Literary Essays

Shocked and distressed by a male writer's vilification of women, Christine de Pizan has a powerful dreamlike vision in which she is visited by three personified Virtues: Reason, Rectitude and Justice. They tell her she has been chosen to write a book which will be like a city, housing virtuous women and protecting them from feminist attack. Partly myth, partly fact, The Book of the City of Ladies is an extraordinary, pioneering and impassioned defense of women that set out to shatter misogynist cliches and serve to instill self-worth in its female listeners of the time.

Arguably the most celebrated and revered writer of our time now gives us a new nonfiction collection - a rich gathering of her essays, speeches, and meditations on society, culture, and art, spanning four decades.

Are you struggling with an essay about a work of literature? This guide will get you started on the process of closely reading A Streetcar Named Desire by Tennessee Williams by giving you strategies and ideas. Included is an act-by-act plot summary with analysis points as well an overview of several schools literary theory. You will discover different angles through which analyze the play and come up with a strong thesis. You will learn how to create substantial body paragraphs and to correctly integrate your quotations and avoid plagiarism by using MLA formatting. You will end up with a ...

A journey of appraisal. Critiques of dark and speculative fiction spanning a decade. Over one hundred essays that will take you into the dark maw of modern horror in both literature and contemporary cinema.

Laugh along with the antics of Sir Rodney. It's good for your health. Sir Rodney is An Old World charmer A world-class bumbler A farcical snob A lovable eccentric Sir Rodney, the hero of our little book, and his overly admiring narrator show us that pretentiousness and silliness are more than likely close cousins and that both have lived long and healthy lives.

For over six decades, Gay Talese has told New York stories. They are the stories of daring bridge builders, disappearing gangsters, intrepid Vogue editors, unassuming doormen who’ve seen too much. They are set in the star-studded salons of George Plimpton’s apartment, in the tense newsroom of a still burgeoning New York Times, in an electric studio session with Tony Bennett and Lady Gaga recording their debut. With the wit, elegance, and depth of insight that has long characterized his work, Talese’s New York reporting showcases a master of the form at his finest.

Jonathan Franzen's The Corrections was the best-loved and most-written-about novel of 2001. Nearly every in-depth review of it discussed what became known as "The Harper's Essay," Franzen's controversial 1996 investigation of the fate of the American novel. This essay is reprinted for the first time in How to be Alone, along with the personal essays and the dead-on reportage that earned Franzen a wide readership before the success of The Corrections.

One of the most highly acclaimed and best-selling authors of our time now gives us a book that charts the history of his own enchantment with story - from his own books to those of Blake, Milton, Dickens, and the Brothers Grimm, among others - and delves into the role of story in education, religion, and science. At once personal and wide-ranging, Daemon Voices is both a revelation of the writing mind and the methods of a great contemporary master and a fascinating exploration of storytelling itself.

Salman Rushdie is celebrated as “a master of perpetual storytelling” (The New Yorker), illuminating truths about our society and culture through his gorgeous, often searing prose. Now, in his latest collection of nonfiction, he brings together insightful and inspiring essays, criticism, and speeches that focus on his relationship with the written word and solidify his place as one of the most original thinkers of our time.

With great originality and wit, Orwell unfolds his views on subjects ranging from a revaluation of Charles Dickens to the nature of Socialism, from a comic yet profound discussion of naughty seaside postcards to a spirited defense of English cooking. Displaying an almost unrivalled mastery of English plain prose, Orwell’s essays created a unique literary manner from the process of thinking aloud and continue to challenge, move, and entertain.

SEX AND THE CITY offers a tantalizing glimpse of the openings, launch parties, and celebrity affairs that keep society amused. Throughout, a cast of characters - the troubled writer, the successful businessman, the famous underwear model, and others - searches for true love...or at least someone to go home with at the end of the night. It's a chronicle of the true-life adventures of the "in" crowd that is often hilarious and sometimes terrifying, but always mesmerizing.

The Tashkent-born Russian-American literary critic, editor, essayist, and journalist Vladislav Davidzon has been covering post-Soviet Ukraine for the past ten years, a tumultuous time for that country and the surrounding world. In late 2015, a year and a half after the 2014 Revolution swept away the Moscow-leaning kleptocratic President Viktor Yanukovich, Davidzon and his wife founded a literary journal, The Odessa Review. This eagerly anticipated debut tells the real story of what happened in Ukraine from the keen and resilient perspective of an observer at its center.

In her introduction to this year’s The Best American Essays, guest editor Vivian Gornick states that her selections “contribute materially to the long and honorable history of the personal essay by way of the value they place on lived experience.” Provocative, daring, and honest at a time when many writers are deliberately silencing themselves in the face of authoritarian and populist censorship movements, the twenty-one essays collected here reflect their authors’ unapologetic observations of the world around them.

Marina Keegan's star was on the rise when she graduated magna cum laude from Yale in May 2012. She had a play that was to be produced at the New York International Fringe Festival and a job waiting for her at the New Yorker. Tragically, five days after graduation, Marina died in a car crash. Even though she was just 22 when she died, Marina left behind a rich, expansive trove of prose that, like her title essay, captures the hope, uncertainty, and possibility of her generation.

“Books can connect people across time zones and zip codes, across cultures, national boundaries, and historical eras”, Kakutani writes in her introduction to Ex Libris. Here listeners will discover novels and memoirs by some of the most gifted writers working today; favorite classics worth listening or relistening; and nonfiction works, both old and new, that illuminate our social and political landscape and some of today’s most pressing issues, from climate change to medicine to the consequences of digital innovation.

C. S. Lewis: Views From Wake Forest is a collection of sixteen insightful essays that will delight both Inklings scholars and C. S. Lewis readers of all ages and opinions. Walter Hooper, for example, the man most responsible for preserving, publishing, and promoting Lewis' many works after Lewis' death in 1963, shares stories from his work with Lewis, Owen Barfield, Lady Collins, and other friends of Lewis in his essay 'Editing C. S. Lewis,' an inspiring tale as well as a landmark event in Lewis scholarship. James Como, author of Why I Believe in Narnia and a Keynote Speaker at the ...

明治から昭和初期にかけて活躍した物理学者、随筆家、俳人である寺田寅彦の随筆作品。

初出は「経済往来」［1933（昭和8）年］。「寺田寅彦随筆集　第四巻」［小宮豊隆編、岩波書店、1948（昭和23）年］に収録。

幼い頃から体が弱かったので牛乳を飲まされていた。当時まだ飲みにくいものであった牛乳に少量のコーヒーを混ぜて飲んだ、という話から広がりを見せ、ついにはコーヒー哲学の序説なるものを綴った作品である。

Over her twenty-five-year career, English teacher Carol Atherton has taught generations of students texts that will be familiar to many of us from our own schooldays. But while the staples of exam syllabuses and reading lists remain largely unchanged, their significance – and their relevance - evolves with each class as they encounter them for the first time. Each chapter of Reading Lessons invites us to take a fresh look at these novels, plays and poems, revealing how they have shaped our beliefs, our values, and how we interact as a society.

Forty essays on history, art, and literature to lift your mind and spirit. Guy Davenport serves as the listener's guide through history and literature, providing links between music and sculpture, modernist poets and classic philosophers, the past and present-pointing out the values and avenues of thought that have shaped our ideas and our thinking.

“IT ALL STARTED WITH MY BALLS.” So begins Colm Tóibín’s fabulously compelling essay, laced with humor, about his diagnosis and treatment for cancer. Tóibín survives, but he has entered, as he says, “the age of one ball.” Tóibín describes his education by priests, several of whom were condemned years later for abuse. He writes about Irish history and literature, and about the long, tragic journey toward legal and social acceptance of homosexuality. A Guest at the Feast is both an intimate encounter with a creative artist and a glorious celebration of writing.