Rules for the Dance: A Handbook for Writing and Reading Metrical Verse

The City of Words

Alberto Manguel · 203 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.

The Rhetoric & The Poetics of Aristotle

Aristotle · 289 pages

Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction

Catherine Belsey · 128 pages

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 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.

Heavy Words Lightly Thrown: The Reason Behind the Rhyme

Chris Roberts

Crossing The Wine-Dark Sea

Emily Wilson

The translator of editions of Homer’s “Iliad” and “Odyssey” explicates potential complications encountered in her line of work.

Morphology of the Folktale

Vladimir Propp · 134 pages

The Ring of Words: Tolkien and the Oxford English Dictionary

Peter Gilliver, E.S.C. Weiner, Jeremy Marshall · 256 pages

Experiences in translation

Umberto Eco · 135 pages

"Translation is not about comparing two languages, Umberto Eco argues, but about the interpretation of a text in two different languages.". "In this book he draws on his substantial practical experience to identify and discuss some central problems of translation. As he demonstrates, a translation can express an evident deep sense of a text even when violating both lexical and referential faithfu

Misquoting Jesus: The Story Behind Who Changed the Bible and Why

Bart D. Ehrman · 256 pages

For almost 1,500 years, the New Testament manuscripts were copied by hand — — and mistakes and intentional changes abound in the competing manuscript versions. Religious and biblical scholar Bart Ehrman makes the provocative case that many of our widely held beliefs concerning the divinity of Jesus, the Trinity, and the divine origins of the Bible itself are the results of both intentional and ac

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:

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

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

Hemingway Didn't Say That: The Truth Behind Familiar Quotations

Garson O'Toole · 383 pages

Garson O'Toole -- the Internet's foremost investigator into the dubious origins of our most repeated quotations, aphorisms, and everyday sayings -- collects his efforts into a first-ever encyclopedia of corrective popular history. Containing an enormous amount of original research, this delightful compendium presents information previously unavailable to readers, writers, and scholars. It also ser

The Languages of Tolkien's Middle-Earth

Ruth S. Noel, J.R.R. Tolkien · 207 pages

Presents a comprehensive pocket guide to the fourteen languages of Tolkien's Middle-Earth and contains a dictionary and English/Elvish glossary, rules of grammar and pronunciation, and how to write the Elvish alphabet.

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.

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

Elements of Semiology

Roland Barthes · 111 pages

The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

Mark Forsyth · 224 pages

From classic poetry to pop lyrics, from Charles Dickens to Dolly Parton, even from Jesus to James Bond, Mark Forsyth explains the secrets that make a phrase--such as "O Captain! My Captain!" or "To be or not to be"--memorable. In his inimitably entertaining and wonderfully witty style, he takes apart famous phrases and shows how you too can write like Shakespeare or quip like Oscar Wilde. Whether

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.

Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words

Jay Rubin · 326 pages