Leading authors in the area of women's literature and romance contribute to this fresh collection of essays on everything from Lydia's scandalous marriage to George Wickham to the female-dominated Bennett household and the emphasis placed on courtship and marriage. Contributors include Jo Beverly, Alesia Holliday, Mercedes Lackey, Joyce Millman, and Jill Winters. This compilation is an excellent companion for both those new to Jane Austen and well-versed Austen-philes.

    H. Auden. This is no accident: McCall Smith has long been fascinated by Auden. Indeed, the novelist, best known for his No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series, calls the poet not only the greatest literary discovery of his life but also the best of guides on how to live. In this book, McCall Smith has written a charming personal account about what Auden has done for him — and what he just might do for you.Part self-portrait, part literary appreciation, the book tells how McCall Smith first came across the poet's work in the 1970s, while teaching law in Belfast, a violently divided city where Auden's "September 1, 1939," a poem about the outbreak of World War II, strongly resonated. McCall Smith goes on to reveal how his life has related to and been inspired by other Auden poems ever since. For example, he describes how he has found an invaluable reflection on life's transience in "As I Walked Out One Evening," while "The More Loving One" has provided an instructive meditation on unrequited love. McCall Smith shows how Auden can speak to us throughout life, suggesting how, despite difficulties and change, we can celebrate understanding, acceptance, and love for others.An enchanting story about how art can help us live, this book will appeal to McCall Smith's fans and anyone curious about Auden.

    In addition to these new conundrums, Professor Sutherland revisits some previous puzzles with the help of readers who offer their own ingenious solutions and who set fresh puzzles for exploration. Victorian drug habits, railway systems, sanitation and dentistry are only a few of the details that shed light on the motives and circumstances of some of literature's most famous characters. Elizabeth Bennet, Betsey Trotwood, Count Dracula, Anna Karenina, Alice and many more come under the spotlight in John Sutherland's highly entertaining collection. Bringing good humor and good sense back to literary criticism, Who Betrays Elizabeth Bennet? offers scintillating forensic exercises that are as compelling as the plots they dissect.

    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 weekly in Lewis’s Oxford rooms and in nearby pubs. They discussed literature, religion, and ideas; read aloud from works in progress; took philosophical rambles in woods and fields; gave one another companionship and criticism; and, in the process, rewrote the cultural history of modern times.In The Fellowship, Philip and Carol Zaleski offer the first complete rendering of the Inklings’ lives and works. C. S. Lewis accepts Jesus Christ while riding in the sidecar of his brother's motorcycle, maps the medieval and Renaissance mind, becomes a world-famous evangelist and moral satirist, and creates new forms of religiously attuned fiction while wrestling with personal crises. J.R.R. Tolkien transmutes an invented mythology into gripping story in The Lord of the Rings, while conducting groundbreaking Old English scholarship and elucidating, for family and friends, the Catholic teachings at the heart of his vision. Owen Barfield, a philosopher for whom language is the key to all mysteries, becomes Lewis's favorite sparring partner, and, for a time, Saul Bellow's chosen guru. And Charles Williams, poet, author of "supernatural shockers," and strange acolyte of romantic love, turns his everyday life into a mystical pageant.Romantics who scorned rebellion, fantasists who prized reality, wartime writers who believed in hope, Christians with cosmic reach, the Inklings sought to revitalize literature and faith in the twentieth century's darkest years--and did so in dazzling style.

    For Jay, a retired research scientist this return to the classroom is his "one last chance" to learn the great literature he'd neglected in his youth--and, even more, a final opportunity to more fully understand his son, a writer and classicist. But through the sometimes uncomfortable months that the two men explore Homer's great work together--first in the classroom, where Jay persistently challenges his son's interpretations, and then during a surprise-filled Mediterranean journey retracing Odysseus's famous voyages--it becomes clear that Daniel has much to learn, too: Jay's responses to both the text and the travels gradually uncover long-buried secrets that allow the son to understand his difficult father at last.

    His thousands of pages of essays, reviews, prologues, lectures, and notes on politics and culture—though revered in Latin America and Europe as among his finest work—have scarcely been translated into English.For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

    This third collection of pieces from his popular historical column also includes longer articles and interviews originally published in Weekend and Sunday Inquirer Magazine.

    . . . A masterpiece.” —Margaret Atwood“No one who is invested in any kind of art . . . can read The Gift and remain unchanged.” —David Foster WallaceBy now a modern classic, The Gift is a brilliantly orchestrated defense of the value of creativity and of its importance in a culture increasingly governed by money and overrun with commodities. This book is even more necessary today than when it first appeared.An illuminating and transformative book, and completely original in its view of the world, The Gift is cherished by artists, writers, musicians, and thinkers. It is in itself a gift to all who discover the classic wisdom found in its pages.

    It makes people think you're dead. So begins Christopher Fowler's foray into the back catalogues and backstories of 99 authors who, once hugely popular, have all but disappeared from shelves.We are fondly introduced to each potential rediscovery from lost Victorian voices to the twentieth century writers who could well become the next John Williams, Hans Fallada, or Lionel Davidson. Whether male or female, flash-in-the-pan or prolific, mega-seller or prize-winner, no author, it seems, can ever be fully immune from the fate of being forgotten.These 99 journeys are punctuated by 12 short essays about faded once-favorites, including the now-vanished novels Walt Disney brought to the screen, the contemporary rivals of Sherlock Holmes and Agatha Christie who did not stand the test of time, and the women who introduced psychological suspense many decades before it conquered the world. This is a book about books and their authors. It is for book lovers and is written by one who could not be a more enthusiastic, enlightening, and entertaining guide.

    Opening with an impassioned critique of modern reading habits, he then presents many of the great, and idiosyncratic, writers he loves most. In this showcase of one hundred of the world's most astonishing books, Dirda covers a remarkable range of literature, including popular genres such as the detective novel and ghost story, while never neglecting the deeper satisfactions of sometimes overlooked classics. Short-listed for the Los Angeles Times Book Award for criticism, Bound to Please is a glorious celebration of just how much fun reading can be.

    He is famous for two masterpieces, Miss Lonelyhearts (1933) and The Day of the Locust (1939). Seventy years later, The Day of the Locust remains the most penetrating novel ever written about Hollywood. EILEEN MCKENNEY—accidental muse, literary heroine—was the inspiration for her sister Ruth’s humorous stories, My Sister Eileen, which led to stage, film, and television adaptations, including Leonard Bernstein’s 1953 musical Wonderful Town.  She grew up in Cleveland and moved to Manhattan at 21 in search of romance and adventure. She and her sister lived in a basement apartment in the Village with a street-level window into which men frequently peered.  Husband and wife were intimate with F. Scott Fitzgerald, Dorothy Parker, Katharine White, S.J. Perelman, Bennett Cerf, and many of the literary, theatrical, and movie notables of their era.  With Lonelyhearts, biographer Marion Meade, whose Bobbed Hair and Bathtub Gin earned accolades from the Washington Post Book World ("Wonderful") to the San Francisco Chronicle ("Like looking at a photo album while listening to a witty insider reminisce about the images"), restores West and McKenney to their rightful places in the rich cultural tapestry of interwar America.

    C. S. Lewis's Studies in Words explores this fascination by taking a series of words and teasing out their connotations using examples from a vast range of English literature, recovering lost meanings and analysing their functions. It doubles as an absorbing and entertaining study of verbal communication, its pleasures and problems. The issues revealed are essential to all who read and communicate thoughtfully, and are handled here by a masterful exponent and analyst of the English language.

    In this selection of essays, he ranges from reflections on his boyhood schooling and the profession of writing to his views on the Spanish Civil War and British imperialism. The pieces collected here include the relatively unfamiliar and the more celebrated, making it an ideal compilation for both new and dedicated readers of Orwell's work.

    Dalloway, To the Lighthouse, and Between the Acts—portray the essential experiences of life.For Edward Mendelson—a professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University—these classic novels tell life stories that are valuable to readers who are thinking about the course of their own lives. Looking beyond theories to the individual intentions of the authors and taking into consideration their lives and times, Mendelson examines the sometimes contradictory ways in which the novels portray such major passages of life as love, marriage, and parenthood. In Frankenstein's story of a new life, we see a searing representation of emotional neglect. In Wuthering Heights and Jane Eyre the transition from childhood to adulthood is portrayed in vastly different ways even though the sisters who wrote the books shared the same isolated life. In Mrs. Dalloway we see an ideal and almost impossible adult love. Mendelson leads us to a fresh and fascinating new understanding of each of the seven novels, reminding us—in the most captivating way—why they matter.The Things That Matter is a book that will delight all passionate readers.

    In over 30 essays, written over 20 years, one of the world's great story-tellers meditates on story-telling. Warm, funny, generous, entertaining, and above all, deeply considered, they offer thoughts on a wide variety of topic, including the origin and composition of Philip's own stories, the craft of writing and the story-tellers who have meant the most to him. The art of story-telling is everywhere present in the essays themselves, in the instantly engaging tone, the vivid imagery and the striking phrases, the resonant anecdotes, the humour and learnedness. Together, they are greater than the sum of their parts.