Book picks similar to
The Faber Book of Beasts by Paul Muldoon
poetry
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The Turkish Embassy Letters
Mary Wortley Montagu - 1971
Her lively letters offer insights into the paradoxical freedoms conferred on Muslim women by the veil, the value of experimental work by Turkish doctors on inoculation, and the beauty of Arab poetry and culture.The ability to study another culture according to its own values and to see herself through the eyes of others makes Lady Mary one of the most fascinating of early travel writers and commentators
Look: Poems
Solmaz Sharif - 2016
In this virtuosic array of poems, lists, shards, and sequences, Sharif assembles her family’s and her own fragmented narratives in the aftermath of warfare. Those repercussions echo into the present day, in the grief for those killed, in America’s invasions of Afghanistan and Iraq, and in the discriminations endured at the checkpoints of daily encounter.At the same time, these poems point to the ways violence is conducted against our language. Throughout this collection are words and phrases lifted from the Department of Defense Dictionary of Military and Associated Terms; in their seamless inclusion, Sharif exposes the devastating euphemisms deployed to sterilize the language, control its effects, and sway our collective resolve. But Sharif refuses to accept this terminology as given, and instead turns it back on its perpetrators. “Let it matter what we call a thing,” she writes. “Let me look at you.”
The Dream of the Rood
Unknown - 1954
It is one of the greatest religious poems in English literature, the work of a nameless poet of superb genius.This edition presents a conservative text with variant reading described in the notes. In his introduction Professor Swanton describes the Vercelli Book, in which the full text of The Dream of the Rood is found, and gives an account of the Ruthwell Cross, the sources for which are scattered and not normally familiar to students of Old English.The relationship between the two texts, the doctrine behind the poem and its style and structure are also discussed. The edition includes extensive notes and glossary.
The French Lieutenant's Woman
John Fowles - 1969
Obsessed with an irresistible fascination for the enigmatic Sarah, Charles is hurtled by a moment of consummated lust to the brink of the existential void. Duty dictates that his engagement to Tina must be broken as he goes forth once again to seek the woman who has captured his Victorian soul & gentleman's heart.
Cal
Bernard MacLaverty - 1983
For Cal, some choices are devastatingly simple: he can work in an abattoir that nauseates him or join the dole queue; he can brood on his past or plan a future with Marcella.Springing out of the fear and violence of Ulster, Cal is a haunting love story that unfolds in a land where tenderness and innocence can only flicker briefly in the dark.
E.E. Cummings: Complete Poems 1904-1962 (Revised, Corrected, and Expanded Edition)
E.E. Cummings - 1991
E. Cummings was, next to Robert Frost, the most widely read poet in America. Combining Thoreau's controlled belligerence with the brash abandon of an uninhibited bohemian, Cummings, together with Pound, Eliot, and William Carlos Williams, helped bring about the twentieth-century revolution in literary expression. He is recognized on the one hand as the author of some of the most beautiful lyric poems written in the English language, and on the other as one of the most inventive American poets of his time in the worlds of Richard Kostelanetz, "the major American poet of the middle-twentieth-century."
Selected Stories
Katherine Mansfield - 1948
The only writing I have ever been jealous of.' Virginia Woolf Virginia Woolf was not the only writer to admire Mansfield's work: Thomas Hardy, D. H. Lawrence, and Elizabeth Bowen all praised her stories, and her early death at the age of thirty-four cut short one of the finest short-story writers in the English language. This selection covers the full range of Mansfield's fiction, from her early satirical stories to the subtly nuanced comedy of 'The Daughters of the Late Colonel' and the macabre and ominous 'A Married Man's Story'. The stories that pay what Mansfield calls 'a debt of love' to New Zealand are as sharply etched as the European stories, and she recreates her childhood world with mordant insight. Disruption is a constant theme, whether the tone is comic, tragic, nostalgic, or domestic, echoing Mansfield's disrupted life and the fractured expressions of Modernism. This new edition increases the selection from 27 to 33 stories and prints them in the order in which they first appeared, in the definitive texts established by Anthony Alpers.
Lunch Poems
Frank O'Hara - 1964
Important poems by the late New York poet published in The New American Poetry, Evergreen Review, Floating Bear and stranger places.Often O'Hara, strolling through the noisy splintered glare of a Manhattan noon, has paused at a sample Olivetti to type up thirty or forty lines of ruminations, or pondering more deeply has withdrawn to a darkened ware- or firehouse to limn his computed misunderstandings of the eternal questions of life, coexistence, and depth, while never forgetting to eat lunch, his favorite meal.
The Complete Poems 1927-1979
Elizabeth Bishop - 1980
Bishop was unforgiving of fashion and limited ways of seeing and feeling, but cast an even more trenchant eye on her own work. One wishes this volume were thicker, though the perfections within mark the rightness of her approach. The poems are sublimely controlled, fraught with word play, fierce moral vision (see her caustic ballad on Ezra Pound, "Visits to St. Elizabeths"), and reticence. From the surreal sorrow of the early "Man-Moth" (leaping off from a typo she had come across for "mammoth"), about a lonely monster who rarely emerges from "the pale subways of cement he calls his home," to the beauty of her villanelle "One Art" (with its repeated "the art of losing isn't hard to master"), the poet wittily explores distance and desolation, separation and sorrow.
The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories
Malcolm Bradbury - 1987
It is a book to dip into, to read from cover to cover, to lend to friends and read again. It includes stories of love and crime, stories touched with comedy and the supernatural, stories set in London, Los Angeles, Bucharest and Tokyo. Above all, as you will discover, it satisfies Samuel Butler's anarchic pleasure principle: 'I should like to like Schumann's music better than I do; I daresay I could make myself like it better if I tried; but I do not like having to try to make myself like things; I like things that make me like them at once and no trying at all...'
The Art of Fiction: Illustrated from Classic and Modern Texts
David Lodge - 1992
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 Black Album
Hanif Kureishi - 1995
The second novel from one of the most celebrated voices in British fiction and film, The Black Album is an exhilarating multicultural coming-of-age tale featuring Shalid, a sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll-loving Pakistani student torn between a love affair with a gorgeous, free-spirited college professor and his desire to please his conservative Muslim community.
Literary Theory: An Introduction
Terry Eagleton - 1983
It could not anticipate what was to come after, neither could it grasp what had happened in literary theory in the light of where it was to lead.