What’s in it
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24 books with the same feel
Include books by the same authorA Room of One's Own
Virginia Woolf · 129 pages
A Room of One's Own is an extended essay by Virginia Woolf. First published on 24 October 1929, the essay was based on a series of lectures she delivered at Newnham College and Girton College, two women's colleges at Cambridge University in October 1928. While this extended essay in fact employs a fictional narrator and narrative to explore women both as writers of and characters in fiction, the m
My Reading Life
Pat Conroy · 331 pages
Bestselling author Pat Conroy acknowledges the books that have shaped him and celebrates the profound effect reading has had on his life.
Heretics
G.K. Chesterton · 160 pages
Gilbert Keith Chesterton was born in London, England on the 29th of May, 1874. Though he considered himself a mere rollicking journalist, he was actually a prolific and gifted writer in virtually every area of literature. A man of strong opinions and enormously talented at defending them, his exuberant personality nevertheless allowed him to maintain warm friendships with people - such as George B
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.
In Search of Our Mothers' Gardens: Womanist Prose
Alice Walker · 397 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
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.
Selected Non-Fictions
Jorge Luis Borges · 559 pages
Why Read the Classics?
Italo Calvino · 288 pages
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
Writing and Difference
Jacques Derrida · 407 pages
Lectures on Russian Literature
Vladimir Nabokov · 352 pages
Against Interpretation and Other Essays
Susan Sontag · 304 pages
Tree and Leaf: Includes Mythopoeia and The Homecoming of Beorhtnoth
J.R.R. Tolkien · 112 pages
Fairy-stories are not just for children, as anyone who has read Tolkien will know. In his essay 'On Fairy-Stories', Tolkien discusses the nature of fairy-tales and fantasy and rescues the genre from those who would relegate it to juvenilia. This is aptly and elegantly illustrated in the haunting short story, 'Leaf by Niggle', which recounts the story of the artist, Niggle, who has 'a long jour
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.
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
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
The Price of the Ticket: Collected Nonfiction, 1948-1985
James Baldwin · 690 pages
Complete collection of major nonfiction writings by author James Baldwin, composed between 1948 and 1985, providing his perceptions of the twentieth century black American experience.
Illuminations: Essays and Reflections
Walter Benjamin · 280 pages
The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays
Charles Baudelaire · 224 pages
"Charles Baudelaire, the nineteenth-century French poet and writer, has also been called 'the father of modern criticism'. This stimulating volume gathers together some of his most celebrated critical writings."--Amazon.
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.

