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Johann Gutenberg: the Inventor of Printing
by Victor ScholdererThis short book draws on legal documents surviving from the 15th century, in an attempt to piece together information about the life of the inventor of the printing press. When all is said and done, however, very little can actually be known about Gutenberg's life.
The Great War and Modern Memory
by Paul FussellFussell writes: This book is about the British experience on the Western Front from 1914 to 1918 and some of the literary means by which it has been remembered, conventionalized, and mythologized. It is also about the literary dimensions of the trench experience itself. Indeed, if the book had a subtitle, it would be something like "An Inquiry into the Curious Literariness of Real Life." <P><P> Winner of the National Book Award
All for Love
by Ved MehtaVed Mehta joined the staff of The New Yorker in the 1960s, blind since the age of four and already on his way to a career as a writer. In a series of four relationships he demanded that his lovers, like him, pretend he could see. With lyrical and stirring accuracy, Mehta revisits these love affairs today, tracing the links between his denial of his disability and the cruel transformations that each of his lovers underwent. “Poignant and occasionally hilarious.”-The New York Times Book Review. “This elegant volume remains a striking piece of insight into the nature of love.”-Publishers Weekly. “[An] excoriatingly truthful and heartbreaking account of the pursuit and loss of love. ...”-The Times of London. “A mesmerizing account ... the most arresting passages are Mehta’s mind-expanding descriptions of how he perceives the world. ”-Booklist.
That Summer in Paris: Memories of Tangled Friendships with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Some Others
by Morley Callaghan"That Summer In Paris" brings to the fore the fabulous summer of 1929 when the literary capital of North America moved to La Rive Gauche--the Left Bank of the Seine River--in Paris. Ernest Hemingway was reading proofs of "A Farewell to Arms", and a few blocks away F. Scott Fitzgerald was struggling with "Tender Is the Night". As his first published book rose to fame in New York, Morley Callaghan arrived in Paris to share the felicities of literary life, not just with his two friends, Hemingway and Fitzgerald, but also with fellow writers James Joyce, Ford Madox Ford, and Robert McAlmon. Amidst these tangled relations, some friendships flourished while others failed.
George Eliot
by Jennifer UglowThis biography of one of the greatest English novelists sheds important new light on George Eliot's audacious life and powerful works, including such masterpieces as "Middlemarch" and "The Mill on the Floss". In her own lifetime, Eliot was widely condemned as a fallen woman: she dared to live openly with a man she could never marry, and shortly after his death married a man twenty years her junior. Her defiance of the conventions that ruled most Victorian women's lives did not prevent her achieving both great professional success and personal happiness. Why, then, did she deny so many of her gifted, headstrong heroines the same opportunities?
Gay Cuban Nation
by Emilio BejelWith Gay Cuban Nation, Emilio Bejel looks at Cuba's markedly homoerotic culture through writings about homosexuality, placing them in the social and political contexts that led up to the Cuban Revolution. By reading against the grain of a wide variety of novels, short stories, autobiographies, newspaper articles, and films, Bejel maps out a fascinating argument about the way in which different attitudes toward power and nationalism struggle for an authoritative stance on homosexual issues. Through close readings of writers such as José Martí, Alfonso Hernández-Catá, Carlos Montenegro, José Lezama Lima, Leonardo Padura Fuentes, and Reinaldo Arenas, whose heartbreaking autobiography, Before Night Falls, has enjoyed renewed popularity, Gay Cuban Nation shows that the category of homosexuality is always lurking, ghostlike, in the shadows of nationalist discourse. The book stakes out Cuba's sexual battlefield, and will challenge the homophobia of both Castro's revolutionaries and Cuban exiles in the States.
What the People Know: Freedom and the Press
by Richard ReevesDiscusses the press and how it does and doesn't work and what needs to happen to improve things.
Silences
by Tillie OlsenThis book is about silences pertaining to literature. Literary criticism from a feminist perspective. Navigating the spaces in the canon where issues of race, class, and gender have been silenced.
The Air-Conditioned Nightmare
by Henry MillerIn 1939, after ten years as an expatriate, Henry Miller returned to the United States with a keen desire to see what his native land was really like -- to get to the roots of the American nature and experience. He set out on a journey that was to last for three years, visiting many sections of the country and making friends of all descriptions. "The Air-Conditioned Nightmare" is the result of that odyssey.
Literature and Western Man
by J. B. PriestleyA study of the recorded writing of western man, covering not only the Americas, but Russia and much of Asia as well. Encompasses not only the written word but also the origins of print and how movable type changed the written world as we currently know it.
Golden Codgers: Biographical Speculations
by Richard EllmannA historical survey of the literary biography, looking at the founding fathers of literary thought.
Violence in the Black Imagination: Essays and Documents
by Ronald T. TakakiIn "Violence in the Black Imagination", Ronald T. Takaki presents three short novels by major African-American leaders in the nineteenth century: "The Heroic Slave", by Frederick Douglass, the leading black abolitionist; "Blake", by Martin Delany, the father of black nationalism; and "Clotelle", by William Wells Brown, a pioneer of the black novel. The novels are accompanied by substantive essays which provide biographical information on the authors and explore the common theme of their works -- the issue of black revolutionary violence in antebellum America.
The Writing on the Wall and Other Literary Essays
by Mary MccarthyLiterary criticism that ranges from Shakespeare to Salinger.
The Outlaws on Parnassus
by Margaret KennedyBoth readable and learned, this book takes us through European literature from Homer to Virginia Woolf, pointing out the ways in which a compelling plot makes for a good novel. Kennedy notes that literature is the only art form that is expected to carry a "message." In truth, she says, we read to be entertained, to be swept into another world.