Around 100 crystal-clear articles explore landmark novels, short stories, plays, and poetry that reinvented the art of writing in their time, whether Ancient Greece, post-classical Europe, or modern-day Korea.As part of DK's award-winning Big Ideas Simply Explained series, The Literature Book uses infographics and images to explain key ideas and themes. Biographies of important authors offer insight into their lives and other writings, and a section on Further Reading details more than 150 additional works to explore.Discover masterpieces from the world's greatest authors, and explore the context, creative history, and literary traditions that influenced each major work of fiction with The Literature Book.Series Overview: Big Ideas Simply Explained series uses creative design and innovative graphics, along with straightforward and engaging writing, to make complex subjects easier to understand. These award-winning books provide just the information needed for students, families, or anyone interested in concise, thought-provoking refreshers on a single subject.

    There he wrote five scrolls describing the "true principles" required for victory in the martial arts and on the battlefield. Instead of relying on religion or theory, Musashi based his writings on his own experience, observation, and reason.

    Here's the story of the Imperial Hotel diamond robbers, who attempted (and may have accomplished) the biggest heist in Tokyo's history. Here is Rikidozan, the professional wrestler who almost single-handedly revived Japanese pride, but whose own ethnicity had to be kept secret. And here is the story of the intimate relationships shared by Japan's ruling party, its financial combines, its ruthless criminal gangs, the CIA, American Big Business, and perhaps at least one presidential relative. Here is the underside of postwar Japan, which is only now coming to light.

    A writer who surpassed his contemporaries in vision, originality, and literary mastery. A man who wrote like an angel, putting it all so much better than anyone else.Is this Shakespeare? Well, sort of.But it doesn't tell us the whole truth. So much of what we say about Shakespeare is either not true, or just not relevant. Now, Emma Smith - an intellectually, theatrically, and ethically exciting writer - takes us into a world of politicking and copycatting, as we watch Shakespeare emulating the blockbusters of Christopher Marlowe and Thomas Kyd, the Spielberg and Tarantino of their day; flirting with and skirting round the cutthroat issues of succession politics, religious upheaval, and technological change. Smith writes in strikingly modern ways about individual agency, privacy, politics, celebrity, and sex, and the Shakespeare she reveals in this book poses awkward questions rather than offering bland answers, always implicating us in working out what it might mean.

    It contains accounts by Richard 'The Iceman' Kuklinski, the contract killer who claimed to have murdered over 200 people in a career lasting 43 years.

    Ibuse began serializing Black Rain in the magazine Shincho in January 1965. The novel is based on historical records of the devastation caused by the atomic bombing of Hiroshima.

    Winner of the National Book Award for Marcel Proust, a sweeping examination of Proust's life and works, Shattuck now offers a useful and eminently readable guidebook to Proust's epic masterpiece, and a contemplation of memory and consciousness throughout great literature. Here, Shattuck laments Proust's defenselessness against zealous editors, praises some translations, and presents Proust as a novelist whose philosophical gifts were matched only by his irrepressible comic sense. Proust's Way, the culmination of a lifetime of scholarship, will serve as the next generation's guide to one of the world's finest writers of fiction.

    The Way of the Warrior presents a remarkably faithful mirror of many of the characteristics and habits of modern Japanese civilization, as it represents a tradition that enjoyed great power and prestige for centuries. This work was written to provide practical and moral instruction for warriors, and to outline the parameters of personal, social, and professional conduct characteristic of Bushido, or Way of the Warrior, the Japanese chivalric tradition.Personal responsibilities, family relationships, public duties, education, finances and ethics are treated in this text from the perspective of the spirit of Japanese gentlemen. Even the forms of political incompetence and corruption that Japan currently struggles with are accurately described in this more than 400-year-old book; So deep did the feudal and military modes of government that generated them take their roots in Japanese society. This manual is therefore an essential resource for anyone who wishes to understand Japan and the Japanese people in a realistic way.

    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.

    The art of fiction is considered under a wide range of headings, such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Time-shift, Magic Realism and Symbolism, and each topic is illustrated by a passage or two taken from classic or modern fiction. Drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James and Martin Amis, Jane Austen and Fay Weldon and Henry Fielding and James Joyce, David Lodge makes accesible to the general reader the richness and variety of British and American fiction. Technical terms, such as Interior Monologue, Metafiction, Intertextuality and the Unreliable Narrator, are lucidly explained and their applications demonstrated.Bringing to criticism the verve and humour of his own novels, David Lodge has provided essential reading for students of literature, aspiring writers, and anyone who wishes to understand how literature works.Beginning (Jane Austen, Ford Madox Ford) --The intrusive author (George Eliot, E.M. Forster) --Suspense (Thomas Hardy) --Teenage Skaz (J.D. Salinger) --The epistolary novel (Michael Frayn) --Point of view (Henry James) --Mystery (Rudyard Kipling) --Names (David Lodge, Paul Auster) --The stream of consciousness (Virginia Woolf) --Interior monologue (James Joyce) --Defamiliarization (Charlotte Bronte) --The sense of place (Martin Amis) --Lists (F. Scott Fitzgerald) --Introducing a character (Christopher Isherwood) --Surprise (William Makepeace Thackeray) --Time-shift (Muriel Spark) --The reader in the text (Laurence Sterne) --Weather (Jane Austen, Charles Dickens) --Repetition (Ernest Hemingway) --Fancy prose (Vladimir Nabokov) --Intertextuality (Joseph Conrad) --The experimental novel (Henry Green) --The comic novel (Kingsley Amis) --Magic realism (Milan Kundera) --Staying on the surface (Malcolm Bradbury) --Showing and telling (Henry Fielding) --Telling in different voices (Fay Weldon) --A sense of the past (John Fowles). Imagining the future (George Orwell) --Symbolism (D.H. Lawrence) --Allegory (Samuel Butler) --Epiphany (John Updike) --Coincidence (Henry James) --The unreliable narrator (Kazuo Ishiguro) --The exotic (Graham Greene) --Chapters etc. (Tobias Smollett, Laurence Sterne, Sil Walter Scott, George Eliot, James Joyce) --The telephone (Evelyn Waugh) --Surrealism (Leonora Carringotn) --Irony (Arnold Bennett) --Motivation (George Eliot) --Duration (Donald Barthelme) --Implication (William Cooper) --The title (George Gissing) --Ideas (Anthony Burgess) --The non-fiction novel (Thomas Carlyle) --Metafiction (John Barth) --The uncanny (Edgar Allen Poe) --Narrative structure (Leonard Michaels) --Aporia (Samuel Beckett) --Ending (Jane Austen, William Golding)

    The Swedish Academy lauded Ōe for his "poetic force [that] creates an imagined world where life and myth condense to form a disconcerting picture of the human predicament today."His most personal book, A Personal Matter, is the story of Bird, a frustrated intellectual in a failing marriage whose utopian dream is shattered when his wife gives birth to a brain-damaged child.

    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.

    In reality, mythology is more screwed up than a schizophrenic shaman doing hits of unidentified. Wait, it all makes sense now. In Zeus Grants Stupid Wishes, Cory O’Brien, creator of Myths RETOLD!, sets the stories straight. These are rude, crude, totally sacred texts told the way they were meant to be told: loudly, and with lots of four-letter words. Skeptical? Here are just a few gems to consider: � Zeus once stuffed an unborn fetus inside his thigh to save its life after he exploded its mother by being too good in bed. � The entire Egyptian universe was saved because Sekhmet just got too hammered to keep murdering everyone. � The Hindu universe is run by a married couple who only stop murdering in order to throw sweet dance parties…on the corpses of their enemies. � The Norse goddess Freyja once consented to a four-dwarf gangbang in exchange for one shiny necklace. And there’s more dysfunctional goodness where that came from.

    She invites us behind the scenes of novel-writing, sharing her own habits and spilling the secrets of her craft. And she offers priceless advice to aspiring authors. As she works her way through one hundred novels–from classics such as the thousand-year-old Tale of Genji to recent fiction by Zadie Smith and Alice Munro–she infects us anew with the passion for reading that is the governing spirit of this gift to book lovers everywhere.

    The clichés of everyday speech are often to be traced to famous ancient poems, and the traditional forms of poetry are widely known and loved. The congenial attitude comes from a poetical history of about a millennium and a half. This classic collection of verse therefore contains poetry from the earliest, primitive period, through the Nara, Heian, Kamakura, Muromachi and Edo periods, ending with modern poetry from 1868 onwards, including the rising poets Tamura Ryuichi and Tanikawa Shuntaro.