Caligula was one of the first rulers of the Roman Empire, and yet numbers among the most famous. His family history is mired in political scandals, tragedy, and murderous plots to forward the agendas of shadowy cabals that sought to oppose the nation in its early infancy. The full story of his life begins long before his birth, and his legacy continues long after his sensational murder at the hands of those closest to him. Inside you will read about... ✓ The Rise of the Roman Empire ✓ The Julio-Claudian Dynasty ✓ Caligula’s Rise to Power ✓ An Emperor Driven Mad ✓ An Emperor Becomes a God ✓ The Assassination of the Emperor And much more! A true product of his time, Caligula’s rich and colorful story is sure to draw you in until the very end.

    . .” One hundred years after its first publication in August 1915, Robert Frost’s poem “The Road Not Taken” is so ubiquitous that it’s easy to forget that it is, in fact, a poem. Yet poetry it is, and Frost’s immortal lines remain unbelievably popular. And yet in spite of this devotion, almost everyone gets the poem hopelessly wrong. David Orr’s The Road Not Taken dives directly into the controversy, illuminating the poem’s enduring greatness while revealing its mystifying contradictions. Widely admired as the poetry columnist for The New York Times Book Review, Orr is the perfect guide for lay readers and experts alike. Orr offers a lively look at the poem’s cultural influence, its artistic complexity, and its historical journey from the margins of the First World War all the way to its canonical place today as a true masterpiece of American literature. “The Road Not Taken” seems straightforward: a nameless traveler is faced with a choice: two paths forward, with only one to walk. And everyone remembers the traveler taking “the one less traveled by, / And that has made all the difference.” But for a century readers and critics have fought bitterly over what the poem really says. Is it a paean to triumphant self-assertion, where an individual boldly chooses to live outside conformity? Or a biting commentary on human self-deception, where a person chooses between identical roads and yet later romanticizes the decision as life altering?What Orr artfully reveals is that the poem speaks to both of these impulses, and all the possibilities that lie between them. The poem gives us a portrait of choice without making a decision itself. And in this, “The Road Not Taken” is distinctively American, for the United States is the country of choice in all its ambiguous splendor.Published for the poem’s centennial—along with a new Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition of Frost’s poems, edited and introduced by Orr himself—The Road Not Taken is a treasure for all readers, a triumph of artistic exploration and cultural investigation that sings with its own unforgettably poetic voice.

    Macbeth is a distinguished warrior hero, who over the course of the play, transforms into a brutal, murderous villain and pays an extraordinary price for committing an evil act. A man consumed with ambition and self-doubt, Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most vital meditations on the dangerous corners of the human imagination. Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom investigates Macbeth’s interiority and unthinkable actions with razor-sharp insight, agility, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character: Just as we encounter one Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are seventeen and another when we are forty, Bloom writes about his shifting understanding—over the course of his own lifetime—of this endlessly compelling figure, so that the book also becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity. Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare’s characters make. He delivers that kind of exhilarating intimacy and clarity in Macbeth, the final book in an essential series.

     James Shapiro illuminates both Shakespeare’s staggering achievement and what Elizabethans experienced in the course of 1599, bringing together the news and the intrigue of the times with a wonderful evocation of how Shakespeare worked as an actor, businessman, and playwright. The result is an exceptionally immediate and gripping account of an inspiring moment in history.

    The view 16-year-old Thomas Osborne first had of Muskoka was at night, trudging alone with his even younger brother along unmarked primitive roads to find their luckless father who, in 1875, had decided to make a new start for his beleaguered family on some "free land" in the bush east of the pioneer village of Huntsville, Ontario. The miracle is that Thomas lived to tell the tale.For the next five years Thomas endured starvation, falling through the ice and freezing, accidents with axes and boats, and narrow escapes from wolves and bears. Many years later, after returning to the United States, Osborne wrote down all his adventures in a graphic memoir that has become, in the words of author and journalist Roy MacGregor, "an undiscovered Canadian classic."Reluctant Pioneer provides a brooding sense of adventure and un- sentimental realism to deliver a powerful account of pioneer life where tragedies arrive as naturally as rain and where humour resides in irony.

    Schmidt reveals how each poet has transformed "a common language of poetry" into the rustic rhythms and elegiac ballads, love sonnets, and experimental postmodern verse that make up our lyrical canon.A comprehensive guided tour that is lively and always accessible, Lives of the Poets illuminates our most transcendent literary tradition.

    It was the year that began with the publication of James Joyce’s Ulysses and ended with the publication of T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land: respectively, the most influential English-language novel and poem of the century. To this day, these two works remain the titanic figures of modern literature—some would say, of modernity itself. And it was the indefatigable Pound who played a significant part in the launch of both writers’ careers. In Constellation of Genius, Kevin Jackson puts the accomplishments of Joyce and Eliot in the context of the world in which their works first appeared. We see the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the end of Dada, and the death of Proust. Meanwhile, Hollywood transformed the nature of fame, making Charlie Chaplin the most recognizable man on the planet. Hitchcock directed his first feature, Kandinsky and Klee joined the Bauhaus, and Louis Armstrong took the train from New Orleans to Chicago, heralding the start of modern jazz. Gloriously entertaining, erudite, and idiosyncratic, this is a biography of a year, a journey through the diaries of the anthropologists, actors, artists, dancers, designers, filmmakers, philosophers, playwrights, politicians, and scientists whose lives and works collided over twelve months, creating a frenzy of innovation that split the world in two.Some of the people discussed are: Charlie Chaplin, Jean Cocteau, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Coco Chanel, Winston Churchill, Sigmund Freud, E. M. Forster, George Gershwin, Albert Einstein, Adolf Hitler, Carl Jung, James Joyce, Sergei Prokofiev, Luis Buñuel, Bertolt Brecht, Wyndham Lewis, Fritz Lang, D. H. Lawrence, Lawrence of Arabia, Katherine Mansfield, Aleister Crowley, Bronisław Malinowski, Eugene O’Neill, George Orwell, Nikola Tesla, Alfred Hitchcock, Pablo Picasso, Vladimir Mayakovsky, Bertrand Russell, Rainer Maria Rilke, Hermann Hesse, Igor Stravinsky, Arnold Schoenberg, Joseph Stalin, Leon Trotsky, Walt Disney, Lois Armstrong, Franz Kafka, Rudolph Valentino, Buster Keaton, Virginia Woolf, Evelyn Waugh, W. B. Yeats, Benito Mussolini, Salvador Dalí, Federico García Lorca, T. S. Eliot, Anna Akhmatova, Le Corbusier, John Maynard Keynes, F. W. Murnau, Sergei Diaghilev, Ernest Hemingway, Frank Lloyd Wright, Wassily Kandinsky, André Breton, Rudyard Kipling, Ronald Firbank, Marcel Duchamp, Dashiell Hammett, Georges Bataille, Aldous Huxley, Andrei Bely, Henri Matisse, Marcel Proust, Ludwig Wittgenstein

    As a culture we have become less interested in the exploration of the glorious mind, and more interested in creating and mastering technologies that will yield material well-being. But while cultural pessimism is always fashionable, there is still much to give us hope. In The Givenness of Things, the incomparable Marilynne Robinson delivers an impassioned critique of our contemporary society while arguing that reverence must be given to who we are and what we are: creatures of singular interest and value, despite our errors and depredations.Robinson has plumbed the depths of the human spirit in her novels, including the National Book Critics Circle Award-winning Lila and the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead, and in her new essay collection she trains her incisive mind on our modern predicament and the mysteries of faith. These seventeen essays examine the ideas that have inspired and provoked one of our finest writers throughout her life. Whether she is investigating how the work of the great thinkers of the past, Calvin, Locke, Bonhoeffer--and Shakespeare--can infuse our lives, or calling attention to the rise of the self-declared elite in American religious and political life, Robinson's peerless prose and boundless humanity are on display. Exquisite and bold, The Givenness of Things is a necessary call for us to find wisdom and guidance in our cultural heritage, and to offer grace to one another.Humanism --Reformation --Grace --Servanthood --Givenness --Awakening --Decline --Fear --Proofs --Memory --Value --Metaphysics --Theology --Experience --Adam --Limitation --Realism

    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.

    Throughout his career, he remained haunted by his inability to master a series of personal and professional challenges: his less-than-heroic military career; the loss of his brother in an airplane crash; a disappointing stint as a Hollywood screenwriter; and a destructive bout with alcoholism. In this imaginative biography, Philip Weinstein--a leading authority on the great novelist--targets Faulkner's embattled sense of self as central to both his life and his work. Weinstein shows how Faulkner's troubled interactions with time, place, and history--with antebellum practices and racial division--take on their fullest meanings in his fiction. Exploring the resonance of his own unpreparedness, Faulkner invented a singular language that captured human consciousness under stress as never before. Becoming Faulkner joins Faulkner's life and art in a bold new way, giving readers a full vantage from which to better understand this twentieth-century literary genius. Weinstein shows how Faulkner's troubled interactions with time, place, and history--with antebellum practices and southern heritage--form a pattern that played out over the course of his entire life. At the same time, these incidents take on their fullest meanings in his fiction. It was in meditating on his failures, his own unreadiness, Weinstein argues, that Faulkner came up with his singular language, one that captured human consciousness under stress as never before. His fruitless striving catapulted American literature to a new level of sophistication. Narrating the events that comprised Faulkner's life, biographers have long struggled to depict his personal complexity, the paradoxes that shaped his decisions and dogged his relationships. But without a consideration of the writing as well, the troubles in the life fail to reveal their deeper resonance. By skillfully analyzing the work while tracing the events, Weinstein achieves a full portrait, revealing struggles that animate his life and shadows that complicate his work. Becoming Faulkner thus conjoins Faulkner's life and art in a bold new way, giving readers a full vantage from which to better understand this twentieth-century literary genius.

    In these myriad, multiform, endlessly changing expressions of the American experience, the authors and editors of this volume find a new American history.In more than two hundred original essays, "A New Literary History of America" brings together the nation s many voices. From the first conception of a New World in the sixteenth century to the latest re-envisioning of that world in cartoons, television, science fiction, and hip hop, the book gives us a new, kaleidoscopic view of what Made in America means. Literature, music, film, art, history, science, philosophy, political rhetoric cultural creations of every kind appear in relation to each other, and to the time and place that give them shape.The meeting of minds is extraordinary as T. J. Clark writes on Jackson Pollock, Paul Muldoon on Carl Sandburg, Camille Paglia on Tennessee Williams, Sarah Vowell on Grant Wood s "American Gothic," Walter Mosley on hard-boiled detective fiction, Jonathan Lethem on Thomas Edison, Gerald Early on "Tarzan," Bharati Mukherjee on "The Scarlet Letter," Gish Jen on "Catcher in the Rye," and Ishmael Reed on "Huckleberry Finn." From Anne Bradstreet and John Winthrop to Philip Roth and Toni Morrison, from Alexander Graham Bell and Stephen Foster to Alcoholics Anonymous, "Life," Chuck Berry, Alfred Hitchcock, and Ronald Reagan, this is America singing, celebrating itself, and becoming something altogether different, plural, singular, new.Please visit www.newliteraryhistory.com for more information. "

    The search for little Pearl consumed the next several weeks, and the story became front page news all over the United States. Hundreds of residents from the nearby towns of Waldron and Booneville Arkansas helped in the search, and a mysterious mountain hermit seemed to hold the secret to Pearl's disappearance. The incredible events that followed contributed to a mountain legend that still exists today.

    For the next 15 years, Trident Studios, was at the epicentre of the music industry, recording some of the era's greatest artists, from The Beatles and David Bowie to Elton John and Genesis. Trident also developed their own talent, including a raw and demanding four-piece band called Queen. After an acrimonious split with Trident, their volatile leader Freddie Mercury famously dedicated a song to Norman: Death On Two Legs. In Life On Two Legs, this legendary music figure breaks his forty year silence and sets the record straight, not just about Freddie and Queen but also about artists from John Lennon and Marc Bolan to Harry Nilsson and Phil Collins and the recording of such classics as Hey Jude by The Beatles and Space Oddity by David Bowie. Funny, fascinating and occasionally irreverent - and with a foreword by Sir Paul McCartney - this is an unmissable memoir that brings to vivid life some of rock's greatest characters as well as the era and the studio that produced some of its classic music.

    In the years since then he has dedicated himself to an assortment of idiosyncratic reading challenges: spending a year reading only short books, spending a year reading books he always suspected he would hate, spending a year reading books he picked with his eyes closed.In One for the Books, Queenan tries to come to terms with his own eccentric reading style. How many more books will he have time to read in his lifetime? Why does he refuse to read books hailed by reviewers as “astonishing”? Why does he refuse to lend out books? Will he ever buy an e-book? Why does he habitually read thirty to forty books simultaneously? Why are there so many people to whom the above questions do not even matter? And what do they read? Acerbically funny yet passionate and oddly affectionate, One for the Books is a reading experience that true book lovers will find unforgettable.

    The authors identify 10 qualities, attributes, and skills that help to explain Lincoln's effectiveness, despite seemingly insurmountable odds:1. Implementing and sustaining a mission and vision with focused and profound clarity2. Communicating ideas effectively with precise and straightforward language3. Building a diverse and competent team to successfully address the mission4. Engendering trust, loyalty, and respect through humility, humor, and personal example5. Leading and serving with emotional intelligence and empathy6. Exercising situational competence and responding appropriately to implement effective change7. Rising beyond personal and professional trials through tenacity, persistence, resilience, and courage8. Exercising purposeful visibility9. Demonstrating personal growth and enhanced competence as a lifetime learner, willing to reflect on and expand ideas10. Believing that hope can become a realityChapters devoted to each element explore the historical record of Lincoln's life and actions, then discuss the implications for modern educators. End-of-chapter exercises provide a structure for reflection, analysis of current behaviors, and guidance for future work, so that readers can create their own path to success--inspired by the example of one of the greatest leaders of all time.