He ponders the doomed library of Alexandria and personal libraries of Charles Dickens, Jorge Luis Borges, and others. He recounts stories of people who have struggled against tyranny to preserve freedom of thought—the Polish librarian who smuggled books to safety as the Nazis began their destruction of Jewish libraries; the Afghani bookseller who kept his store open through decades of unrest. Oral “memory libraries” kept alive by prisoners, libraries of banned books, the imaginary library of Count Dracula, a library of books never written.

    Brings together three hilarious pieces by America's comic genius: Without Feathers, a secret journal that addresses life's "big" questions; Getting Even, Woody as psychologist, historian, and philosopher; and Side Effects, Woody's take on UFOs and more.

    It serves as a reminder to the reader that healing, transformation, and freedom are possible.

    The central character in this work is a Grand Inquisitor who arrests Jesus. A Grand Inquisitor, or Inquisitor Generalis in German is the individual who leads an Inquisition, just like Spanish Dominican Tomas de Torquemada who was the official in charge of the Spanish Inquisition.

    Back in print for the first time in nearly thirty years, here is Yoko Ono's whimsical, delightful, subversive, startling book of instructions for art and for life."A dream you dream alone may be a dream, but a dream two people dream together is a reality.""Burn this book after you've read it." -- Yoko Ono"This is the greatest book I've ever burned." -- John Lennon

    Rich with references ranging from Goethe's Werther to Winnicott, from Plato to Proust, from Baudelaire to Schubert, A Lover's Discourse artfully draws a portrait in which every reader will find echoes of themselves.

    Written with passion, humor, and wisdom, Reading Like a Writer will inspire readers to return to literature with a fresh eye and an eager heart - to take pleasure in the long and magnificent sentences of Philip Roth and the breathtaking paragraphs of Isaac Babel; she is deeply moved by the brilliant characterization in George Eliot's Middlemarch. She looks to John Le Carré for a lesson in how to advance plot through dialogue and to Flannery O'Connor for the cunning use of the telling detail. And, most important, Prose cautions readers to slow down and pay attention to words, the raw material out of which all literature is crafted.

    "Criticism" provides readers with a wide chronological and thematic range of scholarly interpretations, divided into two sections. The first, "1745-1940," includes assessments by Henry Fielding, Samuel Johnson, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, William Makepeace Thackeray, D. H. Lawrence, W. B. Yeats, F. R. Leavis, and Andr� Breton, among others. The second, "After 1940," is by subject and collects critical discussions of A Tale of the Tub, the poems, the English and Irish politics, and Gulliver's Travels, by Hugh Kenner, Marcus Walsh, Irvin Ehrenpreis, Penelope Wilson, Derek Mahon, S. J. Connolly, George Orwell, R. S. Crane, Jenny Mezciems, Ian Higgins, and Claude Rawson. A Chronology and Selected Bibliography are also included.

    Rowling delivered a deeply affecting commencement speech at Harvard University. Now published for the first time in book form, VERY GOOD LIVES presents J.K. Rowling's words of wisdom for anyone at a turning point in life. How can we embrace failure? And how can we use our imagination to better both ourselves and others?Drawing from stories of her own post-graduate years, the world famous author addresses some of life's most important questions with acuity and emotional force.

    Includes several lectures and two interviews.

    For when Jeanette Winterson looks at works as diverse as the Mona Lisa and Virginia Woolf's The Waves, she frees them from layers of preconception and restores their power to exalt and unnerve, shock and transform us."Art Objects is a book to be admired for its effort to speak exorbitantly, urgently and sometimes beautifully about art and about our individual and collective need for serious art."--Los Angeles Times

    All who read The Act of Creation will find it a compelling and illuminating book.

     Beginning with ALONE and closing with WORK, each chapter is a meditation on meaning and context, an invitation to shift and broaden our perspectives on the inevitable vicissitudes of life: pain and joy, honesty and anger, confession and vulnerability, the experience of feeling besieged and the desire to run away from it all. Through this lens, procrastination may be a necessary ripening; hiding an act of freedom; and shyness the appropriate confusion and helplessness that accompanies the first stage of revelation. CONSOLATIONS invites readers into a poetic and thoughtful consideration of words whose meaning and interpretation influence the paths we choose and the way we traverse them throughout our lives.

    Even the most arrogant female writer has to work over time to build an ego that is robust enough to get her through January, never mind all the way to December.' Deborah Levy

    In its companion volume River Notes, Lopez takes us into a different country where a nameless river flows through an animated world of herons, bears, and human beings.There is violence here, in the conflict of natural forces, in the people touching the river. There are landscapes, physical and spiritual, that we have not sensed, rituals we have not understood. Like the earlier peoples of our land, and like few American writers who have reentered this world, Barry Lopez respects the river and its imperatives, understands the language of cottonwoods and the salmon, and brings us in an extraordinary dance with a heron to the oneness with nature which is our heritage. ... [i]n these haunting, passionate stories Lopez brings us home to a deeply comforting unity with the natural world.From the first-edition dustjacket.