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Beowulf on the Beach: What to Love and What to Skip in Literature's 50 Greatest Hits
Jack Murnighan · back to the book
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorHow to Talk About Books You Haven't Read
Pierre Bayard · 208 pages
Offers advice to people on how to talk about books they have not read, including books they have skimmed, heard about, or read and forgotten, analyzes situations in which people might find themselves talking about books they have not read, and includes recommendations on how to resolve such social dilemmas.
How to Read Literature Like a Professor: A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines
Thomas C. Foster · 325 pages
What does it mean when a fictional hero takes a journey?. Shares a meal? Gets drenched in a sudden rain shower? Often, there is much more going on in a novel or poem than is readily visible on the surface—a symbol, maybe, that remains elusive, or an unexpected twist on a character—and there's that sneaking suspicion that the deeper meaning of a literary text keeps escaping you.In this practical an
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
More Baths, Less Talking
Nick Hornby · 135 pages
Shares selections from the author's column in "The Believer" that discuss books he has bought and books he has read, and offers suggestions for great reads in every genre.
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
The Possessed: Adventures With Russian Books and the People Who Read Them
Elif Batuman · 297 pages
Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence--including her own.
The Rights of the Reader
Daniel Pennac · 208 pages
Dear Fahrenheit 451: A Librarian's Love Letters and Break-Up Notes to the Books in Her Life
Annie Spence · 282 pages
If you love to read, and presumably you do since you've picked up this book, you know that some books affect you so profoundly they forever change the way you think about the world. Some books, on the other hand, disappoint you so much you want to throw them against the wall. Either way, it's clear that a book can be your new soul mate or the bad relationship you need to end. In Dear Fahrenheit 45
Changing My Mind: Occasional Essays
Zadie Smith · 306 pages
A sparkling collection of Zadie Smith's nonfiction over the past decade.Zadie Smith brings to her essays all of the curiosity, intellectual rigor, and sharp humor that have attracted so many readers to her fiction, and the result is a collection that is nothing short of extraordinary.Split into four sections—"Reading," "Being," "Seeing," and "Feeling"—Changing My Mind invites readers to witness th
The Art of Memoir
Mary Karr · 256 pages
Karr breaks down the key elements of great literary memoir, opening our concepts of memory and identity, and illuminating the cathartic power of reflecting on the past; anybody with an inner life or complicated history, whether writer or reader, will relate.
Consider the Lobster and Other Essays
David Foster Wallace · 343 pages
Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult-video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are enthralling narrative adventures. Whether covering the three-ring circus of a vicious presidential race, plunging into the wars between dictionary writers, or conf
How Fiction Works
James Wood · 273 pages
Provides a somewhat academic approach to a discussion of the main elements of fiction using examples (good and bad) from literature.
Talking About Detective Fiction
P.D. James · 179 pages
In a perfect marriage of author and subject, P. D. James--one of the most widely admired writers of detective fiction at work today--gives us a personal, lively, illuminating exploration of the human appetite for mystery and mayhem, and of those writers who have satisfied it.P. D. James examines the genre from top to bottom, beginning with the mysteries at the hearts of such novels as Charles Dick
An Experiment in Criticism
C.S. Lewis · 142 pages
"Professor Lewis believed that literature exists above all for the joy of the reader and that books should be judged by the kind of reading they invite. He doubted the use of strictly evaluative criticism, especially its condemnations. Literary criticism is traditionally employed in judging books, and 'bad taste' is thought of as a taste for bad books. Professor Lewis' experiment consists in rever
What Matters in Jane Austen?: Twenty Crucial Puzzles Solved
John Mullan
Which important Austen characters never speak? Is there any sex in Austen? What do the characters call one another, and why? What are the right and wrong ways to propose marriage? In What Matters in Jane Austen?, John Mullan shows that we can best appreciate Austen's brilliance by looking at the intriguing quirks and intricacies of her fiction. Asking and answering some very specific questions abo
Aspects of the Novel
E.M. Forster · 176 pages
The Clark Lectures, sponsored by Trinity College of the University of Cambridge, have had a long and distinguished history and have featured remarks by some of England's most important literary minds. Leslie Stephen, T.S. Eliot, F.R. Leavis, William Empson and I.A. Richards have all given celebrated and widely influential talks as the keynote speaker. One of the Lectures' most important mileston
Poetics
Aristotle · 144 pages
One of the first books written on what is now called aesthetics. Although parts are lost (e.g., comedy), it has been very influential in western thought, such as the part on tragedy.
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
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
How to Live: A Life of Montaigne in One Question and Twenty Attempts at an Answer
Sarah Bakewell · 400 pages