A collection of essays from the acclaimed author of Mrs. Dalloway on such subjects as Jane Austen, Geoffrey Chaucer, and her own literary philosophy. A good essay must have this permanent quality about it; it must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in not out. Not written for scholars or critics, these essays are a collection of Virginia Woolf's everyday thoughts about literature and the world-and the art of reading...

Uncensored: Views & (Re)views is Joyce Carol Oates's most candid gathering of prose pieces since (Woman) Writer: Occasions & Opportunities. Her ninth book of nonfiction, it brings together thirty-eight diverse and provocative pieces from the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New York Times Book Review.

Oates states in her preface, "In the essay or review, the dynamic of storytelling is hidden but not

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America's foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid?Drawing on her Norton Lectures, Toni Morrison takes up these and other vital questions bearing on identity...

Readers will delight at the best scenes ever written. They will find old favorites and savor scenes new to them. With each scene, Barnaby Conrad provides insights as to what the author wishes to accomplish with this passage and the literary devices he or she employs. Any avid reader will enjoy Conrad's ""101 Best Scenes Ever Written,"" but countless fledgling and established writers will benefit enormously by sampling and studying these gems from...

In the early years of its existence, the published some of the finest writers in English: T. S. Eliot, Henry James and E. M. Forster among them. But one of the paper's defining voices was Virginia Woolf, who produced a string of superb essays between the two World Wars. The weirdness of Elizabethan plays, the pleasure of revisiting favorite novels, the supreme examples of Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot and Henry James, Thomas Hardy and Joseph Conrad:...

John Updike's sixth collection of essays and literary criticism opens with a skeptical overview of literary biographies, proceeds to five essays on topics ranging from China and small change to faith and late works, and takes up, under the heading "General Considerations, " books, poker, cars, and the American libido. The last, informal section of Due Considerations assembles more or less autobiographical pieces--reminiscences, friendly forewords,...

Rosa Montero nos acerca a algunas de sus lecturas preferidas, nos sumerge en un mundo literario propio, íntimo y universal al mismo tiempo. "Dejar de leer es la muerte instantánea. Sería como vivir en un mundo sin oxígeno." Al acercarnos a algunas de sus lecturas preferidas, Rosa Montero nos sumerge en un mundo literario propio, íntimo y universal al mismo tiempo, formado por grandes historias, héroes valientes, monstruos memorables, jóvenes...