Literature Books

When an essay is due and dreaded exams loom, here's the lit-crit help students need to succeed! SparkNotes Literature Guides make studying smarter, better, and faster. They provide chapter-by-chapter analysis, explanations of key themes, motifs, and...

When an essay is due and dreaded exams loom, here's the lit-crit help students need to succeed! SparkNotes Literature Guides make studying smarter, better, and faster. They provide chapter-by-chapter analysis, explanations of key themes, motifs, and...

SparkNotes Literature Guides: Making the reading experience fun! When a paper is due, and dreaded exams loom, here's the lit-crit help students need to succeed! SparkNotes Literature Guides make studying smarter, better, and faster. They provide...

A Place To Call Home begins on a ship when a nurse-Sister Adams by name--works her passage home to Australia to console her mother who is grieving for a son killed in the Korean War. Estranged from her family, she stands before the welcome mat, fearful...

Kierkegaard claimed that the gods created man because they were bored, and Baudelaire predicted that the "delicate monster" of boredom would one day swallow up the whole world in an immense yawn. Between these two statements lies the undefined expanse of...

A unique look at how classical notions of ascent and flight preoccupied early modern British writers and artistsBetween the late sixteenth century and early nineteenth century, the British imagination - poetic, political, intellectual, spiritual and...

George Kennedy's three volumes on classical rhetoric have long been regarded as authoritative treatments of the subject. This new volume, an extensive revision and abridgment of The Art of Persuasion in Greece, The Art of Rhetoric in the Roman World, and...

How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up is a conversation in poems on the taboo and abject bodies of women. Collyer disrupts selflessness, tackling the disquieting dilemmas of feminine space with erotic and comic freedom.How to Order Eggs Sunny Side Up was...

If There Is a Butterfly That Drinks Tears is the second full-length collection from award-winning poet Natalie Damjanovich-Napoleon.Exploring one the most personal and politically charged experiences in many women's lives - motherhood - this collection...

In There Might Be a Moon or a Dog, Anglo-Swiss-American poet Marc Vincenz takes us on an unexpected trip. We are lured into disarming circumstances blending despair with wonder, where philosophical queries prompt what ideas and events are trustworthy...

Witches, murder, ghosts, and madness - one of Shakespeare's finest tragedies is also a perfect fit for the graphic novel format. This compelling adaptation depicts every blood-curdling scene in easy-to-follow illustrations, accompanied by Shakespeare's...

An engaging reassessment of the celebrated essayist and his relevance to contemporary readersMore than two centuries after his birth, Ralph Waldo Emerson remains one of the presiding spirits in American culture. Yet his reputation as the starry-eyed...

The follow-up to the bestselling Wanderers, Kerri Andrews' Way Makers is the first anthology of women's writing about walking. Moving from the eighteenth century to the present day, and across poetry, letters, diaries, novels and more,...

The attachments we form shape our experience of the world and our understanding of who we are. 'Hell is other people', wrote Jean-Paul Sartre, his point being less about misanthropy and more about how entwined our self-perception is with the...

A captivating portrait of the poet and the scientist who shared an enchanted view of nature.Emily Dickinson and Charles Darwin were born at a time when the science of studying the natural world was known as natural philosophy, a pastime for poets,...

"Shiki's distinctive vision and direct expression make a tone recognizably his own, conveyed beautifully in these pages' translations. We hear Shiki's haiku as the voice of a friend bringing complex news in a few intimate words. These haiku are drawn...

Have you heard the terms structuralism and deconstruction and postmodernism but aren't really sure what they mean? Have you taken a whole course on literary criticism but are still feeling lost? Here's the book you need to sort it all out--and enjoy...

An introduction to one hundred great Jewish books, arranged as a concise and thought-provoking guide to the Jewish conversation across many centuries. Each of the entries features one work in its historical and cultural context, provides a summary of...

I Have to Go Back to 1994 and Kill a Girl is film noir set in verse, each poem a miniature crime scene with its own set of clues--frosted eye-shadow, a pistol under a horse's eye, dripping window units, an aneurysm opening its lethal trap. In...

Horace (65-8 BC) is the most beguiling of the great Latin poets. He has left an ineradicable mark on Western literature: Dante placed him alongside Homer and Virgil, and his works have been translated and re-imagined since the Renaissance. Len Krisak, an...

Marabou, Jane Yeh's first book of poems, is a meditation on the nature of artifice, and on the self. Her snapshots freeze fraught instants in the lives of a broad cast of characters: the horror movie mummy, an Elizabethan shoemaker, a flock of Cumbrian...

This new collection of essays on American poetry by Donald Davie (1922-1995) displays again 'the scale and range' of one of the great 'understanders' of poetry of our century, here fulfilling his chosen role as bridge-builder between poets, poetries and...

A plain, blank stationer's notebook from the 1780s in the Bodleian Library contains some of the most famous juvenilia in all of English literature. Copied out in Jane Austen's youthful hand, Volume the First, which takes its name from the inscription on...

Complete Poems brings together the published and unpublished work of one of the most significant poets of the late twentieth century, founding editor of Stand and of the Northern House imprint. As well as reprinting all the poems included in Silkins...

Borrowed Landscapes, Peter Scupham's first book since his acclaimed Collected Poems of 2002, explores a hinterland of enchantment and nightmare, a landscape whose contours reach back to Shakespeare's England by way of two world wars and a coming of age...

Judith Wright (1915-2000) is one of Australia's best loved, and essential, poets, devoted to place, responsive to landscape and to the violence done to the land and its inhabitants. As John Kinsella writes in his introduction, 'she looked inwards into...

The memories from which Fred D'Aguiar translates these poems are cultural and personal, from the anciencies of the Gilgamesh epic to the modern world, from classical philosophy to C.L.R. James and Aime Cesaire, from Asia and Europe to the new world in...

An astonishing collection about interconnectedness-between the human and nonhuman, ancestors and ourselves-from National Book Critics Circle Award winner, National Book Award finalist and U.S. Poet Laureate Ada Limn."I have always been too sensitive, a...

When Isaac Bashevis Singer emigrated to America in 1935, he left behind his wife and five-year-old son, Israel, with the promise to send for them as soon as he settled. He never did. In 1955, twenty years after their separation, Zamir came to New York to...

This is an English translation of Euripides' tragedy Hecuba about Hecuba's grief over her daughter and son's deaths and the revenge she enacts over her son's death. Focus Classical Library provides close translations with notes and essays to provide...

The speaker in this extraordinary collection finds herself multiply dislocated: from her childhood in California, from her family's roots in Mexico, from a dying parent, from her prior self. The world is always in motion-both toward and away from us-and...

Not Here is a flight plan for escape and a map for navigating home; a queer Vietnamese American body in confrontation with whiteness, trauma, family, and nostalgia; and a big beating heart of a book. Nguyen's poems ache with loneliness and desire and the...

"The stuff of crackling theater. Combining investigative zeal and theatrical imagination with insider access, Oslo invites you into the chambers where the Oslo Accords between Israel and the Palestinian Liberation Organization were...

"David Lindsay-Abaire has crafted a drama that's not just a departure but a revelation-an intensely emotional examination of grief, laced with wit, insightfulness, compassion and searing honesty." David Rooney, Variety "A beautifully observed new play...

Winner of the 2009 Pulitzer Prize for Drama"A powerhouse drama. . . . Lynn Nottage's beautiful, hideous and unpretentiously important play [is] a shattering, intimate journey into faraway news reports."-Linda Winer, Newsday"An intense and gripping new...

Winner of the 2005 Pulitzer Prize for Drama."A superb new drama written by John Patrick Shanley. It is an inspired study in moral uncertainty with the compellingly certain structure of an old-fashioned detective drama. Even...

"Jeet Heer more thoroughly and widely understands comics history and the perplexing binomial life of the cartoonist better than anyone who's not one. As well-versed in literature as he is in comics, he always gets at the peculiar, poetical texture of his...

Theatre doesn't have much relevance anymore. Or so acclaimed playwright Darren O'Donnell tells us. The dynamics of unplanned social interaction, he says, are far more compelling than any play he could produce. So his latest show, A Suicide-Site Guide to...

This gifty book journal offers the perfect place to indulge your passion for reading and to record your literary explorations. This beautifully refreshed edition of our popular My Book Journal provides space to record reviews and thoughts on 100 books,...

""The big event in poetry for 2015 will likely be the long-awaited resurrection of Frank Stanford, a legendary badass from Arkansas, much of whose poetry has been unavailable since his suicide at the age of 29 in 1978... Stanford was a hell of a...

Whether Jeffrey McDaniel's denouncing insomnia ("4,000 A.M."), exploring family tragedy ("Ghost Townhouse"), or celebrating love and lust ("The Biology of Numbers"), his writing is so profoundly original, so funny, twisted, and literary simultaneously,...

In Jeffrey McDaniel's second book, it is hard to separate the humor from the pain. Both qualities are omnipresent whether he's tackling dysfunctional family memories in 'The Most Awful Lullaby', or broken-hearted romance in poems like 'Another Long Day...

Pier Paolo Pasolini (19221975) was a major cultural figure in post-WWII Italy, well-known as a poet, novelist, communist intellectual, and filmmaker. In Danger is the first anthology in English devoted to his political and literary essays, with a...

While Cernuda's verse is vivid testimony to various aspects of his biographical itinerary, it is in his prose poems that he traces more explicitly an outline of his life's journey. Reviewing this work, Octavio Paz wrote: "In these memories and...

"At last, at last, at last, Pessoa again! More Pessoa! One of the very great poets of the twentieth century, again and more! And one of the fascinating figures of all literature, with his manifold identities, his amazing audacities, his brilliance and...