George Saunders

Heavy Hardcover (2 to 4 lbs)

Michigan

In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December comes a literary master class on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about ourselves—and our world today. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY ESQUIRE • “[A] worship song to writers and readers.”—Oprah Daily For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years. Paired with iconic short stories by Chekhov, Turgenev, Tolstoy, and Gogol, the seven essays in this book are intended for anyone interested in how fiction works and why it’s more relevant than ever in these turbulent times. In his introduction, Saunders writes, “We’re going to enter seven fastidiously constructed scale models of the world, made for a specific purpose that our time maybe doesn’t fully endorse but that these writers accepted implicitly as the aim of art—namely, to ask the big questions, questions like, How are we supposed to be living down here? What were we put here to accomplish? What should we value? What is truth, anyway, and how might we recognize it?” He approaches the stories technically yet accessibly, and through them explains how narrative functions; why we stay immersed in a story and why we resist it; and the bedrock virtues a writer must foster. The process of writing, Saunders reminds us, is a technical craft, but also a way of training oneself to see the world with new openness and curiosity. A Swim in a Pond in the Rain is a deep exploration not just of how great writing works but of how the mind itself works while reading, and of how the reading and writing of stories make genuine connection possible.

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

507ca3c8-2f37-4828-bcb0-0a75933a549e-1

Diana Gabaldon

Florida

The creator of the Outlander series gives fans the skinny on her epic saga of time travel, adventure, and love everlasting, offering a complete listing of the characters and their genealogy; a glossary of Gaelic terms; and more. Tour.

The Outlandish Companion

e152671d-bb8e-4c48-88f1-9dcf090e03de-1

Thomas C. Foster

Light Paperback (1 lb or less)

Mississippi

A Lively and Entertaining Guide to Reading Between the Lines

A thoroughly revised and updated edition of Thomas C. Foster's classic guide—a lively and entertaining introduction to literature and literary basics, including symbols, themes, and contexts—that shows you how to make your everyday reading experience more rewarding and enjoyable. While many books can be enjoyed for their basic stories, there are often deeper literary meanings interwoven in these texts. How to Read Literature Like a Professor helps us to discover those hidden truths by looking at literature with the eyes—and the literary codes—of the ultimate professional reader: the college professor. What does it mean when a literary hero travels along a dusty road? When he hands a drink to his companion? When he's drenched in a sudden rain shower? Ranging from major themes to literary models, narrative devices, and form, Thomas C. Foster provides us with a broad overview of literature—a world where a road leads to a quest, a shared meal may signify a communion, and rain, whether cleansing or destructive, is never just a shower—and shows us how to make our reading experience more enriching, satisfying, and fun. This revised edition includes new chapters, a new preface, and a new epilogue, and incorporates updated teaching points that Foster has developed over the past decade.

How to Read Literature Like a Professor Revised Edition

1672e7e2-fd95-4319-94cd-44f239bb8c58-1

Massachusetts

California

An Extraordinary One-Volume Literary Education

Among the most enjoyable of literary critics, Michael Dirda combines erudition with enthusiasm, a taste for the outré and the forgotten, and a playful, understated wit. Like George Orwell or Gore Vidal, Dirda delights in popular genres, such as the detective novel and the ghost story, without neglecting the deeper satisfactions of sometimes-overlooked classics. This new work features scores of Dirda's most engaging essays, never previously collected in book form, all intended to introduce readers to wonderful writers, from the anecdotal Herodotus and James Boswell to the sensuous Colette and Steven Millhauser to such European masters as Joseph Roth, Flann O'Brien, and Penelope Fitzgerald. With his trademark enthusiasm, Dirda also explores The Arabian Nights, the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone, the crime novels of Chester Himes and K. C. Constantine, and the worlds of Tarzan, Cormac McCarthy, and Proust. Bound to Please is a glorious celebration of just how much fun reading can be.

Bound to Please

1b131391-961e-463c-8404-5592514efb0d-1

Zadie Smith

Paperback (1 to 2 lbs)

New York

Presents a collection of short stories focusing on character development by a group of notable authors and graphic novelists that includes Nick Hornby, Chris Ware, Colm Tâoibâin, and George Saunders.

The Book of Other People

3219c88c-f1a2-4885-9e90-e03428dc9c14-1

Alice Bolin

Maryland

Essays on Surviving an American Obsession

“Dead Girls is everything I want in an essay collection: provocative lines of inquiry, macabre humor, blistering intelligence... I love this book. I want to take it into the middle of a crowded room and hold it up and scream until someone tackles me the ground; even then, I’d probably keep screaming.” — Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body and Other Parties "Bracing and blazingly smart, Alice Bolin's Dead Girls could hardly be more needed or more timely. A critical contribution to the cultural discussion of gender and genre, Los Angeles and noir, the unbearable persistence of the male gaze and the furtive potency of female rage.” — Megan Abbott, Edgar Award-winning author of You Will Know Me Named a most anticipated book of 2018 by Bitch Magazine In this poignant collection, Alice Bolin examines iconic American works from the essays of Joan Didion and James Baldwin to Twin Peaks, Britney Spears, and Serial, illuminating the widespread obsession with women who are abused, killed, and disenfranchised, and whose bodies (dead and alive) are used as props to bolster men’s stories. Smart and accessible, thoughtful and heartfelt, Bolin investigates the implications of our cultural fixations, and her own role as a consumer and creator. Bolin chronicles her life in Los Angeles, dissects the Noir, revisits her own coming of age, and analyzes stories of witches and werewolves, both appreciating and challenging the narratives we construct and absorb every day. Dead Girls begins by exploring the trope of dead women in fiction, and ends by interrogating the more complex dilemma of living women – both the persistent injustices they suffer and the oppression that white women help perpetrate. Reminiscent of the piercing insight of Rebecca Solnit and the critical skill of Hilton Als, Bolin constructs a sharp, perceptive, and revelatory dialogue on the portrayal of women in media and their roles in our culture.

Dead Girls

54212390-b8a2-4829-9a30-5e96fa37823a-1

James S. Hans

Light Hardcover (1 lb or less)

Indiana

Discusses the ethical aspects of literature.

The Value(s) of Literature

e313ec40-bfe1-4f6e-b883-3c68a04c4e90-0

Alessandro Manzoni

Bruce Penman

I Promessi Sposi

"The great plague novel." --The New Yorker

Set in Lombardy during the Spanish occupation of the late 1620s, The Betrothed tells the story of two young lovers, Renzo and Lucia, prevented from marrying by the petty tyrant Don Rodrigo, who desires Lucia for himself. Forced to flee, they are then cruelly separated, and must face many dangers including plague, famine and imprisonment, and confront a variety of strange characters--the mysterious Nun of Monza, the fiery Father Cristoforo and the sinister "Unnamed"--in their struggle to be reunited. A vigorous portrayal of enduring passion, The Betrothed's exploration of love, power, and faith presents a whirling panorama of seventeenth-century Italian life and is one of the greatest European historical novels.

For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

The Betrothed

5e621421-f356-43c0-9beb-27f06f639483-1

Texas

Essays in feminist literary criticism 

Women Writers and the City

Roland Barthes

Richard Howard

Wayne Koestenbaum

Ohio

Fragments

A Lover's Discourse, at its 1978 publication, was revolutionary: Roland Barthes made unprecedented use of the tools of structuralism to explore the whimsical phenomenon of love. Rich with references ranging from Goethe's Werther to Winnicott, from Plato to Proust, from Baudelaire to Schubert, A Lover's Discourse artfully draws a portrait in which every reader will find echoes of themselves.

A Lover's Discourse

901919bf-abf3-42f3-8f6b-9e0f30c3c41c-1

Isobel Armstrong

Oklahoma

Sense and Sensibility

Sets Jane Austen's novel in the context of the Napoleonic wars, with the melancholia and sensibility that they brought to 18th-century society, the source of much of the tension and power of the book. The Austen themes of family, attachments and engagements are explained against a society where great changes were taking place, such as the greater mobility of the populace. Yet it was probably one of the most repressive political eras of the century, and the theme of secrecy in the novel reflects this.

Jane Austen

6d2339a6-3c56-4e29-96d5-183337a71da9-0

#paperback #nonfiction #educational #literarycriticism #criticism #literature #highschool #adult 

Virginia

Peter Widdowson

Very good condition with just a few small marks on the outside of the book (see photos).

Georgia

A Study in Literary Sociology

Hardy in History

bfdc2aa1-fb23-4d91-aa85-5d977850b690-0

This 1981 hardcover appears unread. The book has a 4.0 rating on Goodreads.

Hardcover (1 to 2 lbs)

Characters, Value and Ironic Perspective 

An Understanding of Jane Austen’s Novels 

#paperback #literarycriticism #literature #literary #analysis #criticism #interpretation

English

An Introduction to Theory and Practice

This introduction to literary theory and criticism, its historical development and the variety of theoretical positions or schools of criticism, is designed to help students take conscious, informed and intelligent choices concerning their own methods of literary interpretation. Plato to Henry James. It discusses each of the eight basic schools of theoretical positions concerning literary theory and criticism separately: new criticism; reader-response criticism; structuralism; deconstruction; psychoanalytic criticism; feminism; Marxism; and new historicism. Three works of literature are included: Nathanial Hawthorne's story, Young Goodman Brown; Robert Browning's poem, My Last Duchess; and Susan Glaspell's play, Trifles.

Literary Criticism

8d54d91f-6239-44e9-b7e4-2f105feca95f-1

Michiko Kakutani

100+ Books to Read and Reread

"From "the most powerful book critic in the English-speaking world" (Vanity Fair) comes 100 personal, thought-provoking essays of the life-changing books she wouldn't want you to miss--beautifully illustrated throughout"--

Ex Libris

a8e0cbbe-1739-49ce-a6c9-28456f1bc056-1

Sharon A. Russell

Ex library copy. Sticker remnants on spine.

New Jersey

A Critical Companion

Each chapter deals with one novel and includes sections on plot and narrative structure, character development, and thematic concerns. Russell also draws comparisons to other novels in King's canon. She shows how King uses horror, science fiction, and suspense to explore human relationships, how he expands traditional approaches to the genre by combining elements of the various genres in his fiction, and how he has continued to grow as an artist throughout his career.

Stephen King

ab3707c8-e213-40ba-b6c3-1b757a1358dc-0

Cass R. Sunstein

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER #1 Washington Post Bestseller There’s Santa Claus, Shakespeare, Mickey Mouse, the Bible, and then there’s Star Wars. Nothing quite compares to sitting down with a young child and hearing the sound of John Williams’s score as those beloved golden letters fill the screen. In this fun, erudite, and often moving book, Cass R. Sunstein explores the lessons of Star Wars as they relate to childhood, fathers, the Dark Side, rebellion, and redemption. As it turns out, Star Wars also has a lot to teach us about constitutional law, economics, and political uprisings. In rich detail, Sunstein tells the story of the films’ wildly unanticipated success and explores why some things succeed while others fail. Ultimately, Sunstein argues, Star Wars is about freedom of choice and our never-ending ability to make the right decision when the chips are down. Written with buoyant prose and considerable heart, The World According to Star Wars shines a bright new light on the most beloved story of our time.

The World According to Star Wars

de69b113-780c-4d95-9f94-d69473adac88-1

#paperback #fiction #literarycriticism #myth 

Nevada

Medea, in which a spurned woman takes revenge upon her lover by killing her children, is one of the most shocking and horrific of all the Greek tragedies. Dominating the play is Medea herself, a towering and powerful figure who demonstrates Euripides' unusual willingness to give voice to a woman's case. Alcestis, a tragicomedy, is based on a magical myth in which Death is overcome, and The Children of Heracles examines the conflict between might and right, while Hippolytus deals with self-destructive integrity and moral dilemmas. These plays show Euripides transforming the awesome figures of Greek mythology into recognizable, fallible human beings.

Medea and Other Plays

c71e21ff-e0e6-4436-9df5-0bed029bc513-1

Maureen Corrigan

How the Great Gatsby Came to Be and Why It Endures

The "Fresh Air" book critic investigates the enduring power of The Great Gatsby -- "The Great American Novel we all think we've read, but really haven't." Conceived nearly a century ago by a man who died believing himself a failure, it's now a revered classic and a rite of passage in the reading lives of millions. But how well do we really know The Great Gatsby? As Maureen Corrigan, Gatsby lover extraordinaire, points out, while Fitzgerald's masterpiece may be one of the most popular novels in America, many of us first read it when we were too young to fully comprehend its power. Offering a fresh perspective on what makes Gatsby great-and utterly unusual-So We Read On takes us into archives, high school classrooms, and even out onto the Long Island Sound to explore the novel's hidden depths, a journey whose revelations include Gatsby's surprising debt to hard-boiled crime fiction, its rocky path to recognition as a "classic," and its profound commentaries on the national themes of race, class, and gender. With rigor, wit, and infectious enthusiasm, Corrigan inspires us to re-experience the greatness of Gatsby and cuts to the heart of why we are, as a culture, "borne back ceaselessly" into its thrall. Along the way, she spins a new and fascinating story of her own.

So We Read On

723b2d0f-d5f0-4d10-bbd9-2908604f5832-1

This is a first edition hardcover. 
 #firstedition #biography #nonfiction #writing #booksaboutbooks #theatre #britishlit #literarycriticism #literature #theory

Missouri

How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare

Stephen Greenblatt, the charismatic Harvard professor who "knows more about Shakespeare than Ben Jonson or the Dark Lady did" (John Leonard, Harper's), has written a biography that enables us to see, hear, and feel how an acutely sensitive and talented boy, surrounded by the rich tapestry of Elizabethan life; full of drama and pageantry, and also cruelty and danger; could have become the world's greatest playwright. A young man from the provinces--a man without wealth, connections, or university education--moves to London. In a remarkably short time he becomes the greatest playwright not just of his age but of all time. His works appeal to urban sophisticates and first-time theatergoers; he turns politics into poetry; he recklessly mingles vulgar clowning and philosophical subtlety. How is such an achievement to be explained?Will in the World interweaves a searching account of Elizabethan England with a vivid narrative of the playwright's life. We see Shakespeare learning his craft, starting a family, and forging a career for himself in the wildly competitive London theater world, while at the same time grappling with dangerous religious and political forces that took less-agile figures to the scaffold. Above all, we never lose sight of the great works--A Midsummer Night's Dream, Romeo and Juliet, Hamlet, Macbeth, and more--that continue after four hundred years to delight and haunt audiences everywhere. The basic biographical facts of Shakespeare's life have been known for over a century, but now Stephen Greenblatt shows how this particular life history gave rise to the world's greatest writer. Bringing together little-known historical facts and little-noticed elements of Shakespeare's plays, Greenblatt makes inspired connections between the life and the works and deliver "a dazzling and subtle biography" (Richard Lacayo, Time). Readers will experience Shakespeare's vital plays again as if for the first time, but with greater understanding and appreciation of their extraordinary depth and humanity.A Best Book of the Year: The New York Times 10 Best Books of 2004; Time magazine's #1 Best Nonfiction Book; A Washington Post Book World Rave ; An Economist Best Book ; A San Francisco Chronicle Best Book; A Christian Science Monitor Best Book; A Chicago Tribune Best Book; A Pittsburgh Post-Gazette Best Book ; NPR's Maureen Corrigan's Best.

Will in the World

e5facef1-868d-4d22-a120-aee3f23c44a6-1

Henry James

Out of print edition. See photos for details.

Pennsylvania

Case Studies in Contemporary Criticism

"This edition of James's classic novel presents the 1908 New York Edition along with five critical essays - newly commissioned or revised for a student audience - that read The Turn of the Screw from five contemporary critical perspectives." "Each critical essay is accompanied by a succinct introduction to the history, principles, and practice of the critical perspective and by a bibliography that promotes further exploration of that approach." "In addition, the text and essays are complemented by an introduction providing biographical and historical contexts for James and The Turn of the Screw, a survey of critical responses to the novel since its initial publication, and a glossary of critical and theoretical terms."--BOOK JACKET.Title Summary field provided by Blackwell North America, Inc. All Rights Reserved

Browse by categories

Save this search

George Saunders

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

Diana Gabaldon

The Outlandish Companion

Thomas C. Foster

How to Read Literature Like a Professor Revised Edition

Thomas C. Foster

How to Read Literature Like a Professor Revised Edition

Michael Dirda

Bound to Please

Zadie Smith

The Book of Other People

Alice Bolin

Dead Girls

James S. Hans

The Value(s) of Literature

Alessandro Manzoni; Bruce Penman

The Betrothed

Susan Merrill squier

Women Writers and the City

Roland Barthes; Richard Howard; Wayne Koestenbaum

A Lover's Discourse

Isobel Armstrong

Jane Austen

Thomas C. Foster

How to Read Literature Like a Professor Revised Edition

Peter Widdowson

Hardy in History

John Odmark

An Understanding of Jane Austen’s Novels

Charles E. Bressler

Literary Criticism

Michiko Kakutani

Ex Libris

Sharon A. Russell

Stephen King

Cass R. Sunstein

The World According to Star Wars

Euripides; Philip Vellacott (Translator, Introduction by)

Medea and Other Plays

Maureen Corrigan

So We Read On

Thomas C. Foster

How to Read Literature Like a Professor Revised Edition

Stephen Greenblatt

Will in the World

Henry James

OOPE The Turn of the Screw