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24 books with the same feel
Hide books by the same authorThe Art of Cruelty: A Reckoning
Maggie Nelson · 304 pages
Discusses whether the brutal imagery present in reality and entertainment will shock society into a less alienated state and help create a just social order or whether focusing on representations of cruelty makes society more cruel.
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 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
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
Why Orwell Matters
Christopher Hitchens · 224 pages
For a New Novel: Essays on Fiction
Alain Robbe-Grillet · 175 pages
Better Living Through Criticism: How to Think about Art, Pleasure, Beauty, and Truth
A.O. Scott · 282 pages
"The New York Times film critic shows why we need criticism now more than ever. Few could explain, let alone seek out, a career in criticism. Yet what A.O. Scott shows in Better Living Through Criticism is that we are, in fact, all critics: because critical thinking informs almost every aspect of artistic creation, of civil action, of interpersonal life. With penetrating insight and warm humor, Sc
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
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
The Romantic Manifesto
Ayn Rand · 200 pages
Russian Thinkers
Isaiah Berlin, Jason Ferrell · 312 pages
Few, if any, English-language critics have written as perceptively as Isaiah Berlin about Russian thought and culture. Russian Thinkers is his unique meditation on the impact that Russia's outstanding writers and philosophers had on its culture. In addition to Tolstoy's philosophy of history, which he addresses in his most famous essay, 'The Hedgehog and the Fox,' Berlin considers the social and p
The Ultimate Harry Potter and Philosophy: Hogwarts for Muggles
Gregory Bassham · 288 pages
"The Ultimate Harry Potter: Hogwarts for Muggles, is a fresh and distinctive report on the great ideas in the series. All the authors of these chapters have had the advantage of thinking through their chosen issues, and writing up their conclusions after the entire Potter storyline was complete, and Rowling had even had her say in public about things that never made it into the pages of the offici
The Sadeian Woman
Angela Carter · 154 pages
Angela Carter turns concepts and assumptions about love and sex inside out with an original examination of Sade's ideas.
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.
Writing and Difference
Jacques Derrida · 407 pages
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?
Forbidden Knowledge: From Prometheus to Pornography
Roger Shattuck · 369 pages
Forbidden Knowledge boldly traces the tragic arc of Western literature and culture as it explores the notion of "forbidden knowledge," from the sexual innocence of Adam and Eve to the awe-inspiring discoveries of modern scientists who have created the atomic bomb and recombinant DNA. The result is a dire portrait of human presumption and of a culture that has abandoned all limits in the quest for
A 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
The Naive and the Sentimental Novelist
Orhan Pamuk · 200 pages
What happens within us when we read a novel? And how does a novel create its unique effects, so distinct from those of a painting, a film, or a poem? In this inspired, thoughtful, deeply personal book, Orhan Pamuk takes us into the worlds of the writer and the reader, revealing their intimate connections.
The Republic of Imagination: America in Three Books
Azar Nafisi · 338 pages
The best-selling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran presents an impassioned tribute to the importance of fiction to democracy that blends memoir with close readings of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Babbitt and The Heart Is a Lonely Hunter. "A passionate hymn to the power of fiction to change people's lives, by the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Reading Lolita in Tehran. Ten years a