Spanning the years in which Virginia Woolf penned her classic novel The Waves and worked on Flush, the nonfiction pieces in this fifth volume provide further insight into Woolf's creative genius and showcase her supreme stylistic capability. The far-ranging essays and criticism collected here include ruminations on the romantic and literary lives of William Cowper and Christina Rossetti and an introduction to memoirs by the Women's Cooperative Guild that reveals Woolf's signature feminism. This collection also includes the entirety of The Common Reader: Second Series, the sequel to The Common Reader.
Critical and autobiographical essays by a noted British reviewer and literary journalist. Connolly] has the wonderful capacity for enthusiasm, for exciting in us his own unflagging joy in the presence of genius(New Yorker). Index.
George Orwell was first and foremost an essayist, producing throughout his life an extraordinary array of short nonfiction that reflected--and illuminated--the fraught times in which he lived. As soon as he began to write something, comments George Packer in his foreword, it was as natural for Orwell to propose, generalize, qualify, argue, judge--in short, to think--as it was for Yeats to versify or Dickens to invent.
Facing Unpleasant Facts charts Orwell's development as a master of the narrative-essay form and unites such classics as Shooting an Elephant with lesser-known journalism and passages from his wartime diary. Whether detailing the horrors of Orwell's boyhood in an English boarding school or bringing to life the sights, sounds, and smells of the Spanish Civil War, these essays weave together the personal and the political in an unmistakable style that is at once plainspoken and brilliantly complex.
Author of How Fiction Works
James Wood has long established himself as the leading critic of his generation. With The Fun Stuff, he confirms his preeminence not only as a discerning judge, but also as one of fiction's most ardent appreciators. In these twenty-three sparkling dispatches, Wood offers a panoramic look at the modern novel. He effortlessly connects his encyclopedic understanding of the literary canon--casting his eye upon such crucial writers as Thomas Hardy and Leo Tolstoy--with an equally in-depth analysis of the most important authors writing today, including Cormac McCarthy, Lydia Davis, and Aleksandar Hemon. From the brilliant title essay on Keith Moon and the lost joys of drumming to Wood's incisive piece on the writings of George Orwell, The Fun Stuff is indispensable reading for anyone who cares about contemporary literature.
Between 1967 and 1997, George Steiner wrote more than 130 pieces on a great range of topics for The New Yorker, making new books, difficult ideas, and unfamiliar subjects seem compelling not only to intellectuals but to the common reader. He possesses a famously dazzling mind: paganism, the Dutch Renaissance, children s games, war-time Britain, Hitler s bunker, and chivalry attract his interest as much as Levi-Strauss, Cellini, Bernhard, Chardin, Mandelstam, Kafka, Cardinal Newman, Verdi, Gogol, Borges, Brecht, Wittgenstein, Chomsky, and art historian/spy Anthony Blunt. Steiner makes an ideal guide from the Risorgimento in Italy to the literature of the Gulag, from the history of chess to the enduring importance of George Orwell. Again and again everything Steiner looks at in his New Yorker essays is made to bristle with some genuine prospect of turning out to be freshly thrilling or surprising."
A collection of outstanding British periodical essays from the era in which the genre was invented
From the pens of spectators, ramblers, idlers, tattlers, hypochondriacs, connoisseurs, and loungers, a new literary genre emerged in eighteenth-century England: the periodical essay. Situated between classical rhetoric and the novel, the English essay challenged the borders between fiction and nonfiction prose and helped forge the tastes and values of an emerging middle class.
This authoritative anthology is the first to gather in one volume the consummate periodical essays of the period. Included are the Spectator cofounders Joseph Addison and Richard Steele, literary lion Samuel Johnson, and Romantic recluse Thomas De Quincey, addressing a wide variety of topics from the oddities of virtuosos to the private lives of parrots and the fantastic horrors of opium dreams.
In a lively and informative introduction, Denise Gigante situates the essayists in the context of the contemporary Republic of Letters and highlights the stylistic innovations and conventions that distinguish the periodical essay as a literary form. Critical notes on the essays, a chronology, descriptions and a map of key London sites, and a glossary of eighteenth-century English terms complete the anthology--a uniquely pleasurable survey of the golden era of British essays.
In 1713, soon after publication of the Spectator had come to an end, its place on breakfast tables of Queen Anne's London was taken by the Guardian. Richard Steele, continuing in the new paper the blend of learning, wit, and moral instruction that had proved so attractive in the Tatler and Spectator, was the editor and principal writer; in the 175 numbers of the Guardian he included 53 essays by Joseph Addison, as well as contributions by Alexander Pope, George Berkeley, and several others, some of whom doubtless transmitted their papers through the famous lion's head letterbox that Addison had erected in Button's coffeehouse. "These papers," as John C. Stephens writes in the introduction to his edition of the Guardian, "helped to form and to shape the morals and manners of countless generations in Britain and abroad."
This first modern edition of the Guardian was prepared from the original printing of the papers, is fully annotated and indexed, and includes a comprehensive introduction discussing especially the authorship of the individual essays.
Michael Sells brand new Imagine That series--short, popular histories of how the past didn't quite happen--launches with four titles this year.
Each book is a flight of imagination that explores how the smallest changes to history could have spiraled out of control.
Would a happy ending to Casablanca have led to a more prejudiced world? Would the death of a cat have been the most costly road accident in the history of technology?
Imagine That . . .
Michael Sells brand new Imagine That series--short, popular histories of how the past didn't quite happen--launches with four titles this year.
Each book is a flight of imagination that explores how the smallest changes to history could have spiraled out of control.
Would a happy ending to Casablanca have led to a more prejudiced world? Would the death of a cat have been the most costly road accident in the history of technology?
Imagine That . . .
