"[This book] is a collaborative study of literary tone, a notoriously challenging and slippery topic for criticism. Both granular and global, infusing a text with feeling, tone is so difficult to pin down that responses to it often take the vague form of "I know it when I see it." In Tone, a cooperative authorial voice under the name of the Committee to Investigate Atmosphere begins from the premise that tone is relational, belonging to shared experience...

"This book explores resilience by tracing the linked stories of how Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and William James dealt with personal tragedy: for Emerson, the death of his young wife and, eleven years later, his five-year-old son; for Thoreau, the death of his brother; and for James, the death of his beloved cousin Minny. Weaving together biographical detail with quotations from the writers' journals and letters, Richardson shows readers...

Brown University star professor Weinstein offers a rich, passionate, lyrical look at life's two essential stages--growing up and growing old--explored through great works of literature.

"Focusing on some of the best known characters in all of literature - chosen to trace the arc from childhood to old age - a brilliant psychoanalyst and professor of literature shows how our inner lives become at once stranger and more familiar when seen through the prism of fiction. In supple and elegant prose, and with all the expertise and insight of his dual profession, Josh Cohen illuminates a new way to understand ourselves. He helps us see what...

""Becoming Human" explores matter and meaning in an antiblack world"--

"The alternate self is a persistent theme of modern culture. From Robert Frost to Sharon Olds, Virginia Woolf to Ian McEwan, poets and novelists-and readers-are fascinated by paths not taken. In an elegant and provocative rumination, Andrew H. Miller lingers with other selves, listening to what they have to say about our stories and our lives"--