Catalog Search Results
Author
Language
English
Description
"Sparky Sweets, Ph.D. and Wisecrack present Thug Notes, the outrageously funny, ultra-sharp guide to sixteen of literature's most beloved classics - including The Catcher in the Rye, To Kill a Mockingbird, Pride & Prejudice and Things Fall Apart. Having already taught millions around the world, Dr. Sweets makes it easy to love and understand these important literary works. With hilarious character breakdowns, masterful analyses, witty observations,...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"Scholars and laymen alike have long projected their fantasies onto the great expanse of the global North, whether it be as a frozen no-man's-land, an icy realm of marauding Vikings, or an unspoiled cradle of prehistoric human life. Bernd Brunner reconstructs the encounters of adventurers, colonists, and indigenous communities that led to the creation of a northern "cabinet of wonders" and imbued Scandinavia, Iceland, and the Arctic with a perennial...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Great stories of people, history, and literature are combined to show how the power of the written word has influenced civilizations throughout time. Puchner writes about Ezra and the Old Testament, a young woman in 9th century Japan who wrote the first novel, a wild story about Cervantes and pirates, how Benjamin Franklin became the father of print in the United States, and more. Over this remarkable, engaging book, Puchner tells stories of creative...
Author
Language
English
Description
"W.H. Auden once wrote that "art is our chief means of breaking bread with the dead." In his brilliant and compulsively readable new treatise BREAKING BREAD WITH THE DEAD, distinguished professor and author Alan Jacobs shows us that engaging with the great writings of the past might help us live less anxiously in the present. Today we are battling too much information, a society changing at lightning speed, algorithms aimed at shaping our every move,...
Author
Language
English
Description
"From leading Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro, a timely and insightful examination of what the world's greatest dramatist can teach us about life in an America riven by conflict. The United States has always been divided, but Americans from all walks of life have also always shared a deep affinity for the plays William Shakespeare, even if their meaning has been fiercely contested. For well over two centuries now, Americans of all stripes--presidents...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Preeminent Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro shows how the tumultuous events in England in 1606 affected Shakespeare and shaped the three great tragedies he wrote that year--King Lear, Macbeth, and Antony and Cleopatra. In the years leading up to 1606, since the death of Queen Elizabeth and the arrival in England of her successor, King James of Scotland, Shakespeare's great productivity had ebbed, and it may have seemed to some that his prolific...
Author
Language
English
Description
"A revelatory narrative of the intersecting lives and works of revered authors Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster and D.H. Lawrence during 1922, the birth year of modernism The World Broke in Two tells the fascinating story of the intellectual and personal journeys four legendary writers, Virginia Woolf, T.S. Eliot, E.M. Forster, and D.H. Lawrence, make over the course of one pivotal year. As 1922 begins, all four are literally at a loss for...
Author
Language
English
Description
A "delightful reader's companion" (The New York Times) to the great nineteenth-century British novels of Austen, Dickens, Trollope, the Brontës, and more, this lively guide clarifies the sometimes bizarre maze of rules and customs that governed life in Victorian England.
For anyone who has ever wondered whether a duke outranked an earl, when to yell "Tally Ho!" at a fox hunt, or how one landed in "debtor's prison," this book...
For anyone who has ever wondered whether a duke outranked an earl, when to yell "Tally Ho!" at a fox hunt, or how one landed in "debtor's prison," this book...
Author
Language
English
Description
"A stirring group biography of the Inklings, the Oxford writing club featuring J.R.R. Tolkien and C. S. Lewis"--
C. S. Lewis is the twentieth century's most widely read Christian writer and J.R.R. Tolkien its most beloved mythmaker. For three decades, they and their closest associates formed a literary club known as the Inklings, which met every week in Lewis's Oxford rooms and in nearby pubs. They discussed literature, religion, and ideas; read...