Showing results by publisher "Random House Audio" in Literary History & Criticism

Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists...

Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Her life story is told in the documentary film And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS’s American Masters. Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird...

He's the destroyer of evil, the pervasive one in whom all things lie. He is brilliant, terrifying, wild and beneficent. He is both an ascetic and a householder, both a yogi and a guru. He encompasses the masculine and the feminine, the powerful and the graceful, the Tandava and the Laasya, the...

In Shaggy Muses, we visit Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Flush, the golden Cocker Spaniel who danced the poet away from death, back to life and human love. We roam the wild Yorkshire moors with Emily Brontë, whose fierce Mastiff mix, Keeper, provided a safe and loving outlet for the writer’s...

Friedrich Hölderlin ist der große Unbekannte unter den Klassikern der deutschen Literatur: ein Genie des Zusammenwirkens von philosophischer, religiöser und poetischer Kraft. Ein Einzelgänger, der keinen Halt im Leben fand, obwohl er hingebungsvoll liebte und geliebt wurde. Als Dichter, Übersetzer, Philosoph, Hauslehrer und Revolutionär lebte Hölderlin in zerreißenden Spannungen, unter denen er schließlich zusammenbrach. Seelisch tief verwundet, verbrachte er die zweite Hälfte seines Lebens im Tübinger Turm. Erst das 20. Jahrhundert entdeckte seine tatsächliche Bedeutung.

A memoir about writing a novel about searching for love. Is romance dead? Is that why there are so many vampires in today's romance novels? When Avi Steinberg's love life took a grim turn, he did what he always does: He consulted his old books, the usual cast of Great (Very Serious, Usually...

Lakshmi is the goddess of all that is good wealth (dhana), beauty (saundarya) and happiness (sukha). As Vishnu s consort and in her incarnations as Sita and Rukmini, she represents the ideal of femininity in Hinduism. She is also Shri, the goddess of fertility and grain, and Mahalakshmi, the...

From the longest-running, most influential book review in America, here is its best, funniest, strangest, and most memorable coverage over the past 125 years. Since its first issue on October 10, 1896, The New York Times Book Review has brought the world of ideas to the reading public. It is the...

Western thought on leadership is trait-oriented; it emphasizes the importance of ‘being a leader’. Indian leadership offers a contrast―it focuses on the ‘exercise of leadership’. Power Within introspects on this practice as it captures the civilizational wisdom of Bharat through the...

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK NATIONAL BESTSELLER A timely, passionate, provocative, blisteringly smart interrogation of how we make and experience art in the age of cancel culture, and of the link between genius and monstrosity. Can we love the work of controversial classic and...

A wise, lyrical memoir about the power of literature to help us read our own lives—and see clearly the people we love most. “Transcendent.”—The Washington Post “You’d be hard put to find a more moving appreciation of Woolf’s work.”—The Wall Street Journal NAMED ONE OF THE...

From the internationally best-selling author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, a spellbinding journey into the secrets of his art--the narratives that have shaped his vision, his experience of writing, and the keys to mastering the art of storytelling. One of the most highly acclaimed and...

From The New York Times best-selling author of Paris to the Moon and beloved New Yorker writer, a memoir that captures the romance of New York City in the 1980s. When Adam Gopnik and his soon-to-be-wife, Martha, left the comforts of home in Montreal for New York, the city then, much like today...

What’s a novelist supposed to do with contemporary culture? And what’s contemporary culture sup­posed to do with novelists? In The Ecstasy of Influence, Jonathan Lethem, tangling with what he calls the “white elephant” role of the writer as public intellectual, arrives at an astonishing...

Acclaimed New Yorker writer and author of the breakout debut bestseller The Lost City of Z, David Grann offers a collection of spellbinding narrative journalism. Whether he’s reporting on the infiltration of the murderous Aryan Brotherhood into the U.S. prison system, tracking down a chameleon...

From the widely acclaimed poet, novelist, critic, and scholar, a lucid and edifying exploration of the building blocks of poetry and how they've been used over the centuries to assemble the most imperishable poems. “Anyone wanting to learn how to remodel, restore, or build a poem from the...

An expansive, exhilarating work of criticism by one of the most significant writers of our day. So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our...

From the acclaimed biographer of Jane Jacobs and Srinivasa Ramanujan comes the first full life and work of arguably the most influential classical scholar of the twentieth century, who overturned long-entrenched notions of ancient epic poetry and enlarged the very idea of literature. In this...

On the perimeter of Israel’s Jezreel Valley, with the Carmel mountains rising up in the west, Meir Shalev has a beloved garden, “neither neatly organized nor well kept,” as he cheerfully explains. Often covered in mud and scrapes, Shalev cultivates both nomadic plants and “house dwellers...

In I Wonder as I Wander, Langston Hughes vividly recalls the most dramatic and intimate moments of his life in the turbulent 1930s. His wanderlust leads him to Cuba, Haiti, Russia, Soviet Central Asia, Japan, Spain (during its Civil War), through dictatorships, wars, revolutions. He meets and...