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'A fascinating journey into our relationship with the physical book...I lost count of the times I exclaimed with delight when I read a nugget of information I hadn't encountered before' Val McDermid, The TimesMost of what we say about books is really...

Of all the great novelists writing today, none shows the same gift as Martin Amis for writing non-fiction - his essays, literary criticism and journalism are justly acclaimed. The Rub of Time comprises superb critical pieces on Amis's heroes Nabokov,...

The perfect Father's Day giftTolkien's works are punctuated by dramatic and explosive battles. Men versus Orcs, Elves versus Sauron, Goblins versus Dwarves - the history of Middle-earth has seen some of the greatest characters pitted against each other...

'Literature is not innocent,' stated Georges Bataille in this extraordinary 1957 collection of essays, arguing that only by acknowledging its complicity with the knowledge of evil can literature communicate fully and intensely. These literary profiles of...

Who had birds called Death, Wigs and Spinach? How do you spell the noise of a door slamming? Whose working title was The Chronic Argonauts?Henry Eliot - author, editor and insatiable bookworm - has ransacked the libraries and archives of world...

'Everything you ever wanted to know about cats in books. A wonderful idea, beautifully executed.' - Viv Groskop Cats have provided the inspiration for an incredible range of fiction, memoir and poetry, from ancient myths and fables to much-loved...

'A joy of a book - enriching, illuminating, eclectic and far from a conventional science read' Richard Webb, New Scientist Books of the Year'Carlo Rovelli's imaginative rigour, his lively humour and his beautiful writing are inspiring' Erica WagnerOne of...

'A fascinating journey into our relationship with the physical book...I lost count of the times I exclaimed with delight when I read a nugget of information I hadn't encountered before' Val McDermid, The TimesMost of what we say about books is really...

Taking inspiration from classic authors from Jane Austen to Thomas Hardy, Williams shines a light on our society's changing views of the rural and industrial landscapes in which we work and live.Our collective notion of the city and country is...

During his decades of world fame as a novelist, Tolstoy also wrote prolifically in a series of essays and polemics on issues of morality, social justice and religion. These works culminated in What is Art?, published in 1898. Impassioned and...

Homecoming, haunting, nostalgia, desire: these are some of the themes evoked by the beguiling motif of the lighted window in literature and art. In this innovative combination of place-writing, memoir and cultural study, Peter Davidson takes us on...

From a leading figure in comparative literature, a major new survey of the field that points the way forward for a discipline undergoing rapid changesLiterary studies are being transformed today by the expansive and disruptive forces of globalization...

A splendid new translation of an extraordinary work of modern literature-featuring facing-page commentary by Kafka's acclaimed biographerIn 1917 and 1918, Franz Kafka wrote a set of more than 100 aphorisms, known as the Zurau aphorisms, after the...

From Colm Toibin comes New Ways to Kill Your Mother, a fabulously entertaining book about writers and their families.In this wonderfully entertaining and enlightening collection, Colm Toibin not only explores the often tense relationship between writers...

Ever since Robinson Crusoe in 1719, the novel has introduced British readers to truly unforgettable characters - people in whom we can find deeper understanding of our own lives. In this engaging and personal book, Sebastian Faulks examines and...

"Cities, like cats, will reveal themselves at night," wrote the poet Rupert Brooke. Before the age of electricity, the nighttime city was a very different place to the one we know today - home to the lost, the vagrant and the noctambulant. Matthew...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780679735793Author Camille PagliaFormat PaperbackPage Count 736Imprint Vintage BooksPublisher Random House USA IncWeight(grams) 686gDimensions(mm) 202mm *...

To celebrate the centenary of the publication of Ulysses, the most important literary work of the twentieth century, eighteen artists, writers and thinkers respond to an episode each of the great modernist text. Each essayist is an expert in one of...

Provides a uniquely detailed and accessible insight into the terminology and culture of the Victorian period Surveys not merely the reign of Queen Victoria but its antecedents in the long nineteenth century Includes illustrations derived wholly from...

Beautifully written yet highly controversial, An Image of Africa asserts Achebe's belief in Joseph Conrad as a 'bloody racist' and his conviction that Conrad's novel Heart of Darkness only serves to perpetuate damaging stereotypes of black people. Also...

The four-hundred-year story of readers' struggles with a famously unreadable poem-and what they reveal about the history of reading and the future of literary studies"I am now in the country, and reading in Spencer's fairy-queen. Pray what is the matter...

Every Sunday, readers of The New York Times Book Review turn with anticipation to see which novelist, historian, short story writer, or artist will be the subject of the popular By the Book feature. These wide-ranging interviews are conducted by Pamela...

Eliot's Four Quartets is arguably the finest long poem in modern English literature. It is also one that presents considerable problems of interpretation. In Word Unheard, first published in 1969, Blamires aims to unravel some of these problems by...

Many of Cy Twombly's paintings and drawings include handwritten words and phrases--naming or quoting poets ranging from Sappho, Homer, and Virgil to Mallarme, Rilke, and Cavafy. Enigmatic and sometimes hard to decipher, these inscriptions are a...

A look at how ideas of translation, migration, and displacement are embedded in the works of prominent artists, from Ovid to Tacita DeanOn Belonging and Not Belonging provides a sophisticated exploration of how themes of translation, migration, and...

Revelations on craft from a foundational scholar of Cormac McCarthyDevotees of Cormac McCarthy's novels are legion, and deservedly so. Embracing Vocation, which tells the tale of his journey to become one of America's greatest living writers, will be...

The Longman Anthology of Old English, Old Icelandic and Anglo-Norman Literatures provides a scholarly and accessible introduction to the literature which was the inspiration for many of the heroes of modern popular culture, from The Lord of the Rings to...

The Routledge Companion to Death and Literature seeks to understand the ways in which literature has engaged deeply with the ever-evolving relationship humanity has with its ultimate demise. It is the most comprehensive collection in this growing field...

How do we properly define cultural appropriation, and is it always wrong? If we can write in the voice of another, should we? And if so, what questions do we need to consider first? In Appropriate, creative writing professor Paisley Rekdal addresses a...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781627310840Author Ian CutlerFormat PaperbackPage Count 400Imprint Feral House,U.S.Publisher Feral House,U.S.

Since the 1860s, long before scientists put a name to Alzheimer's disease, Canadian authors have been writing about age-related dementia. Originally, most of these stories were elegies, designed to offer readers consolation. Over time they evolved into...

The contributors to Against Life think critically about the turn to life in theory and culture and especially about its redemptive tendencies. Editors Alastair Hunt and Stephanie Youngblood shape their collection to provocatively challenge an assumption...

For centuries, English-language writers have borrowed words and phrases from other languages in their fictional works. Words in Collision explores this tradition of language-mixing and its consequences. Returning to Shakespeare’s Henry V, Michael Ross...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781681373911Author Edwin FrankFormat PaperbackPage Count 376Imprint The New York Review of Books, IncPublisher The New York Review of Books, Inc

A literary and cultural history of the intimate space of the eighteenth-century closet-and how it fired the imaginations of Pepys, Sterne, Swift, and so many other writers Long before it was a hidden storage space or a metaphor for queer and trans shame,...

'I believe that despite the enormous odds which exist, unflinching, unswerving, fierce intellectual determination, as citizens, to define the real truth of our lives and our societies is a crucial obligation which devolves upon us all. It is in fact...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781942130765Author Samuel WeberFormat HardbackPage Count 224Imprint Zone BooksPublisher Zone BooksWeight(grams) 490gDimensions(mm) 241mm * 161mm * 20mm

The Author's Effects: On the Writer's House Museum is the first book to describe how the writer's house museum came into being as a widespread cultural phenomenon across Britain, Europe, and North America. Exploring the ways that authorship has been...

In this quirky and surprising history, Alan Krell addresses the absurd and abject, the banal and the nastily subversive, and the romantic and fetishistic, as he describes the appearance of the foot in literature, photography, art, sport and film...

Saul Steinberg's inimitable drawings, paintings, and assemblages enriched the New Yorker, gallery and museum shows, and his own books for more than half a century. Although the literary qualities of Steinberg's work have often been noted in passing,...