"In a collection that includes new essays written explicitly for this volume, one of our sharpest and most influential critics confronts the past, present, and future of literary culture. If every outlet for book criticism suddenly disappeared -- if all we had were reviews that treated books like any other commodity -- could the novel survive? In a gauntlet-throwing essay at the start of this brilliant assemblage, Cynthia Ozick stakes the claim that,...

Renowned as one of the world's greatest poems, The Waste Land has been said to describe the moral decay of a world after war and the search for meaning in a meaningless era. It has been labeled the most truthful poem of its time; it has been branded a masterful fake. A century after its publication in 1922, T. S. Eliot's enigmatic masterpiece remains one of the most influential works ever written, and yet one of the most mysterious. In a remarkable...

Desire a book to cozy up with by a wintery window? How about an addictive page-turner for sunbathing on the beach? Thousands of new books are published each year, and if you're a book lover – or just book curious – choosing what to read next can seem like an impossible task. A Year of Reading relieves the anxiety by helping you find just the right read, and includes fun and interactive subcategories for each choice, including: Description and history,...

When the prophet Jokanaan is brought to the attention of the princess Salomé, he rebukes her interest, which causes her to make a brutal declaration. Oscar Wilde's one-act tragedy explores the repercussions of her horrifying decision. Originally composed in French in 1892, Salomé is a controversial tale full of cruelty and retribution. Wilde expands on the Biblical story of John the Baptist, whom was captured and beheaded by Herod Antipas....

"On the 100th anniversary of T. S. Eliot's modernist masterpiece, a rich cultural history of The Waste Land's creation, explosive impact, and enduring influence. When T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922, it put its 34-year-old author on a path to worldwide fame and the Nobel Prize. "But," as Jed Rasula writes, "The Waste Land is not only a poem: it names an event, like a tornado or an earthquake. Its publication was a watershed, marking a...

The Waves by an English writer, who is considered as one of the most important modernist 20th Century authors and also a pioneer in the use of the stream of consciousness as a narrative device, Virginia Woolf. It is an experimental novel which is considered a key text of the Modernist literary movement. Interspersed with lyrical descriptions of waves breaking against the shoreline, the novel traces the intertwining lives of six friends from childhood...

"Nothing is so good as it seems beforehand" An innocent young man is betrayed by a close friend and wrongly accused of stealing Church money. Exiled from his religious community, with his life shattered, his trust in God lost and his heart broken, an embittered weaver, Silas Marner leaves his village and moves to the rural town of Raveloe. There, he throws himself into his craft and lives only to adore the gold coins he earns and hoards from his...

Since the appearance of The Lord of the Rings in 1954, J. R. R. Tolkien's works have always sold briskly, appealing to a wide and diverse audience of intellectuals, religious believers, fantasy enthusiasts, and science fiction aficionados. Now, Peter Jackson's film version of Tolkien's trilogy-with its accompanying Rings-related paraphernalia and publicity-is playing a unique role in the dissemination of Tolkien's imaginative creation to the masses....

Throughout his career, whether as a man of letters, professor, soldier, journalist, novelist, or world traveler, Russell Kirk found himself in the thick of the intellectual controversies of his age. In “The Politics of Prudence”, his twenty-ninth book (and the last to be published during his lifetime), Kirk endeavors to defend a truly conservative "prudential politics," as opposed to the "ideological politics" now often advanced by self-identified...

"Joan Acocella was "one of our finest cultural critics" (Edward Hirsch), and she had the rare ability to examine literature and unearth the lives contained within it-its authors, its subjects, and the communities from which it springs. In her hands, arts criticism was a celebration and an investigation, and her essays pulse with unadulterated enthusiasm. As Kathryn Harrison wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "Hers is a vision that allows art...