Literary Criticism

This second edition of Peter G. Beidler's Readers Companion builds on the success of the first edition. It will be an indispensable guide for teachers, students, and general readers who want fully to appreciate Salinger's perennial bestseller. Now six decades old, The Catcher in the Rye contains references to people, places, books, movies, and historical events that wil

The CliffsNotes study guide on Ray Bradbury's Fahrenheit 451 supplements the original literary work, giving you background information about the author, an introduction to the work, a graphical character map, critical commentaries, expanded glossaries, and a comprehensive index, all for you to use as an educational tool that will allow you to better understand th

Nicholas Frankel presents a new and revisionary account of Wilde’s final years, spent in poverty and exile on the European continent following his release from an English prison for the crime of “gross indecency” between men. Oscar Wilde: The Unrepentant Years challenges the prevailing, traditional view of Wilde as a broken, tragic figure, a martyr to Victorian s

Jonathan Lethem (Motherless Brooklyn, The Fortress of Solitude) joins Judith Freeman and Rich Cohen in celebrating Raymond Chandler's classic detective novel, The Big Sleep.

Narrated by the award-winning Bahni Turpin and covering topics from Scrabble to Lena Dunham, Gay’s essays prove she’s both a funny & insightful cultural critic & a compassionate observer of human nature.

Covering gesture, characterization, narration, and dialogue, Prose shows you how to get the most out of your reading — and how to apply those lessons to that manuscript shoved in the back of your desk drawer.

The CliffsNotes study guide on Gaines' A Lesson Before Dying supplements the original literary work, giving you background information about the author, an introduction to the work, critical commentaries, expanded glossaries, and a comprehensive index, all for you to use as an educational tool that will allow you to better understand the work. This study guide wa

A traveling salesman awakens from troubled slumbers to find himself transformed into a giant insect. Franz Kafka's matter-of-fact tone brings an air of absolute truth to his fantastic narrative, which chronicles the effects of this monstrous conversion upon the protagonist's business and family life. Interpretations of Kafka's acclaimed 1915 no

Dr. Faustus is one of the jewels of early modern English drama, and is still widely performed today. Interestingly, the play has come down to the contemporary audience in two distinct versions that have become known as the 'A' and the 'B' texts. David Bevington and Eric Rasmussen, who edited the original Revels edition over twenty years ago (and are two of the most eminent

Perfectly balanced between humor and erudition, Ex Libris establishes Anne Fadiman as one of our finest contemporary essayists. Anne Fadiman is—by her own admission—the sort of person who learned about sex from her father's copy of Fanny Hill, whose husband buys her 19 pounds of dusty books for her birthday, and who once found herself poring over her roommate's 1974 Toyot

A ferryboat captain in search of a notorious ivory trader ventures into an African jungle, where he discovers a dark side of the human condition. In this burning indictment of colonialism, Joseph Conrad drew upon his own shipboard experiences in the region formerly known as the Belgian Congo. His novella explores the potential for evil that lurks behind the illusion o

What is astrology? Fiction for the bourgeoisie. The Tour de France? An epic. The brain of Einstein? Knowledge reduced to a formula. Like iconic images of movie stars or the rhetoric of politicians, they are fabricated. Once isolated from the events that gave birth to them, these "mythologies" appear for what they are: the ideology of mass culture. When Roland Barthes's gro

Patti Smith’s beautifully rendered memoir was selected as the 2019 read for One Book, One New York (a city-wide book club). Set in the bohemian glamour of the Chelsea Hotel in the late ’60s, the book chronicles Smith’s loving relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe and their early years as struggling artists.

The literary critic defends the importance of Western literature from Chaucer and Shakespeare to Kafka and Beckett in this acclaimed national bestseller. NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD Harold Bloom's The Western Canon is more than a required reading list—it is a “heroically brave, formidably learned” defen

“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 grea

The narrator, Francis Wayland Thurston, recounts his discovery of notes left behind by his grand-uncle, Brown University linguistic professor George Gammell Angell after his death in the winter of 1926-27. Among the notes is a small bas-relief sculpture of a scaly creature which yields "simultaneous pictures of an octopus, a dragon, and a human caricature." The sculptor, a

Penetrating insights from one of the most exciting and original thinkers of the 20th century. Benjamin’s writings on art, history, and translation are as powerful today they ever were.

Harold Bloom is Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University, Berg Professor of English at New York University, and a former Charles Eliot Norton Professor at Harvard. He has written more than 20 books of literary criticism. From a lifetime of writing and teaching about literature, this great scholar exhorts readers to consider the pleasures and benefits of reading

Bill Bryson’s bestselling biography of William Shakespeare takes the reader on an enthralling tour through Elizabethan England and the eccentricities of Shakespearean scholarship—updated with a new introduction by the author to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behin