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,...

"The Iliad's beauty and profound bleakness are intensely moving, but great questions remain: Where, how, and when was it composed and why does it endure? Robin Lane Fox addresses these questions, drawing on a lifelong love and engagement with the poem. He argues for a place, a date, and a method for its composition--subjects of ongoing controversy--combining the detailed expertise of a historian with a poetic reader's sensitivity. Lane Fox considers...

"No literary form is as admired and feared as poetry. Admired for its lengthy pedigree--a line of poets extending back to a time before recorded history--and a ubiquitous presence in virtually all cultures, poetry is also revered for its great beauty and the powerful emotions it evokes. But the form has also instilled trepidation in its many admirers mainly because of a lack of familiarity and knowledge. Poetry demands more from readers--intellectually,...

"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,...

"More 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 prophet of self-reliance has obscured a much more complicated figure, who spent a lifetime wrestling with injustice, philosophy, art, desire, and suffering. James Marcus introduces readers to this Emerson, a writer of self-interrogating genius whose visionary flights are always grounded in Yankee...

"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...

"A fun, illustrated history of the umbrella's surprising place in life and literature. Humans have been making, using, perfecting, and decorating umbrellas for millennia--holding them over the heads of rulers, signalling class distinctions, and exploring their full imaginative potential in folk tales and novels. In the spirit of the best literary gift books, Brolliology is a beautifully designed and illustrated tour through literature and history....

The last book written by the most famous literary critic of his generation, on the sustaining power of poetry.

For longtime Conan Doyle fans as well as readers just discovering Sherlock Holmes, a wickedly smart and rollicking journey through the birth, life, and afterlives of popular culture's most beloved sleuth. More than a century after Sherlock Holmes first capered into our world, what is it about Arthur Conan Doyle's peculiar creation that continues to fascinate us? Dundas provides a history of an idea, a biography of someone who never lived, a tour...

In the first major history of crime fiction in fifty years, The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and their Creators traces the evolution of the genre from the eighteenth century to the present, offering brand-new perspective on the world's most popular form of fiction. "The Life of Crime is the result of a lifetime of reading and enjoying all types of crime fiction, old and new, from around the world. In what will surely be regarded...