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...

This collection of 5 dozen pieces of literary criticism was published in the Washington Post between March 2003 and January 2010. It is a collection of Yardley's opinions of books that he believes are worthy of a second look. They scan the realms of fiction, biography and autobiography, memoirs, and history.

Includes criticism by T.S. Eliot of Euripides, Christopher Marlowe, William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Ben Jonson, Thomas Middleton, Thomas Heywood, Cyril Tourneur, John Ford, Philip Massinger, Dante, Andrew Marvell, John Dryden, William Blake, Algernon Swinburne, Alfred Lord Tennyson, Lancelot Andrewes, John Bramhall, Blaise Pascal and the Pensees, Charles Baudelaire, Matthew Arnold, Walter Pater, Francis Herbert Bradley, Marie Lloyd, Wilkie Collins, Charles...

"At the time of his death, Italo Calvino was at work on six lectures setting forth the qualities in writing he most valued, and which he believed would define literature in the century to come. Here, in Six Memos for the Next Millennium, are the five lectures he completed, forming not only a stirring defense of literature, but also an indispensable guide to the writings of Calvino himself. He devotes one "memo" each to the concepts of lightness, quickness,...

Green Town, Illinois is visited by a mysterious Mr. Dark and his Pandemonium Carnival. Terrifiying things begin to happen when two small boys become too curious about things.

Less than a year before his death in 1972, John Berryman signed a contract with his publisher for a book of prose, The Freedom of the Poet, for which he had made a selection from his published and unpublished writings. In his draft of a prefatory note, he acknowledged the influence of Eliot, Blackmur, Pound, and Empson on his critical thought, pointing out that "my interest in critical theory has been slight," and concluding: "But I have also borne...

All narrative writing must pull from the raw material of life a tale that will shape experience, transform event, deliver a bit of wisdom. In a story or a novel the "I" who tells this tale can be, and often is, an unreliable narrator but in nonfiction the reader must always be persuaded that the narrator is speaking truth. How does one pull from one's own boring, agitated self the truth-speaker who will tell the story a personal narrative needs to...

Sample some of the greatest literary expressions the world has known and experience storytelling in its many forms, including poetry, drama, and narrative.

"In this now-classic history of Roman civilization, Edith Hamilton vividly depicts Roman life and spirit as they are revealed by the greatest writers of the age. Among these literary guides are Cicero, who left an incomparable collection of letters; Catullus, who was the quintessential poet of love; Horace, who chronicled a cruel and materialistic Rome; and the Romantics: Virgil, Livy, and Seneca. Hamilton concludes her work by contrasting the high-mindedness...