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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorAll 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.
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.
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
Classics 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.
Shadow and Act
Ralph Ellison · 317 pages
"With the same intellectual incisiveness and supple, stylish prose he brought to his classic novel Invisible Man, Ralph Ellison examines his antecedents and in so doing illuminates the literature, music, and culture of both black and white America. His range is virtuosic, encompassing Mark Twain and Richard Wright, Mahalia Jackson and Charlie Parker, The Birth of a Nation and the Dante-esque lands
Selected Non-Fictions
Jorge Luis Borges · 559 pages
Against Interpretation and Other Essays
Susan Sontag · 304 pages
The Polysyllabic Spree
Nick Hornby · 230 pages
A hilarious and true account of one man's struggle with the monthly tide of the books he's bought and the books he's been meaning to read.
Testaments Betrayed: An Essay in Nine Parts
Milan Kundera · 280 pages
Testaments Betrayed is written like a novel: the same characters appear and reappear throughout the nine parts of the book, as do the principal themes that preoccupy the author. Kundera once again celebrates the art of the novel, from its birth in a spirit of humor unique to European culture and sensibility - illustrated by some wonderful examples from the work of Rabelais and Cervantes - through
Where I'm Reading From: The Changing World of Books
Tim Parks · 241 pages
"Why do we need fiction? Why do books need to be printed on paper, copyrighted, read to the finish? Why should a group of aging Swedish men determine what "world" literature is best? Do books change anything? Did they use to? Do we read to challenge our vision of the world or to confirm it? Has novel writing turned into a job like any other? In Where I'm Reading From, the internationally acclaimed
Proofs & Theories: Essays on Poetry
Louise Gluck · 134 pages
"Proofs & Theories is a long-awaited first gathering of essays by one of this country's most brilliant poets. Like her poems, the prose of Ms. Gluck, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1993 for The Wild Iris, is compressed, fastidious, fierce, alert, and absolutely unconsoled." "The force of her thought is apparent everywhere in her writing and whether she is contemplating - skeptically - th
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
Walter Benjamin · 280 pages
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
Maps and Legends: Reading and Writing Along the Borderlands
Michael Chabon · 222 pages
A series of linked essays in praise of reading and writing, with subjects running from ghost stories to comic books, Sherlock Holmes to Cormac McCarthy. Throughout, Chabon energetically argues for a return to the thrilling, chilling origins of storytelling, rejecting the false walls around "serious" literature in favor of a wide-ranging affection.
Why Read the Classics?
Italo Calvino · 288 pages
Meditations on Middle-Earth
Karen Haber · 256 pages
A collection of essays, most of them by fantasy writers, on J.R.R. Tolkien and the influence of his work on the contributors' own literary endeavors.
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.
Burning Down the House: Essays on Fiction
Charles Baxter · 268 pages
What happens to American fiction in a time when villains are deprived of their villainy; when our consumer culture relentlessly insists on happy endings? In *Burning Down the House*, Baxter delves into the dramatic way that social and political circumstances influence the “urgent issues of storytelling.” Did Richard Nixon start a trend of dysfunctional narration that is now rife throughout fiction
What Makes This Book So Great
Jo Walton · 446 pages
"As any reader of Jo Walton's Among Others might guess, Walton is both an inveterate reader of SF and fantasy, and a chronic re-reader of books. In 2008, then-new science-fiction mega-site Tor.com asked Walton to blog regularly about her re-reading--about all kinds of older fantasy and SF, ranging from acknowledged classics, to guilty pleasures, to forgotten oddities and gems. These posts have con
Image-Music-Text
Roland Barthes · 220 pages
'Image-Music-Text' brings together major essays by Roland Barthes on the structural analysis of narrative and on issues in literary theory, on the semiotics of photograph and film, on the practice of music and voice. Throughout the volume runs a constant movement 'from work to text': an attention to the very 'grain' of signifying activity and the desire to follow -- in literature, image, film, son
Negotiating with the Dead
Margaret Atwood · 219 pages
What is the role of the Writer? Prophet? High Priest of Art? Court Jester? Or witness to the real world? Looking back on her own childhood and writing career, Margaret Atwood examines the metaphors which writers of fiction and poetry have used to explain--or excuse!--their activities, looking at what costumes they have assumed, what roles they have chosen to play. In her final chapter she takes up
The Hatred of Poetry
Ben Lerner · 96 pages
"No art has been denounced as often as poetry. It's even bemoaned by poets: "I, too, dislike it," wrote Marianne Moore. "Many more people agree they hate poetry," Ben Lerner writes, "than can agree what poetry is. I, too, dislike it and have largely organized my life around it and do not experience that as a contradiction because poetry and the hatred of poetry are inextricable in ways it is my pu