Gradually he learns the violent history of the house's owner, the fierce, saturnine Heathcliff and the thwarted love that has led him to exact terrible revenge on the two families that have sought to oppose him.Since its original publication in 1847, Emily Bronte's only novel, whether repelling, captivating or intriguing different generations of readers, has never relaxed its powerful grip on the public, and the figure of the haunted, brutal Heathcliff has become part of Britain's cultural mythology.This edition also includes over sixty of Emily Bronte's poems, an introduction, notes, text summary, selected criticism and a chronology of Emily Bronte's life and times.(back cover)

    Much of the evidence is internal, but he also makes the first use of some important indications by Joyce himself.

    Fitzgerald rose to fame in his 20s with stories chronicling the upheaval of manners and morals in the Jazz Age, and with his wife Zelda blurred the line between literature and life.

    But Robert Ferguson’s new biography tells a different tale; for where the novels are sexually explicit and brutally frank—woundingly so to those close to Miller—they are also the fantasies of a man escaping from his past, and from himself.

    And because reading is the thing I love most, it's only natural for me to hope it will become something they love, too...The trouble is that reading is a particularly slippery passion to want to pass along because it's a skill most parents would agree their children have to master, to one degree or another. ""--from Raising a Reader" Can passion be passed along from parent to child? Can you, in other words, make someone love baseball, ballet or books? Of course you can't - but that doesn't stop parents from trying. Jennie Nash was one of those parents - a parent so obsessed about getting her kids to read that her desire sometimes strayed into desperation; her hope often became an obsession; and instead of helping, her resolve got in the way. In the end, she found that, like so many of the things we do as parents, passing along a passion for reading happens in the push and pull of digging in and letting go, day in and day out, both because of and in spite of our efforts. Nash shares stories and misadventures from the years when her young daughters were learning what it meant to have a relationship with words--and she was learning to let them. She reminds us how the magic moments happen in their own sweet time, by being together in the presence of good books and seeing each child as unique. Each chapter of "Raising a Reader" ends with personal, practical tips and games that spring straight from the narrative. A comprehensive index discusses many of the books Nash has enjoyed with her children, providing a year's worth of titles for parents and their children to explore.

    Joyce's Voices is both a helpful guide through Joyce's complexities, and a brief treatise on the concept of objectivity: the idea that the world can be perceived as a series of reports to our senses. Objectivity, Kenner claims, was a modern invention, and one that the modernists--Joyce foremost among them--found problematic. Accessible and enjoyable, Joyce's Voices is what so much criticism is not: an aid to better understanding--and enjoying more fully--the work of one of the world's greatest writers.

    In one, we sit with the teenage Mark Strand while he reads for the first time a poem that truly amazes him: "You, Andrew Marvell" by Archibald MacLeish, in which night sweeps in an unstoppable but exhilarating circle around the earth toward the speaker standing at noon. The essay goes on to explicate the poem, but it also evokes, through its form and content, the poem's meaning -- time's circular passage -- with the young Strand first happening upon the poem, the older Strand seeing into it differently, but still amazed. Among the other subjects Strand explores: the relationship between photographs and poems, the eternal nature of the lyric, the contemporary use of old forms, four American views of Parnassus, and an alphabet of poetic influences.We visit as well Strandian parallel universes, whose absurdity illuminates the lack of a vital discussion of poetry in our culture at large: Borges drops in on a man taking a bath, perches on the edge of the tub, and discusses translation; a president explains in his farewell address why he reads Chekhov to his cabinet.Throughout The Weather of Words, Mark Strand explores the crucial job of poets and their readers, who together joyfully attempt the impossible -- to understand through language that which lies beyond words.From the Hardcover edition.

    She’ll have to stand up for herself in order to stand up for the murder victim. It’s a risk, and so is reaching out to the mysterious young man who works with deadly birds of prey. But with danger all around, some risks are worth taking.

    The Second Edition newly includes “A Prisoner in the Caucasus,” “Father Sergius,” and “After the Ball,” in addition to Michael Katz’s new translation of “Alyosha Gorshok.” Together these stories represent the best of the author’s short fiction before War and Peace and after Anna Karenina.“Backgrounds and Sources” includes two Tolstoy memoirs, A History of Yesterday (1851) and The Memoirs of a Madman (1884), as well as entries—expanded in the Second Edition—from Tolstoy’s “Diary for 1855” and selected letters (1858–95) that shed light on the author’s creative process.“Criticism” collects twenty-three essays by Russian and western scholars, six of which are new to this Second Edition. Interpretations focus both on Tolstoy’s language and art and on specific themes and motifs in individual stories. Contributors include John M. Kopper, Gary Saul Morson, N. G. Chernyshevsky, Mikhail Bakhtin, Harsha Ram, John Bayley, Vladimir Nabokov, Ruth Rischin, Margaret Ziolkowski, and Donald Barthelme.A Chronology of Tolstoy’s life and work and an updated Selected Bibliography are also included.

    The original edition cost seventy-five cents, but there was something priceless about its eponymous piece. Although it gave a voice to the new generation that came of age in the conservative years following World War II, the poem also conferred a strange, subversive power that continues to exert its influence to this day. Ginsberg went on to become one of the most eminent and celebrated writers of the second half of the twentieth century, and "Howl" became the critical axis of the worldwide literary, cultural, and political movement that would be known as the Beat generation.The year 2006 marks the fiftieth anniversary of the publication of "Howl," and The Poem That Changed America will celebrate and shed new light on this profound cultural work. With new essays by many of today's most distinguished writers, including Frank Bidart, Andrei Codrescu, Vivian Gornick, Phillip Lopate, Daphne Merkin, Rick Moody, Robert Pinsky, and Luc Sante, The Poem That Changed America reveals the pioneering influence of "Howl" down through the decades and its powerful resonance today.

    'Not all those who wander are lost, ' 'Faithless is he that says farewell when the road darkens, ' and 'Never laugh at live dragons' are all poetic, wise, and convincingly real-sounding, but they are also a lens, through which more can be seen. These proverbs belong to entirely invented wisdom traditions and reflect the culture, the philosophical worldview, and the history of those who use them.In The Proverbs of Middle-earth, David Rowe discovers and investigates the degree to which the 'soul' of each of these fictional civilizations can be understood through the lens of their proverbs. What is revealed enriches the reader's experience of and delight in Middle-earth, as well as illuminating the astounding depth and detail of creativity behind it. Arrows dipped in honey abound!

    In Maigret in Society, on the other hand, the inspector confronts a cast of characters so subtle and overbred as to seem unreal. Most remarkable, perhaps, is Simenon's widely praised creation of the thief in Maigret and the Lazy Burglar, in which a risky profession exercised by an eminently cautious man. The common thread to all three novellas is Simenon's astounding virtuosity and, of course, the inimitable Maigret.

    But now meet another Terry Pratchett – a man of serious metaphysical ideas and sophisticated philosophical insights. In Philosophy and Terry Pratchett thirteen professional philosophers survey such key philosophical issues as personal identity, the nature of destiny, the value of individuality, the meaning of existentialism, the reality of universals and the existence of alternative realities. In considering these and many other equally fascinating themes, close reference is made to more than 35 Discworld novels as well as to the ideas of some of history's greatest philosophers including Aristotle, Hobbes, Rousseau, Kant, Mill, Kierkegaard, Wittgenstein and Rawls.During your journey, you will be surprised by numerous provocative conclusions including the startling claim that the existence of Discworld is logically possible!

    And yet at the same time, like another masterpiece of fiction, James Joyce's Ulysses, it's been deemed endlessly complex and filled with impenetrable mysteries. Now, however, in the first book-length investigation of Wolfe's literary puzzlebox, Robert Borski takes you inside the twisting corridors of the tetralogy and along the way reveals his solutions to many of the novel's conundrums and riddles, such as who really is Severian's lost twin sister (almost certainly not who you think) and why he believes the novel's main character may not even be the torturer Severian. Furthermore, and in essay after essay, Borski demonstrates how a single master key will unlock many of the book's secret relationships--all in the attempt to guide you through the labyrinth that is Gene Wolfe's BOOK OF THE NEW SUN.

    Fusing family memoir with a meditation on creative block, depression, solitude, class, place and the intractable politics of our present moment, Dan Fox draws upon his experiences as a writer to consider the role that fallow periods and states of impasse play in art and life. LIMBO is an essay about getting by when you can't get along, employing a cast of artists, exiles, ghosts, hermits and sailors - including the author's older brother who, in 1985, left England for good to sail the world - to reflect on the creative, emotional and political consequences of being stuck, and how these are also crucial to our understanding of inspiration, flow and productivity. From Thomas Aquinas to radical behavioural experiments, from creative constraints to the social horrors of THE TWILIGHT ZONE and Get Out's SUNKEN PLACE, LIMBO argues that there can be no growth without stagnancy, no movement without inactivity, and no progress without refusal.