Make It Scream, Make It Burn
A new collection of essays about obsession and longing from Leslie Jamison, the New York Times bestselling author of The Recovering and The Empathy Exams A combination of memoir, criticism, and journalism, Make It Scream, Make It Burn is Leslie Jamison s profound exploration of the oceanic depths
The Origin of Others
America s foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging What is race and why does it matter What motivates the human tendency to construct Others
Monster, She Wrote: The Women Who Pioneered Horror and Speculative Fiction
Meet the women writers who defied convention to craft some of literature s strangest tales, from Frankenstein to The Haunting of Hill House and beyond.Frankensteinwas just the beginning horror stories and other weird fiction wouldn t exist without the women who created it From Gothic ghost stories
Well-Read Black Girl: Finding Our Stories, Discovering Ourselves
An inspiring collection of essays by black women writers, curated by the founder of the popular book club Well Read Black Girl, on the importance of recognizing ourselves in literature Remember that moment when you first encountered a character who seemed to be written just for you That feeling of
What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading
Do you worry that you ve lost patience for anything longer than a tweet If so, you re not alone Digital age pundits warn that as our appetite for books dwindles, so too do the virtues in which printed, bound objects once trained us the willpower to focus on a sustained argument, the curiosity to
The Real Lolita: The Kidnapping of Sally Horner and the Novel that Scandalized the World
7 Hours and 26 Minutes Vladimir Nabokov sLolitais one of the most beloved and notorious novels of all time And yet, very few of its readers know that the subject of the novel was inspired by a real life case the 1948 abduction of eleven year old Sally Horner Weaving together suspenseful crime
Latest Readings
In 2010, Clive James was diagnosed with terminal leukemia Deciding that if you don t know the exact moment when the lights will go out, you might as well read until they do, James moved his library to his house in Cambridge, where he would live, read, and perhaps even write James is the
Bookworm: A Memoir of Childhood Reading
When Lucy Mangan was little, stories were everything They opened up new worlds and cast light on all the complexities she encountered in this one.She was whisked away to Narnia and Kirrin Island and Wonderland She ventured down rabbit holes and womble burrows into midnight gardens and
Meander, Spiral, Explode: Design and Pattern in Narrative
Novelist and writing teacher Jane Alison illuminates the many shapes other than the usual wavelike narrative arc that can move fiction forward The stories she loves most follow other organic patterns found in nature spirals, meanders, and explosions, among others Alison s manifesto for new
Packing My Library: An Elegy and Ten Digressions
A best selling author and world renowned bibliophile meditates on his vast personal library and champions the vital role of all libraries In June 2015 Alberto Manguel prepared to leave his centuries old village home in France s Loire Valley and reestablish himself in a one bedroom apartment on
The Albertine Workout
The Albertine Workout contains fifty nine paragraphs, with appendices, summarizing Anne Carson s research on Albertine, the principal love interest of Marcel in Proust s la recherche du temps perdu.
Ursula K. Le Guin: Conversations on Writing
When theNew York Timesreferred to Ursula K Le Guin as America s greatest writer of science fiction, they just might have undersold her legacy It s hard to look at her vast body of work novels and stories across multiple genres, poems, translations, essays, speeches, and criticism and see anything
1,000 Books to Read Before You Die: A Life-Changing List
Celebrate the pleasure of reading and the thrill of discovering new titles in an extraordinary book that s as compulsively readable, entertaining, surprising, and enlightening as the 1,000 plus titles it recommends Covering fiction, poetry, science and science fiction, memoir, travel writing,
The Ministry of Truth: The Biography of George Orwell's "1984"
The author has written a study that places George Orwell s 1984 in a variety of contexts the author s life and times, the book s precursors in the science fiction genre, and its subsequent place in popular culture Lynskey delves into how Orwell s harrowing Spanish Civil War experiences shaped his
So We Read On: How The Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures
It s a staple on almost every high school reading list in the country It s a book that has remained current for over half a century, fighting off critics and changing tastes in fiction But do even its biggest fans know all there is to appreciate about The Great Gatsby Maureen Corrigan, the book
Literary Theory: An Introduction
Written in 1982, this work appeared, as Professor Eagleton explains, at the watershed of two very different decades It could not anticipate what was to come after, neither could it grasp what had happened in literary theory in the light of where it was to lead.
The Western Canon: The Books and School of the Ages
Literary critic Harold Bloom s The Western Canon is than a required reading list it is a vision Infused with a love of learning, compelling in its arguments for a unifying written culture, it argues brilliantly against the politicization of literature and presents a guide to the great works of