It not only urges us to indulge deeply and often, it shows us how."-Myra Hart, professor, Harvard Business School "Readers and want-to-be readers will be encouraged by the advice to read more, more widely and more systematically."-Michael Keller, university librarian, Stanford University "An ideal gift for both sporadic and relentless readers."-James Mustich Jr., publisher of A Common Reader "A worthy addition to even the most well-stocked personal library."-Ross King, author of Michelangelo & The Pope's Ceiling Do not set out to live a well-read life but rather your well-read life. No one can be well-read using someone else's reading list. Unless a book is good for you, you won't connect with it and gain from it. Just as no one can tell you how to lead your life, no one can tell you what to read for your life. How do readers find more time to read? In The Little Guide to Your Well-Read Life, Steve Leveen offers both inspiration and practical advice for bibliophiles on how to get more books in their life and more life from their books. His recommendations are disarmingly refreshing, as when he advises when not to read a book and why not to feel guilty if you missed reading all those classics in school. He helps readers reorganize their bookshelves into a Library of Candidates that they actively build and a Living Library of books read with enthusiasm, and he emphasizes the value of creating a Bookography, or annotated list of your reading life. Separate chapters are devoted to the power of audio books and the merits of reading groups. The author himself admits he came "late to the bookshelf," making this charming little guide all the more convincing.

    (Was it just bread, or was it chapatti, rye, dal, or pita?) Brand-new word spectrums show where your word falls in a line between two polar opposites (passable is three-quarters of the way from beautiful to ugly).Other features include quick guides to easily confused words; helpful, real-world usage guidance to tricky sticking points of grammar and word choice; and careful, expert distinctions among awkward synonyms. All Oxford American dictionaries use an easy-to-use respelling system to show how entries are pronounced. It uses simple, familiar markings to represent common American English sounds. The Oxford American Writer's Thesaurus will unlock the power of language and is certain to be the thesaurus that stays on the desk--and stays open.

    Providing the ideal first step in understanding the often bewildering world of literary theory, this text is an easy to follow and clearly presented introduction to this fascinating area.

    Books are reflection. Books change your mind.”—Toni Morrison   Designed by a book lover for book lovers, My Reading Life is the ideal companion for all your literary adventures.  Anne Bogel, creator of the Modern Mrs. Darcy blog, provides you with insightful reading lists for every popular genre and each season. She even helps you determine the kinds of books you’d most like to read based on your interests. You’ll also appreciate the sleek, compact design, perfect for taking on the go to the library, bookstore, or your next book club gathering.    So much more than just a journal, this book is a joyful celebration of the written word, one that will significantly enrich every day of your reading life.

    Joyce Carol Oates has collected a group of works that are both intimate and important, essays that move from personal experience to larger significance without severing the connection between speaker and audience. From Ernest Hemingway covering bullfights in Pamplona to Martin Luther King, Jr.’s “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” these essays fit, in the words of Joyce Carol Oates, “into a kind of mobile mosaic suggest[ing] where we’ve come from, and who we are, and where we are going.” Among those whose work is included are Mark Twain, John Muir, T. S. Eliot, Richard Wright, Vladimir Nabokov, James Baldwin, Tom Wolfe, Susan Sontag, Maya Angelou, Alice Walker, Joan Didion, Cynthia Ozick, Saul Bellow, Stephen Jay Gould, Edward Hoagland, and Annie Dillard.Foreword / by Robert Atwan --Introduction / by Joyce Carol Oates --Corn-pone opinions / Mark Twain --Of the coming of John / W.E.B. Du Bois --Law of acceleration / Henry Adams --Stickeen / John Muir --Moral equivalent of war / William James --Handicapped / Randolph Bourne --Coatesville / John Jay Chapman --Devil baby at Hull-house / Jane Addams --Tradition and the individual talent / T.S. Eliot --Pamplona in July / Ernest Hemingway --Hills of Zion / H.L. Mencken --How it feels to be colored me / Zora Neale Hurston --Old stone house / Edmund Wilson --What are master-pieces and why are there so few of them / Gertrude Stein --Crack-up / F. Scott Fitzgerald --Sex Ex Machina / James Thurber --Ethics of living Jim Crow: an autobiographical sketch / Richard Wright --Knoxville: Summer of 1915 / James Agee --Figure a poem makes / Robert Frost --Once more to the lake / E.B. White --Insert flap "A" and throw away / S.J. Perelman --Bop / Langston Hughes --Future is now / Katherine Anne Porter --Artists in uniform / Mary McCarthy --Marginal world / Rachel Carson --Notes of a native son / James Baldwin --Brown wasps / Loren Eiseley --Sweet devouring / Eudora Welty --Hundred thousand straightened nails / Donald Hall --Letter from Birmingham jail / Martin Luther King, Jr. --Putting daddy on / Tom Wolfe --Notes on "Camp" / Susan Sontag --Perfect past / Vladimir Nabokov --Way to Rainy Mountain / N. Scott Momaday --Apotheosis of Martin Luther King / Elizabeth Hardwick --Illumination rounds / Michael Herr --I know why the caged bird sings / Maya Angelou --Lives of a cell / Lewis Thomas --Search for Marvin Gardens / John McPhee --Doomed in their sinking / William H. Gass --No name woman / Maxine Hong Kingston --Looking for Zora / Alice Walker --Women and honor: some notes on lying / Adrienne Rich --White album / Joan Didion --Aria: a memoir of a bilingual childhood / Richard Rodriguez --Solace of open spaces / Gretel Ehrlich --Total eclipse / Annie Dillard --Drugstore in winter / Cynthia Ozick --Okinawa: the bloodiest battle of all / William Manchester --Heaven and nature / Edward Hoagland --Creation myths of Cooperstown / Stephen Jay Gould --Life with daughters: watching the miss America Pageant / Gerald Early --Disposable rocket / John Updike --hey all just went away / Joyce Carol Oates --Graven images / Saul Bellow --Biographical notes --Appendix: Notable twentieth-century American literary nonfiction

    It's a book that has remained current for over half a century, fighting off critics and changing tastes in fiction. But do even its biggest fans know all there is to appreciate about The Great Gatsby?Maureen Corrigan, the book critic for "Fresh Air" and a Gatsby lover extraordinaire, points out that while Gatsby may be the novel most Americans have read, it's also the ones most of us read too soon -- when we were "too young, too defensive emotionally, too ignorant about the life-deforming powers of regret" to really understand all that Fitzgerald was saying ("it's not the green light, stupid, it's Gatsby's reaching for it," as she puts it). No matter when or how recently you've read the novel, Corrigan offers a fresh perspective on what makes it so enduringly relevant and powerful. Drawing on her experience as a reader, lecturer, and critic, her book will be a rousing consideration of Gatsby: not just its literary achievements, but also its path to "classic" (its initial lukewarm reception has been a form of cold comfort to struggling novelists for decades), its under-acknowledged debt to hard-boiled crime fiction, its commentaries on race, class, and gender.With rigor, wit, and an evangelistic persuasiveness, Corrigan will leave readers inspired to grab their old paperback copies of Gatsby and re-experience this great novel in an entirely new light.

    John Hollander illustrates each variation with a self-descriptive example. In this third edition, he adds a section of examples taken from centuries of poetry that exhibit the patterns he has described.

    "We know a subject ourselves, or we know where we can find information upon it." Today we think of Wikipedia as the source of all information, the ultimate reference. Yet it is just the latest in a long line of aggregated knowledge--reference works that have shaped the way we've seen the world for centuries. You Could Look It Up chronicles the captivating stories behind these great works and their contents, and the way they have influenced each other. From The Code of Hammurabi, the earliest known compendium of laws in ancient Babylon almost two millennia before Christ to Pliny's Natural History; from the 11th-century Domesday Book recording land holdings in England to Abraham Ortelius's first atlas of the world; from Samuel Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language to The Whole Earth Catalog to Google, Jack Lynch illuminates the human stories and accomplishment behind each, as well as its enduring impact on civilization. In the process, he offers new insight into the value of knowledge.

    Geographically and culturally boundless, with contributions from Great Britain, Ireland, America, Canada, Australia, India, the Caribbean, and Southern Africa; influenced by great novelists working in other languages; and encompassing a range of genres, the story of the novel in English unfolds like a richly varied landscape that invites exploration rather than a linear journey. In The Novel: A Biography, "Michael Schmidt does full justice to its complexity.Like his hero Ford Madox Ford in The March of Literature," Schmidt chooses as his traveling companions not critics or theorists but "artist practitioners," men and women who feel "hot love" for the books they admire, and fulminate against those they dislike. It is their insights Schmidt cares about. Quoting from the letters, diaries, reviews, and essays of novelists and drawing on their biographies, Schmidt invites us into the creative dialogues between authors and between books, and suggests how these dialogues have shaped the development of the novel in English.Schmidt believes there is something fundamentally subversive about art: he portrays the novel as a liberalizing force and a revolutionary stimulus. But whatever purpose the novel serves in a given era, a work endures not because of its subject, themes, political stance, or social aims but because of its language, its sheer invention, and its resistance to cliche--some irreducible quality that keeps readers coming back to its pages."

    Jonathan Culler, an extremely lucid commentator and much admired in the field of literary theory, offers discerning insights into such theories as the nature of language and meaning, and whether literature is a form of self-expression or a method of appeal to an audience. Concise yet thorough, Literary Theory also outlines the ideas behind a number of different schools: deconstruction, semiotics, postcolonial theory, and structuralism, among others. From topics such as literature and social identity to poetry, poetics, and rhetoric, Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction is a welcome guide for anyone interested in the importance of literature and the debates surrounding it.About the Series: Combining authority with wit, accessibility, and style, Very Short Introductions offer an introduction to some of life's most interesting topics. Written by experts for the newcomer, they demonstrate the finest contemporary thinking about the central problems and issues in hundreds of key topics, from philosophy to Freud, quantum theory to Islam.

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    This new and expanded third edition continues to offer students and readers the best one-volume introduction to the field.The bewildering variety of approaches, theorists and technical language is lucidly and expertly unraveled. Unlike many books which assume certain positions about the critics and the theories they represent, Peter Barry allows readers to develop their own ideas once first principles and concepts have been grasped.

    In her previous book, The Well-Trained Mind, the author provided a road map of classical education for parents wishing to home-school their children, and that book is now the premier resource for home-schoolers. In this new book, Bauer takes the same elements and techniques and adapts them to the use of adult readers who want both enjoyment and self-improvement from the time they spend reading.The Well-Educated Mind offers brief, entertaining histories of five literary genres—fiction, autobiography, history, drama, and poetry—accompanied by detailed instructions on how to read each type. The annotated lists at the end of each chapter—ranging from Cervantes to A. S. Byatt, Herodotus to Laurel Thatcher Ulrich—preview recommended reading and encourage readers to make vital connections between ancient traditions and contemporary writing.The Well-Educated Mind reassures those readers who worry that they read too slowly or with below-average comprehension. If you can understand a daily newspaper, there's no reason you can't read and enjoy Shakespeare's Sonnets or Jane Eyre. But no one should attempt to read the "Great Books" without a guide and a plan. Susan Wise Bauer will show you how to allocate time to your reading on a regular basis; how to master a difficult argument; how to make personal and literary judgments about what you read; how to appreciate the resonant links among texts within a genre—what does Anna Karenina owe to Madame Bovary?—and also between genres. Followed carefully, the advice in The Well-Educated Mind will restore and expand the pleasure of the written word.

    ...An essential resource for any writer -- beginning, published, or just plain stuck. -- Amy TanOakley Hall cites the works and methods of such great novelists as John Steinbeck, Joyce Carol Oates, Leo Tolstoy, Agatha Christie and Milan Kundera to show readers what works in the novel, and why. This book features advice on taking a novel through each of its stages, from the beginning of an idea to The End, and guides writers through the process of writing a novel.

    It is not pious, it is wise; and its wisdom is delivered with extraordinary lucidity and charm. This is how Montaigne would have written about the dizzy and increasingly dolorous age of the Internet. May So Many Books fall into so many hands."—Leon Wieseltier"Reading liberates the reader and transports him from his book to a reading of himself and all of life. It leads him to participate in conversations, and in some cases to arrange them…It could even be said that to publish a book is to insert it into the middle of a conversation."—from So Many BooksJoin the conversation! In So Many Books, Gabriel Zaid offers his observations on the literary condition: a highly original analysis of the predicament that readers, authors, publishers, booksellers, librarians, and teachers find themselves in today—when there are simply more books than any of us can contemplate."With cascades of books pouring down on him from every direction, how can the twenty-first-century reader keep his head above water? Gabriel Zaid answers that question in a variety of surprising ways, many of them witty, all of them provocative."—Anne Fadiman, Author of Ex-Libris"A truly original book about books. Destined to be a classic!"—Enrique Krauze, Author of Mexico: Biography of Power, Editor of Letras Libres"Gabriel Zaid's small gem of a book manages to be both delectable and useful, like chocolate fortified with vitamins. His rare blend of wisdom and savvy practical sense should make essential and heartening reading for anyone who cares about the future of books and the life of the mind."—Lynne Sharon Schwartz, Author of Ruined by Reading: A Life in Books"Gabriel Zaid is a marvelously elegant and playful writer—a cosmopolitan critic with sound judgment and a light touch. He is a jewel of Latin American letters, which is no small thing to be. Read him—you'll see."—Paul Berman"'So many books,' a phrase usually muttered with despair, is transformed into an expression of awe and joy by Gabriel Zaid. Arguing that books are the essential part of the great conversation we call culture and civilization, So Many Books reminds us that reading (and, by extension, writing and publishing) is a business, a vanity, a vocation, an avocation, a moral and political act, a hedonistic pursuit, all of the aforementioned, none of the aforementioned, and is often a miracle."—Doug Dutton"Zaid traces the preoccupation with reading back through Dr. Johnson, Seneca, and even the Bible ('Of making many books there is no end'). He emerges as a playful celebrant of literary proliferation, noting that there is a new book published every thirty seconds, and optimistically points out that publishers who moan about low sales 'see as a failure what is actually a blessing: The book business, unlike newspapers, films, or television, is viable on a small scale.' Zaid, who claims to own more than ten thousand books, says he has sometimes thought that 'a chastity glove for authors who can't contain themselves' would be a good idea. Nonetheless, he cheerfully opines that 'the truly cultured are capable of owning thousands of unread books without losing their composure or their desire for more.'"—New YorkerGabriel Zaid's poetry, essays, social and cultural criticism, and business writings have been widely published throughout the Spanish-speaking world. He lives in Mexico City with the artist Basia Batorska, her paintings, three cats, and ten thousand books.Natasha Wimmer is an editor and a translator in New York City. Her recent translations include The Savage Detectives and 2666 by Roberto Bolaño andThe Way to Paradise by Mario Vargas Llosa.