What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorClassics for Pleasure
Michael Dirda · 346 pages
In these delightful essays, Pulitzer Prize winner Michael Dirda introduces nearly ninety of the world's most entertaining books.
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
Mystery and Manners: Occasional Prose
Flannery O'Connor · 237 pages
The essays and articles in this volume are concerned mainly with the art of fiction--its quality, in regional writing; its nature and its aims; and its relatino to the writer's religion.
Writing and Difference
Jacques Derrida · 407 pages
The Common Reader
Virginia Woolf · 288 pages
Contains 26 essays on aspects of English literature. Among her subjects are the writings of Mary Wollstonecraft, Dorothy Wordsworth, and Christina Rossetti. She also reflects on the poetry of John Donne; the works of Daniel Defoe, Lawrence Sterne, George Meredith, and Thomas Hardy; Lord Chesterfield’s letters; and Thomas De Quincey’s autobiography. Noteworthy too is the last essay, "How Should One
Why Read the Classics?
Italo Calvino · 288 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
What is Literature?
Jean-Paul Sartre · 280 pages
Sartre argues for literature as a form of liberation in this classic and influential exposition of his existentialist philosophy. He examines the nature of writing, why people write, and for whom.
All Art Is Propaganda: Critical Essays
George Orwell, Keith Gessen · 374 pages
Collects critical essays written by George Orwell in the 1940s, in which he discusses the work of Charles Dickens, Rudyard Kipling, T. S. Eliot, Salvador Dali, and others; and also covers propaganda, politics, and more.
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
For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction
Alain Robbe-Grillet · 175 pages
On Stories: And Other Essays on Literature
C.S. Lewis · 180 pages
"A repackaged edition of the revered author's collection of essays on writing fiction. C.S. Lewis--the great British writer, scholar, lay theologian, broadcaster, Christian apologist, and bestselling author of Mere Christianity, The Screwtape Letters, The Great Divorce, The Chronicles of Narnia, and many other beloved classics--was a professor of literature at Oxford University, where he was known
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?
The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays
Mikhail Bakhtin · 444 pages
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.
The Curtain: An Essay in Seven Parts
Milan Kundera · 176 pages
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.

