Showing titles in Literary History & Criticism

Los Angeles, 1948: Easy Rawlins is a black war veteran just fired from his job at a defense plant. Easy is drinking in a friend's bar, wondering how he'll meet his mortgage, when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if Easy will simply locate Miss Daphne Money, a blonde beauty known to frequent black jazz clubs.

In Lan Dong’s Audible Original, The History of the Superhero, examine the roots of the superhero dynamic that’s overtaking popular culture. Encompassing both Marvel Comics’ and DC Comics’ pantheon of extraordinary heroes, these eight lectures explore how superhero comics came to be, how famous characters (and their exploits) evolved in response to social and cultural changes, how superhero cinematic universes have become an integral (and highly lucrative) part of film history, and why superheroes of all types are likely here to stay.

This classic personal time-management book, originally published in 1908, has inspired generations of men and women to live deliberate lives. Not just another collection of timesaving tips, this book is more of a challenge to leave behind mundane everyday concerns, focus on pursuing one's true desires, and live the fullest possible life. Reflection, concentration, and study techniques make it easier to accomplish more truly rewarding undertakings than anyone ever dreamed possible.

What made the Romans laugh? Was ancient Rome a carnival, filled with practical jokes and hearty chuckles? Or was it a carefully regulated culture in which the uncontrollable excess of laughter was a force to fear-a world of wit, irony, and knowing smiles? How did Romans make sense of laughter? What role did it play in the world of the law courts, the imperial palace, or the spectacles of the arena?

Brought to you by Penguin. The articles collected in George Orwell's Essays illuminate the life and work of one of the most individual writers of this century - a man who elevated political writing to an art. This outstanding collection brings together Orwell's longer, major essays and a fine...

1940s. With the world at war, Eleanor Trigg leads a mysterious ring of female secret agents in London. Twelve of these women are sent to aid the resistance. They never return home. 1946. Passing through Grand Central Station, Grace Healey finds an abandoned suitcase tucked beneath a bench. The case is filled with a dozen photographs, each of a different woman.

To celebrate a hundred years since Sylvia Beach published James Joyce’s Ulysses, and to encourage readers to engage (or re-engage) with this spirited, funny, life-changing book, Shakespeare and Company, Paris—in partnership with Penguin Classics and Hay Festival—created an ensemble recording of the unabridged text, released as a free podcast between the centenary of the publication on 2nd February 2022 and Bloomsday on June 16 2022.Read by more than a hundred writers, artists, comedians and musicians from all over the world— including Sally Rooney, Margaret Atwood, Stephen Fry, Pete...

'Wonderful . . . all killer, no filler' Red Magazine 'Dazzling stories, as inventive as they are inspiring' Daily Mirror 'Where power and feminist rage meet' Stylist ______________________________ A fun and fearless anthology of feminist tales, by fifteen bestselling, award-winning writers...

Over 60 years after Virginia Woolf drowned in the River Ouse, Olivia Laing set out one midsummer morning to walk its banks, from source to sea. Along the way, she explores the roles that rivers play in human lives, tracing their intricate flow through literature, mythology, and folklore. Lyrical and stirring, To the River is a passionate investigation into how history resides in a landscape - and how ghosts never quite leave the places they love.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE COSTA BIOGRAPHY AWARD 2019 Wordsworth and Coleridge as you’ve never seen them before in this new book by Adam Nicolson, brimming with poetry, art and nature writing. Proof that poetry can change the world. It is the most famous year in English poetry. Out of it came The...

Albus Percival Wulfric Brian Dumbledore, Headmaster of Hogwarts, is one of the most recognizable and mysterious figures in the Harry Potter series. As an unscrupulous beetle-like journalist once said, he's "a biographer's dream." Is he omniscient or limited? Is he benevolent or malevolent? What really drove him in the last years of an extraordinary life? Dumbledore dives between the lines of the Harry Potter books to create a portrait of the controversial Headmaster. We find Dumbledore's hand in every seeming coincidence and consider the impossible decisions he had to make.

Brought to you by Penguin. From cyborgs, starships, UFOs, aliens and antimatter to telepathy, invisibility, psychokinesis and precognition, Michio Kaku's Physics of the Impossible is an exciting look at how science fiction could soon become science fact. Albert Einstein said, 'If at first an...

Brought to you by Penguin. The first collection of Booker Prize-winning writer Anne Enright's non-fiction writing about culture, literature and her own life For thirty years Anne Enright has been paying attention: casting her lucid and distinctive gaze across the world, literature and her own...

Christianity is in crisis in the West. The Inkling friend of C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien, Owen Barfield, analysed why. He developed an account of our spiritual predicament that is radical and illuminating. Barfield realized that the human experience of life shifts fundamentally over periods of cultural time. Our perception of nature, the cosmos, and the divine changes dramatically across history.

Brought to you by Penguin. A delightful, thoughtful and original new way to understand England's history This is the history of England told in a new way: glimpsed through twenty-five remarkable poems written down between the eighth century and today, which connect us directly with the...

Northanger Abbey by Jane Austen. If it is a truth universally acknowledged that a good-looking girl cannot fail of attracting a clever young man does it follow that the reverse is also true? If the man comes of a terrifyingly dysfunctional family and the girl in question likes to see spooks and horrors round every corner, yes. Morland by name, Lackland by nature, Catherine, not altogether addicted to the heroine role in general, finds this greatness thrust upon her in the (fortunately, principally financial) fantasies of her would-be inamorato's father, the General. When the General finds ...

For years now the Ramsays have spent every summer in their holiday home in Scotland, and they expect these summers will go on forever; but as the First World War looms, the integrity of family and society will be fatally challenged. The novel's use of stream of consciousness, reminiscence and shifting perspectives gives it an intimate, poetic essence, and at the time of publication in 1927 it represented an utter rejection of Victorian and Edwardian literary values.

Countless would-be readers and listeners of Finnegans Wake - James Joyce's 1939 masterwork, on which he labored for a third of his life - have given up after a few pages and "dismissed the book as a perverse triumph of the unintelligible." In 1944, a young professor of mythology and literature named Joseph Campbell, working with novelist and poet Henry Morton Robinson, wrote the first guide to understanding the fascinating world of Finnegans Wake.

More than any other canonical English writer, Geoffrey Chaucer lived and worked at the center of political life - yet his poems are anything but conventional. Edgy, complicated, and often dark, they reflect a conflicted world, and their astonishing diversity and innovative language earned Chaucer renown as the father of English literature. Marion Turner, however, reveals him as a great European writer and thinker.

NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK OF 2025 A TIME MUST-READ BOOK OF 2025 ELLE BEST BOOKS OF 2025 'Essential reading' Irish Independent 'Fascinating and powerfully argued' Daily Telegraph 'A captivating must-read for anyone who wants to understand how and why misogyny is as powerful a force as ever'...