"From the New York Times bestselling author of The Most Dangerous Book, the true story behind the creation of another masterpiece of world literature, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. The Sinner and The Saint is the deeply researched and immersive tale of how Dostoevsky came to write this great murder story-and why it changed the world. As a young man, Dostoevsky was a celebrated writer, but his involvement with the radical politics of his...

"A delightful romp through the Shakespeare authorship question, exploring how doubting that William Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to him became an act of blasphemy... and who the Bard might really be"--

"Joan Acocella was "one of our finest cultural critics" (Edward Hirsch), and she had the rare ability to examine literature and unearth the lives contained within it-its authors, its subjects, and the communities from which it springs. In her hands, arts criticism was a celebration and an investigation, and her essays pulse with unadulterated enthusiasm. As Kathryn Harrison wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "Hers is a vision that allows art...

"Curious readers and fans of monsters and the macabre, get ready to bulk up your TBR piles! Sadie "Mother Horror" Hartmann has curated the best selection of modern horror books, including plenty of deep cuts. Indulge your heart's darkest desires to be terrified, unsettled, disgusted, and heartbroken with stories that span everything from paranormal hauntings and creepy death cults to small-town terrors and apocalyptic disasters. Each recommendation...

"George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire has sparked a renewed interest in things medieval. The pseudo-historical world of Westeros delights casual fans while offering a rich new perspective for medievalists and scholars. This study explores how Martin crafts a chivalric code that intersects with and illuminates well known medieval texts, including both romance and heroic epics. Through characters such as Brienne of Tarth, Sandor Clegane and...

The author shares her enthusiasm for more than 100 books: novels and memoirs by some of today's most gifted writers; favorite classics worth reading or rereading; and nonfiction works that illuminate our social and political landscape. -- Adapted from back cover. "From "the most powerful book critic in the English-speaking world" (Vanity Fair) comes 100 personal, thought-provoking essays of the life-changing books she wouldn't want you to miss--beautifully...

"Northern Ireland is one hundred years old. Northern Ireland does not exist. Both of these statements are true. It just depends on who you ask. How do you write about a place like this? 'The Strangers' House' asks this question of the region's greatest writers, living and dead. What have they made of Northern Ireland--and what has Northern Ireland made of them? Northern Ireland is roughly the same size as the State of Connecticut, yet has produced...

"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...

Yale professor Harold Bloom--who for more than half a century was regarded as America's most daringly original and controversial literary critic--gives us his only book devoted entirely to the art of the novel. With his hallmark percipience, remarkable scholarship, and extraordinary devotion to sublimity, Bloom offers meditations on forty-eight essential works spanning the Western canon, from "Don Quivote" to "Book of numbers"; from "Wuthering Heights"...

Renowned as one of the world's greatest poems, The Waste Land has been said to describe the moral decay of a world after war and the search for meaning in a meaningless era. It has been labeled the most truthful poem of its time; it has been branded a masterful fake. A century after its publication in 1922, T. S. Eliot's enigmatic masterpiece remains one of the most influential works ever written, and yet one of the most mysterious. In a remarkable...