Literary History & Criticism

In the rigid theocracy of Salem, Massachusetts, rumors that women are practicing witchcraft galvanize the town....

An intellectual detective story, this history audiobook directs probing questions at orthodox history, presenting disturbing new evidence that historians have tried - but failed - to explain....

One morning in February 1952, a journalist called Ian Fleming sat down at his desk and set about creating a fictional secret agent. James Bond was born and would go on to become one of the most successful, enduring and lucrative creations in literature.

Author Benjamin Hoff shows that the philosophy of Winnie-the-Pooh is amazingly consistent with the principles of Taoism....

Dame Harriet Walter, renowned for her wonderful portrayals in Succession and Killing Eve, among others, is one of Britain's most esteemed Shakespearean actors. Now, having played most of Shakespeare's female characters, audaciously, she lets them speak their minds.

Tim Bowden takes us on one of the world's greatest road trips, from Australia's east coast to the Top End and into the heart of the outback....

At long last, the untold story of the mysterious Mrs Brontë. It is time to bring her out of the shadows....

Indigenous communities have been organizing against violence since newcomers first arrived, but the cases of missing and murdered women have only recently garnered broad public attention....

Over the course of a steamy and tense afternoon, twelve jurors deliberate the fate of a 19-year-old boy alleged to have murdered his own father....

Short Stories in Spanish for Beginners has been written especially for students from beginner to intermediate level, designed to give a sense of achievement, a feeling of progress and, most importantly, enjoyment....

Finally sort out who’s who in Greek mythology - from gods, goddesses, heroes, monsters, and everyone in between....

A brilliant investigation into the motivations and methods, Dumbledore dives between the lines of the Harry Potter books to create a portrait of the controversial Headmaster....

With passion and wit, Mary Oliver skillfully imparts expertise from her long, celebrated career as a disguised poet....

Insightful and inspiring thoughts on creative expression from a treasured poet in correspondence with a young neophyte. A perfect gift for the writer, artist, or thinker....

The Heroine’s Journey describes contemporary woman’s search for wholeness in a society where she has been defined according to masculine values....

The poems of the Poetic Edda have waited a long time for a modern English translation that would do them justice. Here it is at last (Odin be praised!). These amazing texts from a 13th-century Icelandic manuscript are of huge historical, mythological, and literary importance....

For anyone who ever wondered what Marcel Proust had in mind when he wrote In Search of Lost Time (while bedridden no less), Alain de Botton has the answer....

Significantly expanded and updated—a lively excursion into Japanese folklore and its increasing influence within global popular culture.

Zest. Gusto. Curiosity. These are the qualities every writer must have, as well as a spirit of adventure. In this exuberant book, the incomparable Ray Bradbury shares the wisdom, experience, and excitement of a lifetime of writing....

Orson Scott Card’s Ender’s Game is a science fiction classic. In Ender’s World almost two dozen writers offer new perspectives on the 1985 novel....

Take a tour through the horror paperback novels of two iconic decades...if you dare. Hear shocking plot summaries that invoke devil worship, satanic children, and haunted real estate....

Investigates what blackface is, why it occurred, and what its legacies are in the 21st century.

With this book, you’re bound to make those into a reality, where inside you will discover an easy guide to understanding dyslexia—cut through the jargon and get to know what dyslexia really is and how it uniquely impacts boys....

In The Oxford Handbook of Jorge Luis Borges, editors Daniel Balderston and Nora Benedict, along with a team of international scholars, contextualize Jorge Luis Borges's work for a new generation of twenty-first-century listeners and critics.

Living and Dying with Marcel Proust is the result of a lifetime's reading of, reflection on, and love for Proust's masterpiece, In Search of Lost Time....

Omar Khayyám (1048–1122) was a Persian mathematician, astronomer, and a philosopher who was not known as a poet in his lifetime. Later, a body of quatrains became attached to his name, although not all were his works. These verses lay in obscurity until 1859, when Edward FitzGerald (1809–1883), an English country gentleman, published a free adaptation of this Persian poetry. After its discovery by D. G. Rossetti and others, the verse became extremely popular.

Hindi Sahitya Ka Itihas by Acharya Ramchandra Shukla, translated by Shyam Chandra Kapoor, is a comprehensive history of Hindi literature. The audiobook covers the evolution of Hindi literature from its origins to contemporary times, exploring major literary movements, poets, and writers. Shukla’s work is a crucial resource for students, researchers, and enthusiasts of Hindi literature.

Rebecca van Laer and her partner purchase a home and move in with their senior cats, Toby and Gus. Their loved ones see this as a step toward an inevitable future—first comes the house, then a dog, then a child. But what if they are just cat people ? Moving between memoir, philosophy, and pop culture, Cat is a playful and tender meditation on cats and their people.

Featuring iterations of fairy tales and sinister descendants of Greek myths and bible stories, as well as a cast of lesser-known characters with names like Tam Lim, Child Wynd and Maisery, Old Songs threads a tapestry of Britain's landscape, history and cultures. At the base of hills we can visit to this day, elf queens kidnap hapless poets and carry them through rivers of blood; and at the foot of a tree whose offspring still stand in the forests of Northumberland, a girl mimes combing the hairless head of a dragon who was once her brother.

As John Freeman writes in California Rewritten, "Literature of so many kinds and so many genres from so many different types of people—at the highest level—has been coming out of California and from Californians for decades now." Freeman, one of the sharpest editors working today, has followed the evolution of California's literary life since his teenage years in Sacramento. In over fifty essays inspired by his hosting of Alta Journal's popular California Book Club, he offers an essential road map to California literature now.

In a narrative that moves from Mexico to the United States and back, Sánchez Prado discusses the definition of the taco, the question of the tortilla and the taco shell, and the existence of the taco as a modern social touchstone that has been shaped by history and geography. Challenging the idea of centrality and authenticity, Sánchez Prado shows instead that the taco is a contemporary, transcultural food that has always been subject to transformation.

In the last few decades, restaurants and food culture have achieved extraordinary cultural presence. Chefs are heroes and thought leaders, well-executed entrées go viral, dining out has become theater, plating has become art and ubiquitous Instagram content. It explores the meaning we find in good food and warm hospitality. It shows why the restaurant offers unique opportunities to change the quality of our engagement with others and to create shared meaning across the table.

The tales of Zeus, Hercules, and Medusa can seem confusing and disconnected from modern life. Without a guide, they remain an untapped source of wisdom, leaving you with the sense you’re missing something profound.

In popular imagination, Tolkien is a Luddite, but recent scholarship has identified Tolkien's extensive modern sympathies. Tolkien, Philosopher of War contributes to this growing literature. His is a modern critique of Enlightenment thinking, specifically those philosophies that wrest the initiative from God in divinizing man. His worry is apocalyptic politics—political movements that take Christ's word out of the realm of grace and make it a platform for political action.

Víctor Goti (Madrid, 1975) è scrittore, prologhista e responsabile della Casa Editrice Estivale. Cura il blog "Lo scribacchino preso a legnate", da decenni punto di riferimento degli scrittori emergenti. Valerio Di Stefano (Bergisch-Gladbach, 1964) è ispanista, filologo, linguista e genitore. Quando gli avanza un po' di tempo prova a insegnare qualcosa a qualcuno.

The burger, long the All-American meal, is undergoing an identity crisis. From its shifting place in popular culture to efforts by investors such as Bill Gates to create the non-animal burger that can feed the world, the burger’s identity has become as malleable as that patty of protein itself, before it is thrown on a grill. Carol Adams’s Burger is a fast-paced and eclectic exploration of the history, business, cultural dynamics, and gender politics of the ordinary hamburger.

The pub is an English institution. But its history has been obscured by myth and nostalgia. In this unique book, Philip Howell takes the public house as an object, or rather as a series of objects: he takes the pub apart and examines its constituent elements, from pub signs to the bar staff to the calling of "time." But Pub also explores the hidden features of the pub, such as corporate control, cultural acceptance and exclusion, and the role of the pub in communities.

Over the span of a single decade, VHS technology changed the relationship between privacy and entertainment, pried open the closed societies behind the Iron Curtain, and then sank back into oblivion. In the West, its advent deepened the trends of the age: individualism, consumerism, the fragmentation of society, and the consolidation of corporate power in the entertainment industry and its victory over the regulatory powers of the state.

This book examines the covert mechanisms by which children's literature and storytelling traditions shape moral, emotional, and ideological development through narrative form. Across these chapters, fairy tales and cultural myths are reinterpreted not as innocent entertainment, but as structured systems of control—normalizing obedience, framing suffering as necessary, and aligning virtue with conformity. The text interrogates recurring narrative tropes such as deferred rescue, the moralization of pain, the ritual function of punishment, and the binary construction of good and evil.

Jack Kerouac was one of America's great writers of the latter half of the twentieth century, yet he endured a life characterized by persistent hardship and disillusion. Leading Kerouac scholar Paul Maher Jr. targets the writer's embattled insight of self as central to his life and work. He reveals how Kerouac's troubled interactions with alcohol, drugs, and spirituality stamped its importance on his autobiographical prose and poetry and created a singular language that united thoughts on the human condition and spiritual liberation.