Literary Criticism

James McNeill Whistler and France: A Dialogue in Paint, Poetry, and Music is the first full-length and in-depth study to position this painter within the overall trajectory of French modernism during the second half of the nineteenth century and to view...

'White handles hefty quantities of research effortlessly, combining multiple biographies with a broader overview of the period. His energetic, anecdote-laden prose will have you hooked all the way from Orwell to le Carre' Sunday Times, Books of the...

This book collects, for the first time, Colm Toibin's critical essays on Henry James. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his novel about James's life, The Master, Toibin brilliantly analyzes James from a novelist's point of view. Known for his acuity...

This title is part of UC Press's Voices Revived program, which commemorates University of California Press's mission to seek out and cultivate the brightest minds and give them voice, reach, and impact. Drawing on a backlist dating to 1893, Voices...

AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR A droll and dazzling compendium of observations, stories, lists, and brief essays about babies. 'Beguiling ... A wunderkabinett of baby-related curios ... A peculiar book, and...

"This book was crying out to be written." The Irish Times "Scandalously readable." Literary Review James Joyce's relationship with his homeland was a complicated and often vexed one. The publication of his masterwork Ulysses - referred to by The...

He insists on my dreams, on my letters, on my Hs on my Cs, on my Js, on my Gs. G, G, G, G, jet ! A" You are my insister A" he says. A" You are my insister A" I say. No one has performed more learned yet more innocent pirouettes around...

A late epic bridge between Homeric masterpieces.Quintus Smyrnaeus' Posthomerica, the only long mythological epic to survive in Greek from the period between Apollonius' Argonautica (3rd century BC) and Nonnus' Dionysiaca (5th century AD), fills in the...

Object Lessons is a series of short, beautifully designed books about the hidden lives of ordinary things. To hyphenate or not to hyphenate has been a central point of controversy since before the imprinting of the first Gutenberg Bible. And yet, the...

Contemporary fiction has never been less contemporary. Midcentury writers tended to set their works in their own moment, but for the last several decades critical acclaim and attention have fixated on historical fiction. This shift is particularly...

Winner of the 2019 Somerset Maugham Award'A great galloping joy of a book - funny, lyrical, fast paced, heart-warming - a delicious celebration of love and life' - Rebecca Stott, author of In the Days of RainIn 1857, Elizabeth Gaskell set sail for Rome,...

For much of its history, philosophy was not merely a theoretical discipline but a way of life, an 'art of living'. This practical aspect of philosophy has been much less dominant in modernity than it was in ancient Greece and Rome, when philosophers of...

Ever since children have learned to read, there has been children's literature. Seth Lerer here charts the makings of the Western literary imagination from Aesop's fables to Mother Goose, from Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to Peter Pan, from "Where...

With his richly detailed world of Middle Earth and the epic tales he told around it, J.R.R. Tolkien invented the modern fantasy novel. For readers and students getting to grips with this world for the first time, J.R.R. Tolkien: A Guide for the Perplexed...

Across Palestine, from the Allenby Bridge and Ramallah, to Jerusalem and Gaza, Marcello Di Cintio has met with writers, poets, librarians, booksellers and readers, finding extraordinary stories in every corner. Stories of how revolutionary writing is...

This volume offers an account of English literary culture in one of its most volatile and politically engaged moments. From the work of Milton and Marvell in the 1650s and 1660s through the brilliant careers of Dryden, Rochester, and Behn, Locke and...

This authoritative text of the first edition of John Milton's Paradise Lost transcribes the original 10-book poem, records its textual problems and numerous differences from the second edition, and discusses in critical commentary the importance of these...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780156030595Author Marion MeadeFormat PaperbackPage Count 368Imprint Mariner BooksPublisher Mariner Books

'He reads for his own pleasure rather than to impart knowledge or correct the opinions of others'.So Virginia Woolf described the 'common reader' for whom she wrote her second series of essays. Here she turns her brilliant eye on novels and poetry from...

An esteemed literary critic shares his final musings on books, his children, and his own impending death In 2010, Clive James was diagnosed with terminal leukemia. Deciding that "if you don't know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might...

A revealing and witty new examination of how Agatha Christie became the world's most successful and popular female playwright, including details of never-before-published scripts and stories. Agatha Christie is revered worldwide for her books...

A century and a half after the publication of Origin of Species, evolutionary thinking has expanded beyond the field of biology to include virtually all human-related subjects-anthropology, archeology, psychology, economics, religion, morality, politics,...

This text of the first book of the "Aeneid" includes a detailed commentary.Book InformationISBN 9780198721178Author VirgilFormat PaperbackPage Count 264Imprint Oxford University PressPublisher Oxford University PressWeight(grams) 243gDimensions(mm) 186mm...

A masterful writer working in many genres, Ngugi wa Thiong'o entered the East African literary scene in 1962 with the performance of his first major play, The Black Hermit, at the National Theatre in Uganda. In 1977 he was imprisoned after his most...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780307717153Author Jack WeatherfordFormat PaperbackPage Count 368Imprint Random House IncPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 261gDimensions(mm)...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780743236393Author Solomon VolkovFormat PaperbackPage Count 320Imprint The Free PressPublisher Simon & SchusterWeight(grams) 354g

Erudite, witty and often controversial, The London Review of Books informs and entertains its readers with a fortnightly dose of the best and liveliest of all things cultural.This anthology brings together some of the most memorable pieces from recent...

A Book of the Year for The Times and the Sunday Times 'The writer is the engineer of the human soul,' claimed Stalin. Although one wonders how many found nourishment in Turkmenbashi's Book of the Soul (once required reading for driving tests in...

What is meant by the Puritan literary tradition, and when did the idea of Puritan literature, as distinct from Puritan beliefs and practices, come into being? The answer is not straightforward. This volume addresses these questions by bringing together...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781590179109Author Andrew DavisFormat PaperbackPage Count 112Imprint NYRB PoetsPublisher The New York Review of Books, IncWeight(grams) 110gDimensions(mm)...

'There's more than one way to skin a theatrical cat; and McDonagh's chosen weapons are laughter and gore...Pushing theatre to its limits, McDonagh is making a serious point...a work as subversive as those Synge and O'Casey plays that sparked Dublin riots...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780143136538Author Daniel SherrellFormat PaperbackPage Count 272Imprint Penguin USAPublisher Penguin Putnam Inc

Chu T'ien-hsin's The Old Capital is a brilliant evocation of Taiwan's literature of nostalgia and remembrance. The novel is centered on the question, "Is it possible that none of your memories count?" and explores the reliability of remembrances and the...

Aristotle's "Nicomachean Ethics" deals with character and its proper development in the acquisition of thoughtful habits directed toward appropriate ends. The articles in this unique collection, many new or not readily available, form a continuous...

George Orwell was one of the most significant literary figures on the left in the twentieth century. While titles such as 1984, Animal Farm and Homage to Catalonia are still rightly regarded as modern classics, his own politics are less well understood. ...

Lewis Carroll's books have delighted children and adults for generations, but behind their exuberant fantasy and delightful nonsense was the mind of a brilliant mathematician. Now his forgotten achievements in the world of numbers are brought to light by...

A compelling personal introduction to the life and work of Nobel Prize-winning writer Czeslaw Milosz from his fellow Polish exile and acclaimed writer Eva HoffmanCzeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) was a giant of twentieth-century literature, not least because he...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780946206483Author Jennifer AulieFormat PaperbackPage Count 80Imprint Wynstones PressPublisher Wynstones Press

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.About the AuthorEugene Ionesco (1910-1994), a Romanian-born Frenchman, was central to the theatre of the Absurd, a dramatic movement that abandons logical plot development,...

A paperback anthology of essential Greek and Latin texts with facing English translations.This selection of lapidary nuggets drawn from thirty-three of antiquity's major authors includes poetry, dialogue, philosophical writing, history, descriptive...