Books & Reading

What do we mean when we say that a novel's conclusion "feels right"? How did feeling, form, and the sense of right and wrong get mixed up, during the nineteenth century, in the experience of reading a novel? Good Form argues that Victorian readers...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781632280176Author Matt BurriesciFormat PaperbackPage Count 288Imprint Viva EditionsPublisher Viva Editions

This is the first scholarly work to examine the cultural significance of the "talking book" since the invention of the phonograph in 1877, the earliest machine to enable the reproduction of the human voice. Recent advances in sound technology make this...

First published in 1983, this book explores a number of avenues of critical thinking about Joseph Conrad, showing him as an author deeply concerned with humankind's ethical motivation and its relationship with the ideas of evolution current in his day...

In this book, a group of prominent scholar-teachers meditate on how to read, in the context of a specifically Christian university or college education, some of the greatest texts of the Western tradition. Each author devotes himself or herself to a...

Disturbed by stories of drownings in the river behind his home in Eau Claire, Wisconsin, writer B. J. Hollars combed the archives of local newspapers only to discover vast discrepancies in articles about the deaths. In homage to Michael Lesy's cult...

The antebellum period has long been identified with the belated emergence of a truly national literature. And yet, as Meredith L. McGill argues, a mass market for books in this period was built and sustained through what we would call rampant literary...

Playwright, biographer, screenwriter, and critic S. N. Behrman (1893-1973) characterized the years he spent writing for The New Yorker as a time defined by ""feverish contact with great theatre stars, rich people and social people at posh hotels, at...

NEW & NOTEWORTHY ~ THE NEW YORK TIMES With a Foreword by Susan Orlean, twenty-three of today's living literary legends, including Donna Tartt, Viet Thanh Nguyen, Andrew Sean Greer, Laila Lalami, and Michael Chabon, reveal the books that made them think,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780451529282Author Robert B. DownsFormat PaperbackPage Count 352Imprint Signet ClassicsPublisher Penguin Putnam IncWeight(grams) 167g

From Frankenstein and Dracula to Psycho and The Chainsaw Massacre, horror fiction has provided our culture with some of its most enduring themes and narratives. Considering horror fiction both as a genre and as a social phenomenon, Joseph Grixti provides...

Starting with the premise that the history of a medieval subject cannot be properly written "without recourse to the materials it produced," Lesley Smith's Masters of the Sacred Page provides an illuminating study of theology in the Middle Ages. She...

Remember the Hand studies a body of articulate manuscript books from the Christian monasteries of northern Iberia in the tenth and eleventh centuries. These exceptional, richly illuminated codices have in common an urgent sense of scribal...

In 1500, as many as 99 out of 100 English women may have been illiterate, and girls of all social backgrounds were the objects of purposeful efforts to restrict their access to full literacy. Three centuries later, more than half of all English and...

The book traces the development of British Indian literature from the early days of the 19th century through the Victorian period. Previously unstudied poems and essays drawn from the thriving periodicals culture of British India are examined alongside...

In this important new book, Guy and Small develop a new account of literary creativity in the late nineteenth century, one that combines concepts generated by text-theorists concerning the embodied nature of textuality with the empirical insights of...

An exploration of the creative process in four classic works: Death in Venice, Treasure Island, The Rubaiyat of Mar Khayyam, and War and Peace. Creating Literature Out of Life examines four very dissimilar masterpieces and their authors in search of...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781564783554Author Peter FreeseFormat PaperbackPage Count 270Imprint Dalkey Archive PressPublisher Dalkey Archive PressWeight(grams) 454g

In this book Zeina G. Halabi examines the figure of the intellectual as profet national icon, and exile in contemporary Arabic literature and film. Staging a comparative dialogue with writers and critics such as Elias Khoury, Edward Said, Jurji Zaidan,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781632461339Author Robin BlackFormat PaperbackPage Count 176Imprint Ig PublishingPublisher Ig Publishing

Madame Bovary ranks among the world's most famous and widely read novels, and has inspired numerous critical theories. First published in 1987, this study draws on both twentieth-century and traditional critical views to provide both students and...

In celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of Yale University's Beinecke Library, one of the world's great bibliographic treasure houses, comes this sumptuously illustrated volume of fifty of the Library's most prized rare books and manuscripts. Selected...

Since the early 1990s, tens of thousands of memoirs by celebrities and unknown people have been published, sold, and read by millions of American readers. The memoir boom, as the explosion of memoirs on the market has come to be called, has been...

Since the earlier twentieth century, literary genres have traveled across magnetic, wireless, and electronic planes. Literature may now be anything from acoustic poetry and oral performance to verbal-visual constellations in print and on screen,...

The eighteenth century has long been associated with realism and objective description, modes of representation that deemphasize writing. But in the middle decades of the century, Christina Lupton observes, authors described with surprising candor the...

In a recent sale catalog, one bookseller apologized for the condition of a sixteenth-century volume as "rather soiled by use." When the book was displayed the next year, the exhibition catalogue described it as "well and piously used [with] marginal...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781702090872Author Fellow Paul DaviesFormat PaperbackPage Count 230Imprint Independently PublishedPublisher Independently PublishedWeight(grams)...

Information science was a burgeoning field in the early years of the Cold War, and while public and academic libraries acted as significant sites for the information boom, it is unsurprising that McCarthyism and censorship would shape what they granted...

This lucid and elegantly written book is a sustained conversation about the nature and importance of literary interpretation. Distinguished critic Denis Donoghue argues that we must read texts closely and imaginatively, as opposed to merely or mistakenly...

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,...

The Literary Agenda is a series of short polemical monographs about the importance of literature and of reading in the wider world and about the state of literary education inside schools and universities. The category of 'the literary' has always been...

Recent works of young adult fantastic fiction such as Stephenie Meyer's Twilight Saga have been excoriated for glamorizing feminine subordination. However, young adult horror fiction with female protagonists who have paranormal abilities suggests to...

Drawing lessons from writers of all ages and writing across genres, a distinguished teacher and writer reveals the enduring importance of writing for our time In this new contribution to Yale University Press's Why X Matters series, a distinguished...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780893704131Author Robert PlankFormat PaperbackPage Count 140Imprint Borgo PressPublisher Borgo PressWeight(grams) 216g

Originally published in 1929, The Process of Literature is a study of the art of letters considered from a new point of view, as a process of human activity rather than as a series of objects produced by that activity. It examines in detail “the process...

An annotated edition of Leon Modena’s Hebrew Musar book Tsemaḥ Tsaddik (‘Pious Plant’), originally published in Venice in 1600. Tsemaḥ Tsaddik follows the format of a medieval Physiologus, where each chapter corresponds to a specific animal and addresses...

A legendary editor’s survey of the twentieth-century novel and how it shaped the fiction of the future'Edwin Frank’s masterly account of the novel gone modern and the modern gone global is a critical history of the last literary century. Epic, personal,...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780241562734Author Henry EliotFormat PaperbackPage Count 160Imprint Particular BooksPublisher Penguin Books LtdWeight(grams) 200g

A WATERSTONES NON-FICTION BOOK OF THE MONTH In this love letter to reading, curated by Pandora Sykes in aid of the National Literacy Trust, bestselling and beloved writers share their favourite books: the ones they hold most dearly, that they return to...

How ordinary forms of writing—including manuals, petitions, almanacs, and magazines—shaped the way colonial subjects understood their place in empire In Required Reading, Priyasha Mukhopadhyay offers a new and provocative history of reading that centers...