Literary category: 117525 books

A lost nineteenth-century literary life, brilliantly rediscovered--Letitia Elizabeth Landon, hailed as the female Byron; she changed English poetry; her novels, short stories, and criticism, like Byron though in a woman's voice, explored the dark side of sexuality--by the acclaimed author of The Brontë...

"It's hard to see how anyone is ever going to better this User's Manual to the life of Georges Perec" - Gilbert Adair, Sunday Times Winner of the Prix Goncourt for Biography, 1994 George Perec (1936-82) was one of the most significant European writers of the twentieth century...

Ralph Ellison is justly celebrated for his epochal novel Invisible Man, which won the National Book Award in 1953 and has become a classic of American literature. But Ellison’s strange inability to finish a second novel, despite his dogged efforts and soaring prestige, made him a supremely enigmatic...

Winner of the 2007 B.C. Award for Canadian Non-fiction A Globe and Mail Best 100 Book (2006) National Post Best Books (2006) A bold cultural portrait of contemporary Canada through the work of its most celebrated novelists, short story writers, and storytellers. Stories are the surest...

Gail Godwin was twenty-four years old and working as a waitress in the North Carolina mountains when she wrote: “I want to be everybody who is great; I want to create everything that has ever been created.” It is a declaration that only a wildly ambitious young writer would make in the privacy...

The first book by distinguished novelist, journalist, and literary critic Rebecca West: a biography of Henry James Setting the standard for a century’s worth of criticism, Rebecca West diagnosed Henry James as an American who “could never feel at home until he was in exile” in this slim,...

Stories of twentieth-century American literary giants, by the man who was their friend, peer, and confidant When he was introduced to F. Scott Fitzgerald as a potential partner on a screenplay, novelist and scriptwriter Budd Schulberg was surprised the author was still alive. In Schulberg’s...

A National Book Critics Circle Award finalist in Criticism • A November 2016 American Booksellers Association Indie Next List Selection • A Buzzfeed Best Nonfiction Book of 2016 • A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book of 2016 “An entrancing attempt to catch what falls between [literary...

Beloved by children and adults worldwide, the writings of C.S. Lewis have a broad and enduring appeal. Although he is best known for the iconic Chronicles of Narnia series, C. S. Lewis was actually a man of many literary parts. Already well-known as a scholar in the thirties, he became a famous broadcaster...

The influential literary magazine The Dial is regarded as a titanic artistic and aesthetic achievement for having published most of the great modernist writers, artists, and critics of its day. As publisher and editor of The Dial from 1920 to 1926, Scofield Thayer was gatekeeper and guide for the...

Joseph Frank's award-winning, five-volume Dostoevsky is widely recognized as the best biography of the writer in any language--and one of the greatest literary biographies of the past half-century. Now Frank's monumental, 2500-page work has been skillfully abridged and condensed in this single, highly...

Described in a recent New York Times Magazine profile as a "postcolonial Philip Roth," Hanif Kureishi first captured the attention of audiences and critics in the 1980s with the award-winning novel The Buddha of Suburbia and the films My Beautiful Laundrette and Sammy and Rosie Get Laid....

For more than two hundred years after William Shakespeare's death, no one doubted that he had written his plays. Since then, however, dozens of candidates have been proposed for the authorship of what is generally agreed to be the finest body of work by a writer in the English language. In this remarkable...

ABOUT THE BOOK Maya Angelou is renowned worldwide for being one of the most influential women of our time. Her literary pieces, civil rights campaigning, filmmaking, dancing and acting have all received critical acclaim over the past four decades. Angelou has been privileged enough to have...