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Author
Language
English
Description
"From leading Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro, a timely and insightful examination of what the world's greatest dramatist can teach us about life in an America riven by conflict. The United States has always been divided, but Americans from all walks of life have also always shared a deep affinity for the plays William Shakespeare, even if their meaning has been fiercely contested. For well over two centuries now, Americans of all stripes--presidents...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Preeminent Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro shows how the tumultuous events in England in 1606 affected Shakespeare and shaped the three great tragedies he wrote that year--King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. In the years leading up to 1606, since the death of Queen Elizabeth and the arrival in England of her successor, King James of Scotland, Shakespeare's great productivity had ebbed, and it may have seemed to some that his prolific...
Author
Publisher
Random House
Pub. Date
[2017]
Language
English
Description
The story of how literature shaped world history, in sixteen acts-from Alexander the Great and the Iliad to Don Quixote and Harry Potter In this groundbreaking book, Martin Puchner leads us on a remarkable journey through time and around the globe to reveal the powerful role stories and literature have played in creating the world we have today. Puchner introduces us to numerous visionaries as he explores sixteen foundational texts selected from...
Author
Publisher
Penguin Press
Pub. Date
2020.
Language
English
Description
"W.H. Auden once wrote that "art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead." In his brilliant and compulsively readable new treatise BREAKING BREAD WITH THE DEAD, distinguished professor and author Alan Jacobs shows us that engaging with the great writings of the past might help us live less anxiously in the present. Today we are battling too much information, a society changing at lightning speed, algorithms aimed at shaping our every move,...
Author
Publisher
W. W. Norton & Company
Pub. Date
[2022]
Language
English
Description
"Scholars and laymen alike have long projected their fantasies onto the great expanse of the global North, whether it be as a frozen no-man's-land, an icy realm of marauding Vikings, or an unspoiled cradle of prehistoric human life. Bernd Brunner reconstructs the encounters of adventurers, colonists, and indigenous communities that led to the creation of a northern "cabinet of wonders" and imbued Scandinavia, Iceland, and the Arctic with a perennial...
Author
Series
Publisher
New York Review Books
Pub. Date
[2017]
Language
English
Description
"In this sparkling essay collection, Joachim Kalka delves into the mythos of the nineteenth century, exploring our fascination with its "auratic gaslight," its mingling of romanticism and modernity, enlightenment and darkness. "To gaze back at the nineteenth century is to confront an era which. easily inspires a kind of sentimental scorn. And yet in this era's depths lie all the things that grin at us today with the Medusa's gaze of the unsolvable...
Author
Publisher
W. W. Norton & Company
Pub. Date
[2015]
Language
English
Description
"A collection of essays from a "great poet-critic-intellectual" (Daily Beast). In these brilliant, wide-ranging essays, published over the last seven years in the New Republic, The New Yorker, and elsewhere, renowned American critic Adam Kirsch explores the intersection of literature with larger questions about ideas, history, and society. Kirsch has been described as "elegant and astute . . . [a] critic of the very first order" (Michiko Kakutani,...
Author
Publisher
Cambridge University Press
Pub. Date
1996.
Language
English
Description
Pearl Buck was one of the most renowned, interesting, and controversial figures ever to influence American and Chinese cultural and literary history - yet she remains one of the least studied, honored, or remembered. Peter Conn's Pearl S. Buck: A Cultural Biography sets out to reconstruct Buck's life and significance, and to restore this remarkable woman to visibility.
Born into a missionary family, Pearl Buck lived the first half of her life in...
Publisher
The Library of America
Pub. Date
[2013?]
Language
English
Description
Who were the original hipsters? In this dazzling collection, Glenn O'Brien provides a kaleidoscopic guided tour through the margins and subterranean tribes of mid-twentieth century America-the worlds of jazz, of disaffected postwar youth, of those alienated by racial and sexual exclusion, of outlaws and drug users creating their own dissident networks. Whether labeled as Bop or Beat or Punk, these outsider voices ignored or suppressed by the mainstream...
Author
Publisher
Counterpoint Press
Pub. Date
2014.
Language
English
Description
"Thomas Christensen's previous title 1616 : The World in Motion looked at a single year in the age of early maritime globalism--PW gave it a starred review, calling it 'a stunning overview of the nascent modern world.' By contrast his new gorgeously illustrated River of Ink ranges widely across time and cultures and offers what amounts to a magisterial history of literacy. The book's title refers to the sacking of Baghdad in 1258 when the Tigris ran...
Author
Publisher
Penguin Press
Pub. Date
2021.
Language
English
Description
The superhero comic books that Marvel Comics has published since 1961 are, as Douglas Wolk notes, the longest continuous, self-contained work of fiction ever created: over half a million pages to date, and still growing. The Marvel story is a gigantic mountain smack in the middle of contemporary culture. Thousands of writers and artists have contributed to it. Everyone recognizes its protagonists: Spider-Man, the Avengers, the X-Men. Eighteen of the...
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