A literary titan of our time, "looks to poems for clarity about the end of life" ( New York Times Book Review ).In this charming anthology, esteemed literary critic Harold Bloom collects the last poems of history's most important and celebrated poets. As with his immensely popular Best Poems of the English Language, Bloom has carefully curated and annotated the final works of one hundred poets in Till I End M...

More than 200 years after it was first published, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein has stood the test of time as a gothic masterpiece—a classic work of horror that blurs the line between man and monster.“If I cannot inspire love, I will cause fear.”For centuries, the story of Victor Frankenstein and the monster he created has held readers spellbound. On the surface, it is a novel of tense and steadily mounting dread. On a more profound level, i...

From Harold Bloom, one of the greatest Shakespeare scholars of our time, comes an intimate, wise, deeply compelling portrait of Cleopatra—one of the Bard’s most riveting and memorable female characters—in “a masterfully perceptive reading of this seductive play’s endless wonders” (*Kirkus Reviews*).**Cleopatra is one of the most famous women in history—and thanks to Shakespeare, one of the most intriguing personalities in literature. She is lover of Marc Antony, de...

An essential new selection of poems from one of the most influential poets of the twentieth century.Among A. R. Ammons’ most devout readers—and lifelong friends—was critic Harold Bloom, who declared Ammons’ Collected Poems “the most distinguished book of American verse since the publication of Wallace Stevens’ Collected Poems in 1955.” This new compendium of work by a major American poet, selected and with an introduction by one of the most promin...

America's most original and controversial literary critic writes trenchantly about forty-eight masterworks spanning the Western tradition—from Don Quixote to Wuthering Heights to Invisible Man—in his first book devoted exclusively to narrative fiction.In this valedictory volume, Yale professor Harold Bloom—who for more than half a century was regarded as America's most daringly original and controversial literary critic—gives us his only ...

Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet is perhaps the most read and beloved of all stage works. Now the most extensively annotated version of the play to date makes it completely accessible to readers in the twenty-first century. The new edition is a rich resource for students, teachers, and the general reader.Eminent linguist and translator Burton Raffel offers generous help with vocabulary and usage of Elizabethan English, pronunciation, prosody, and alternative readings of phras...

Shakespeare's valedictory play is also one of his most poetical and magical. The story involves the spirit Ariel, the savage Caliban, and Prospero, the banished Duke of Milan, now a wizard living on a remote island who uses his magic to shipwreck a party of ex-compatriots.

In arguably his most personal and lasting book, America's most daringly original and controversial critic gives us brief, luminous readings of more than eighty texts by canonical authors-- texts he has had by heart since childhood.Gone are the polemics. Here, instead, in a memoir of sorts--an inward journey from childhood to ninety--Bloom argues elegiacally with nobody but Bloom, interested only in the influence of the mind upon itself when it absorbs the highest a...

From Harold Bloom, one of the greatest Shakespeare scholars of our time comes “a timely reminder of the power and possibility of words [and] the last love letter to the shaping spirit of Bloom’s imagination” (front page, The New York Times Book Review) and an intimate, wise, deeply compelling portrait of Falstaff—Shakespeare’s greatest enduring and complex comedic characters.Falstaff is both a comic and tragic central protagonist in Shakespeare’s three Hen...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE WASHINGTON POST AND KIRKUS REVIEWSHailed as “the indispensable critic” by The New York Review of Books, Harold Bloom—New York Times bestselling writer and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University—has for decades been sharing with readers and students his genius and passion for understanding literature and explaining why it matters. Now ...

From one of the greatest Shakespeare scholars of our time, a beloved professor who has taught the Bard for over half a century—an intimate, wise, deeply compelling portrait of Lear, arguably Shakespeare’s most tragic and compelling character, the third in a series of five short books hailed as Harold Bloom’s “last love letter to the shaping spirit of his imagination” (The New York Times Book Review).King Lear is one of the most famous and...