Collected Essays: Notes of a Native Son / Nobody Knows My Name / The Fire Next Time / No Name in the Street / The Devil Finds Work / Other Essays


James Baldwin - 1998
    His brilliant and provocative essays made him the literary voice of the Civil Rights Era, and they continue to speak with powerful urgency to us today, whether in the swirling debate over the Black Lives Matter movement or in the words of Raoul Peck’s documentary “I Am Not Your Negro.” Edited by Nobel laureate Toni Morrison, the Library of America’s Collected Essays is the most comprehensive gathering of Baldwin’s nonfiction ever published.With burning passion and jabbing, epigrammatic wit, Baldwin fearlessly articulated issues of race and democracy and American identity in such famous essays as “The Harlem Ghetto,” “Everybody’s Protest Novel,” “Many Thousands Gone,” and “Stranger in the Village.”Here are the complete texts of his early landmark collections, Notes of a Native Son (1955) and Nobody Knows My Name (1961), which established him as an essential intellectual voice of his time, fusing in unique fashion the personal, the literary, and the political. “One writes,” he stated, “out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give.” With singular eloquence and unblinking sharpness of observation he lived up to his credo: “I want to be an honest man and a good writer.”The classic The Fire Next Time (1963), perhaps the most influential of his writings, is his most penetrating analysis of America’s racial divide and an impassioned call to “end the racial nightmare…and change the history of the world.” The later volumes No Name in the Street (1972) and The Devil Finds Work (1976) chart his continuing response to the social and political turbulence of his era and include his remarkable works of film criticism. A further 36 essays—nine of them previously uncollected—include some of Baldwin’s earliest published writings, as well as revealing later insights into the language of Shakespeare, the poetry of Langston Hughes, and the music of Earl Hines.

Before You Put That on: 365 Daily Style Tips for Her


Lloyd Boston - 2005
    He's familiar to readers who made his style guides for men -- and the women who dress them -- bestselling books. Now with Before You Put That On, Boston delivers 365 expert fashion tips to help women create a wardrobe and a personal style they can be proud of every day of the year -- using much of what may already be in their closets! Lloyd Boston defines finding your style as "taking your world and giving it shape." That's what he's done for his individual and corporate clientele for years, and now with this beautifully designed book -- including his own original art -- he's offering his insider secrets to you. Boston's user-friendly references are filled with inspirational ideas for looking and feeling your most stylish.Friendly, frank, and with a wealth of professional tips at his disposal, Boston guides readers through an entire year's worth of fashion choices, beginning with a new style resolution at the top of the year, through the fresh fashion possibilities of spring and barely dressed days of summer, and back through the glittering holidays.Before You Put That On offers:• Hints for choosing garments to flatter every body type• Simple solutions for going from day to night in minutes• Tailoring tricks that bring new life to items you already own• Advice on adding accessories that turn a look from frumpy to fabulous• Organizational tips for creating a user-friendly closetNamed one of Crain's magazine's "40 Under 40," he is also a national spokesperson for companies including Tommy Hilfiger, Jones New York, and LensCrafters. As Boston himself says, "Nothing makes me happier than helping real people look their absolute best." Whether the occasion is lunch with a new client, a catch-up drink with friends, or a special holiday gathering, Before You Put That On provides classic ideas that will usher readers through every event with confidence and panache.

The Theatre of the Absurd


Martin Esslin - 1961
    Its startling popularity marked the emergence of a new type of theatre whose proponents—Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, and others—shattered dramatic conventions and paid scant attention to psychological realism, while highlighting their characters’ inability to understand one another. In 1961, Martin Esslin gave a name to the phenomenon in his groundbreaking study of these playwrights who dramatized the absurdity at the core of the human condition.Over four decades after its initial publication, Esslin’s landmark book has lost none of its freshness. The questions these dramatists raise about the struggle for meaning in a purposeless world are still as incisive and necessary today as they were when Beckett’s tramps first waited beneath a dying tree on a lonely country road for a mysterious benefactor who would never show. Authoritative, engaging, and eminently readable, The Theatre of the Absurd is nothing short of a classic: vital reading for anyone with an interest in the theatre.

Due Considerations: Essays and Criticism


John Updike - 2007
    The last, informal section of Due Considerations assembles more or less autobiographical pieces—reminiscences, friendly forewords, comments on the author’s own recent works, responses to probing questions.In between, many books are considered, some in introductions—to such classics as Walden, The Portrait of a Lady, and The Mabinogion—and many more in reviews, usually for The New Yorker. Ralph Waldo Emerson and the five Biblical books of Moses come in for appraisal, along with Uncle Tom’s Cabin and The Wizard of Oz. Contemporary American and English writers—Colson Whitehead, E. L. Doctorow, Don DeLillo, Norman Rush, William Trevor, A. S. Byatt, Muriel Spark, Ian McEwan—receive attentive and appreciative reviews, as do Rohinton Mistry, Salman Rushdie, Peter Carey, Margaret Atwood, Gabriel García Márquez, Haruki Murakami, Günter Grass, and Orhan Pamuk. In factual waters, Mr. Updike ponders the sinking of the Lusitania and the “unsinkable career” of Coco Chanel, the adventures of Lord Byron and Iris Murdoch, the sexual revolution and the advent of female Biblical scholars, and biographies of Robert Frost, Sinclair Lewis, Marcel Proust, and Søren Kierkegaard.Reading Due Considerations is like taking a cruise that calls at many ports with a witty, sensitive, and articulate guide aboard—a voyage not to be missed.

Seven Types of Ambiguity


William Empson - 1930
    Ambiguity, according to Empson, includes "any verbal nuance, however slight, which gives room for alternative reactions to the same piece of language." From this definition, broad enough by his own admission sometimes to see "stretched absurdly far," he launches into a brilliant discussion, under seven classifications of differing complexity and depth, of such works, among others, as Shakespeare's plays and the poetry of Chaucer, Donne, Marvell, Pope, Wordsworth, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and T. S. Eliot.

Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery


Jeanette Winterson - 1995
    For when Jeanette Winterson looks at works as diverse as the Mona Lisa and Virginia Woolf's The Waves, she frees them from layers of preconception and restores their power to exalt and unnerve, shock and transform us."Art Objects is a book to be admired for its effort to speak exorbitantly, urgently and sometimes beautifully about art and about our individual and collective need for serious art."--Los Angeles Times

The Storyteller: Tales out of Loneliness


Walter Benjamin - 2016
    His stories revel in the erotic tensions of city life, cross the threshold between rational and hallucinatory realms, celebrate the importance of games, and delve into the peculiar relationship between gambling and fortune-telling, and explore the themes that defined Benjamin. The novellas, fables, histories, aphorisms, parables and riddles in this collection are brought to life by the playful imagery of the modernist artist and Bauhaus figure Paul Klee.

Greed


Ai - 1993
    Beginning with "Riot Act," a monologue about the Los Angeles uprising in April 1992, Ai explored racial and sexual politics through the voices of diverse characters.

The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society


Lionel Trilling - 1950
    Published in 1950, one of the chillier moments of the Cold War, Trilling's essays examine the promise—and limits—of liberalism, challenging the complacency of a naïve liberal belief in rationality, progress, and the panaceas of economics and other social sciences, and asserting in their stead the irreducible complexity of human motivation and the tragic inevitability of tragedy. Only the imagination, Trilling argues, can give us access and insight into these realms and only the imagination can ground a reflective and considered, rather than programmatic and dogmatic, liberalism.Writing with acute intelligence about classics like Huckleberry Finn and the novels of Henry James and F. Scott Fitzgerald, but also on such varied matters as the Kinsey Report and money in the American imagination, Trilling presents a model of the critic as both part of and apart from his society, a defender of the reflective life that, in our ever more rationalized world, seems ever more necessary—and ever more remote.

Critical Theory Today: A User-Friendly Guide


Lois Tyson - 1998
    It provides clear, simple explanations and concrete examples of complex concepts, making a wide variety of commonly used critical theories accessible to novices without sacrificing any theoretical rigor or thoroughness.This new edition provides in-depth coverage of the most common approaches to literary analysis today: feminism, psychoanalysis, Marxism, reader-response theory, new criticism, structuralism and semiotics, deconstruction, new historicism, cultural criticism, lesbian/gay/queer theory, African American criticism, and postcolonial criticism. The chapters provide an extended explanation of each theory, using examples from everyday life, popular culture, and literary texts; a list of specific questions critics who use that theory ask about literary texts; an interpretation of F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby through the lens of each theory; a list of questions for further practice to guide readers in applying each theory to different literary works; and a bibliography of primary and secondary works for further reading.

How to Interpret Literature: Critical Theory for Literary and Cultural Studies


Robert Dale Parker - 2008
    It is also the only up-to-date survey of literary theory that devotes extensive treatment to Queer Theory and Postcolonial and Race Studies. How to Interpret Literature, Second Edition, is ideal as either a stand-alone text or in conjunction with an anthology of primary readings such as Robert Dale Parker's Critical Theory: A Reader for Literary and Cultural Studies.DISTINCTIVE FEATURES* Uses a conversational and engaging tone that speaks directly to today's students* Covers a variety of theoretical schools--including New Criticism, Structuralism, Deconstruction, Psychoanalysis, Feminism, and Marxism--weaving connections among chapters to show how these different movements respond to and build on each other* Offers a rich assortment of pedagogical features (charts, text boxes that address frequently asked questions, photos, and a bibliography)

Poetics


Aristotle
    Taking examples from the plays of Aeschylus, Sophocles and Euripides, The Poetics introduces into literary criticism such central concepts as mimesis (‘imitation’), hamartia (‘error’), and katharsis (‘purification’). Aristotle explains how the most effective tragedies rely on complication and resolution, recognition and reversals, centring on characters of heroic stature, idealized yet true to life. One of the most powerful, perceptive and influential works of criticism in Western literary history, the Poetics has informed serious thinking about drama ever since.Malcolm Heath’s lucid English translation makes the Poetics fully accessible to the modern reader. It is accompanied by an extended introduction, which discusses the key concepts in detail and includes suggestions for further reading.

William Stoner and the Battle for the Inner Life: Bookmarked


Steve Almond - 2019
    It tells the story of William Stoner, who attends the state university to study agronomy, but instead falls in love with English literature and becomes an academic. The novel narrates the many disappointments and struggles in Stoner's academic and personal life, including his estrangement from his wife and daughter, set against the backdrop of the first half of the twentieth century.In his entry in the Bookmarked series, author Steve Almond writes about why Stoner has endured, and the manner in which it speaks to the impoverishment of the inner life in America. Almond will also use the book as a launching pad for an investigation of America’s soul, in the process, writing about his own struggles as a student of writing, as a father and husband, and as a man grappling with his own mortality.

David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest: A Reader's Guide


Stephen J. Burn - 2003
    The aim of the series is to give readers accessible and informative introductions to some of the most popular, most acclaimed and most influential novels of recent years - from ‘The Remains of the Day' to ‘White Teeth'. A team of contemporary fiction scholars from both sides of the Atlantic has been assembled to provide a thorough and readable analysis of each of the novels in question.

Confessions of a Fashionista


Angela Clarke - 2013
    Now its anonymous author reveals both her identity and the true story of her giddyingly glamorous time in the style industry, with insider gossip on the people who populate it.Propelled by a painful end to a relationship and determined to prove her ex wrong for breaking up with her, our Fashionista lands a place on the Harrods Graduate Scheme. A complete outsider to the fashion world, she sets out on a wing and a pair of Guccis, and finds herself in a whirlwind of couture and craziness. Along the way she learns how to stay sane in a world where hairdressers have egos as big as their clients' bouffants, where dogs fly business class, and if you're eating carbs it can only be because you're pregnant.Confessions of a Fashionista is a book for anyone who's ever been an outsider, for anyone who's ever had a relationship end badly and thought they'd never find true love, and for anyone who thinks that cakes were made to be eaten, not sniffed. By turns hilarious, sad, thrilling, romantic and fun, it is the It book for fashionistas everywhere.