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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorThe Heroine's Bookshelf: Life Lessons, from Jane Austen to Laura Ingalls Wilder
Erin Blakemore · 224 pages
In this compelling book of beloved heroines and the remarkable writers who created them, Erin Blakemore explores how the pluck and dignity of literary characters such as Anne Shirley, Elizabeth Bennet, Jane Eyre, Scarlett O'Hara, Scout Finch and Jo March can inspire women today.
Wild Things: The Joy of Reading Children's Literature as an Adult
Bruce Handy · 307 pages
"An irresistible, nostalgic, and insightful--and totally original--ramble through classic children's literature from Vanity Fair contributing editor (and father) Bruce Handy. In 1690, the dour New England Primer, thought to be the first American children's book, was published in Boston. Offering children gems of advice such as "Strive to learn" and "Be not a dunce," it was no fun at all. So how di
How Proust Can Change Your Life
Alain de Botton · 203 pages
The starting point of How Proust Can Change Your Life is that a great novel can be nothing less than life-transforming. This is an unusual claim: our education system, while stressing that novels are highly worthwhile, rarely investigates why this is so. How Proust Can Change Your Life takes Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time as the basis for a sustained investigation into the power and signif
Reality Hunger: A Manifesto
David Shields · 219 pages
An open call for new literary and other art forms to match the complexities of the twenty-first century.Reality TV dominates broadband. YouTube and Facebook dominate the web. In Reality Hunger: A Manifesto, his landmark new book, David Shields (author of the New York Times best seller The Thing About Life Is That One Day You'll Be Dead) argues that our culture is obsessed with "reality" precis
Shelf Discovery: The Teen Classics We Never Stopped Reading
Lizzie Skurnick, Laura Lippman, Meg Cabot, Jennifer Weiner, Cecily von Ziegesan
Remember that book you read at that time in your life when everything seemed to be going crazy—the one book that brought the world into focus and helped soothe your raging teenage angst?
Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination
Toni Morrison · 91 pages
Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison brings the genius of a master writer to this personal inquiry into the significance of African-Americans in the American literary imagination. Her goal, she states at the outset, is to "put forth an argument for extending the study of American literature ... draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for dis
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
The Books in My Life
Henry Miller · 323 pages
Some writers attempt to conceal the literary influences which have shaped their thinking––but not Henry Miller. In this unique work, he gives an utterly candid and self-revealing account of the reading he did during his formative years. In The Books in My Life he shares the thrills of discovery that many kinds of books have brought to a keenly curious and questioning mind. Some of Miller's favor
The Art of Subtext: Beyond Plot
Charles Baxter · 149 pages
My Life in Middlemarch
Rebecca Mead · 293 pages
"A New Yorker writer revisits the seminal book of her youth--Middlemarch-- and fashions a singular, involving story of how a passionate attachment to a great work of literature can shape our lives and help us to read our own histories."--From publisher description. "Rebecca Mead was a young woman in an English coastal town when she first read George Eliot's Middlemarch, regarded by many as the gr
The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books
Azar Nafisi · 338 pages
The best-selling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran presents an impassioned tribute to the importance of fiction to democracy that blends memoir with close readings of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Babbitt and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. "A passionate hymn to the power of fiction to change people's lives, by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran. Ten years a
Out of Sheer Rage: Wrestling with D. H. Lawrence
Geoff Dyer · 256 pages
Geoff Dyer wanted to write a book about D. H. Lawrence. He wanted, in fact, to write his 'Lawrence book'. The problem was Dyer didn't really know what his 'Lawrence book' would be, what form it would take, or even when he'd start writing it. He set out simply to explore and record his reactions - both as a reader, and as a writer himself. But, just as Lawrence's study of Thomas Hardy ended up bei
A Reader's Manifesto: An Attack on the Growing Pretentiousness in American Literary Prose
B.R. Myers · 149 pages
Including: A response to critics, and: Ten rules for "serious" writers, the author continues his fight on behalf of the American reader, arguing against pretension in so-called "literary" fiction, naming names and exposing the literary status quo.
Stephen King's Modern Macabre: Essays on the Later Works
Patrick McAleer, Michael A. Perry · 220 pages
Supernatural Horror in Literature
H.P. Lovecraft · 106 pages
Great modern American supernaturalist brilliantly surveys history of genre to 1930s, summarizing, evaluating scores of books, including works by Poe, Bierce, M.R. James, "Monk" Lewis, many others. Praised by critics as diverse as Edmund Wilson and Vincent Starrett. New introduction by E. F. Bleiler
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
13 Ways of Looking at the Novel
Jane Smiley · 591 pages
Pulitzer Prize winner and bestselling novelist Jane Smiley celebrates the novel--and takes us on an exhilarating tour through one hundred of them--in this seductive and immensely rewarding literary tribute.In her inimitable style--exuberant, candid, opinionated--Smiley explores the power of the novel, looking at its history and variety, its cultural impact, and just how it works its magic. She inv