Literary Studies

What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it wil...

John Berger was one of the most influential thinkers and writers of postwar Europe. As a novelist, he won the Booker Prize in 1972, donating half h...

Vivian Gornick’s writing has always explored the hard truths of existence: the nature of human loneliness, and the struggle to love, work, and conn...

Bird by Bird is the Bible of writing guides--a wry, honest, down-to-earth book that has never stopped selling since it was first published in the U...

In the introduction to her new collection of essays, Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Reread, Michiko Kakutani writes: “In a world riven by politi...

Don't know if it's, like, okay to say 'like'? Are your apostrophe's in the wrong place? Want to make fewer not less grammatical mistakes? Then do n...

A biography of two troublesome words. Isn't it ironic? Or is it? Never mind, I'm just being sarcastic (or am I?). Irony and sarcasm are two of the ...

This first full-length biography of the Nobel Laureate to appear in a quarter century explores John Steinbeck's long apprenticeship as a writer str...

Vol. 1 of the brand new MONKEY will be 152 pages of full color and printed at a larger trim size, allowing you to enjoy MONKEY like never before. T...

The Greek myths are among the world's most important cultural building blocks and they have been retold many times, but rarely do they focus on the...

Translated by Lara Vergnaud Reading is an act of resistance. Daraya is a town outside Damascus, the very spot where the Syrian Civil War began. Lon...

This is the story of our love affair with books, whether we arrange them on our shelves, inhale their smell, scrawl in their margins or just curl u...

What is humour? Why do we laugh? And why is the root of a good joke almost always error? Good jokes, bad jokes, clever jokes, dad jokes? The desire...

The Language Lover's Puzzle Book is a book of more than 100 surprising and entertaining puzzles that celebrate the amazing diversity of the world o...

In this wide-ranging collection of thought-provoking interviews -- including her first and last -- Toni Morrison (whom President Barrack Obama call...

A pathbreaking book of literary criticism is now reissued with a new introduction by Lisa Appignanesi that speaks to how The Madwoman in the Attic ...

Born of Tamil and Teochew parents, he embraced the Protestant faith late in his life. He has a self-confessed fetish for Yeats and Pound and yet co...

A lavishly illustrated exploration of the places that inspired and shaped the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, creator of Middle-earth. This new book from r...

Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader is Vivian Gornick's celebration of passionate reading, of returning again and again to the books ...

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) was famously driven by his passion for God, for art - and for books. Vincent's life with books is examined here chapte...