Literary Criticism Essays

Forty essays on history, art, and literature to lift your mind and spirit. Guy Davenport serves as the listener's guide through history and literature, providing links between music and sculpture, modernist poets and classic philosophers, the past and present-pointing out the values and avenues of thought that have shaped our ideas and our thinking.

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice A New York Times Bestseller A New York Magazine Best Book of the Year An Economist Best Book of the Year Pulitzer Prize–Winning Author of Gilead Marilynne Robinson has built a sterling reputation as a writer of sharp, subtly moving prose, not only...

'A book to underline endlessly, to carry around until battered, and then to tell all your friends to buy because you're too reluctant to give up your own copy. A wonder’ Polly Barton 'Brings a welcome freshness of vision and a dashing style … provocative and illuminating' The Spectator...

Brought to you by Penguin. Crafted over twenty-five years, I Want to Talk to You invites you into a conversation about literature, art and music, identity, grief and everything in between As a young journalist, Diana Evans was catapulted overnight into the role of culture editor, going on to...

15 Essays des gefeierten Autors von Die Korrekturen, Freiheit und Crossroads. Virtuos und pointiert setzt sich Jonathan Franzen mit dem Geist seiner Zeit auseinander und offenbart ganz persönliche Erfahrungen: In fünfzehn Essays ergründet er »die Schwierigkeit, in einer lärmenden und zerstreuenden Massenkultur Individualität und Vielschichtigkeit zu bewahren: die Frage, wie Alleinsein geht«. Gegen eine medial beschleunigte Welt und von Ideologien gefärbte Wahrnehmung setzt er die kreative Abgeschiedenheit, den genauen Blick, das Lesen.

In recent years, nicotine has become as verboten as many hard drugs. The literary styles in this volume are as varied as the moral quandaries herein, and the authors have successfully unleashed their incandescent imaginations on the subject matter, fashioning an immensely addictive collection...

A partir de siete preguntas que funcionan como disparadores, ¿A qué llamamos literatura? intenta responder cuestiones centrales en los estudios literarios: cómo se clasifican las obras, por qué las valoramos, qué valoramos en ellas, cómo representan mundos posibles, cómo las leemos, cómo circulan en la vida social, cómo se insertan en los conflictos que atraviesan nuestra cultura. Dirigido por José Luis de Diego, el presente volumen es el resultado de convertir -obligado por las restricciones sanitarias de 2020- las clases orales en clases escritas.

Gli scritti riuniti in questa raccolta vertono sulle funzioni della letteratura, su autori che Eco ha frequentato a lungo come Nerval, Joyce, Borges (ma anche Aristotele e Dante), sull’influenza di alcuni testi più o meno letterari sullo sviluppo degli eventi storici, su alcuni problemi tipici del narrare, come la rappresentazione verbale dello spazio, l’ironia intertestuale, la natura dei mondi possibili della finzione, e su alcuni concetti chiave della scrittura "creativa", come il simbolo, lo stile, la "zeppa" (ovvero i momenti apparentemente "morti", e meramente funzionali nello sviluppo d

The "Fresh Air" book critic investigates the enduring power of The Great Gatsby—"The Great American Novel we all think we've read, but really haven't." Conceived nearly a century ago by a man who died believing himself a failure, it's now a revered classic and a rite of passage in the reading...

As any fan of Jo Walton's Among Others might guess, Walton is both an inveterate reader of SF and fantasy, and a chronic rereader of books. In 2008, then-new science fiction mega-site Tor.com asked Walton to blog regularly about her rereading—about all kinds of older fantasy and SF, ranging from acknowledged classics, to guilty pleasures, to forgotten oddities and gems. These posts have consistently been among the most popular features of Tor. Now this volume presents a selection of the best of them, ranging from short essays to long reassessments of some of the field's most ambitious series.

The complete sonnets of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century—in English and SpanishThis landmark collection brings together for the first time in any language all of the sonnets of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. More intimate and personally revealing than...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER Here is the Nobel Prize winner in her own words: a rich gathering of her most important essays and speeches, spanning four decades that "speaks to today’s social and political moment as directly as this morning’s headlines” (NPR). These pages give us her searing...

A pithy and brilliant introduction to Susan Sontag’s writing on women, gathering early essays on aging, equality, beauty, sexuality, and fascism Susan Sontag was one of the most formidable, original, and influential thinkers of the last century. “The most interesting ideas are heresies,”...

A dual-language volume of poems on darkness and light—many appearing in English for the first time—by one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century Revered for his magnificent works of fiction, Jorge Luis Borges thought of himself primarily as a poet. Poems of the Night is a...

An updated version of Mark Twain's classic examination of James Fenimore Cooper's classic works.

People have been telling their love stories for thousands of years. It is the greatest common human experience. And yet, love stories coach us to believe that love is selective, somehow, that it can be boxed in and easily defined. This is a collection of eleven remarkable essays that widen the...