The Shepheardes Calender is represented by six eclogues, including the much-discussed "Februarie." Colin Clouts Come Home Againe, increasingly a focus of critical attention, is an important addition, and Amoretti is offered in its entirety.Seventeen critical essays, judiciously chosen from the many published since 1982, have been added to supplement eleven earlier commentaries. New to the Third Edition are the perspectives of Spenser's contemporary William Camden, Virginia Woolf, William Nelson, A. Bartlett Giamatti, Donald Cheney, Judith Anderson, Richard Helgerson, Louis Adrian Montrose, and David Lee Miller. The critical essays on the House of Busyrane, Spenser's pastoral, Muiopotmos, and Amoretti are grouped to "speak" to each other in ways sure to stimulate classroom discussion. This class-tested feature is back by popular demand along with essays by D. C. Allen, Robert A. Brinkley, Ronald P. Bond, Anne Lake Prescott, Andrew D. Weiner, Susanne Lindgren Wofford, Harry Berger, Jr., and Paul Alpers.A Chronology of Spenser's life and an extensive Bibliography are also included.

    Anderson has cleared away the dross and shown us the golden roots of fantasy before it became a genre.”–Michael Moorcock, author of The Eternal ChampionMany of today’s top names in fantasy acknowledge J.R.R. Tolkien as the author whose work inspired them to create their own epics. But which writers influenced Tolkien himself? In a collection destined to become a classic in its own right, internationally recognized Tolkien expert Douglas A. Anderson, editor of The Annotated Hobbit, has gathered the fiction of the many gifted authors who sparked Tolkien’s imagination. Included are Andrew Lang’s romantic swashbuckler “The Story of Sigurd,” which features magic rings and a ferocious dragon; an excerpt from E. A. Wyke-Smith’s The Marvelous Land of Snergs, about creatures who were precursors to Tolkien’s hobbits; and a never-before-published gem by David Lindsay, author of A Voyage to Arcturus, a novel that Tolkien praised highly both as a thriller and as a work of philosophy, religion, and morality.In stories packed with magical journeys, conflicted heroes, and terrible beasts, this extraordinary volume is one that no fan of fantasy or Tolkien should be without. These tales just might inspire a new generation of creative writers.

    But his penetrating work of political philosophy - now fully revised and with a new introduction for this edition - opened up questions about the nature of statecraft and society that influenced governments across the world.

    The book is a frame narrative primarily depicting a fictional island society as described by the character Raphael Hythloday who lived there some years, who describes and its religious, social and political customs.

    Now published in six paperback volumes (packaged in two attractive slipcases), the new anthology boasts slimmer volumes, thicker paper, a bolder typeface, and dozens of newly included or newly translated works from around the world. The Norton Anthology of World Literature represents continuity as well as change. Like its predecessor, the anthology is a compact library of world literature, offering an astounding forty-three complete longer works, more than fifty prose works, over one hundred lyric poems, and twenty-three plays. More portable, more suitable for period courses, more pleasant to read, and more attuned to current teaching and research trends, The Norton Anthology of World Literature remains the most authoritative, comprehensive, and teachable anthology for the world literature survey.

    This new edition offers expanded selections from the works of Kongzi (Confucius), Mengzi (Mencius), Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu), and Xunzi (Hsun Tzu); two new works, the dialogues Robber Zhi and White Horse; a concise general introduction; brief introductions to, and selective bibliographies for, each work; and four appendices that shed light on important figures, periods, texts, and terms in Chinese thought.

    Miłosz provides a preface to each of these poems, divided into thematic (and often beguiling) sections, such as “Travel,” “History,” and “The Secret of a Thing,” that make the reading as instructional as it is inspirational and remind us how powerfully poetry can touch our minds and hearts. "

    Rich with references ranging from Goethe's Werther to Winnicott, from Plato to Proust, from Baudelaire to Schubert, A Lover's Discourse artfully draws a portrait in which every reader will find echoes of themselves.

    In course of time ice piled over the Well, and out of it grew something they called Ymir, the father of the terrible Frost Giants. Ymir was fed on the milk of a magic cow who licked the ice, and with it salt from the Well of Life. As she licked with her tongue, she formed the first of the gods, the Ǣsir, who was called Buri. Buri had a son Borr, and Borr was the father of Odin. Odin and his brothers overcame the ice and frost giants. They thrust Ymir down into the Yawning Void, and of his body they made the world we live in. They set the sea in a ring about the world, and planted the World Tree, the Ash Yggdrasill, to hold it in place. From this making of the world, to Ragnarok, the last Great Battle, Roger Lancelyn Green tells the story in one continuous narrative. It is easy to read, and there is a clear rhythm carrying through to the final climax. He has taken his material from original sources, of which he gives a brief account in his foreword. “The interest in these myths often preceded reading abilty, but this telling will be found good to read aloud, and boys and gtirls from 10 up will easily manage it for themselves. “

    The popular, brief rhetoric that treats writing as thinking, WRITING ANALYTICALLY offers a sequence of specific prompts that teach students across the curriculum how the process of analysis and synthesis is a vehicle for original and well-developed ideas.

    Aesop was reputedly a tongue-tied slave who miraculously received the power of speech; from his legendary storytelling came the collections of prose and verse fables scattered throughout Greek and Roman literature. First published in English by Caxton in 1484, the fables and their morals continue to charm modern readers: who does not know the story of the tortoise and the hare, or the boy who cried wolf?

    But what exactly is on her reading list? In this unique literary journal, enjoy inspiring quotes from some of Belle's favorite books, as well as her insightful notes and colorful drawings. Includes a forward by noted Disney screenwriter Linda Woolverton.

    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.Cover art by Jordan Crane.

    In two sketches, he experiments with tales transplanted from Europe, thereby creating the first classic American short stories, Rip Van Winkle, and The Legend of Sleepy Hollow. Based on Irving's final revision of his most popular work, this new edition includes comprehensive explanatory notes of The Sketch-Book's sources for the modern reader.

    And if any is left, I buy food and clothing." — --Desiderius Erasmus — Those who share Erasmus's love of those curious bundles of paper bound together between hard or soft covers know exactly how he felt. These are the people who can spend hours browsing through a bookstore, completely oblivious not only to the passage of time but to everything else around them, the people for whom buying books is a necessity, not a luxury. A Passion for Books is a celebration of that love, a collection of sixty classic and contemporary essays, stories, lists, poems, quotations, and cartoons on the joys of reading, appreciating, and collecting books.This enriching collection leads off with science-fiction great Ray Bradbury's Foreword, in which he remembers his penniless days pecking out Fahrenheit 451 on a rented typewriter, conjuring up a society so frightened of art that it burns its books. This struggle--financial and creative--led to his lifelong love of all books, which he hopes will cosset him in his grave, "Shakespeare as a pillow, Pope at one elbow, Yeats at the other, and Shaw to warm my toes. Good company for far-travelling."Booklovers will also find here a selection of writings by a myriad of fellow sufferers from bibliomania. Among these are such contemporary authors as Philip Roth, John Updike, Umberto Eco, Robertson Davies, Nicholas Basbanes, and Anna Quindlen; earlier twentieth-century authors Christopher Morley, A. Edward Newton, Holbrook Jackson, A.S.W. Rosenbach, William Dana Orcutt, Robert Benchley, and William Targ; and classic authors such as Michel de Montaigne, Gustave Flaubert, Petrarch, and Anatole France.Here also are entertaining and humorous lists such as the "Ten Best-Selling Books Rejected by Publishers Twenty Times or More," the great books included in Clifton Fadiman and John Major's New Lifetime Reading Plan, Jonathan Yardley's "Ten Books That Shaped the American Character," "Ten Memorable Books That Never Existed," "Norman Mailer's Ten Favorite American Novels," and Anna Quindlen's "Ten Big Thick Wonderful Books That Could Take You a Whole Summer to Read (but Aren't Beach Books)."Rounding out the anthology are selections on bookstores, book clubs, and book care, plus book cartoons, and a specially prepared "Bibliobibliography" of books about books.Whether you consider yourself a bibliomaniac or just someone who likes to read, A Passion for Books will provide you with a lifetime's worth of entertaining, informative, and pleasurable reading on your favorite subject--the love of books.A Sampling of the Literary Treasures in A Passion for BooksUmberto Eco's "How to Justify a Private Library," dealing with the question everyone with a sizable library is inevitably asked: "Have you read all these books?"Anatole Broyard's "Lending Books," in which he notes, "I feel about lending a book the way most fathers feel about their daughters living with a man out of wedlock."Gustave Flaubert's Bibliomania, the classic tale of a book collector so obsessed with owning a book that he is willing to kill to possess it.A selection from Nicholas Basbanes's A Gentle Madness, on the innovative arrangements Samuel Pepys made to guarantee that his library would survive "intact" after his demise.Robert Benchley's "Why Does Nobody Collect Me"--in which he wonders why first editions of books by his friend Ernest Hemingway are valuable while his are not, deadpanning "I am older than Hemingway and have written more books than he has."George Hamlin Fitch's extraordinarily touching "Comfort Found in Good Old Books," on the solace he found in books after the death of his son.A selection from Anna Quindlen's How Reading Changed My Life, in which she shares her optimistic view on the role of reading and the future of books in the computer age.Robertson Davies's "Book Collecting," on the difference between those who collect rare books because they're valuable and those who collect them because they love books, ultimately making it clear which is "the collector who really matters."