Catalog Search Results
Author
Pub. Date
2018.
Language
English
Description
A collection of both previously unpublished works and classic essays includes discussions of recent cultural and political events, social networking, libraries, and the failure to address global warming.
Since she burst spectacularly into view with her debut novel almost two decades ago, Zadie Smith has established herself not just as one of the world's preeminent fiction writers, but also a brilliant and singular essayist. She contributes regularly...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
Two excerpts from never-before-seen notebooks offer insights into the author's literary mind and process and includes notes on her Sacramento upbringing, her life in the Gulf states, her views on prominent locals and her experiences during a formative "Rolling Stone" assignment.
"Joan Didion has always kept notebooks of overheard dialogue, observations, interviews, drafts of essays, and copies of articles. "Notes on the South" traces a road trip...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"From her creation of the first 'Approval Matrix' in New York magazine in 2004 to her Pulitzer Prize-winning columns for The New Yorker, Emily Nussbaum has known all along that what we watch is who we are. In this collection, including several substantive, never-before-published essays, Nussbaum writes about her passion for television beginning with Buffy--as she writes, a show that was so much more than its critical assessment--the evolution of female...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Bloom instructs readers in how to immerse themselves in the different literary forms." "Probing discussions of the works of writers such as William Shakespeare, Ernest Hemingway, Jane Austen, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Charles Dickens, and William Faulkner highlight the varied challenges and delights found in short stories, poems, novels, and plays. Bloom not only provides guidance on how to read a text but also illustrates what such reading...
Author
Pub. Date
2019
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “From The New Yorker’s beloved cultural critic comes a bold, unflinching collection of essays about self-deception, examining everything from scammer culture to reality television.”—Esquire
Book Club Pick for Now Read This, from PBS NewsHour and The New York Times • “A...
Book Club Pick for Now Read This, from PBS NewsHour and The New York Times • “A...
Author
Series
Publisher
HarperCollins
Pub. Date
2009
Language
English
Formats
Description
The essential collection of critical essays from a twentieth-century master and author of 1984.
As a critic, George Orwell cast a wide net. Equally at home discussing Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin, he moved back and forth across the porous borders between essay and journalism, high art and low.
A frequent commentator on literature, language, film, and drama throughout his career, Orwell turned increasingly to the critical...
As a critic, George Orwell cast a wide net. Equally at home discussing Charles Dickens and Charlie Chaplin, he moved back and forth across the porous borders between essay and journalism, high art and low.
A frequent commentator on literature, language, film, and drama throughout his career, Orwell turned increasingly to the critical...
Author
Series
Pub. Date
2020
Language
English
Formats
Description
"BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY." —Time
Volume 1 of the gripping epic masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn's chilling report of his arrest and interrogation, which exposed to the world the vast bureaucracy of secret police that haunted Soviet society. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum.
"The greatest and most powerful single indictment of a political regime ever leveled in modern times." —George
89) Little weirds
Author
Pub. Date
2019.
Language
English
Description
You may "know" Jenny Slate from her new Netflix special, "Stage Fright," or as the creator of Marcel the Shell, or as the star of "Obvious Child." But you don't really know Jenny Slate until you get bonked on the head by her absolutely singular writing style. To see the world through Jenny's eyes is to see it as though for the first time, shimmering with strangeness and possibility. As she will remind you, we live on an ancient ball that rotates around...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the writers of the Beat Generation revolutionized American literature with their iconoclastic approach to language and their angry assault on the conformity and conservatism of postwar society. They and their followers took aim at the hypocrisy and taboos of their time—particularly those involving sex, race, and class—in such provocative works as Jack Kerouac's On the Road (1957), Allen Ginsberg's "Howl"...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
From Zeus and Europa, to Diana, Pan, and Prometheus, the myths of ancient Greece and Rome seem to exert a timeless power over us. But what do those myths represent, and why are they so enduringly fascinating? Why do they seem to be such a potent way of talking about our selves, our origins, and our desires? This imaginative and stimulating Very Short Introduction goes beyond a simple retelling of the stories to explore the rich history and diverse...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
From the internationally-acclaimed author of some of this century's most breathtakingly original novels comes this posthumous collection of thirty-six literary essays that will make any fortunate reader view the old classics in a dazzling new light.
Learn why Lara, not Zhivago, is the center of Pasternak's masterpiece, Dr. Zhivago, and why Cyrano de Bergerac is the forerunner of modern-day science-fiction writers. Learn how many odysseys
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Saloon-keepers and street preachers, gypsies and steel-walking Mohawks, a bearded lady and a 93-year-old “seafoodetarian” who believes his specialized diet will keep him alive for another two decades. These are among the people that Joseph Mitchell immortalized in his reportage for The New Yorker and in four books—McSorley's Wonderful Saloon, Old Mr. Flood, The Bottom of the Harbor, and Joe Gould's Secret—that are still renowned for their...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence--including her own.
Author
Pub. Date
2022.
Language
English
Description
"Four new and revelatory essays by the author of My Brilliant Friend and The Lost Daughter. In 2020, Claire Luchette in O, The Oprah Magazine described the beloved Italian novelist Elena Ferrante as "an oracle among authors." Here, in these four crisp essays, Ferrante offers a rare look at the origins of her literary powers. She writes about her influences, her struggles, and her formation as both a reader and a writer; she describes the perils of...
Author
Language
English
Description
I took off my wedding ring for the last time--a gold band with half a line of "Morning Song" by Sylvia Plath etched inside--and for weeks afterwards, my thumb would involuntarily reach across my palm for the warm bright circle that had gone. I didn't fling the ring into the long grass, like women do in the movies, but a feeling began bubbling up nevertheless, from my stomach to my throat: it could fling my arms out. I was free ... A few years into...
Author
Publisher
Haymarket Books
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
"Changing the world means changing the story, the names, and the language with which we describe it. Calling things by their true names cuts through the lies that excuse, disguise, avoid, or encourage inaction, indifference, obliviousness in the face of injustice and violence. In this powerful and wide-ranging collection, Solnit turns her attention to battles over meaning, place, language, and belonging at the heart of the defining crises of our time....
Author
Publisher
Duke Classics
Pub. Date
2015
Language
English
Formats
Description
Want a glimpse into the mind of one of the most interesting and innovative writers of the twentieth century? In Notes on My Books, famed novelist Joseph Conrad discusses his creative process and lets loose some juicy details about the circumstances and inspirations that gave rise to timeless classics such as Lord Jim and Heart of Darkness.
Author
Publisher
HarperCollins
Pub. Date
2010
Language
English
Formats
Description
Are you tired of bland, overly earnest reading guides that discuss the same old books? Read This Next by Sandra Newman and Howard Mittlemark is the answer. A smart, irreverent, honest, and truly hilarious guide to your 500 new favorite books, Read This Next is aimed at those readers and book groups that are looking for great reading suggestions with more variety and spice than the usual book club picks—while offering food for thought and laughter...
Author
Publisher
Saqi Books
Pub. Date
2014
Language
English
Formats
Description
In Syria, culture has become a critical line of defence against tyranny. Syria Speaks is a celebration of a people determined to reclaim their dignity, freedom and self-expression. It showcases the work of over fifty artists and writers who are challenging the culture of violence in Syria. Their literature, poems and songs, cartoons, political posters and photographs document and interpret the momentous changes that have shifted the frame of reality...
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