What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorNietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist
Walter Kaufmann · 412 pages
The Silent Woman: Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes
Janet Malcolm · 224 pages
Janet Malcolm has produced a brilliant, elegantly reasoned meditation on the art of biography, in which she takes as her example the various biographies of the poet Sylvia Plath. The Silent Woman is an astonishing feat of criticism and literary detection. It is not a book about the life of Sylvia Plath, but about her afterlife: how her reputation was forged from the poems she wrote just before he
How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
Sarah Bakewell · 400 pages
H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life
Michel Houellebecq · 150 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 Life of Charlotte Brontë
Elizabeth Gaskell · 448 pages
Intertwining fact and story, The Life of Charlotte Bronte takes the reader by one hand and Charlotte Bronte by the other to run rampant through the making of one of the greatest authoresses of all time. Follow Charlotte from her birthplace of Thornton as she sets off for school and later returns to teach her sisters, and come to know the “characteristic kindness of the Brontes.” This unsentimental
A Hobbit, a Wardrobe, and a Great War: How J.R.R. Tolkien and C.S. Lewis Rediscovered Faith, Friendship, and Heroism in the Cataclysm of 1914-18
Joseph Loconte · 235 pages
"The untold story of how the First World War shaped the lives, faith, and writings of J. R. R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis"--Amazon.com.
Tolkien and the Great War: The Threshold of Middle-earth
John Garth · 398 pages
"J.R.R. Tolkien responded to critics who saw The Lord of the Rings as a reaction to the Second World War. Tolkien and the Great War tells for the first time the full story of how he embarked on the creation of Middle-earth in his youth as the world around him was plunged into catastrophe. This biography reveals the horror and heroism that he experienced as a signals officer in the Battle of the So
The Lady and Her Monsters
Roseanne Montillo · 322 pages
"A ... blend of literary history, lore, and early scientific exploration that traces the origins of the greatest horror story of all time"--Dust jacket flap. Motillo brings to life the fascinating times, startling science, and real-life horrors behind Mary Shelley's gothic masterpiece, Frankenstein.
Tolkien and C.S. Lewis: The Gift of a Friendship
Colin Duriez · 244 pages
Both Tolkien and C.S. Lewis are known around the world as the creators of Middle-earth and Narnia. But few of their readers and fans know about the complex friendship between Tolkien and C.S. Lewis. Without the persistent encouragement of his friend, Tolkien would never have completed The Lord of the Rings. This great tale, along with the connected matter of The Silmarillion, would have remained m
Genius: A Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds
Harold Bloom · 832 pages
What is genius? It is the trait, says Harold Bloom, of standing both of and above an age, the ancient principle that recognizes and hallows the God within us, and the gift of breathing life into what is best in every living person. Now, in a monumental achievement of scholarship, America's preeminent literary critic presents an unprecedented celebration of one hundred of the most creative literary
Becoming Jane Austen
Jon Spence · 294 pages
"Becoming Jane Austen shows how Jane Austen's own personal experiences resonated throughout her work, from her juvenilia to Sanditon. Two people, above all, affected her life and caught her imagination. The first was her flirtatious and exotic cousin, Eliza de Feullide, married to a French count who was later guillotined. The second was the young Irish lawyer, Tom Lefroy, with whom Jane fell in lo
Everybody Behaves Badly: The True Story Behind Hemingway's Masterpiece The Sun Also Rises
Lesley M.M. Blume · 368 pages
"The making of Ernest Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises, the outsize personalities who inspired it, and the vast changes it wrought on the literary world. In the summer of 1925, Earnest Hemingway and a clique of raucous companions traveled to Pamplona, Spain, for the town's infamous running of the bulls. Then, over the next six weeks, he channeled that trip's maelstrom of drunken brawls, sexual rival
The Fellowship: The Literary Lives of the Inklings: J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, Owen Barfield, Charles Williams
Philip Zaleski, Carol Zaleski
Why Orwell Matters
Christopher Hitchens · 224 pages
Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time
Joseph Frank · 462 pages
This present volume is the second in a series dealing with the life and works of Dostoevsky ... during the ten years [he] spent first in solitary confinement, then in a prison camp in Siberia, and finally as a soldier in one of the Siberian regiments of the Russian army. --Preface.
Jane's Fame: How Jane Austen Conquered the World
Claire Harman · 341 pages
Part biography and part cultural history, this splendid book not only tells the captivating story of Jane Austen's life, but also her literary legacy. The slow growth of Austen's fame, the changing status of her work, and what it has stood for in English culture is a story of personal struggle and family dynamics as well as a history of critical practices and changing public tastes. Jane's Fame is
White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson
Brenda Wineapple · 416 pages
White Heat is the first book to portray the remarkable relationship between America's most beloved poet and the fiery abolitionist who first brought her work to the public. As the Civil War raged, an unlikely friendship was born between the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a literary figure who ran guns to Kansas and commanded the first Union regiment of black soldie
The Narnian: The Life and Imagination of C.S. Lewis
Alan Jacobs · 355 pages
The White Witch, Aslan, fauns and talking beasts, centaurs and epic battles between good and evil -- all these have become a part of our collective imagination through the classic volumes of The Chronicles of Narnia. Over the past half century, children everywhere have escaped into this world and delighted in its wonders and enchantments. Yet what we do know of the man who created Narnia? This bio

