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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorFrom Ritual to Romance
Jessie Laidlay Weston · 202 pages
A study of the Grail legend explores the saga's Gnostic roots and its relationship to ancient nature cults that associated the physical condition of the king with the productivity of the land.
The Rhetoric & The Poetics of Aristotle
Aristotle · 289 pages
The Hero With a Thousand Faces
Joseph Campbell · 456 pages
A thoroughly intense and all-embracing read. In the 2-page preface written in 1948, he states such ground-shakingly obvious facts about the human psyche, that you'll wonder why these ideas had never dawned on you before. Then, into the main text of the book, and you're spirited away into an adventure that explores all forms of mythology and their importance in founding different cultures all aroun
The History of the Hobbit, Part One: Mr. Baggins
John D. Rateliff, J.R.R. Tolkien · 512 pages
Of Grammatology
Jacques Derrida · 354 pages
Jacques Derrida's revolutionary theories about deconstruction, phenomenology, psychoanalysis, and structuralism, first voiced in the 1960s, forever changed the face of European and American criticism. The ideas in De la grammatologie sparked lively debates in intellectual circles that included students of literature, philosophy, and the humanities, inspiring these students to ask questions of thei
Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction
Catherine Belsey · 128 pages
A Collection of Essays
George Orwell · 320 pages
Such, such were the joys ... -- Charles Dickens -- The art of Donald McGill -- Rudyard Kipling -- Raffles and Miss Blandish -- Shooting an elephant -- Politics and the English language -- Reflections on Gandhi -- Marrakech -- Looking back on the Spanish War -- Inside the whale -- England your England -- Boys' weeklies -- Why I write.
Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art
Scott McCloud · 215 pages
Praised throughout the cartoon industry by such luminaries as Art Spiegelman, Matt Groening, and Will Eisner, Scott McCloud's Understanding Comics is a seminal examination of comics art: its rich history, surprising technical components, and major cultural significance. Explore the secret world between the panels, through the lines, and within the hidden symbols of a powerful but misunderstood art
The Location of Culture
Homi K. Bhabha · 346 pages
Rethinking questions of identity, social agency and national affiliation, Bhabha provides a working, if controversial, theory of cultural hybridity - one that goes far beyond previous attempts by others. In The Location of Culture, he uses concepts such as mimicry, interstice, hybridity, and liminality to argue that cultural production is always most productive where it is most ambivalent. Speakin
The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien
J.R.R. Tolkien · 463 pages
Selected letters discuss his books, their meanings, his interests and also reveal his view of the world.
The City of Words
Alberto Manguel · 203 pages
The Art of Biblical Narrative
Robert Alter · 195 pages
This book offers a literary approach to the biblical text. Robert Alter brings numerous textual examples of the different types of biblical narrative, e.g., dialogue, repetition, narration.
This Craft of Verse
Jorge Luis Borges · 160 pages
**From Library Journal:** For Borges (1899-1986), the central fact of life was the existence of words and their potential as building blocks of poetry. In this series of six long-forgotten lectures given at Harvard more than 30 years ago, he insists that reading (in English, primarily) gave him more pleasure than writing. Most of his examples are taken from English-speaking writers, such as Shakes
Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve: What the Numbers Reveal About the Classics, Bestsellers, and Our Own Writing
Ben Blatt · 288 pages
In Nabokov's Favorite Word Is Mauve, statistician and journalist Ben Blatt brings big data to the literary canon, exploring the wealth of fun findings that remain hidden in the works of the world's greatest writers. He assembles a database of thousands of books and hundreds of millions of words, and starts asking the questions that have intrigued curious word nerds and book lovers for generations:
Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse
Mary Oliver · 194 pages
For both readers and writers of poetry, here is a concise and engaging introduction to sound, rhyme, meter, and scansion - and why they matter. "The dance," in the case of this brief and luminous book, refers to the interwoven pleasures of sound and sense to be found in some of the most celebrated and beautiful poems in the English language, from Shakespeare to Edna St. Vincent Millay to Robert F
Six Memos For The Next Millennium
Italo Calvino · 124 pages
"Six memos for the Next Millenium" is a collection of five lectures Italo Calvino was about to deliver at the time of his death. Here is his legacy to us: the universal values he pinpoints become the watch-words for out appreciation of Calvino himself. What should be cherished in literature? Calvino devotes one lecture, or memo to the reader, toe each of five indispensable qualities: lightness, qu
The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts
David Lodge · 240 pages
"The articles with which David Lodge entertained and enlightened readers of the Independent on Sunday and The Washington Post are now revised, expanded and collected together in book form. The art of fiction is considered under a wide range of headings, such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Time-shift, Magical Realism and Symbolism, and each topic is illustrated by a passag
How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One
Stanley Fish · 165 pages
Some appreciate fine art; others appreciate fine wines. Stanley Fish appreciates fine sentences. The New York Times columnist and world-class professor has long been an aficionado of language: "I am always on the lookout for sentences that take your breath away, for sentences that make you say, 'Isn't that something?' or 'What a sentence!'" Like a seasoned sportscaster, Fish marvels at the adeptne
Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words
Jay Rubin · 326 pages
The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory
J.A. Cuddon · 1,051 pages
Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction
Jonathan Culler · 152 pages
Culler offers insights into theories about the nature of language and meaning, looks at whether literature is a form of self-expression or a method of appeal to an audience, and outlines the ideas behind deconstruction and semiotics.
Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction
Tracy Kidder, Richard Todd · 209 pages
From the inside flap: ...*Good Prose* explores three major nonfiction forms: narratives, essays, and memoirs. Kidder and Todd draw candidly, sometimes comically, on their own experience--their mistakes as well as accomplishments--to demonstrate the pragmatic ways in which creative problems get solved. They also turn to the works of a wide range of writers, novelists as well as nonfiction authors,
The Theatre of the Absurd
Martin Esslin · 443 pages
"In 1953 Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot premiered at a tiny avant-garde theatre in Paris; within five years, it had been translated into more than twenty languages and seen by more than a million spectators. Its startling popularity marked the emergence of a new type of theatre whose proponents - Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, and others - shattered dramatic conventions and paid scant attent