To be fair, Ellmann does have some distinct advantages. For starters, there's his deep mastery of the Irish milieu--demonstrated not only in this volume but in his books on Yeats and Wilde. He's also an admirable stylist himself--graceful, witty, and happily unintimidated by his brilliant subjects. But in addition, Ellmann seems to have an uncanny grasp on Joyce's personality: his reverence for the Irishman's literary accomplishment is always balanced by a kind of bemused affection for his faults. Whether Joyce is putting the finishing touches on Ulysses, falling down drunk in the streets of Trieste, or talking dirty to his future wife via the postal service, Ellmann's account always shows us a genius and a human being--a daunting enough task for a fiction writer, let alone the poor, fact-fettered biographer. Richard Ellmann has revised and expanded his definitive work on Joyce's life to include newly discovered primary material, including details of a failed love affair, a limerick about Samuel Beckett, a dream notebook, previously unknown letters, and much more.

    He has chosen a diverse, very personal collection that celebrates the essay as an independent genre unlike any other. This year’s pieces embrace stylistic freedom and strong opinions and afford the reader a fascinating view of the writer’s mind as it struggles with truth, memory, and experience. Featured writers include Jamaica Kincaid, Edward Hoagland, Cynthia Ozick, Mary Gordon, Edwidge Danticat, and others.

    She has become our most important critic, while her brilliant novels and short fiction are, at long last, getting the recognition they deserve. Sontag is above all a writer, which is only to say that, though the form may differ, there is an essential unity in all her work. The truth of this is perhaps more evident in A Susan Sontag Reader than in any of Sontag's individual books. The writer selected a sampling of her work, meaning the choice both to reflect accurately a career and also to guide the reader toward those qualities and concerns which she prizes in her own writing.  A Susan Sontag Reader is arranged chronologically and draws on most of Sontag's books. There are selections from her two novels, The Benefactor and Death Kit,  and from her collections of short stories, I, etcetera. The famous essays from the 1960s--"Against Interpretation," "Notes on Camp," and "On Style"--which established Sontag's reputation and can be fairly said to have shaped the cultural views of a generation are included, as are selctions from her two subsequent volumes of essays, Styles of Radical Will and Under the Sign of Satury. A part of Sontag's best-selling On Photography is also included.  It is astonishing to read these works when they are detached from the books they appeared in and offered instead in the order in which Sontag wrote them. The connections between various literary forms, the progression of themes, are revealed in often startling ways. Moreover, Sontag has included a long interview in which she moves mroe informally over the whole range of her concerns and of her work. The volume ends with "Writing Itself," a previously uncollected essay on Roland Barthes which, in the eyes of many, is one of Sontag's finest achievements. This collection is, in a sense, both a self-potrait and a key for a reader to understand the work of one of the most imporant writers of our time.

    With the elegance and verve for which he is well known, Stephen Greenblatt, author of the best-selling Will in the World, shows that Shakespeare was strikingly averse to such absolutes and constantly probed the possibility of freedom from them. Again and again, Shakespeare confounds the designs and pretensions of kings, generals, and churchmen. His aversion to absolutes even leads him to probe the exalted and seemingly limitless passions of his lovers.Greenblatt explores this rich theme by addressing four of Shakespeare’s preoccupations across all the genres in which he worked. He first considers the idea of beauty in Shakespeare’s works, specifically his challenge to the cult of featureless perfection and his interest in distinguishing marks. He then turns to Shakespeare’s interest in murderous hatred, most famously embodied in Shylock but seen also in the character Bernardine in Measure for Measure. Next Greenblatt considers the idea of Shakespearean authority—that is, Shakespeare’s deep sense of the ethical ambiguity of power, including his own. Ultimately, Greenblatt takes up Shakespearean autonomy, in particular the freedom of artists, guided by distinctive forms of perception, to live by their own laws and to claim that their creations are singularly unconstrained.A book that could only have been written by Stephen Greenblatt, Shakespeare’s Freedom is a wholly original and eloquent meditation by the most acclaimed and influential Shakespearean of our time.

    Indeed it was with a Salon review that he made his literary debut: and it is significant that even at this early stage - in 1845 - he was already articulating the need for a painter who could depict the heroism of modern life. This he was to find in Constantin Guys, whom he later celebrated in the famous essay which provides the title-piece for this collection. Other material in this volume includes important and extended studies of three of Baudelaire's contemporary heroes - Delacroix, Poe and Wagner - and some more general articles, such as those on the theory and practice of caricature, and on what Baudelaire, with intentional scorn, called philosophic art. This last article develops views only touched on in Baudelaire's other writings. This volume is extensively illustrated with reproductions of works referred to in the text and otherwise relevant to it. It provides a survey of some of the most important ideas and individuals in the critical world of the great poet who has been called the father of modern art criticism.

    The only unabridged prose translation of Ariosto's Orlando Furioso - a witty parody of the chivalric legends of Charlemagne and the Saracen invasion of France - this version faithfully recaptures the entire narrative and the subtle meanings behind it.

    They include introductions for books of avant-garde poets; collaborations with visual artists, and articles for publications such as The New York Review of Books, The London Review of Books, and October.One section focuses on writers and literary works: strange tales from classical and modern China; the Psalms in translation: a skeptical look at E. B. White’s New York. Another section is a continuation of Weinberger’s celebrated political articles collected in What Happened Here: Bush Chronicles (a finalist for the National Books Critics Circle Award), including a sequel to “What I Heard About Iraq,” which the Guardian called the only antiwar “classic” of the Iraq War. A new installment of his magnificent linked “serial essay,” An Elemental Thing, takes us on a journey down the Yangtze River during the Sung Dynasty.The reader will also find the unlikely convergences between Samuel Beckett and Octavio Paz, photography and anthropology, and, of course, oranges and peanuts, as well as an encomium for Obama, a manifesto on translation, a brief appearance by Shiva, and reflections on the color blue, death, exoticism, Susan Sontag, and the arts and war.

    This complete and definitive collection of twenty-five plays and "playlets" includes Beckett's celebrated Krapp's Last Tape, Embers, Cascando, Play, Eh Joe, and Footfalls, as well as his mimes, all his radio and television plays, his screenplay for Film, his adaptiation of Robert Pinget's The Old Tune, and the more recent Catastrophe, What Where, Quad, and Night and Dreams."Beckett reduces life, perception, and writing to barest minimums: a few dimly seen, struggling torsos; a hopeless intelligence compulsively seeking to come to terms, in rudimentary yet endlessly varied language, with the human condition they represent. Within these extraordinary limitations, Beckett's verbal ability nonetheless generates great intensity." - Library Journal"Beckett stalks after men on their way out... His plays (Endgame, Krapp's Last Tape) and novels (Molloy, Murphy) are metaphors for modern man's spiritual bafflement... In spite of the hits of movement... all is really paralytic stasis - except for the voices, the indomitable voices." - Time

    Called up by the army, he soon found himself hundreds of miles away, advancing on Russian lines—or perhaps on his own lines—and facing relentless rifle and artillery fire. Badly wounded, he returned to normal life, which now struck him as unspeakably strange. He had witnessed, he realized, the end of a way of life, of a whole world.Published here for the first time in any language, this extraordinary reminiscence is a deeply moving addition to the literature of the terrible war that defined the shape of the twentieth century.

    Joyce scholar Edmund L. Epstein has arranged this material as running commentary on A Portrait of the Artist As a Young Man, Ulysses, and Finnegans Wake. With a new foreword by Phil Cousineau for this Collected Works edition, Mythic Worlds, Modern Words is both an introduction to the major work of Joyce and a representative portrait of Joseph Campbell as a critic of Joyce. It is also a major contribution to Joyce criticism, the fruit of a lifetime’s meditation on the great Irish writer’s writings.

    Tolkien written by Lin Carter. It was 1st published in paper by Ballantine in 3/69 & went thru numerous additional printings. It was among the earliest full-length critical works devoted to Tolkien's fantasies, the 1st to set his writings in their proper context in the history of fantasy. It was the earliest of three studies by Carter devoted to fantasy/horror writers & the history of fantasy, being followed by Lovecraft: A Look Behind the Cthulhu Mythos ('72) & Imaginary Worlds: The Art of Fantasy ('73), establishing him as an authority on the genre, indirectly leading to his editorial guidance of the Ballantine Adult Fantasy series. Gollancz published a cloth edition updated by Adam Roberts in 8/03. The study serves as an introduction for those unfamiliar with Tolkien's work. An introduction briefly reviews the publishing phenomenon of The Lord of the Rings & its popularity in the wake of the 1st paper editions in the '60s, after which he devotes three chapters to a short biography of the author thru the late '60s, including an account of how it was written. Four chapters explaining Middle-earth & summarizing the stories of The Hobbit & the three volumes of The Lord of the Rings follow, for the benefit of readers who may not have actually read the works. Carter next turns to the question of what the works are, a point of some confusion at the time. The then-current vogue for realistic fiction provided critics with few tools for evaluating an out-&-out fantasy on its own terms. Attempts to deconstruct it as a satire or allegory were rife. Carter firmly debunks these efforts, supporting his argument by drawing on Tolkien's own published ruminations on fantasy's functions & purposes. He then contextualizes the works by sketching the history of written fantasy from its earliest appearance in the epic poetry of the ancient world thru the heroic poetry of the Dark & the prose romances of the Middle Ages, down to the fairy tales, ghost stories & gothic novels of the early modern era & the rediscovery of the genre by writers of the 19-20th centuries prior to & contemporary with Tolkien. The origins of the modern genre are discovered in the writings of Wm Morris, Lord Dunsany & E.R. Eddison & followed thru the works of authors they influenced, including H.P. Lovecraft, Fletcher Pratt, L. Sprague de Camp & Mervyn Peake. Carter next highlights some of Tolkien's particular debts to his predecessors, tracing the motifs & names he utilizes back to their beginnings in Norse mythology & highlighting other echoes in his work deriving from legend & history. Finally noted is Tolkien's influence on contemporary fantasy, which was just beginning to make itself felt, primarily in the juvenile fantasies of Carol Kendall, Alan Garner & Lloyd Alexander.

    Along with his roommate, an arsonist named Firebug, Miguel tries to fit a lifetime of partying, casual sex, and high times into a few short years. But when he meets the beautiful and practical-minded Cristalena, the shallowness and imminent danger of his world come crashing home. Tense, gritty, and moving, written in the fast, rhythmic language of the streets, "Spidertown" captures a world where children own guns, where death is a part of everyday life, and where, miraculously, hope manages to survive.

    "Anyone, whether knowledgeable or not, will profit by reading it..." - Opera Quarterly

    The latest generation of titles in this series also features glossaries and visual elements that complement the classic, familiar format.CliffsNotes on Atlas Shrugged is your guide to author Ayn Rand's masterpiece, an impassioned defense of the freedom of man's mind. She shows that without the independent mind, our society would collapse into primitive savagery.Delve into the post-World War II historical context of Atlas Shrugged and the modern implications of its conclusions. Other features that help you study includeCharacter analyses of major playersA character map that graphically illustrates the relationships among the charactersCritical essaysA review section that tests your knowledgeA Resource Center full of books, articles, films, and Internet sitesClassic literature or modern modern-day treasure you'll understand it all with expert information and insight from CliffsNotes study guides."

    The title of his new work reflects de Man’s preoccupation with the unreliability of language. … The contributions that the book makes, both in the initial theoretical chapters and in the detailed analyses (or deconstructions) of particular texts are undeniable."—Caroline D. Eckhardt, World Literature Today