Presents the life of the Greek poet, discussing her poetry, the critical reception of her work at different periods in history, and her influence on some modern women poets.
A major dystopian work by one of Canada's most important living writers, The Handmaid's Tale has generated controversy since it first appeared in 1985. In this collection aimed at college undergraduat
This innovative book charts what has been a largely unexplored literary landscape, looking at the work of such diverse writers as the gens de couleur libre poets of antebellum New Orleans, Kate Chopin
This study for scholars and advanced students in literature explores the work of two American writers, David Foster Wallace and Dave Eggers, and their efforts at writing nonfiction, memoir, autobi
Franz Kafka is without question one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century despite the fact that much of his work remained unpublished when he died at a relatively young age in 1924.
An absorbing look at the early beginnings of one of America’s finest writers, The Mortgaged Heart is an important collection of Carson McCullers’s work, including stories, essays, articles, poems, and
A specialist in contemporary women's writing, Rubenstein (literature, American U.) looks at the work of two British and six American women writers of different generations and ethnicities to explore t
An unforgettable, lighthearted story about a young woman who discovers the insular world of writers, from the New York Times bestselling author of The Year We Left Home.Carla is in her twenties, working for a landscaper, lacking confidence, still unsure what direction her life will take. Viridian is a lauded and lovely aging poet whose reputation has been defined by her infamous affair with a famous male poet, Mathias, many years earlier. When Carla is hired to work at Viridian's house, she is perplexed by this community of writers: their tendency to recite lines in conversation, the stories of their many liaisons, their endless wine-soaked nights. And still she becomes enamored with Viridian and her whole circle, and especially with the power of words, the “ache and hunger that can both be awakened and soothed by a poem,” a hunger that Carla feels sharply at this stagnating moment in her young life. At the same time, she sees how even Viridian has had to compromise so much to take her
The Austrian playwright, novelist, and poet Thomas Bernhard (1931-89) is acknowledged as among the major writers of our times. At once pessimistic and exhilarating, Bernhard's work depicts the corrup
In this propulsive novel by the author of Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World and The Elephant Vanishes, one of the most idiosyncratically brilliant writers at work in any language fuses s
Written by one of the most prolific writers on China at the turn of the century, this 1905 publication was intended as a guide for travellers rather than as a scientific study of Asian landscape and culture. Little, a well-known merchant and traveller, spent fifty years of his life exploring the Orient. The book is structured with a chapter dedicated to each region of China and the 'Dependencies' (Manchuria, Mongolia, Turkestan, Tibet, Indo-China and Korea), as well as Siam and Japan. Little proves himself a shrewd observer of both landscape and peoples, and the content of his work is wonderfully detailed. He manages to encompass a wide range of subjects into his survey, including natural resources, the development of railways, trade routes and meteorology, as well as a history of the land mass and populations. The book is supplemented with several maps and illustrations.
Sir Richard Jebb's edition of Bacchylides' Odes, published in 1905, remains an authoritative work today. Jebb (1841–1905) was the most distinguished classicist of his generation, a Fellow of Trinity College, Cambridge, and University Orator, subsequently Professor of Greek at Glasgow University and finally Regius Professor of Greek at Cambridge, and a Member of Parliament for the University. This edition contains an introductory essay describing the poet's life, his literary context and his influence on later writers, especially Pindar and Horace. It also includes a section on metre. The text itself is given with a parallel English translation, textual collation and explanatory notes. An appendix discusses conjectural reconstructions of the odes, and there is a vocabulary list and index.
Written at the height of his career, A Place in the Country is W.G. Sebald's lyrical homage to six writers and artists who greatly influenced him in his life and work. Leading us from Johann Peter Heb
Maggie Nelson is one of the most electrifying writers at work in America today, among the sharpest and most supple thinkers of her generation - Olivia Laing Bluets winds its way through depression, divinity, alcohol, and desire, visiting along the way with famous blue figures, including Joni Mitchell, Billie Holiday, Yves Klein, Leonard Cohen and Andy Warhol. While its narrator sets out to construct a sort of `pillow book' about her lifelong obsession with the colour blue, she ends up facing down both the painful end of an affair and the grievous injury of a dear friend. The combination produces a raw, cerebral work devoted to the inextricability of pleasure and pain, and to the question of what role, if any, aesthetic beauty can play in times of great heartache or grief.Much like Roland Barthes's A Lover's Discourse, Bluets has passed between lovers in the ecstasy of new love, and been pressed into the hands of the heartbroken. Visceral, learned, and acutely lucid, Bluets is a slim fe
Although there was a substantial Jewish population in Western Europe from at least the first century BC, literary evidence for it before the end of the sixth century AD is very sparse, amounting to a few mainly hostile references by Roman writers and some material of doubtful historical value in rabbinic and hagiographic sources. Knowledge of the Jewish communities of the West is therefore almost entirely dependent on inscriptions, which contain information on community organisation, the use of biblical texts and religious symbols, linguistic habits, naming practices and social status, and burial customs and beliefs about life after death. This volume, the first of a two volume work, provides ready access to the Jewish inscriptions from Italy and the islands, Spain, France and Germany. Volume 2 concentrates on the inscriptions of the City of Rome. Hitherto it has been necessary to consult specialist publications to gain a complete picture of the inscriptions: this book fills a notable
The electrifying new historical thriller featuring Harriet Westerman and Gabriel Crowther from 'one of the best writers of historical fiction currently at work' BBC History Magazine
Liver - Booker prize nominee Will Self's extraordinary examination of lives out of control 'Magnificent, horribly funny' The Times 'Brilliant. One of the most manically imaginative writers at work tod
Since the 1990 publication of her first collection, Four Bare Legs in a Bed, the author has been hailed as one of the best short story writers at work in the world today. This title features stories t
The Letters of Ernest Hemingway, Volume 3: 1926–1929, featuring many previously unpublished letters, follows a rising star as he emerges from the literary Left Bank of Paris and moves into the American mainstream. Maxwell Perkins, legendary editor at Scribner's, nurtured the young Hemingway's talent, accepting his satirical novel Torrents of Spring (1926) in order to publish what would become a signature work of the twentieth century: The Sun Also Rises (1926). By early 1929 Hemingway had completed A Farewell to Arms. Hemingway's letters of this period also reflect landmark events in his personal life, including the dissolution of his first marriage, his remarriage, the birth of his second son, and the suicide of his father. As the volume ends in April 1929, Hemingway is setting off from Key West to return to Paris and standing on the cusp of celebrity as one of the major writers of his time.
This volume covers a relatively short span of time, rather less than the first three-quarters of the first century BC; but it was an age of profoundly important developments, with enduring consequences for the subsequent history of Latin literature. Original and innovative in widely differing ways as was the work of Lucretius, Sallust and Caesar in particular, the scene is dominated, historically, by two figures: Cicero and Catullus. Cicero was a politician and a man of affairs as well as a man of latters, whose vast literary output reflects a range of intellectual interests unparalleled among surviving Roman writers; creator of a prose style the Quintilian regarded as synonymous with eloquence itself; and better known to us, from his letters, as a human being, than any other figure from classical antiquity. Catullus was a poet, single-mindedly devoted to fostering the tradition of learned Alexandrian poetry at Rome; the author of one slender volume of verse that has attracted more cri
