What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorCareless People: Murder, Mayhem, and the Invention of The Great Gatsby
Sarah Churchwell · 432 pages
" Tracing the genesis of a masterpiece, a Fitzgerald scholar follows the novelist as he begins work on The Great Gatsby. The autumn of 1922 found F. Scott Fitzgerald at the height of his fame, days from turning twenty-six years old, and returning to New York for the publication of his fourth book, Tales of the Jazz Age. A spokesman for America's carefree younger generation, Fitzgerald found a home
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
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
Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words
Jay Rubin · 326 pages
The Trip to Echo Spring
Olivia Laing · 352 pages
Why is it that some of the greatest works of literature have been produced by writers in the grip of alcoholism, an addiction that cost them personal happiness and caused harm to those who loved them? In this title, the author examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six extraordinary men.
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
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
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.
H.P. Lovecraft: Against the World, Against Life
Michel Houellebecq · 150 pages
Eminent Outlaws: The Gay Writers Who Changed America
Christopher Bram · 372 pages
Describes how the trailblazing, post-war gay literary figures, including Tennessee Williams, Gore Vidal, Truman Capote, and Allen Ginsberg, paved the way for newer generations, including Armistead Maupin, Edmund White, and Edward Albee.
Three Masters; Balzac, Dickens, Dostoeffsky
Stefan Zweig · 238 pages
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.
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
Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg: The Letters
Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg · 500 pages
The first collection of letters between the two leading figures of the Beat movement. Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg are the most celebrated names of the Beat Generation, linked together not only by their shared artistic sensibility but also by a deep and abiding friendship, one that colored their lives and greatly influenced their writing. Editors Bill Morgan and David Stanford shed new light on
Clever Maids: The Secret History of the Grimm Fairy Tales
Valerie Paradiz · 222 pages
The Most Dangerous Book: The Battle for James Joyce's Ulysses
Kevin Birmingham · 424 pages
For more than a decade, the book that literary critics now consider the most important novel in the English language was illegal to own, sell, advertise or purchase in most of the English-speaking world. James Joyce's big blue book, "Ulysses, " ushered in the modernist era and changed the novel for all time. But the genius of "Ulysses "was also its danger: it omitted absolutely nothing. All of the