Essays

In The Critic as Artist, arguably the most complete exploration of his aesthetic thinking, and certainly the most entertaining, Oscar Wilde harnesses his famous wit to demolish the supposed boundary between art and criticism. Subtitled Upon the...

A career-spanning collection of writings by the Nobel laureate Elias Canetti, edited and introduced by Pulitzer Prize winner Joshua Cohen. He embarked on no adventures, he was in no war. He was never in prison, he never killed anyone. He neither won...

The Austrian playwright, novelist, and poet Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) is acknowledged as among the major writers of our times. At once pessimistic and exhilarating, Bernhard's work depicts the corruption of the modern world, the dynamics of...

WINNER OF THE 2020 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR POETRY "Don Mee Choi's urgent DMZ Colony captures the migratory latticework of those transformed by war and colonization. Homelands present and past share one sky where birds fly, but 'during the Korean War...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780814257807Author Susanne Paola AntonettaFormat PaperbackPage Count 248Imprint Ohio State University PressPublisher Ohio State University...

Two thousand years ago the Roman poet Virgil related the adventures of a hero called Aeneas. He was a man who escaped from the burning ruins of Troy and, 'driven by Fate', led his people to a new home in a distant land. The story of Aeneas and the...

Clouds is a partly revised version of a play that failed when it was first produced. It has always fascinated (and usually shocked) students of philosophy because of its portrayal of Socrates as an atheist and a teacher of dishonest rhetoric, justly...

Rip-roaring and rib-tickling, Francois Rabelais' irreverent story of the giant Gargantua, his giant son Pantagruel, and their companion Panurge is a classic of the written word. This complete translation by Donald Frame, helpfully annotated for the...

Described by a later Greek historian as "a man seriously committed to raising a laugh", Lucian exulted in the exposure of absurdity and the puncturing of pretension, and was capable of finding a comic angle on almost any subject. In this selection we...

The Idler is a literary and philosophical lifestyle periodical edited by Tom Hodgkinson. This instalment features an interview with Jarvis Cocker about his memoir Good Pop Bad Pop, a guide to mudlarking, Arthur Smith in praise of teachers, Kate Rew on...

This is an extraordinary collection of tales from one of the very greatest Gaelic storytellers, Angus MacLellan, and translated by one of Scotland's finest Celtic Scholars, John Lorne Campbell. The stories in the book include every type of tale found on...

'This book will take your breath away, break your heart, and leave you in awe' President Bill Clinton_______Soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines speak in their own words about real life in today's armed forces. These are the brutally honest stories...

Includes a new introduction from Sophie Hannah, bestselling author of THE MONOGRAM MURDERS and HAVEN'T THEY GROWNAgatha Christie was not only the biggest selling writer of detective stories the world has ever known, she was also a mystery in herself,...

To double-track is to be both: counter-cultural and establishment, rich and poor, a bum with the keys to a country retreat, an exotic addition to the dinner table who still knows how to find their way around the silverware. In the 1970s Tom Wolfe...

'It has been said by its opponents that science divorces itself from literature; but the statement, like so many others, arises from lack of knowledge.' John Tyndall, 1874 Although we are used to thinking of science and the humanities as separate...

microbursts is a collection of hybrid, lyric essays about the places between life and death; memoir and poetry; making and letting go. Originally written by Reeder as an intense text-based collection of lyric and experimental essays responding to the...

Writer, poet, lecturer, broadcaster and man-of -letters, John Jordan (1930-88) was a distinguished scholar-critic in the Dublin of his day, teaching English at University College Dublin (1955-66) and at the Memorial University of Newfoundland at St...

'It is Hustvedt's gift to write with exemplary clarity of what is by necessity unclear.' Hilary Mantel, GuardianFeminist philosophy meets family memoir in a fresh essay collection by the award-winning essayist and novelist Siri Hustvedt, author of the...

'When the last fire goes out, time too will be finished'Italo Calvino was one of the most joyful and imaginative writers of the twentieth century. Here he muses on what the things we leave behind - whether waxworks or ancient graffiti, enigmatic maps or...

'Revisiting this selection of diaries and essay-reviews from the London Review of Books is restorative, an extended spa treatment that stretches tired brains and unkinks the usual habitual responses where Hitchens is concerned.' James Wolcott in his...

This volume gathers together some of the real and the imagined lives of Willa Muir, one of the finest and fiercest intellectuals of her generation.Her writing is rich with paradox - although obsessively Scottish in subject and style, she resented...

Completed shortly before his death, this is the last work of science from the most celebrated popular science writer in the world.In characteristic form, Gould weaves the ideas of some of Western society's greatest thinkers, from Bacon to Galileo to E. O...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781910170427Author Virginia WoolfImprint Five Leaves PublicationsPublisher Five Leaves Publications

Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship, a novel of self-realization greatly admired by the Romantics, has been called the first Bildungsroman and has had a tremendous influence on the history of the German novel. The story centers on Wilhelm, a young man...

Rational persuasion and appeal to an audience's emotions are elements of most literature, but they are found in their purest form in oratory. The speeches written by the Greek Orators for delivery in law-courts, deliberative councils and assemblies ...

More than a memoir, My Crazy Century explores the ways in which the epoch and its dominating totalitarian ideologies impacted the lives, character, and morality of Klima's generation. Klima's story begins in the 1930s, in the Terezin concentration camp...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780063138322Author JosephFormat PaperbackPage Count 272Imprint HarperCollins PublishersPublisher HarperCollins Publishers Inc

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780988553699Author Peter H GilmoreFormat PaperbackPage Count 176Imprint Underworld AmusementsPublisher Underworld AmusementsWeight(grams) 245gDimensions(mm)...

Lyric essayists draw on memoir, poetry, and prose to push against the arbitrary genre restrictions in creative nonfiction, opening up space not only for new forms of writing, but also new voices and a new literary canon. This anthology features some of...

Discover Virginia Woolf's informative and erudite critical essays on some of the key novelists and dramatists of the canon - from the ancient Greeks to Jane Austen and beyond.Virginia Woolf read, and wrote, as an outsider, denied the educational...

A new anthology of Dostoevsky's remarkable work 'A Writer's Diary'. A voluminous and variegated miscellany in which the celebrated author spoke to his readers about issues concerning Russia, it is a work as eerily prescient of global preoccupations in...

Description currently unavailableBook InformationISBN 9780850364392Author Edward ThompsonFormat PaperbackPage Count 366Imprint The Merlin Press LtdPublisher The Merlin Press Ltd

'Sometimes when you're reading Neal Stephenson, he doesn't just seem like one of the best novelists writing in English right now; he seems like the only one.' TimeOne of the most talented and creative authors working today, Neal Stephenson is renowned...

This new book of essays from the author of Wild tracks the turning light of the day and seasons, an almanac of the turning times. Beginning in night and winter, it moves to dawn and spring, then noon and summer and finally evening and autumn. Set partly...

A collected series of intertwined poetic essays written by acclaimed Japanese poet Hiromi Ito-part nature writing, part travelogue, part existential philosophy. Written between April 2012 and November 2013, Tree Spirits Grass Spirits adopts a non-linear...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9780486489230Author Mark TwainFormat PaperbackPage Count 192Imprint Dover Publications Inc.Publisher Dover Publications Inc.Weight(grams) 205gDimensions(mm)...

In this entertaining and stimulating essay, one of world literature's most distinctive thinkers sets out his personal view of the history and value of the novel in Western civilization. Too often, Kundera suggests, a novel is thought about only within...

From slave to sage.Epictetus was a crippled Greek slave of Phrygia during Nero's reign (AD 54-68) who heard lectures by the Stoic Musonius before he was freed. Expelled with other philosophers by the emperor Domitian in 89 or 92, he settled permanently...

Apologies but we at Booksplease don't have a full description for this book.Book InformationISBN 9781609809430Author Lydia LunchFormat PaperbackPage Count 112Imprint Seven Stories Press,U.S.Publisher Seven Stories Press,U.S.

In June 1862 Fyodor Dostoevsky left Petersburg on his first excursion to Western Europe. Ostensibly a trip to consult Western specialists about his epilepsy, Dostoevsky also wished to see firsthand the source of the Western ideas he believed were...