Showing titles in Literary History & Criticism

The long-awaited portrait of a literary master from one of our generation's greatest biographers. Anthony Powell: the literary genius who gave us A Dance to the Music of Time, an undisputed classic of English literature. Spanning 12 spectacular volumes and written over 25 years, his comic masterpiece teems with idiosyncratic characters, capturing 20th-century Britain through war and peace. Drawing on Powell's letters and journals, and the memories of those who knew him, Hilary Spurling explores his life.

Set in a remote fishing village in Japan, The Sound of Waves is a timeless story of first love. A young fisherman is entranced at the sight of the beautiful daughter of the wealthiest man in the village. They fall in love, but must then endure the calumny and gossip of the villagers.

In an innovative and engaging narrative of everyday life in Shakespeare's England, Ramie Targoff carries us from the sumptuous coronation of Queen Elizabeth in the mid-16th century into the private lives of four women writers working at a time when women were legally the property of men: Mary Sidney, accomplished poet and sister of the famous Sir Philip Sidney; Aemilia Lanyer, the first woman in the 17th century to publish a book of original poetry; Elizabeth Cary, who published the first original play by a woman and Anne Clifford, a lifelong diarist.

Designing Terry Pratchett's Discworld takes listeners behind the scenes of the amazing partnership between Sir Terry Pratchett and artist Paul Kidby. It shows how the Discworld was brought to visual life - from the earliest sketches to the final magnificent masterpieces - and how Terry and Paul absorbed influences from art and pop culture, fusing them into the Discworld landscape.

The Importance of Being Earnest is undoubtably Oscar Wilde's best known play probably due to its sharp wit that cannot help but enchant and entertain any reader, theatregoer or listener with this performance.

A Princess of Mars was the first book by Edgar Rice Burroughs to feature the character John Carter. It led to an 11-book series featuring his adventures and became the basis for the 2012 movie. Carter is a war-weary former military captain during the Civil War who is inexplicably transported to Mars. He quickly (and reluctantly) becomes embroiled in a conflict of epic proportions among the inhabitants of the planet.

This third edition of the bestselling textbook has been fully revised, continuing to provide a concise introduction to the key concepts of semiotics in accessible and jargon-free language.

Straight Acting is a surprising portrait of Shakespeare's queer lives - his own and those in his plays and poems. It is a journey back in time and through Shakespeare's England, revealing a culture that both endorsed and supressed same-sex desire. It is a call to stop making Shakespeare act straight and to recognise how queerness powerfully shaped the life and career of the world's most famous playwright.

Charming, vibrant, witty and edifying, The Life of Samuel Johnson is a work of great obsession and boundless reverence. The literary critic Samuel Johnson was 54 when he first encountered Boswell; the friendship that developed spawned one of the greatest biographies in the history of world literature. The book is full of humorous anecdote and rich characterization, and paints a vivid picture of 18th-century London, peopled by prominent personalities of the time.

Using never-before-published archives, Abbott Kahler weaves a chilling, stranger-than-fiction tale worthy of Agatha Christie. Set against the backdrop of the Great Depression and the march to World War II, with a mystery as alluring and curious as the Galápagos itself, Eden Undone explores the universal and timeless desire to seek utopia–and lays bare the human fallibility that, inevitably, renders such a quest doomed.

Over her twenty-five-year career, English teacher Carol Atherton has taught generations of students texts that will be familiar to many of us from our own schooldays. But while the staples of exam syllabuses and reading lists remain largely unchanged, their significance – and their relevance - evolves with each class as they encounter them for the first time. Each chapter of Reading Lessons invites us to take a fresh look at these novels, plays and poems, revealing how they have shaped our beliefs, our values, and how we interact as a society.

Haruki Murakami's myriad fans will be delighted by this unique look into the mind of a master storyteller. In this engaging book, the internationally best-selling author and famously reclusive writer shares with listeners what he thinks about being a novelist; his thoughts on the role of the novel in our society; his own origins as a writer; and his musings on the sparks of creativity that inspire other writers, artists, and musicians.

Los Angeles, 1948: Easy Rawlins is a black war veteran just fired from his job at a defense plant. Easy is drinking in a friend's bar, wondering how he'll meet his mortgage, when a white man in a linen suit walks in, offering good money if Easy will simply locate Miss Daphne Money, a blonde beauty known to frequent black jazz clubs.

Set in English society before the 1832 Reform Bill, Wives and Daughters centers on the story of youthful Molly Gibson, brought up from childhood by her father. When he remarries, a new stepsister enters Molly's quiet life, the loveable, but worldly and troubling, Cynthia. The narrative traces the development of the two girls into womanhood within the gossiping and watchful society of Hollingford.

Poet, artist, visionary and author of the unofficial English national anthem 'Jerusalem', William Blake is an archetypal misunderstood genius. In this radical new biography, we return to a world of riots, revolutions and radicals, discuss movements from the Levellers of the sixteenth century to the psychedelic counterculture of the 1960s, and explore the latest discoveries in neurobiology, quantum physics and comparative religion to look afresh at Blake's life and work—and, crucially, his mind.

In 2022, two authors debuted in the same genre, with the same publisher, in the same year. Yet each of their books, and subsequently each of their careers, went in very different directions. That pattern repeats itself throughout the industry, over and over. Why does this happen, and what does it mean?In this Hugo-nominated podcast, we aim to answer those questions and many more, using collated experiences from ourselves, friends, colleagues, and a slew of industry professionals in an attempt to deconstruct what makes or breaks a book, along with how to build–and maintain!–an author career...

Thomas Sowell might well be our greatest living Intellectual. His accomplishments span 6 decades and include over 40 books and thousands of columns and articles written on a wide range of topics, from economics to sociology to history to race and culture. It is hard to name another intellectual who has studied and written on as wide a range of topics in such a profound way. This podcast will discuss his ideas and is intended to provide a place for admirers of his work to discuss his contributions with other like minded thinkers.

Stephen Fry believes that if you can speak and read English, you can write poetry. But it is no fun if you don't know where to start or have been led to believe that anything goes. Stephen, who has long written poems, and indeed has written long poems, for his own private pleasure, invites you to discover the incomparable delights of metre, rhyme and verse forms.