Books & Reading

Since the publication of The Savage Detectives in 2007, the work of Roberto Bolano (1953-2003) has achieved an acclaim rarely enjoyed by literature in translation. Chris Andrews, a leading translator of Bolano's work into English, explores the singular...

The New York Times bestselling author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor uses the same skills to teach how to access accurate information in a rapidly changing 24/7 news cycle and become better readers, thinkers, and consumers of media. We live...

The Mother of All Booklists: The 500 Most Recommended Nonfiction Reads for Ages 3 to 103 is written for parents, grandparents, and teachers unfamiliar with the bewildering array of award and recommended reading lists. This book is a long overdue...

First published in 1964, The Art of Discrimination is a study in the relation between critical theory and practice, taking as its test-case James Thomson’s The Seasons, the poem which was, according to Johnson, of "a new kind". Professor Cohen explores...

This is a book about the ethics of authorship. Most directly, it explores different conceptualizations of the responsibilities of the author to the reader. But it also engages the question of what styles of authorship allow these responsibilities to be...

Trains, Literature and Culture: Reading and Writing the Rails delves into the rich connections between rail travel and the creation of cultural products from short stories to novels, from photographs to travel guides, and from artistic manifestos of the...

"There is real hope for a culture that makes it as easy to buy a book as it does a pack of cigarettes."--a civic leader quoted in a New American Library ad (1951) American Pulp tells the story of the midcentury golden age of pulp paperbacks...

"There is real hope for a culture that makes it as easy to buy a book as it does a pack of cigarettes."--a civic leader quoted in a New American Library ad (1951) American Pulp tells the story of the midcentury golden age of pulp paperbacks and how they...

The zombie craze has infected popular culture with the intensity of a viral outbreak, propagating itself through text, television, film, video games, and many other forms of media. As a metaphor, zombies may represent political notions, such as the...

To Write as if Already Dead circles around Kate Zambreno's failed attempts to write a study of Herve Guibert's To the Friend Who Did Not Save My Life. In this diaristic, transgressive work, the first in a cycle written in the years preceding his death,...

This casebook gathers a collection of ambitious essays about both parts of the novel (1605 and 1615) and also provides a general introduction and a bibliography. The essays range from Ramon Menendez Pidal's seminal study of how Cervantes dealt with...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781934759172Author Steve ChandlerFormat PaperbackPage Count 126Imprint Robert D. Reed PublishersPublisher Robert D. Reed PublishersWeight(grams) 226g

In this remarkable blend of memoir and criticism, James Wood, the noted contributor to the New Yorker, has written a master class on the connections between fiction and life. He argues that of all the arts, fiction has a unique ability to describe the...

Reading at Risk presents the results from the literature segment of a large-scale survey, the Survey of Public Participation in the Arts, conducted by the Census Bureau at the request of the National Endowment for the Arts. This survey investigated the...

Carl Rollyson's Biography: A User's Guide is an informative and entertaining text for those interested in biography. No aspect of the genre, from A to Z, goes uncovered: issues around authorized and unauthorized biography, censorship, libel, fair use,...

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...

A history of the chapter from its origins in antiquity to todayWhy do books have chapters? With this seemingly simple question, Nicholas Dames embarks on a literary journey spanning two millennia, revealing how an ancient editorial technique became a...

Writing Time shows how serial literature based in journals and anthologies shaped the awareness of time at a transformative moment in the European literary and political landscapes. Sean Franzel explores how German-speaking authors and editors "write...

In 1960, two high school friends were assigned to read the Herman Melville novel Moby-Dick. Neither one of them read it. Four decades later, plagued by feelings of guilt at never having read The Great American Novel, the two friends grab for belated...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780374173265Author John FreemanFormat PaperbackPage Count 384Imprint Fsg OriginalsPublisher Fsg OriginalsWeight(grams) 277gDimensions(mm) 191mm * 129mm *...

The question of an erotic readership has always vexed scholars. With little evidence of anyone's actually reading erotic material, scholars have had to make do with variations of an "ideal reader" approach. Insofar as it presupposes authorial intention...

Since Gutenberg’s time, every aspect of print has gradually changed. But the advent of computational media has exponentially increased the pace, transforming how books are composed, designed, edited, typeset, distributed, sold, and read. N. Katherine...

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...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781772120837Author Faye HammillFormat PaperbackPage Count 256Imprint University of Alberta PressPublisher University of Alberta PressWeight(grams) 400g

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780845348307Author Theresa MeyerowitzFormat HardbackPage Count 131Imprint Cornwall Books,U.S.Publisher Associated University Presses

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781839987168Author Stevie MarsdenFormat PaperbackPage Count 250Imprint Anthem PressPublisher Anthem PressWeight(grams) 454g

How do early modern media underlie today's digital creativity? In Cut/Copy/Paste, Whitney Trettien journeys to the fringes of the London print trade to uncover makerspaces and collaboratories where paper media were cut up and reassembled into radical,...

Few writers rankle like Jonathan Franzen. Despite popular acclaim, robust sales, and august literary laurels, Franzen's polarizing persona shares the spotlight with-and sometimes steals it from-his tragicomic novels of Midwestern family life. In this...

A Lifetime of Fiction: The 500 Most Recommended Reads for Ages 2 to 102 is the most authoritative set of fiction book recommendations in the United States because it is a composite of the most noteworthy book award lists, best book publications, and...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781451668568Author Colm ToibinFormat PaperbackPage Count 288Imprint Scribner Book CompanyPublisher Scribner Book CompanyWeight(grams) 372gDimensions(mm)...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780268206871Author Marshall GregoryFormat HardbackPage Count 240Imprint University of Notre Dame PressPublisher University of Notre Dame PressWeight(grams)...

The impetus for literary creation has often been explained as an attempt to transcend the mortality of the human condition through a work addressed to future generations. Failing to obtain literal immortality, or to turn their hope towards the spiritual...

This book examines the history of women's bookstores in the US from the 1970s to the 1990s. It establishes that women's bookstores played an important role in feminism by enabling the dissemination of women's voices and thereby helping to sustain and...

This work seeks to chart what happens in the embodied minds of engaged readers when they read literature. Despite the recent stylistic, linguistic, and cognitive advances that have been made in text-processing methodology and practice, very little is...

The book trade historically tended to operate in a spirit of co-operation as well as competition. Networks between printers, publishers, booksellers and related trades existed at local, regional, national and international levels and were a vital part of...

A biographical encyclopedia of American and British Christian-themed writers from World War II to the present, covering acclaimed literary works and popular evangelical fiction. Encyclopedia of Contemporary Christian Fiction: From C.S. Lewis to Left...

Hamlet's Castle is both a theoretical and a practical examination of the interactions that take place in a literary classroom. The book traces the source of literature's power to the relationship between its illusional quality and its abstract meaning...

A provocative examination of literacy in the American South before emancipation, countering the long-standing stereotype of the South's oral tradition Schweiger complicates our understanding of literacy in the American South in the decades just prior...

The zombie craze has infected popular culture with the intensity of a viral outbreak, propagating itself through text, television, film, video games, and many other forms of media. As a metaphor, zombies may represent political notions, such as the...

This reader is the most comprehensive selection of key texts on twentieth and twenty-first century print culture yet compiled. Illuminating the networks and processes that have shaped reading, writing and publishing, the selected extracts also examine...