Who Killed Homer? is must reading for anyone who agrees that knowledge of classics acquaints us with the beauty and perils of our own culture.

    Massively erudite, the essays are also brave, unflinching, and wholly personal. In this fiercely original and audacious work, George Steiner tells of seven books which he did not write. Because intimacies and indiscretions were too threatening. Because the topic brought too much pain. Because its emotional or intellectual challenge proved beyond his capacities. The actual themes range widely and defy conventional taboos: the torment of the gifted when they live among--when they confront--the very great; the experience of sex in different languages; a love for animals greater than for human beings; the costly privilege of exile; a theology of emptiness. Yet a unifying perception underlies this diversity. The best we have or can produce is only the tip of the iceberg. Behind every good book, as in a lit shadow, lies the book which remained unwritten, the one that would have failed better.

    In this novel, Wolf explodes the myth, offering modern readers a portrayal of a fiercely independent woman ensnared in a political battle.

    Unrelenting and empathetic, casting light into the darker caverns of our collective psyche, Savage Art is an exemplary homage to an American original. A National Book Critics Circle Award winner. 57 photos.

    With bracing directness and aphoristic authority, one of our greatest living playwrights addresses the questions: What makes good drama? And why does drama matter in an age that is awash in information and entertainment? David Mamet believes that the tendency to dramatize is essential to human nature, that we create drama out of everything from today’s weather to next year’s elections. But the highest expression of this drive remains the theater.          With a cultural range that encompasses Shakespeare, Bretcht, and Ibsen, Death of a Salesman and Bad Day at Black Rock, Mamet shows us how to distinguish true drama from its false variants. He considers the impossibly difficult progression between one act and the next and the mysterious function of the soliloquy. The result, in Three Uses of the Knife, is an electrifying treatise on the playwright’s art that is also a strikingly original work of moral and aesthetic philosophy.

    Long celebrated as a pathbreaking achievement in the social history of the ancient world, M.I. Finley's brilliant study remains, as classicist Bernard Knox notes in his introduction to this new edition, "as indispensable to the professional as it is accessible to the general reader"--a fundamental companion for students of Homer and Homeric Greece.

    The Democratic city-state has been ravaged by a long and bloody war with neighbouring Sparta. The search for scapegoats begins and Athens, liberty's beacon in the ancient world, turns its sword on its own way of life. Civil war and much bloodshed ensue. Defining moments of Greek history, culture, politics, religion and identity are debated ferociously in Athenian board rooms, back streets and battlefields. By 323 BC, less than 100 years later, Athens and the rest of Greece, not to mention a large part of the known world, has come under the control of an absolute monarch, a master of self-publicity and a model for despots for millennia to come: 'megas alexandros', Alexander the Great. Michael Scott, Finley Fellow in Ancient History at Darwin College, Cambridge, explores the dramatic and little-known story of how the ancient world was turned on its head from Democratic Athens to King Alexander the Great in this superb example of popular history writing. "From Democrats to Kings" also gives us a fresh take on the similar challenges we face today in the 21st century - a world in which many democracies - old and new - fight for survival, in which war-time and peace-time have become indistinguishable and in which the severity of the economic crisis is only matched by a crisis in our own sense of self.

    The complete translation, from the Greek of A. O. Prickard's Oxford text, features an introduction by Grube, establishing the historical and critical context of the work, and a biographical index.

    Tragedy permits us to come face to face with what we do not know about ourselves but that which makes those selves who we are. Having Been Born is a compelling examination of ancient Greek origins in the development and history of tragedy--a story that represents what we thought we knew about the poets, dramatists, and philosophers of ancient Greece--and shows them to us in an unfamiliar, unexpected, and original light.

    A carefully planned home invasion was meant to go smoothly...but an unforeseen turn of events ultimately leads to bloodshed. Nothing is what it seems and no one can be trusted when it comes to the love of the almighty dollar. Filled with drama, love triangles, and a plethora of deadly secrets, "Torn Between a Goon and Gangsta 2" gives new meaning to the phrase, "Keep your friends close and your enemies closer."

    Turning for comfort to the one man she can trust, she finds a sudden and undeniable passion instead. But any future with Josh Withers seems a betrayal of her past, and Maggie realises the only way to survive is to conceal a very dark secret of her own... *Includes a preview of the next book in the series and bonus material from the author.* Don't miss Jennie's Families of Fairley Terrace series, which began with Maggie's story in All The Dark Secrets and continued with Lucy's story in The Miner's Daughter, Edie's story in The Girl Below Stairs, Carina's story in The Widow's Promise and Laurel's story in The Sister's Secret.

    The "treason of the intellectuals" is a phrase that evokes much but is inherently ambiguous. The book bearing this title is well known but little understood. This edition is introduced by Roger Kimball.From the time of the pre-Socratics, intellectuals were a breed apart. They were non-materialistic knowledge-seekers who believed in a universal humanism and represented a cornerstone of civilized society. According to Benda, this all began to change in the early twentieth century. In Europe in the 1920s, intellectuals began abandoning their attachment to traditional philosophical and scholarly ideals, and instead glorified particularisms and moral relativism.The "treason" of which Benda writes is the betrayal by the intellectuals of their unique vocation. He criticizes European intellectuals for allowing political commitment to insinuate itself into their understanding of the intellectual vocation, ushering the world into "the age of the intellectual organization of political hatreds." From the savage flowering of ethnic and religious hatreds in the Middle East and throughout Europe today to the mendacious demand for political correctness and multiculturalism on college campuses everywhere in the West, the treason of the intellectuals continues to play out its unedifying drama.

    “Chattering Courtesans” is a series of short dialogues in which the amusing gossip of “kept women” gives rise to a discussion of more serious subjects such as love, sex, and marriage. Other comic dialogues in this volume show Lucian making fun of fanaticism and mocking pretension, hypocrisy, and the vanity of human wealth and power, while in “Diatribes” he targets a range of subjects, from scandal and money to death, in order to demonstrate the follies of contemporary life. Also included here is Lucian’s most famous work, True Histories, which inspired imaginary voyages, from More’s Utopia to Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels. First time in Penguin Classics Keith Sidwell's new translation captures Lucian's lively informal humor and rich variety of styles Introduction discusses the influence on Lucian of earlier Greek writers and philosophers, as well as Lucian's influence on later European culture Includes preface to each section, suggestions for further reading, explanatory notes, and a glossary of names

    But for the young V. S. Naipaul, there was a great distance between the wish and its fulfillment. To become a writer, he would have to find ways of understanding three very different cultures: his family's half-remembered Indian homeland, the West Indian colonial society in which he grew up, and the wholly foreign world of the English novels he read.In this essay of literary autobiography, V. S. Naipaul sifts through memories of his childhood in Trinidad, his university days in England, and his earliest attempts at writing, seeking the experiences of life and reading that shaped his imagination and his growth as a writer. He pays particular attention to the traumas of India under its various conquerors and the painful sense of dereliction and loss that shadows writers' attempts to capture the country and its people in prose.Naipaul's profound reflections on the relations between personal or historical experience and literary form, between the novel and the world, reveal how he came to discover both his voice and the subjects of his writing, and how he learned to turn sometimes to fiction, sometimes to the travel narrative, to portray them truthfully. Along the way he offers insights into the novel's prodigious development as a form for depicting and interpreting society in the nineteenth century and its diminishing capacity to do the same in the twentiethÑa task that, in his view, passed to the creative energies of the early cinema.As a child trying to read, I had felt that two worlds separated me from the books that were offered to me at school and in the libraries: the childhood world of our remembered India, and the more colonial world of our city. ... What I didn't know, even after I had written my early books of fiction ... was that those two spheres of darkness had become my subject. Fiction, working its mysteries, by indirections finding directions out, had led me to my subject. But it couldn't take me all the way. -V.S. Naipaul, from Reading & Writing

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