H. Lawrence. He wanted, in fact, to write his "Lawrence book." The problem was, he had no idea what his "Lawrence book" would be, though he was determined to write a "sober academic study." Luckily for the reader, he failed miserably.Out of Sheer Rage is a harrowing, comic, and grand act of literary deferral. At times a furious repudiation of the act of writing itself, this is not so much a book about Lawrence as a book about writing a book about Lawrence. As Lawrence wrote about his own study of Thomas Hardy, "It will be about anything but Thomas Hardy, I am afraid-queer stuff-but not bad."

    The other big event of that year was the outbreak of the Second World War, but for the moment, that did not affect me.' In the first instalment of Clive James's memoirs, we meet the young Clive, dressed in short trousers, and wrestling with the demands of school, various relatives and the occasional snake, in the suburbs of post-war Sydney.

    Influenced by works such as Don Juan, and the novels of Kafka, these essays begin with a meditation on suicide: the question of living or not living in an absurd universe devoid of order or meaning. With lyric eloquence, Camus posits a way out of despair, reaffirming the value of personal existence, and the possibility of life lived with dignity and authenticity.

    An indignant, outrageous, witty, deeply felt collection of reviews, essays, and speeches, this is a window not only into Vonnegut’s mind but also into his heart.

    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.

    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.

    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.

    Now, The View from the Cheap Seats brings together for the first time ever more than sixty pieces of his outstanding nonfiction. Analytical yet playful, erudite yet accessible, this cornucopia explores a broad range of interests and topics, including (but not limited to): authors past and present; music; storytelling; comics; bookshops; travel; fairy tales; America; inspiration; libraries; ghosts; and the title piece, at turns touching and self-deprecating, which recounts the author’s experiences at the 2010 Academy Awards in Hollywood.

    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)

    G. Sebald's first novel, never before translated into English, is perhaps his most amazing and certainly his most alarming. Sebald—the acknowledged master of memory's uncanniness—takes the painful pleasures of unknowability to new intensities in Vertigo. Here in their first flowering are the signature elements of Sebald's hugely acclaimed novels The Emigrants and The Rings of Saturn. An unnamed narrator, beset by nervous ailments, is again our guide on a hair-raising journey through the past and across Europe, amid restless literary ghosts—Kafka, Stendhal, Casanova. In four dizzying sections, the narrator plunges the reader into vertigo, into that "swimming of the head," as Webster's defines it: in other words, into that state so unsettling, so fascinating, and so "stunning and strange," as The New York Times Book Review declared about The Emigrants, that it is "like a dream you want to last forever."

    These are the memoirs of 29 year old John Birmingham, who has shared houses and apartments with 89 people and kept notes on all of them.

    But she has, and here is the record of that change in the decade since the publication of her last nonfiction collection, The Language of the Night. And what a mind — strong, supple, disciplined, playful, ranging over the whole field of its concerns, from modern literature to menopause, from utopian thought to rodeos, with an eloquence, wit, and precision that makes for exhilarating reading.

    Here, collected for the first time, are his famous lectures, which include Mansfield Park, Bleak House, and Ulysses. Edited and with a Foreword by Fredson Bowers; Introduction by John Updike; illustrations.

    It takes us from backstage at the ballet to the trial of a woman for the murder of her newborn baby. It moves effortlessly from the significance of moving house to the pleasure of re-reading Pride and Prejudice.Everywhere I Look includes Garner's famous and controversial essay on the insults of age, her deeply moving tribute to her mother and extracts from her diaries, which have been part of her working life for as long as she has been a writer. Everywhere I Look glows with insight. It is filled with the wisdom of life.

    The masterly essay on Tolstoy's view of history, in which Sir Isaiah underlines a fundamental distinction between those people (foxes) who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things and those (hedgehogs) who relate everything to a central, all-embracing system.