Product Description: The New York Times called Malcolm Lowry's 1947 novel Under the Volcano "One of the towering novels of this century," and the Modern Library ranked the book number eleven on its list of the one hundred Best English-language novels of the twentieth century...read more

Product Description: How We Speak to One Another is some of the most engaging evidence we’ve got that the essay is going strong. Here, essayists talk back to each other, to the work they love and the work that disquiets them, and to the very basic building blocks of what we understand “essay” to be...read more

Product Description: The edited volume Motifs in Language and Text is the first collection of original research in the area of the quantitative analysis of motifs. It hosts a collection of contributions that give insight to linguistic motifs theoretically across different languages, text genres, and structural levels, such as lexical, syntactic, semantic etc...read more

Product Description: How does literature work? And what does it mean? How does it relate to the world: to politics, to history, to the environment? How do we analyse and interpret a literary text, paying attention to its specific poetic and fictitious qualities? This wide-ranging introduction helps students to explore these and many other essential questions in the study of literature, criticism and theory...read more

Product Description: “[A] masterpiece . . . Denby is especially astute in describing what it takes to capture teenagers’ attention. . . . [A] wonderful book.” ---The Huffington PostIt’s no secret that millions of American teenagers, caught up in social media, television, movies, and games, don’t read seriously---they associate sustained reading with duty or work, not with pleasure...read more

Product Description: “[A] masterpiece . . . Denby is especially astute in describing what it takes to capture teenagers’ attention. . . . [A] wonderful book.” ---The Huffington PostIt’s no secret that millions of American teenagers, caught up in social media, television, movies, and games, don’t read seriously---they associate sustained reading with duty or work, not with pleasure...read more

Product Description: F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby is widely considered to be the greatest American novel ever written, its exploration of decadence, idealism, social upheaval, and excess having been described as a cautionary tale regarding the American Dream...read more

For anyone who has ever identified with a hero or heroine, been seduced by a strong opening sentence, or been powerfully moved by a story’s end, How to Write Like Tolstoy is a thought-provoking journey inside the minds of the world’s most accomplished storytellers, from Shakespeare to Stephen King.“I have tried, as far as possible using the words of the authors themselves, to explain their craft, aiming to take readers on a journey into the concerns, techniques, tricks, flaws, and, occasionally, obsessions of our most luminous writers.”—from the Preface Behind every acclaimed work of literature is a trove of heartfelt decisions. The best authors put painstaking—sometimes obsessive—effort into each element of their stories, from plot and character development to dialogue and point of view. What made Nabokov choose the name Lolita? Why did Fitzgerald use first-person narration in The Great Gatsby? How did Kerouac, who raged against revision, finally come to revise On the Road? Veteran editor and teacher Richard Cohen draws on his vast reservoir of a lifetime’s reading and his insight into what makes good prose soar. Here are Gabriel García Márquez’s thoughts on how to start a novel (“In the first paragraph you solve most of the problems with your book”); Virginia Woolf offering her definition of style (“It is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can’t use the wrong words”); and Vladimir Nabokov on the nature of fiction (“All great novels are great fairy tales”). Cohen has researched the published works and private utterances of our greatest authors to discover the elements that made their prose memorable. The result is a unique exploration of the act and art of writing that enriches our experience of reading both the classics and the best modern fiction. Evoking the marvelous, the famous, and the irreverent, he reveals the challenges that even the greatest writers faced—and shows us how they surmounted them. Praise for How to Write Like Tolstoy“The highest compliment one can pay How to Write Like Tolstoy is that it provokes an overwhelming urge to read and write, to be in dialogue or even doomed competition with the greatest creative minds . . . .  That Mr. Cohen is an editor, that his love of literature comes in large part from awe in the presence of better writers than he, is no small matter. His love is infectious, and regardless of how well he ends up teaching us to write, that is miracle enough.”—Wall Street Journal“[A] perfect tasting menu . . . the homage of a passionate reader to the writers who have provided his ‘main pastime.’ ”—The Sunday Times (U.K.) “This book is a wry, critical friend to both writer and reader. It is filled with cogent examples and provoking statements. You will agree or quarrel with each page, and be a sharper writer and reader by the end.”—Hilary Mantel“These twelve essays are like twelve perfect university lectures on the craft of writing fiction. The professor—or, in this case, author—succeeds in being not only knowledgeable but also interesting, charming, and engaging.”—Library Journal (starred review)“Insightful . . . [Cohen] escorts his readers to Iris Murdoch for sage counsel on launching a novel, to Salman Rushdie for shrewd guidance on developing an unreliable narrator, to Rudyard Kipling for a cagey hint on creating memorable minor characters, and to Leo Tolstoy for a master’s help in transforming personal experience into fictional art.”—Booklist

Product Description: From the author of the beloved New York Times best-selling The End of Your Life Book Club, an inspiring and magical exploration of the power of books to shape our lives in an era of constant connectivity. Why is it that we read? Is it to pass time? To learn something new? To escape from reality? For Will Schwalbe, reading is a way to entertain himself but also to make sense of the world, to become a better person, and to find the answers to the big (and small) questions about how to live his life...read more

Product Description: Ideas in Profile: Small Introductions to Big TopicsAt the heart of criticism lies one question: What do you think of it? Every time we comment on an artefact, whether a poem, a play, a painting, a novel or a piano concerto, we are acting as critics, making our own judgements and interpretations...read more

Product Description: Roy Peter Clark, one of America's most influential writing teachers, draws writing lessons from 25 great texts.Where do writers learn their best moves? They use a technique that Roy Peter Clark calls X-ray reading, a form of reading that lets you penetrate beyond the surface of a text to see how meaning is actually being made...read more

Product Description: During the Cold War, the editor of Time magazine declared, "A good citizen is a good reader." As postwar euphoria faded, a wide variety of Americans turned to reading to understand their place in the changing world. Yet, what did it mean to be a good reader? And how did reading make you a good citizen?In Reading America, Kristin L...read more

Product Description: In The Writer in the Well: On Misreading and Rewriting Literature, Gary Weissman argues that the analysis of literature is fundamentally a writing-based practice, a practice in which the process of writing functions as a way of discovering one’s interpretation (or “rewriting”) of a text...read more

Product Description: The second of three volumes charting the history of the modernist magazine in Britain, North America, and Europe, this collection offers the first comprehensive study of the wide and varied range of "little magazines" which were so instrumental in introducing the new writing and ideas that came to constitute literary and cultural modernism...read more

Product Description: More than 600 quotations from centuries of observations on writing, reading and books. Published for those who agree with Jason Epstein that “actual books will continue to be irreplaceable depositories of our collective wisdom.” Contributors include Eudora Welty, Patti Smith, Henry Miller, John Updike, Cicero, Groucho Marx, George Orwell, Marcel Proust, William Faulkner, E...read more

Product Description: 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...read more

Product Description: Short Story Criticism assembles critical responses to the writings of the worlds most renowned short fiction writers and provides supplementary biographical context and bibliographic material to guide the reader to a greater understanding of the genre and its creators...read more

Product Description: Short Story Criticism assembles critical responses to the writings of the worlds most renowned short fiction writers and provides supplementary biographical context and bibliographic material to guide the reader to a greater understanding of the genre and its creators...read more

Product Description: From Charles Johnson—a National Book Award winner, Professor Emeritus at University of Washington, and one of America’s preeminent scholars on literature and race—comes an instructive, inspiring guide to the craft and art of writing...read more

Dirda's latest volume collects fifty of his witty and wide-ranging reflections on literary journalism, book collecting, and the writers he loves. Reaching from the classics to the post-moderns, his allusions dance from Samuel Johnson, Ralph Waldo Emerson and M. F. K. Fisher to Marilynne Robinson, Hunter S. Thompson, and David Foster Wallace. Dirda's topics are equally diverse: literary pets, the lost art of cursive writing, book inscriptions, the pleasures of science fiction conventions, author photographs, novelists in old age, Oberlin College, a year in Marseille, writer's block, and much more, not to overlook a few rants about Washington life and American culture. As admirers of his earlier books will expect, there are annotated lists galore of perfect book titles, great adventure novels, favorite words, essential books about books, and beloved children's classics, as well as a revealing peek at the titles Michael keeps on his own nightstand. Funny and erudite, occasionally poignant or angry, Browsings is a celebration of the reading life, a fan's notes, and the perfect gift for any booklover. "

Product Description: Book Review Index provides quick access to reviews of books, periodicals, books on tape and electronic media representing a wide range of popular, academic and professional interests. The up-to-date coverage, wide scope and inclusion of citations for both

Product Description: Each volume of Short Stories For Students contains easily accessible and content-rich discussions of the literary and historical background of 13-15 works from various cultures and time periods. Each story covered in this new resource was specially chosen by an advisory panel of teachers and librarians -- experts who have helped us define the information needs of students and ensure the age-appropriateness of this references content...read more

Product Description: Childrens Literature Review assembles critical responses to the writings of the worlds most renowned childrens writers and provides supplementary biographical context and bibliographic material to guide the reader to a greater understanding of the genre and its creators...read more