Showing titles in Literary History & Criticism

A new biography exploring J.R.R. Tolkien’s wartime experiences and their impact on his life and his writing of The Lord of The Rings. “To be caught in youth by 1914 was no less hideous an experience than in 1939 … by 1918 all but one of my close friends were dead.” So J.R.R. Tolkien...

Introduction As a psychotherapist, I’ve worked with many people who came to me shortly after their lives had crashed. Everything was going great until the sudden heart attack, divorce, or death of a child. If not for that life-jarring event, they would never have thought to see a therapist, because they felt successful. After the event they can’t find the same drive or determination. Their former goals of having big houses or reputations have lost their meaning. They feel at sea and vulnerable in a way that’s unfamiliar and scary.

Discover the gods, goddesses, heroes, and monsters from Celtic mythology with this beautiful book that captures the ancient stories and tales that captivated the Celts. Prepare to be entertained as you learn about the many myths and legends of the Celtic people. From the storytelling duo behind...

Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures. Whether covering the...

‘An absolute belter of a biography’ MARINA HYDE A Times Literary Non-Fiction Book of the Year 2022 An LA Times Best Book of the Year 2022 An intimate, revealing and profoundly moving biography of Jean Rhys, acclaimed author of Wide Sargasso Sea. An obsessive and troubled genius, Jean Rhys is...

In The Trip to Echo Spring, Olivia Laing examines the link between creativity and alcohol through the work and lives of six of America's finest writers: F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Tennessee Williams, John Berryman, John Cheever, and Raymond Carver. All six of these men were alcoholics, and the subject of drinking surfaces in some of their finest work, from Cat on a Hot Tin Roof to A Moveable Feast.

A provocative, moving, kinky, and often absurdly funny memoir about Shakespeare, love, obsession, and spanking When it came to understanding love, a teenage Jillian Keenan had nothing to guide her—until a production of The Tempest sent Shakespeare’s language flowing through her blood for the...

‘A delight for anyone whose heart thumps at the sight of dawn, dusk and hazy light’ Nell Frizzell At first, I didn’t find fog – fog found me. Liminal, transformative and increasingly elusive – far from a simple cloud of water droplets, fog is a state of mind. As mist drifted through a...

Slide "Further Under the Duvet", get yourself comfortable, and let Marian take you places you've never been before. Places like the Irish air-guitar championships, a shopping trip to Bloomingdales with a difference, and Cannes with a chronic case of Villa-itis. Along the way you'll encounter knicker-politics, fake tans, sticky-out ears and passionate love affairs both with make-up and Toblerones.

"Speak of one that loved not wisely but too well." This moving tragedy tells the story of Othello, a Moorish general, whose servant Iago deceives him into believing his wife, Desdemona, is unfaithful. In a jealous rage, he murders her - and then must face his own self-loathing when he realizes what he has done. In rendering the dramatic descent of a proud warrior from greatness to jealous insanity, Shakespeare produced some of the most eloquent passages ever written in the English language. This full-cast performance does justice to Shakespeare's words, featuring Frank Silvera as Othello, Alan Bates as Cassio, Cyril Cusack as Iago, and Anna Massey as Desdemona.

On the Road with Penguin Classics is a podcast that takes a stroll around the world's favourite books. In each episode, author and editor Henry Eliot travels to a different literary location to explore a brilliant book in the company of a remarkable reader. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

In thirteen iconoclastic essays, Slavoj Žižek disrupts the death-grip that neoliberalists, Trumpian populists, toxic self-improvement industries and accelerationists alike have established on the idea of progress. Anatomizing what is lost when opponents of the future are allowed to define it, Žižek ruthlessly exposes what different visions of progress exclude or sacrifice and the dynamics of desire, denial and disavowal at work in Hollywood blockbusters, Buddhist economics, decolonization movements and other engines of vision.

A GUARDIAN AND INDEPENDENT BEST MUSIC BOOK OF 2017. ‘At last an expert classicist gets to grips with Bob Dylan’ Mary Beard ‘Thomas’s elegant, charming book offers something for everyone – not just the super-fans’ Independent When the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Bob...

The godfather of British performance poetry - Daily Telegraph The Luckiest Guy Alive, performed by the author, is the first new book of poetry from Dr John Cooper Clarke for several decades – and a brilliant, scabrous, hilarious collection from one of our most beloved and influential writers...

Brought to you by Penguin. A fascinating journey into the life of H.G. Wells, from one of Britain's best biographers. How did the first forty years of H. G. Wells' life shape the father of science fiction? From his impoverished childhood in a working-class English family, to his determination to...

The unabridged, downloadable audiobook edition of Charles Dickens: A Life, the major new biography from the highly acclaimed Claire Tomalin, published for the 200th anniversary of his birth. Charles Dickens was a phenomenon: a demonicly hardworking journalist, the father of ten children, a...

Words matter. Even more so when those words are communicating the very Word of God in the Bible. Since, as Saint Ambrose tells us, God himself speaks to us in the word of Scripture, then the accuracy of those words should matter to us. With The Gospel of Matthew, the Augustine Institute inaugurates the first of the biblical books to be translated as part of the Catholic Standard Version (CSV), a new translation of the Holy Bible. The CSV strives to translate the Scriptural text with the highest level of accuracy in its rendering of the original languages, as well as the highest degree of ...

This delightful anthology is a timeless collection of poems chosen by Classic FM listeners. With humorous limericks, romantic sonnets, traditional and modern classics, this book is a true refelction of the greatest and best-loved verse. Discover poems for special occasions, as well as poems to...

Lord Byron was the most celebrated of all the Romantic poets. Troubled, handsome, sexually fluid, disabled, and transgressive, he wrote his way to international fame—and scandal—before finding a kind of redemption in the Greek Revolution. He also left behind the vast trove of thrilling letters (to friends, relatives, lovers, and more) that form the core of this remarkable biography.

The word most commonly used to describe Muriel Spark is ‘puzzling’. Spark was a puzzle, and so too are her books. She dealt in word games, tricks, and ciphers; her life was composed of weird accidents, strange coincidences and spooky events. Evelyn Waugh thought she was a saint, Bernard Levin said she was a witch, and she described herself as ‘Muriel the Marvel with her X-ray eyes’. Following the clues, riddles, and instructions Spark planted for posterity in her biographies, fiction, autobiography and archives, Frances Wilson aims to crack her code.