Literary Criticism

23728 books

Ellmann's Joyce: The Biography of a Masterpiece and Its Maker

$35.00

Report copyright infringementby Zachary Leader (Author)The story of the most acclaimed literary biography of the twentieth century--an ingeniously plotted, behind-the-scenes account of how the literary critic and scholar Richard Ellmann shaped James Joyce's reputation. Richard Ellmann's James Joyce, published in 1959, was hailed by Anthony Burgess as "the greatest literary biography of the twentieth century." Frank Kermode thought the book would "fix Joyce's image for a generation," a predic...

The Garden Against Time: In Search of a Common Paradise

$18.99

Report copyright infringementby Olivia Laing (Author)In 2020, Olivia Laing began to restore an eighteenth-century walled garden in Suffolk, an overgrown Eden of unusual plants. The work brought to light a crucial question for our age: Who gets to live in paradise, and how can we share it while there's still time? Moving between real and imagined gardens, from Milton's Paradise Lost to John Clare's enclosure elegies, from a wartime sanctuary in Italy to a grotesque aristocratic pleasure ground...

Dickens the Enchanter: Inside the Explosive Imagination of the Great Storyteller

$30.00

Report copyright infringementby Peter Conrad (Author)A kaleidoscopic investigation of Dickens's imagination and the world he created. See Dickens as never before in this creative biography, which delves into his novels, journalistic essays and letters to reveal his strange, hilarious but obsessive personal character and the audacity of a mind that set out, as he said, to rearrange the universe. Peter Conrad's bold rediscovery of Dickens suggests that he alone rivals Shakespeare and in some wa...

The Genius of Judy: How Judy Blume Rewrote Childhood for All of Us

$18.99

Report copyright infringementby Rachelle Bergstein (Author)NATIONAL BESTSELLER This "lively and important portrait of a true literary revolutionary" (Los Angeles Times) explores Judy Blume's life, work, and cultural impact, focusing on her most iconic--and controversial--young adult novels, from Are You There God? It's Me, Margaret to Blubber. Everyone knows Judy Blume. Her books have garnered her fans of all ages for decades and sold tens of millions of copies. But why were people so drawn ...

$37.50

Report copyright infringementby Marco Santagata (Author), Emlyn Eisenach (Translator)A comprehensive biography of the celebrated author of the Decameron, a medieval masterpiece written in early Italian. Boccaccio (1313-75) stands with Dante and Petrarch as one of the "Three Crowns" of Italian letters, a trio of writers who shaped the history of humanism, literature, and poetry. In this book, Dante's award-winning biographer, Marco Santagata, takes up the moving life and legacy of Boccaccio--...

$198.00

Report copyright infringementby Jake Zawlacki (Editor)Over thirty years after his initial ascent to super stardom, Todd McFarlane (b. 1961) remains one of the most popular and contentious comic artists ever. The interviews compiled in this volume offer a nuanced portrait of McFarlane's polarizing character. Beginning with his earliest days on Spider-Man to the months before the hotly anticipated release of Spawn and ending with his writing ventures decades later, the interviews offer compelli...

$56.63

Report copyright infringementby Paul F. Brown (Author)One of the most gifted of America's writers, James Rufus Agee (1909-1955), spent a third of his short life in Tennessee, yet no biographical treatment until this one has so fully explored his roots in the state. In Rufus, Paul F. Brown draws deeply on a trove of journals, letters, interviews, and contemporaneous newspaper accounts, to produce a captivating portrait of Agee's boyhood.Brown meticulously delineates Agee's family history, his ...

Chaim Potok: Confronting Modernity Through the Lens of Tradition

$53.91

Report copyright infringementby Daniel Walden (Editor)Chaim Potok was a world-class writer and scholar, a Conservative Jew who wrote from and about his tradition and the conflicts between observance and acculturation. With a plain, straightforward style, his novels were set against the moral, spiritual, and intellectual currents of the twentieth century. This collection aims to widen the lens through which we read Chaim Potok and to establish him as an authentic American writer who created un...

$16.95

Report copyright infringementby David Biespiel (Author)"Biespiel's supple memoir of becoming a poet will surely inspire other writers to embrace the bodily character of writing and feel the power and, sometimes, the emptiness of the act of writing poetry." --Publishers Weekly (starred review) The Education of a Young Poet is David Biespiel's moving account of his awakening to writing and the language that can shape a life. Exploring the original source of his creative impulse--a great-grandfa...

$14.99

Report copyright infringementby David Medina (Author)Relying on historical and literary evidence hidden in plain sight, Shakespeare's Greatest Love tells the true, uncensored love story of William Shakespeare and Henry Wriothesley, 3rd Earl of Southampton."Shall I compare thee to a summer's day? Thou art more lovely and more temperate." --Shakespeare's Sonnet 18, written for and about Southampton. Leaving behind a wife and three young children in Stratford-upon-Avon, Shakespeare moved to L...

$14.00

Report copyright infringementby Natasha Trethewey (Author)An exquisite meditation on the geographies we inherit and the metaphors we inhabit, from Pulitzer Prize winner and nineteenth U.S. poet laureate Natasha Trethewey "Trethewey doesn't just explore the reasons why she writes. She also offers a compassionate argument for why we must all be the authors of our own stories."--Shannon Carlin, Time "Searching and intimate, this impresses."--Publishers Weekly In a shotgun house in Gulfport, Mi...

Who the Hell Is Pansy O'Hara?: The Fascinating Stories Behind 50 of the World's Best-Loved Books

$24.00

Report copyright infringementby Jenny Bond (Author), Chris Sheedy (Author)The captivating stories behind fifty of the greatest authors and their most famous literary creations Before Who the Hell is Pansy O'Hara ?, there had never been a single volume that explored the backstories of so many of the greatest books in the English language. A work sure to captivate all lovers of language and literature, it reveals in short, pithy chapters, the lives, loves, motivations, and quirky, fascinating ...

$188.10

Report copyright infringementby Charlotte Lee (Editor) Number of Pages: 438 Dimensions: 0.94 x 9 x 6 IN Publication Date: May 23, 2024

$63.00

Report copyright infringementby Brian Cremins (Author)Billy Batson discovers a secret in a forgotten subway tunnel. There the young man meets a wizard who offers a precious gift: a magic word that will transform the newsboy into a hero. When Billy says, "Shazam!," he becomes Captain Marvel, the World's Mightiest Mortal, one of the most popular comic book characters of the 1940s. This book tells the story of that hero and the writers and artists who created his magical adventures. The saga of ...

$27.00

Report copyright infringementby Proal D. Heartwell (Author)In Beauty It Is Finished: Reflections on the Life and Work of Oliver La Farge is a hybrid biography of an American author best known for his novel Laughing Boy, winner of the 1930 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. A member of a prominent American family, La Farge's canon of 24 books is equally divided between fiction and nonfiction, and most of his work examines Native American life and culture. In Beauty It Is Finished is divided into four...

$22.00

Report copyright infringementby Thomas Bernhard (Author)Written with a dark pain and drama that recalls the novels of Dickens, Gathering Evidence is a powerful and compelling memoir of youth by one of the twentieth century's most gifted writers. Born in 1931, the illegitimate child of an abandoned mother, Thomas Bernhard was brought up by an eccentric grandmother and an adored grandfather in right-wing, Catholic Austria. He ran away from home at age fifteen. Three years later, he contracted p...

Jim: The Life and Afterlives of Huckleberry Finn's Comrade

$28.00

Report copyright infringementby Shelley Fisher Fishkin (Author)The origins and influence of Jim, Mark Twain's beloved yet polarizing literary figure Mark Twain's Jim, introduced in Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1885), is a shrewd, self-aware, and enormously admirable enslaved man, one of the first fully drawn Black fathers in American fiction. Haunted by the family he has left behind, Jim acts as father figure to Huck, the white boy who is his companion as they raft the Mississippi toward ...

Henry James Comes Home: Rediscovering America in the Gilded Age

$18.95

Report copyright infringementby Peter Brooks (Author)In this enthralling re-creation of American novelist Henry James' famous ten-month trip around the United States, lauded critic Peter Brooks brings to life both the literary giant and America in its Gilded Age. In 1904, after two decades of living and travelling abroad, Henry James returned to the United States to discover a world drastically different from the one he had left behind. Suddenly, the future of the world seemed to be in his na...

$23.95

Report copyright infringementby Paul Fussell (Author)Not everyone is as innocent as this engaging complainant. Most people who read know something about Johnson, enough at least to summon up images of him asseverating "No, Sir," knocking back endless cups of tea, rambling over the Hebrides, puffing out his breath like a whale, repressing Boswell, standing bareheaded in Uttoxeter Market, and having a frisk with Beauclerk and Langton. And now, thanks to the Johnsonians of Yale, Columbia, Oxford...

The Perfect Hour: The Romance of F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ginevra King, His First Love

$20.00

Report copyright infringementby James L. W. West (Author)In The Perfect Hour, biographer James L. W. West III reveals the never-before told story of the romance between F. Scott Fitzgerald and his first love, Ginevra King. They met in January 1915, when Scott was nineteen, a Princeton student, and sixteen-year-old Ginevra, socially poised and confident, was a sophomore at Westover School. Their romance flourished in heartfelt letters and quickly ran its course-but Scott never forgot it. Ginev...

$15.10

Report copyright infringementby Jens Baggesen (Author), Jesper Gulddal (Editor), Jesper Gulddal (Translator)'This travel book is truly a labyrinth--or, more precisely, a piece of the labyrinth that it has been my fate to wander, from the cradle to the grave.' Jens Baggesen's The Labyrinth (1792-93) is a genre-bending and highly personal travel book that follows the young Danish author's journey, made in 1789, from Copenhagen through Germany to the Swiss border at Basel. In its outer form, it ...

The Origins of Nostalgia: Memories and Reflections

$71.91

Report copyright infringementby Svetlana Boym (Author), Ron Roberts (Editor)This collection of previously unpublished autobiographical and semi-autobiographical "snippets of experience" written by Svetlana Boym in the final period of her life capture her penchant for seamlessly melding, poetically and dream-like, the intensively personal with the everyday and the world-historical. They illuminate the formative conditions for the thinking which she was to develop into her majestic work on nost...

The Early H.G. Wells: A Study of the Scientific Romances

$64.89

Report copyright infringementby Bernard Bergonzi (Author)This is a sensitive study of Wells' imaginative development during his formative years. It comes at a time when interest in H.G. Wells' early writing is beginning to revive, owing, no doubt, to the current translation into reality of some aspects of science fiction.Mr. Bergonzi examines Wells' early fiction, from surviving student writings of the late eighties to 1901 when he published The First Men in the Moon, his last significant sci...

Muse of Fire: World War I as Seen Through the Lives of the Soldier Poets

$19.99

Report copyright infringementby Michael Korda (Author)Michael Korda, the best-selling author of Hero and Alone, tells the story of the First World War not in any conventional way but through the intertwined lives of the soldier poets who came to describe it best, and indeed to symbolize the war's tragic arc and lethal fury.His epic narrative begins with Rupert Brooke, "the handsomest young man in England" and perhaps its most famous young poet in the halcyon days of the Edwardian Age, and end...

In the Future of Yesterday: A Life of Stefan Zweig

$34.95

Report copyright infringementby R?diger G?rner (Author)A refreshing approach to the life and work of Austrian writer Stefan Zweig. In the Future of Yesterday delves into Stefan Zweig's considerable contribution to world literature, rooted in the Austro-Jewish tradition. His privileged social background saw him embrace European culture and cosmopolitanism. A world traveler from the outset he liked to uproot himself, but whether he stayed in London, New York or, eventually, in Brazil, his liter...

Writers Like Us: My Life with Sinclair Lewis

$68.31

Report copyright infringementby Barnaby Conrad (Author), Barnaby Conrad III (Editor)Writers Like Us is a poignant literary memoir by Barnaby Conrad, who had the good fortune to be mentored by Sinclair Lewis, the first American author to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the spring of 1947, the 25 year-old Conrad was living in Santa Barbara, California, when he met Lewis. Conrad was struggling with his first novel, while Lewis, then 62, was in the twilight of his career. While they both h...

$15.84

Report copyright infringementby Kristian Carlsson (Author) Number of Pages: 114 Dimensions: 0.27 x 8 x 5 IN Illustrated: Yes Publication Date: August 16, 2013

$21.60

Report copyright infringementby Frederik Byrn K?hlert (Author)Best known for his alternative comics, Chester Brown (b. 1960) is one of the most acclaimed and influential cartoonists of the last half century. This first biography provides a critical account of Brown's life and career, highlighting his role in the evolving comics landscape and tracing his journey from self-publishing minicomics on the streets of Toronto to creating award-winning graphic novels. Characterized by often minimalis...

Women Thrive IV: Inspiring True Stories of Women Overcoming Adversity

$18.70

Report copyright infringementby Raimonda Jankunaite (Author)Could the stories of others spark the transformation you've been seeking? Women Thrive Volume IV is a celebration of courage, resilience, and the strength it takes to rise. Through the deeply personal stories of 15 extraordinary women, this book shines a light on what's possible when we embrace hope, let go of fear, and step into our power.Each chapter takes you on a journey-from trauma to triumph, from darkness to light-revealing ho...

$19.44

Report copyright infringementby Eileen Cleary (Editor), Martha McCollough (Designed by) Number of Pages: 156 Dimensions: 0.33 x 9 x 6 IN Publication Date: June 10, 2025

$45.00

Report copyright infringementby David Stephen Calonne (Editor)Conversations with Michael McClure features twenty interviews from 1969 to 2015 that chronicle the capacious scope of McClure's creativity. McClure (1932-2020) is notable not only for his considerable achievements as a poet and prose writer of the Beat Generation, but also for the many collaborative connections he forged over seven decades. From the 1950s to his death, McClure worked with an astonishing range of important figures i...

Reckoning with the Imagination: Wittgenstein and the Aesthetics of Literary Experience

$68.31

Report copyright infringementby Charles Altieri (Author)Much current theorizing about literature involves efforts to renew our sense of aesthetic values in reading. Such is the case with new formalism as well as recent appeals to the notion of "surface reading." While sympathetic to these efforts, Charles Altieri believes they ultimately fall short because too often they fail to account for the values that engage literary texts in the social world. In Reckoning with the Imagination, Altieri a...