Geared toward students, teachers, readers, and writers alike, The Penguin Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory explains critical jargon (intertextuality, aporia), schools of literary theory (structuralism, feminist criticism), literary forms (sonnet, ottava rima), and genres (elegy, pastoral) and examines artifacts, historic locales, archetypes, origins of well-known phrases, and much, much more. Scholarly, straightforward, comprehensive, and even entertaining, this is a resource that no word-lover should be without.

    Then again, maybe not. But to The Useless Information Society, any fact that passes its gasp-inducing, not-a-lot-of-people-know-that test merits inclusion in this fascinating but ultimately useless book... Did you know (or do you care)...- That fish scales are used to make lipstick?- Why organized crime accounts for ten percent of the United States's annual income?- The name of the first CD pressed in the United States?- The last year that can be written upside-down or right side-up and appear the same?- The shortest performance ever nominated for an Oscar(R)?- How much Elvis weighed at the time of his death?- What the suits in a deck of cards represent?- How many Quarter Pounders can be made from one cow?- How interesting useless information can be?The Book of Useless Information answers these teasers and is packed with facts and figures that will captivate you--and anyone who shares your joy in the pursuit of pointless knowledge.

    There's the man who survived the atomic bomb in both Hiroshima and Nagasaki. And there's many, many more.Covering everything from adventure, war, murder and slavery to espionage, including the stories of the female Robinson Crusoe, Hitler's final hours, Japan's deadly balloon bomb and the emperor of the United States, these tales deserve to be told.

    He wrote too much and what he did write is inaccessible and elitist. Right? Wrong. "Shakespeare on Toast" knocks the stuffing from the staid old myth of Shakespeare, revealing the man and his plays for what they really are: modern, thrilling and uplifting drama. Actor and author Ben Crystal brings the bright words and colourful characters of the world's greatest hack writer brilliantly to life, handing over the key to Shakespeare's plays, unlocking the so-called difficult bits and, astonishingly, finding Shakespeare's own voice amid the poetry.Told in five fascinating Acts, "Shakespeare on Toast" sweeps the cobwebs from the Bard - from his language, his life, his time - revealing both the man and his work to be relevant, accessible and full of beans. This is a book for everyone, whether you're reading Shakespeare for the first time, occasionally find him troublesome, think you know him backwards, or have never set foot near one of his plays but have always wanted to ...It's quick, easy and good for you. Just like beans on toast.

    -- Alan Dundes. Propp's work is seminal...[and], now that it is available in a new edition, should be even more valuable to folklorists who are directing their attention to the form of the folktale, especially to those structural characteristics which are common to many entries coming from even different cultures. -- Choice

    Additionally, 100 Words Every Word Lover Should Know features scores of quotations from classical and contemporary authors, from Henry James and Jane Austen to Sylvia Plath and William Golding, Douglas Coupland and Donna Tartt. A great gift for anyone who appreciates the beauty, history, and depth of the English language, 100 Words Every Word Lover Should Know will appeal to all who are avid readers and take pride in a vibrant, active vocabulary.

    That they exist, Simon Singh reveals, underscores the brilliance of the shows' writers, many of whom have advanced degrees in mathematics in addition to their unparalleled sense of humor. While recounting memorable episodes such as “Bart the Genius” and “Homer3,” Singh weaves in mathematical stories that explore everything from p to Mersenne primes, Euler's equation to the unsolved riddle of P v. NP; from perfect numbers to narcissistic numbers, infinity to even bigger infinities, and much more. Along the way, Singh meets members of The Simpsons' brilliant writing team-among them David X. Cohen, Al Jean, Jeff Westbrook, and Mike Reiss-whose love of arcane mathematics becomes clear as they reveal the stories behind the episodes. With wit and clarity, displaying a true fan's zeal, and replete with images from the shows, photographs of the writers, and diagrams and proofs, The Simpsons and Their Mathematical Secrets offers an entirely new insight into the most successful show in television history.

    The rules about how to use them are complicated, and have evolved haphazardly. Originally written as advice by a copywriter for designers – wont to insert and remove apostrophes at will, for visual effect – this is a light-hearted pocket-sized guide to getting the things right.Simon Griffin lets off steam so that we don’t have to, showing precisely why ‘Rhianna and Jennifer’s photos were all over the internet’ is quite different to ‘Rhianna’s and Jennifer’s photos’ or what words apostrophes are replacing in sentences such as ‘He’d like you to buy him some cocaine’, or ‘They’ve got it all on camera.’Elegantly produced, this is the perfect gift for any pedant, as well as an indispensable guide in all our moments of grammar-related frustration.

    Each work of literature featured here is a seminal work key to understanding and appreciating the written word.The featured works have been handpicked by a team of international critics and literary luminaries, including Derek Attridge (world expert on James Joyce), Cedric Watts (renowned authority on Joseph Conrad and Graham Greene), Laura Marcus (noted Virginia Woolf expert), and David Mariott (poet and expert on African-American literature), among some twenty others.Addictive, browsable, knowledgeable--1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die will be a boon companion for anyone who loves good writing and an inspiration for anyone who is just beginning to discover a love of books. Each entry is accompanied by an authoritative yet opinionated critical essay describing the importance and influence of the work in question. Also included are publishing history and career details about the authors, as well as reproductions of period dust jackets and book designs.

    “Babel in California” told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University during a conference about the enigmatic writer Isaac Babel. Over the course of several pages, Batuman managed to misplace Babel’s last living relatives at the San Francisco airport, uncover Babel’s secret influence on the making of King Kong, and introduce her readers to a new voice that was unpredictable, comic, humane, ironic, charming, poignant, and completely, unpretentiously full of love for literature. Batuman’s subsequent pieces—for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, and the London Review of Books— have made her one of the most sought-after and admired writers of her generation, and its best traveling companion. In The Possessed we watch her investigate a possible murder at Tolstoy’s ancestral estate. We go with her to Stanford, Switzerland, and St. Petersburg; retrace Pushkin’s wanderings in the Caucasus; learn why Old Uzbek has one hundred different words for crying; and see an eighteenth-century ice palace reconstructed on the Neva. Love and the novel, the individual in history, the existential plight of the graduate student: all find their place in The Possessed. Literally and metaphorically following the footsteps of her favorite authors, Batuman searches for the answers to the big questions in the details of lived experience, combining fresh readings of the great Russians, from Pushkin to Platonov, with the sad and funny stories of the lives they continue to influence—including her own.

    It’ll have you scratching your head wondering why we even bother to go to school.Think Magellan was the first man to circumnavigate the globe, baseball was invented in America, Henry VIII had six wives, Mount Everest is the tallest mountain? Wrong, wrong, wrong, and wrong again. You’ll be surprised at how much you don’t know! Check out THE BOOK OF GENERAL IGNORANCE for more fun entries and complete answers to the following:How long can a chicken live without its head?About two years.What do chameleons do?They don’t change color to match the background. Never have; never will. Complete myth. Utter fabrication. Total Lie. They change color as a result of different emotional states.How many legs does a centipede have?Not a hundred.How many toes has a two-toed sloth?It’s either six or eight.Who was the first American president?Peyton Randolph.What were George Washington’s false teeth made from?Mostly hippopotamus.What was James Bond’s favorite drink?Not the vodka martini.

    In MY IDEAL BOOKSHELF, dozens of leading cultural figures share the books that matter to them most; books that define their dreams and ambitions and in many cases helped them find their way in the world. Contributors include Malcolm Gladwell, Thomas Keller, Michael Chabon, Alice Waters, James Patterson, Maira Kalman, Judd Apatow, Chuck Klosterman, Miranda July, Alex Ross, Nancy Pearl, David Chang, Patti Smith, Jennifer Egan, and Dave Eggers, among many others. With colorful and endearingly hand-rendered images of book spines by Jane Mount, and first-person commentary from all the contributors, this is a perfect gift for avid readers, writers, and all who have known the influence of a great book.

    In this quirky new title designer and typographer Teresa Monachino rounds up and breaks down a variety of unruly words: words lacking in integrity, misleading words that do not mean what they say, words that mean more than they say, words with inconsistent pronunciation or spellings that are just plain cruel! Using striking and witty graphic design the author demands answers to such troublesome questions as, why is abbreviation such a long word, does monosyllabic really need five syllables and why is lisp so hard to say if you have one?

    Arranged into 13 chilling chapters like Haunted Hollywood, Blood Red Crosses and Gross Anatomy: Hospital Horrors, Bride of Bizarre, and Tales from the Cryptids, Beyond Bizarre tackles everything from female pirates and creepy candy stripers to psychic predictions and virgin shark birthsand much, much more.A word of warning: this book is not for the faint of heart!

    In the original edition, Steiner provided readers with the first systematic investigation since the eighteenth century of the phenomenologyand processes of translation both inside and between languages. Taking issue with the principal emphasis of modern linguistics, he finds the root of the Babel problem in our deep instinct for privacy and territory, noting that every people has in its language a unique body of shared secrecy. Withthis provocative thesis he analyzes every aspect of translation from fundamental conditions of interpretation to the most intricate of linguistic constructions. For the long-awaited second edition, Steiner entirely revised the text, added new and expanded notes, and wrote a new preface setting the work in the present context of hermeneutics, poetics, and translation studies. This new edition brings the bibliography up to the present with substantiallyupdated references, including much Russian and Eastern European material. Like the towering figures of Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault, Steiner's work is central to current literary thought. After Babel, Third Edition is essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the debates raging in theacademy today.