fiction featuring a variety of authors, from the bestsellers and award-winners you already know to the best new voices you haven't heard yet. ...

Bram Stoker, despite having a name nearly as famous as his legendary undead count, has remained a puzzling enigma. Now, in this psychological and cultural portrait, David J. Skal exhumes the inner world and strange genius of the writer who conjured an undying cultural icon.

Best friends Katie and Frankie discuss all things Keeper of the Lost Cities: including shipping, analysis, and more. Icon made by the lovely @yukonfox on Tumblr!

Daphne A. Brooks explores more than a century of music archives to examine the critics, collectors, and listeners who have determined perceptions of Black women on stage and in the recording studio. How is it possible, she asks, that iconic artists such as Aretha Franklin and Beyonce exist simultaneously at the center and on the fringe of the culture industry? Liner Notes for the Revolution offers a startling new perspective on these acclaimed figures—a perspective informed by the overlooked contributions of other Black women concerned with the work of their musical peers.

Eccentric and reclusive, Emily Dickinson wrote poetry that reflects the richness of her interior world and the peculiar beauty of her inner vision. During her lifetime, her poetry was considered too unusual to be publishable, but after her death in 1885, Dickinson achieved posthumous recognition as one of the great poetic voices of the 19th century. This collection, read by Alexandra O'Karma, includes commentary and some of Dickinson's letters as well as 75 of her over 900 poems, including such favorites as "Because I Could Not Stop for Death," "'Hope' Is the Thing with Feathers," "There Is No Frigate like a Book," and "There's a Certain Slant of Light."

From the Author of the Best Selling Stan Lee Lied - Your Handy Guide to Every Lie in the Origins of Marvel Comics comes Ditko & Romita vs Lee - The Origins of the Amazing Spider-Man - answering the long debated question of 'Who Really Created Spider-Man?' In June of 1962, Marvel Comics released Amazing Fantasy #15, featuring the first appearance of Spider-Man. A lot has been written and said about this creation, as his popularity grew and grew, until he became one of the most popular superheroes in the world. Here we examine the TRUTH, as to who actually created Spider-Man. Filled with ...

Dame Harriet Walter, renowned for her wonderful portrayals in Succession and Killing Eve, among others, is one of Britain's most esteemed Shakespearean actors. Now, having played most of Shakespeare's female characters, audaciously, she lets them speak their minds. With new parts for thirty Shakespearean women, written in 'Shakespearean' verse and prose, Harriet Walter goes between the lines of the plays to let us hear what she imagines - sometimes playfully and sometimes searchingly - these women were really thinking.

What does it take to escape the plotlines mapped onto us? Searching for clues in the work of her literary foremothers, Lipson untangles what it means to be a girl, a woman, a lover, a partner, a daughter, and a mother in a world all too ready to reduce us to stock characters. 

Li Po (AD 701-762) lived in T'ang Dynasty China, but his influence has spanned the centuries: the pure lyricism of his poems has awed readers in China and Japan for over a millennium, and through Ezra Pound’s translations, Li Po became central to the modernist revolution in the West. However ethereal in spirit, his poems remain grounded in the everyday experience we all share. He wrote 1,200 years ago, half a world away, but in his poems we see our world transformed.

Between 1948 and 1961, Ernest Hemingway and A. E. Hotchner traveled together, fished the waters off Cuba, hunted in Idaho, and ran with the bulls in Pamplona. Everywhere they went, they talked. For 14 years, Hotchner and Hemingway shared their thoughts and as Hemingway reminisced about his childhood, recalled the Paris literary scene of the 20s, and recounted the real events that lay behind his fiction, Hotchner took it all down.

APPENDIX N: The Literary History of Dungeons & Dragons is a detailed and comprehensive investigation of the various works of science fiction and fantasy that game designer Gary Gygax declared to be the primary influences on his seminal role-playing game, Dungeons & Dragons. It is a deep intellectual dive into the literature of SF/F's past that will fascinate any serious role-playing gamer or fan of classic science fiction and fantasy. Author Jeffro Johnson, an expert role-playing gamer, accomplished Dungeon Master and three-time Hugo Award Finalist, critically reviews all 43 works and ...

In Twice upon a Time, the third volume in The L.M. Montgomery Library, Benjamin Lefebvre collects and discusses over two dozen stories from across Montgomery’s career as a short fiction writer, many of them available in book form for the first time.