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Literature

Literature as Exploration

In Literature as Exploration, Louise M. Rosenblatt presents her unique theory of literature and focuses on the immense, often untapped, potential for the study and teaching of literature in a democratic society.
Rosenblatt's philosophy is frequently cited as the first presentation of reader-response theory, but Louise M. Rosenblatt differs from her successors in emphasizing both the reader and the text. Her "transactional" theory of literature examines the reciprocal nature of the literary experience and explains why meaning is neither in the text nor in the reader.
Each reading is a particular event involving a particular reader and a particular text under particular circumstances. And teachers of literature, Louise M. Rosenblatt argues, play a pivotal role in influencing how students perform in response to a text. Students, teachers, and scholars reading the book for the first time will be as enlightened and challenged by this classic work as earlier generations have been.
The many readers of the previous editions of Literature as Exploration will want to own this special edition, with its larger format, elegant typography, and new supporting materials.
Literature as Exploration by Louise M. Rosenblatt
ISBN: 087352568X

Harold Bloom: Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?

Harold Bloom takes us from the Bible through the twentieth century, searching for the ways literature can inform our lives. Through comparisons of the Book of Job and Ecclesiastes, Plato and Homer, Cervantes and Shakespeare, Montaigne and Bacon, Johnson and Goethe, Emerson and Nietzsche, Freud and Proust, and finally discussions of the Gospel of Thomas and Saint Augustine, Harold Bloom distills for us the various - and even contrary - forms of wisdom that have shaped our thinking.
Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? by Harold Bloom
ISBN: 1573222844

Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood

What to read next is every book lover's greatest dilemma. Nancy Pearl comes to the rescue with this wide-ranging and fun guide to the best reading new and old. Nancy Pearl, who inspired legions of litterateurs with "What If All (name the city) Read the Same Book," has devised 170 thematic reading lists that cater to every mood, occasion, and personality. These annotated lists cover such topics as mother-daughter relationships, science for nonscientists, mysteries of all stripes, African-American fiction from a female point of view, must-reads for kids, books on bicycling, "chick-lit," and many more.
Nancy Pearl's enthusiasm and taste shine throughout in this lively and informative illustrated guide.
Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment and Reason by Nancy Pearl
ISBN: 1570613818

Anton Chekhov by Vera Gottlieb

This volume by Vera Gottlieb of specially commissioned essays explores the world of Anton Chekhov and the creation, performance and interpretation of his works. The Companion begins with an examination of Anton Chekhov's life and his Russia. Later film versions and adaptations of Chehov's works are analyzed, with insights also offered on acting Anton Chekhov, by Ian McKellen, and directing Anton Chekhov, by Trevor Nunn and Leonid Heifetz. The volume provides essays on special topics such as Anton Chekhov as writer, Chekhov and women, and the Anton Chekhov comedies and stories.
Cambridge Companion to Chekhov by Vera Gottlieb
ISBN: 0521581176

Mikhail Bulgakov: 20th Century Master and Margarita

Mikhail Bulgakov's devastating satire of Soviet life was written during the darkest period of Stalin's regime. Combining two distinct yet interwoven parts-one set in ancient Jerusalem, one in contemporary Moscow-the novel veers from moods of wild theatricality with violent storms, vampire attacks, and a Satanic ball; to such somber scenes as the meeting of Pilate and Yeshua, and the murder of Judas in the moonlit garden of Gethsemane; to the substanceless, circus-like reality of Moscow. Its central characters, Woland (Satan) and his retinue-including the vodka-drinking, black cat, Behemoth; the poet, Ivan Homeless; Pontius Pilate; and a writer known only as The Master, and his passionate companion, Margarita-exist in a world that blends fantasy and chilling realism, an artful collage of grostesqueries, dark comedy, and timeless ethical questions.
Although completed in 1940, The Master and Margarita was not published in Moscow until 1966, when the first part appeared in the magazine Moskva. It was an immediate and enduring success: Audiences responded with great enthusiasm to its expression of artistic and spiritual freedom. This new translation has been created from the complete and unabridged Russian texts.
Mikhail Bulgakov (1891-1940) was described in the official Big Soviet Encyclopedia as a slanderer of Soviet reality. A medical doctor, he gave up his practice to pursue his writing. Stalin named Mikhail Bulgakov the assistant director of the Moscow Arts Theater, where his actions were monitored. Bulgakov died in disgrace. 20th Century Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
ISBN: 0141180145

Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology

From the earliest years of the American republic, Paris has provoked an extraordinary American literary response. An almost inevitable destination for writers and thinkers, Paris has been many things to many Americans: a bastion of old-world traditionalism, a hot-bed of revolutionary ideologies in politics and art, and above all a space in which to cultivate an openness to life and love impossible at home.
Through stories, letters, memoirs, poems and journalism, Americans in Paris distills three centuries of vigorous, glittering, and powerfully emotional writing about the place that Henry James called "the most brilliant city in the world" and that Ernest Hemingway characterized as a moveable feast.
Americans in Paris: A Literary Anthology by Adam Gopnik
ISBN: 1931082561

Lectures on Russian Literature

The author's observations on the great nineteenth-century Russian writers-Chekhov, Dostoevsky, Gogol, Gorky, Tolstoy, and Turgenev.
The companion volume to Lectures on Literature sets forth the author's observations about the literature of his homeland.
This volume never once fails to instruct and stimulate. This is a great Russian talking of great Russians. Edited and with an Introduction by Fredson Bowers; illustrations.
Lectures on Russian Literature by Vladimir Nabokov
ISBN: 0156495910

The Master by Colm Toibin

Like Michael Cunningham in The Hours, Colm Tóibín captures the extraordinary mind and heart of a great writer. Brilliant and profoundly moving, The Master tells the story of Henry James, a man born into one of America's first intellectual families two decades before the Civil War. James left his country to live in Paris, Rome, Venice, and London among privileged artists and writers.
In stunningly resonant prose, Tóibín captures the loneliness and longing, the hope and despair of a man who never married, never resolved his sexual identity, and whose forays into intimacy inevitably failed him and those he tried to love. The emotional intensity of Tóibín's portrait of James is riveting. Time and again, James, a master of psychological subtlety in his fiction, proves blind to his own heart and incapable of reconciling his dreams of passion with his own fragility.
Tóibín is "a great and humanizing writer" who describes complex relationships in "supple, beautifully modulated prose" (The Washington Post Book World). In The Master, he has written his most ambitious and heartbreaking novel, an extraordinarily inventive encounter with a character at the cusp of the modern age, elusive to his own friends and even family, yet astonishingly vivid in these pages.
The Master by Colm Toibin
ISBN: 0743250400

The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst

It is the summer of 1983, and young Nick Guest has moved into an attic room in the Notting Hill home of the Feddens: Gerald, an ambitious new Tory MP, his wealthy wife Rachel, and their children Toby and Catherine. Nick had idolized Toby at Oxford, but in his London life it will be the troubled Catherine, the critic and rebel of the family, who becomes both his friend and his uneasy responsibility.
As the boom years of the mid-80s unfold, Nick, an innocent in matters of politics and money, becomes caught up in the Feddens' world - its grand parties, its surprising alliances, its parade of monsters both comic and menacing. In an era of endless possibility, Nick finds himself able to pursue his own private obsession, with beauty - a prize as compelling to him as power and riches are to his friends. An affair with a young black council worker gives him his first experience of romance; but it is a later affair, with a beautiful millionaire, that will change his life more drastically and bring into question the larger fantasies of a ruthless decade.
Framed by the two general elections which returned Mrs. Thatcher to power, The Line of Beauty unfurls through four extraordinary years of change and tragedy. Richly textured, emotionally charged, disarmingly funny, it is a major work by one of the finest writers in the English language.
The Line of Beauty by Alan Hollinghurst
ISBN: 1582345082