Books & Reading

In the late 1790s, British Prime Minister William Pitt created a crisis of representation when he pressured the British Parliament to relieve the Bank of England from its obligations to convert paper notes into coin. Paper quickly became associated with...

For the last 2,500 years literature has been attacked, booed, and condemned, often for the wrong reasons and occasionally for very good ones. The Hatred of Literature examines the evolving idea of literature as seen through the eyes of its adversaries:...

Vineland is hardly anyone's favorite Thomas Pynchon novel. Marking Pynchon's return after vanishing for nearly two decades following his epic Gravity's Rainbow, it was initially regarded as slight, a middling curiosity. However, for Peter Coviello, the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780974878928Author S., T. JoshiFormat PaperbackPage Count 220Imprint Hippocampus PressPublisher Hippocampus PressWeight(grams) 285gDimensions(mm) 216mm *...

Why do we read? What do we cherish in a book? What is the nature of a masterpiece? What do Alice Munro, Albert Camus, and the great Polish experimentalist Witold Gombrowicz have in common? In the tradition of Nabokov, Calvino, and Kundera, Douglas...

The novel has lost its purpose, Joseph Bottum argues in this fascinating new look at the history of fiction. We have not transcended our need for what novels provide, but we have grown to distrust the culture that allowed novels to flourish. "For almost...

Considered by some to be the greatest novel of the twenty-first century, Helen DeWitt's brilliant The Last Samurai tells the story of Sibylla, an Oxford-educated single mother raising a possible child prodigy, Ludo. Disappointed when he meets his...

Andrew Piper grew up liking books and loving computers. While occasionally burying his nose in books, he was going to computer camp, programming his Radio Shack TRS-80, and playing Pong. His eventual love of reading made him a historian of the book and a...

Modernism as a global phenomenon is the focus of the essays gathered in this book. The term "geomodernisms" indicates their subjects' continuity with and divergence from commonly understood notions of modernism. The contributors consider modernism as it...

An investigation into the transformation of publishing in the United States from a field in which Jews were systematically excluded to one in which they became ubiquitous "Readers with an interest in the industry will find plenty of insights...

The response to Nancy Pearl's surprise bestseller Book Lust was astounding: the Seattle librarian even became the model for the now-famous Librarian Action Figure. Readers everywhere welcomed Pearl's encyclopedic but discerning filter on books worth...

Histories of the book often move straight from the codex to the digital screen. Left out of that familiar account are nearly 150 years of audio recordings. Recounting the fascinating history of audio-recorded literature, Matthew Rubery traces the path of...

In his latest book, Marshall Gregory begins with the premise that our lives are saturated with stories, ranging from magazines, books, films, television, and blogs to the words spoken by politicians, pastors, and teachers. He then explores the ethical...

Thomas Wyatt didn't publish "They Flee from Me." It was written in a notebook, maybe abroad, maybe even in prison. Today it is in every poetry anthology. How did it survive? That is the story Peter Murphy tells-in vivid and compelling detail-of the...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780060777050Author Francine ProseFormat PaperbackPage Count 272Imprint HarperPerennialPublisher HarperCollins Publishers Inc

Literary culture has become a form of popular culture over the last fifteen years thanks to the success of televised book clubs, film adaptations, big-box book stores, online bookselling, and face-to-face and online book groups. This volume offers the...

An inside look at the politics of book reviewing, from the assignment and writing of reviews to why critics think we should listen to what they have to sayTaking readers behind the scenes in the world of fiction reviewing, Inside the Critics' Circle...

Our Ladies of Darkness opens with a question raised by Nathaniel Hawthorne in his 1835 sketch "The Haunted Mind": "What if the fiend should come in women's garments, with a pale beauty amid sin and desolation, and lie down by your side?" Joseph Andriano...

Jennifer Egan described her Pulitzer Prize-winning novel A Visit from the Goon Squad as a combination of Proust and The Sopranos. In rereading the book, Ivan Kreilkamp takes Egan up on her comparison, showing how it blends a concern with the status of...

In this pioneering scholarly work on occult symbols in literature, the reader is offered a vivid look into how W.B. Yeats, T.S. Eliot, and Franz Kafka_three masters of symbolic expression_utilized Tarot cards in their poetry and prose. Focusing on the...

In 1962, the publication of Rachel Carson's ""Silent Spring"" sparked widespread public debate on the hazards of pesticide abuse for humans and their environment. With in a year, the controversy had spread throughout print and broadcast media. Despite...

The first book of its kind, Our Caribbean is an anthology of lesbian and gay writing from across the Antilles. The author and activist Thomas Glave has gathered outstanding fiction, nonfiction, memoir, and poetry by little-known writers together with...

After over ten years of research into the settings in the Cotswold shires that Professor Tolkien turned from reality into fantasy, Steve Ponty explores the locations that serve as the true inspiration for the Shire in The Lord of the Rings. By reversing...

In this brilliant collection, the follow-up to her New York Times bestseller Reading Like a Writer, the distinguished novelist, literary critic, and essayist celebrates the pleasures of reading and pays homage to the works and writers she admires above...

After retiring from a lifetime of teaching literature, Patricia Meyer Spacks embarked on a year-long project of rereading dozens of novels: childhood favorites, fiction first encountered in young adulthood and never before revisited, books frequently...

The start of the twenty-first century has brought with it a rich variety of ways in which readers can connect with one another, access texts, and make sense of what they are reading. At the same time, new technologies have also opened up exciting...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781632461315Author Pamela ErensFormat PaperbackPage Count 162Imprint Ig PublishingPublisher Ig Publishing

On the Road meets Tuesdays with Morrie in this pilgrimage by "an American classic" (Newsweek) to thank his most important mentors through memorable meals and conversations"Some years later, George Plimpton offered to punch me in the nose," recounts Rick...

In recent years, scholarship on translation has moved well beyond the technicalities of converting one language into another and beyond conventional translation theory. With new technologies blurring distinctions between "the original" and its...

The first cultural history of early modern cryptography, this collection brings together scholars in history, literature, music, the arts, mathematics, and computer science who study ciphering and deciphering from new materialist, media studies,...

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Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781498216500Author Eva Marta BaillieFormat HardbackPage Count 218Imprint Cascade BooksPublisher Cascade BooksWeight(grams) 476g

The study of English literature, language, culture and creative writing is an important and dynamic enterprise. English: Shared Futures celebrates the discipline's intellectual strength, diversity and creativity, explores its futures in the nations of...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781620329245Author Eva Marta BaillieFormat PaperbackImprint Cascade BooksPublisher Cascade BooksWeight(grams) 318g

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781579102869Author William T SheddFormat PaperbackPage Count 378Imprint Wipf & Stock PublishersPublisher Wipf & Stock PublishersWeight(grams) 144g

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781737847403Author John Matthew FoxFormat PaperbackPage Count 190Imprint BookfoxPublisher BookfoxWeight(grams) 245g

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780998761268Author Marion HillFormat PaperbackPage Count 66Imprint Red Mango PublishingPublisher Red Mango PublishingWeight(grams) 86g

How studying material texts can help us better understand the diversity of the Americas, past and present A Hawai’ian quilt stitched with anti-imperial messages; a Jesuit report that captures the last words of a Wendat leader; an invitation to a ball,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780307745248Author Orhan PamukFormat PaperbackPage Count 200Imprint Random House IncPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 204g

There they sit, the great tomes of classical literature, taunting you with their length and difficulty, as you ask: which books are the most important and why - and what's actually any good? Why does most writing about the classics have words like...