Literary Studies

A poem seems a fragile thing. Change a word and it is broken. But poems outlive empires and survive the devastation of conquests. Celebrated author John Carey here presents a uniquely valuable anthology of verse based on a simple principle: select the one-hundred greatest poets from across the centuries, and then choose their finest poems. Ranging from Homer and Sappho to Donne and Milton, Plath and Angelou, this is a delightful and accessible introduction to the very best that poetry can off...

This book is a print on demand title. Orders of this title are expected to be fulfilled within 4 to 6 weeks upon purchase. Click here to find out more about when your print on demand title will ship. How have the fairy tales of different cultures changed over the centuries? What do they tell us about our fears and hopes? In a work that spans 2,500 years these ambitious questions are addressed by over 50 experts, each contributing their overview of a theme applied to a period in history. With ...

For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever ...

A Vertical Art gathers the expansive and spirited public lectures delivered by Simon Armitage during his acclaimed four-year tenure as Oxford University Professor of Poetry. Armitage tries to identify a 'common sense' approach to an artform that can lend itself to grand statements and vacuous gestures, questioning both the facile and obscure ends of the poetry spectrum, asserting certain fundamental qualities that separate the genre from near-neighbours such as prose and song lyrics, examini...

Despite originating over than two-and-a-half thousand years ago, Aesop's Fables are still passed on from parent to child, and are embedded in our collective consciousness. The morals we have learned from these tales continue to inform our judgements, but have the stories also informed how we regard their animal protagonists? If so, is there any truth behind the stereotypes? Are wolves deceptive villains? Are crows insightful geniuses? And could a tortoise really beat a hare in a race? In Aeso...

Science fiction is everywhere. Every day fantasy is made fact by new technologies, advancements in science and by connection and communication. Imaginings of the future allow us to reshape our understanding of all that we experience - and through classic science fiction we are better able to understand the hopes and ambitions of the past. With precision and humour Aldiss uses science fiction as a lens with which to examine some of his favourite authors and their work, the role of art and lite...

Christopher Hitchens (1949-2011) was a matchless writer, debater and humanist. Throughout his life he shone the light of reason and truth into the eyes of charlatans and hucksters, exposing falsehood and decrying hypocrisy wherever he found it. With his passing, the world lost a great soul, the written word one of its finest advocates and those who stand for freedom everywhere have lost one of their clearest voices. Arguably collects Hitchens' writing on politics, literature and religion when...

We are currently accepting pre-orders for this title. Orders of this title are expected to be fulfilled by mid-November 2021. Click here to find out more about when your pre-order will ship. Inspired by Jules Verne's hero Phileas Fogg, David Damrosch, chair of Harvard's Department of Comparative Literature and founder of Harvard's Institute for World Literature, set out to counter a pandemic's restrictions on travel by exploring eighty exceptional books from around the globe. Following a lite...

The struggles of Black Lives Matter and the attempt to achieve a new America have been challenged by the presidency of Donald Trump, a president whose time in the White House represents the latest failure of America to face the lies it tells itself about race. For James Baldwin, a similar attempt to force a confrontation with the truth of America's racism came in the wake of the Civil Rights Movement, and was answered with the murders of Medgar Evers, Malcolm X and Martin Luther King, Jr. In ...

Heather Cass White's Books Promiscuously Read is about the pleasures of reading and its power in shaping our internal lives. It advocates for a life of constant, disorderly, time-consuming reading, and encourages readers to trust in the value of the exhilaration and fascination such reading entails. Rather than arguing for the moral value of reading or the preeminence of literature as an aesthetic form, Books Promiscuously Read illustrates the irreplaceable experience of the self that reading...

An unforgettable 3,000-year-old journey - from Mesopotamian clay tablets trying to predict the future, to Tudor book-hunters and Nazi bonfires, and on into the dangers of our increasingly digital existence, Burning the Books shows how the preservation of knowledge is vital for the survival of civilization itself. Paperback: 320 PagesProduct Dimensions: 129 x 198 mmISBN: 9781529378771 Published by John Murray Press

The traditional writing workshop was established with white male writers in mind; what we call craft is informed by their cultural values. In this bold and original examination of elements of writing—including plot, character, conflict, structure, and believability—and aspects of workshop—including the silenced writer and the imagined reader—Matthew Salesses asks questions to invigorate these familiar concepts. He upends Western notions of how a story must progress. How can we rethink craft, ...

What makes "cults" so intriguing and frightening? What makes them powerful? The reason why so many of us binge Manson documentaries by the dozen and fall down rabbit holes researching suburban moms gone QAnon is because we're looking for a satisfying explanation for what causes people to join-and more importantly, stay in-extreme groups. We secretly want to know: could it happen to me? Amanda Montell's argument is that, on some level, it already has... Our culture tends to provide pretty flim...

Dante has no equal as he sings of other-worldly horror and celestial beatitude alike. Yet for all our distance from medieval theology, the Florentine poet's allegorical journey through hell, purgatory and paradise remains one of the essential works of world literature. At least fifty English language versions of the Inferno - the first part of Dante's poem - appeared in the twentieth century alone. If Dante's Divine Comedy speaks to our present condition, it is because it tells the story of E...

Dostoevsky's life was marked by brilliance and brutality. Sentenced to death as a young revolutionary, he survived mock execution and Siberian exile to live through a time of seismic change in Russia, eventually being accepted into the Tsar's inner circle. He had three great love affairs, each overshadowed by debilitating epilepsy and addiction to gambling. Somehow, amidst all this, he found time to write short stories, journalism and novels such as Crime and Punishment, The Idiot and The Bro...

Largely unknown to readers today, Sir Philip Sidney’s sixteenth-century pastoral romance Arcadia was long considered one of the finest works of prose fiction in the English language. Shakespeare borrowed an episode from it for King Lear; Virginia Woolf saw it as “some luminous globe” wherein “all the seeds of English fiction lie latent.” In Gallery of Clouds, the Renaissance scholar Rachel Eisendrath has written an extraordinary homage to Arcadia in the form of a book-length essay divided int...

Born in the United States into a secularized Hindu family, Amit Majmudar puzzled over the many religious traditions on offer, and found that the Bhagavad Gita had much to teach him with its "song of multiplicities." Chief among them is that "its own assertions aren't as important as the relationships between its characters... The Gita imagined a relationship in which the soul and God are equals"; it is, he believes, "the greatest poem of friendship... in any language." His verse translation c...

Granta 155: Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists 2 showcases a new generation of remarkable storytellers. When Granta published the first Best of Young Spanish-Language Novelists ten years ago, it presented a list of explosive talent that included Samanta Schweblin and Alejandro Zambra. Now judges Chloe Aridjis, Horacio Castellanos Moya, Rodrigo Fresan, Aurelio Major, Valerie Miles and Gaby Wood will select the brightest rising stars. Paperback: 352 PagesProduct Dimensions: 145 x 210 mmIS...

Illustrated by Chris Ofili Charlotte Higgins' spellbinding new collection will include all the most famous Greek myths, as well as many less well known but equally intriguing ones. Here are stories of the creation, of Heracles and Theseus and Perseus, the Trojan war and its origins and aftermaths, tales of Thebes and Argos and Athens. There are stories of love and desire, adventure and magic, destructive gods, helpless humans, gender-shifting characters, resourceful witches, and the origins o...

From the truths and lies we tell about ourselves to the resonant creations of fiction, stories give shape and meaning to all our lives. Both a practicing psychoanalyst and a professor of literature, Josh Cohen has long been taken with the mutual echoes between the life struggles of the consulting room and the dramas of the novel. So what might the most memorable characters in literature tell us about how to live meaningfully? In How to Live. What to Do., Cohen plots a course through the vario...

Hearing stories can help children manage their emotions, empathize with others and better understand the complex world we live in. But more importantly storytelling cultivates a rich and meaningful bond between parent and child, building intimacy and trust. In How to Tell Stories to Children, educators Silke Rose West and Joseph Sarosy distil the key ingredients for storytelling into a surprisingly simple technique for creating imaginative stories from the events, objects and activities in yo...

A naive and idealistic twenty-two-year-old from the Midwest, Adrienne Miller got her lucky break when she was hired as an editorial assistant at GQ magazine in the mid-nineties. Even if its sensibilities were manifestly mid-century-the martinis, powerful male egos, and unquestioned authority of kings-GQ still seemed the red-hot center of the literary world. It was there that Miller began learning how to survive in a man's world. Three years later, she forged her own path, becoming the first w...

Taking readers behind the scenes in the world of fiction reviewing, Inside the Critics' Circle explores the ways critics evaluate books despite the inherent subjectivity involved and the uncertainties of reviewing when seemingly anyone can be a reviewer. Drawing on interviews with critics from such venues as the New York Times, Los Angeles Times, and Washington Post, Phillipa Chong delves into the complexities of the review-writing process, including the considerations, values, and cultural a...

Salman Rushdie is celebrated as a storyteller of the highest order, illuminating deep truths about our society and culture through his gorgeous, often searing, prose. Now, in his latest collection of nonfiction, he brings together insightful and inspiring essays, criticism, and speeches that focus on his relationship with the written word, and solidify his place as one of the most original thinkers of our time. Gathering pieces written between 2003 and 2020, Languages of Truth chronicles Rush...

A vibrant collection of sharp and essential modern pieces on Vladimir Nabokov’s perennially provocative book—with original contributions from a stellar cast of prominent twenty-first century writers. In 1958, Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita was published in the United States to immediate controversy and bestsellerdom. More than sixty years later, this phenomenal novel generates as much buzz as it did when originally published. Central to countless issues at the forefront of our national discourse—a...

Bernardine Evaristo's 2019 Booker win - the first by a Black woman - was a revolutionary moment both for British culture and for her. After three decades as a trailblazing writer, teacher and activist, she moved from the margins to centre stage, taking her place in the spotlight at last. Her journey was a long one, but she made it, and she made history. Manifesto is Bernardine Evaristo's intimate and inspirational, no-holds-barred account of how she did it, refusing to let any barriers stand...

In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to the editor, Karl Miller, 'I have no critical training whatsoever, so I am forced to be more brisk and breezy than scholarly.' This collection of twenty reviews, essays and pieces of memoir from the next three decades, tells the story of what happened next. Her subjects range far and wide: Robespierre and Danton, the Hite report, Saudi Arabia where she lived for four years in the 1980s, the Bulger case,...

Readers rejoice! From Mental Floss, an online destination for more than a billion curious minds since its founding in 2001, comes the ultimate book for lovers of literature. From Americanah to War and Peace, from Chinua Achebe and Jane Austen to Jesmyn Ward and George R. R. Martin, learn surprising facts about the world's most famous novels and novelists. The Curious Reader will delight bookworms everywhere. This literary compendium from Mental Floss reveals fascinating facts about the world'...

Translated by Chris Turner Iconic French novelist, playwright, and essayist Jean-Paul Sartre is widely recognized as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and his work has remained relevant and thought-provoking through the decades. The Seagull Sartre Library now presents some of his most incisive philosophical, cultural, and literary critical essays in twelve newly designed and affordable editions. Sartre met Albert Camus in Occupied France in 1943, and from the st...

Translated by Chris Turner Iconic French novelist, playwright, and essayist Jean-Paul Sartre is widely recognized as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and his work has remained relevant and thought-provoking through the decades. The Seagull Sartre Library now presents some of his most incisive philosophical, cultural, and literary critical essays in twelve newly designed and affordable editions. In this collection of brief, insightful essays, we find ourselves f...

Translated by Chris Turner Iconic French novelist, playwright, and essayist Jean-Paul Sartre is widely recognized as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and his work has remained relevant and thought-provoking through the decades. The Seagull Sartre Library now presents some of his most incisive philosophical, cultural, and literary critical essays in twelve newly designed and affordable editions. On Poetry includes two long essays in this slim volume. The first e...

One of the most enduringly popular and controversial writers of the twentieth century, George Orwell's work is as relevant today as it was in his own lifetime. Possibly, in the age of Brexit and populism, even more so. He foresaw 'Fake News' in Nineteen Eighty Four's 'Doublethink', the creation of the EU and predicted that post-Imperial xenophobia would cause Britain to leave it. Separate from his career as a political theorist and novelist, Orwell's life is fascinating in its own right. Disi...

Translated by Chris Turner Iconic French novelist, playwright, and essayist Jean-Paul Sartre is widely recognized as one of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century, and his work has remained relevant and thought-provoking through the decades. The Seagull Sartre Library now presents some of his most incisive philosophical, cultural, and literary critical essays in twelve newly designed and affordable editions. Political Fictions includes Sartre's long foreword to Andre Gorz's ...

Haresh has honed his devising and playwrighting skills through his work with TNS and its founder and Artistic Director Alvin Tan over the past 34 years, establishing its signature focus on social issues and a research and process-driven approach to theatre-making. Reading the Room: A Playwright’s Journey breaks down TNS’ devising methodology and processes into four chapters: Devising with Communities, Devising and Verbatim Theatre, Devising and International Collaboration, Devising and Interd...

We are currently accepting pre-orders for this title. Orders of this title are expected to be fulfilled by mid-November 2021. Click here to find out more about when your pre-order will ship. An all-in-one craft guide and anthology, this is the first creative writing text to find inspiration and guidance in the diverse literary traditions of Asia. Including exemplary stories by leading writers from Japan, China, India, Singapore and beyond as well as those from Asian diasporas in Europe and Am...

Translated by John W. Schwieter Over half of the world's population is bilingual and yet few of us understand how this extraordinary, complex ability really works. How do two languages co-exist in the same brain? What are the advantages and challenges of being bilingual? How do we learn - and forget - a language? In the first study of its kind, leading expert Albert Costa shares twenty years of experience to explore the science of language. Looking at studies and examples from Canada to Franc...

In the mid-1400s, Vespasiano da Bisticci's bookshop in Florence was said to contain all the wisdom of the world. Vespasiano and his team of scribes and illuminators produced exquisite manuscripts for popes and princes across Europe, rediscovering and disseminating some of the most significant texts from classical antiquity. At his shop, the most formidable minds of the city would gather to debate these old ideas of revolutionary power. But in 1476 a new technology arrived in Florence. The con...

Every bookshop has a story. We're not talking about rooms that are just full of books. We're talking about bookshops in barns, disused factories, converted churches and underground car parks. Bookshops on boats, on buses, and in old run-down train stations. Fold-out bookshops, undercover bookshops, this-is-the-best-place-I've-ever-been-to-bookshops. Meet Sarah and her Book Barge sailing across the sea to France; meet Sebastien, in Mongolia, who sells books to herders of the Altai mountains; m...

Southern Chile was an open frontier when the beloved poet Pablo Neruda was born there in 1904. A motherless, pensive child in the wild, he began writing poems long before quitting the countryside for Santiago, where he spent his bohemian student years. From there, his memoir follows his travels as a globetrotting Chilean consul—including a stint in Spain during its civil war, and in Mexico, where he attracted attention for aiding a man suspected of conspiring to assassinate Leon Trotsky—and h...

How does poetry work? What should readers notice and look out for? Poet Lucy Newlyn demystifies the principles of the form, effortlessly illustrating key approaches and terms-all through her own original verse. Each poem exemplifies an aspect of poetic craft-but read together they suggest how poetry can evoke a whole community and its way of life in myriad ways. In a series of beautiful meditations, Newlyn guides the reader through key aspects of poetry, from sonnets and haiku to volta and sy...

'This story, like so many stories, begins with a gift. The gift, like so many gifts, was a book...' So begins the essay by Robert Macfarlane that inspired this collection. In this cornucopia of an anthology, you will find essays by some of the world's most beloved novelists, nonfiction writers, essayists and poets. 'You will see books taking flight in flocks, migrating around the world, landing in people's hearts and changing them for a day or a year or a lifetime.' 'You will see books sparki...

Shirley Jackson is one of the most important American authors of the last hundred years and among our greatest chroniclers of the female experience. This extraordinary compilation of personal correspondence has all the hallmarks of Jackson's beloved fiction: flashes of the uncanny in the domestic, sparks of horror in the quotidian, and the veins of humor that run through good times and bad. i am having a fine time doing a novel with my left hand and a long story--with as many levels as grand ...

Famed across the known world, jealously guarded by private collectors, built up over centuries, destroyed in a single day, ornamented with gold leaf and frescoes or filled with bean bags and children's drawings - the history of the library is rich, varied and stuffed full of incident. In this, the first major history of its kind, Andrew Pettegree and Arthur der Weduwen explore the contested and dramatic history of the library, from the famous collections of the ancient world to the embattled ...

We are currently accepting pre-orders for this title. Orders of this title are expected to be fulfilled by late-November 2021. Click here to find out more about when your pre-order will ship. For six decades the Penguin Modern Classics series has been an era-defining, ever-evolving series of books, encompassing works by modernist pioneers, avant-garde iconoclasts, radical visionaries and timeless storytellers. This reader's companion showcases every title published in the series so far, with ...

Known as the "patron saint of all outsiders," Simone Weil (1909-43) was one of the twentieth century's most remarkable thinkers, a philosopher who truly lived by her political and ethical ideals. In a short life framed by the two world wars, Weil taught philosophy to lycee students and organized union workers, fought alongside anarchists during the Spanish Civil War and labored alongside workers on assembly lines, joined the Free French movement in London and died in despair because she was n...

Almost as soon as it appeared, the crossword puzzle became indispensable to our lives. Invented practically by accident in 1913, when a newspaper editor at the New York World was casting around for something to fill empty column space, it became a roaring commercial success almost overnight. Ever since then, the humble puzzle has been an essential ingredient of any newspaper worth its salt. But why, exactly, are the crossword's satisfactions so sweet? Blending first-person reporting from the ...

Illustrated by Kaley Bales This compelling graphic collection features 18 women-including Jane Austen, Louisa May Alcott, Alice Dunbar Nelson, Anne Lister, and more-and asks a simple question: in a time when being a woman writer often meant being undervalued, overlooked, or pigeonholed, why did she write? Why did Jane Austen struggle to write for five years before her first novel was ever published? How did Edith Maude Eaton's writing change the narrative around Chinese immigrant workers in N...