"From the award-winning biographer of Chaucer, the story of his most popular and scandalous character, from the Middle Ages to #MeToo Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognizably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers-from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie Smith. Few literary characters have led such colourful lives or matched...

"A transporting and illuminating voyage around the globe, through classic and modern literary works that are in conversation with one another and with the world around them. Inspired by Jules Verne's hero Phileas Fogg, David Damrosch, chair of Harvard University's department of comparative literature and founder of Harvard's Institute for World Literature, set out to counter a pandemic's restrictions on travel by exploring eighty exceptional books...

"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"--

"Prophet. Entertainer. Courtier. Criminal. Revolutionary. Critic. Scholar. Nobody. Context Collapse is the secret history of the poet--from Bronze Age Greece and Renaissance Italy to the cafés of Grub Street and the Latin Quarter, from the creative writing departments of the American Midwest to the boardrooms of Silicon Valley. Cheekily introducing academic discourse, media studies, cybersemiotics, literary sociology, and heterodox economics into...

The twentieth anniversary edition of the “utterly and shamelessly sensational” history of punk music—featuring new photos and an afterword by the authors (Newsday).
A contemporary classic, Please Kill Me is the definitive oral history of the most nihilistic of all pop movements. Iggy Pop, Lou Reed, Richard Hell, the Ramones, and scores of other punk figures lend their voices to this decisive account

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Thoroughly revised and expanded for a new generation of readers, this classic guide to enjoying literature to its fullest—a lively, enlightening, and entertaining introduction to a diverse range of writing and literary devices that enrich these works, including symbols, themes, and contexts—teaches you how to make your everyday reading experience richer and more rewarding.

While books can be enjoyed for their

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"When Charles Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol in 1843, he likely had no idea that the story and its main character, Ebenezer Scrooge, would remain so popular nearly two centuries later. Today, readers still find themselves entertained by the story of a grumpy, selfish man who becomes a holiday hero after he learns generosity through the help of three spirits in Victorian-era England. Whether a Dickens fan or someone in love with all things "Christmas,"...

"The Unsignificant: Three Talks on Poetry and Pictures is a selection of lectures that poet and Griffin Award-finalist Srikanth Reddy presented for the Bagley Wright Lecture Series in 2015. True to its title, The Unsignificant is concerned with what it's not about--not significance, or insignificance, but "unsignificance." The lectures approach poetry from Homer to Gertrude Stein to Ronald Johnson obliquely, refracted through images such as Bruegel's...

"Almost unknown during his lifetime, Sigizmund Krzhizhanovsky is now hailed as a master of Russian prose. His short stories and novels, unpublishable under Stalinism but rediscovered long after his death, have drawn comparisons to the works of Jorge Luis Borges for their distinctive blend of metafictional play and philosophical thought experiment. Like Borges, Krzhizhanovsky also wrote dazzlingly unconventional essayistic pieces as a slippery extension...

"Tap into the wealth and health of Christian civilization with the help of literary critic Joseph Pearce. After learning the true meaning of the word 'civilization'-a society rooted in truth-the reader is taken on a tour of twelve of the most important books ever written, from Augustine to Shakespeare to the masterpieces of nineteenth- and twentieth-century literature. Each work played a role, for better or for worse, in shaping the civilized world....