**Celebrate America's zaniest and most subversive magazine in 26 essays and comix from all-star contributors, including Roz Chast, Jonathan Lethem, and Grady Hendrix.Before SNL and the wise-guy sarcasm of Letterman and Colbert, before The Simpsons and online memes, there was . . .  MAD.**A mainstay of countless American childhoods, MAD magazine exploded onto the scene in the 1950s and gleefully thumbed its nose at all the postwar pieties....

Reading, David Mikics says, should not be drudgery, and not mere information-gathering or escape either, but a way to live life at a higher pitch. Slow Reading in a Hurried Age is a practical guide for anyone who yearns for a more meaningful, satisfying reading experience, as well as sharper reading skills and improved concentration.

A leading literary critic’s innovative study of how the Nobel Prize–winning author turned life into art.Saul Bellow was the most lauded American writer of the twentieth century—the winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, and the only novelist to be awarded the National Book Award in Fiction three times. Preeminently a novelist of personality in all its wrinkles, its glories and shortcomings, Bellow filled his work with vibrant, ga...

An engrossing biography of one of the most influential filmmakers in cinematic history"A cool, cerebral book about a cool, cerebral talent. . . . A brisk study of [Kubrick's] films, with enough of the life tucked in to add context as well as brightness and bite.”—Dwight Garner, New York Times"An engaging and well-researched primer to the work of a cinematic legend."—Library JournalKubrick grew up i...

A New Handbook of Literary Terms offers a lively, informative guide to words and concepts that every student of literature needs to know. Mikics’s definitions are essayistic, witty, learned, and always a pleasure to read. They sketch the derivation and history of each term, including especially lucid explanations of verse forms and providing a firm sense of literary periods and movements from classicism to postmodernism. The Handbook also supplies a helpful map to the intrica...

Stanley Kubrick revolutionized Hollywood with movies like Dr. Strangelove, 2001: A Space Odyssey, and A Clockwork Orange, and electrified audiences with The Shining and Full Metal Jacket. David Mikics takes listeners on a deep dive into Kubrick's life and work, illustrating his intense commitment to each of his films.Kubrick grew up in the Bronx, a doctor's son. From a young age he was consumed by photography, chess, and, above all else, movies. ...

The enduring and engaging guide to educating yourself in the classical tradition.Have you lost the art of reading for pleasure? Are there books you know you should read but haven’t because they seem too daunting? In The Well-Educated Mind, Susan Wise Bauer provides a welcome and encouraging antidote to the distractions of our age, electronic and otherwise.Newly expanded and updated to include standout works from the twenty-first century as well as ...

Most English majors who take the GRE Literature in English test do not do particularly well, usually near the 50th percentile. To increase their acceptance into a graduate program (MA or PhD), test takers need at least to be over the 80th percentile. This is hard to do since ETS deliberately designs the test to befuddle most test takers. Quite frankly, these test takers simply do not know enough literature to excel. Further, they do not have the test "psyched" out, and they are lacking eff...

Thoroughly revised and expanded for a new generation of readers, this classic guide to enjoying literature to its fullest—a lively, enlightening, and entertaining introduction to a diverse range of writing and literary devices that enrich these works, including symbols, themes, and contexts—teaches you how to make your everyday reading experience richer and more rewarding.While books can be enjoyed for their basic stories, there are often deeper literary meanings beneath the surfac...

More than 150 inspired—and inspiring—novelists, poets, playwrights, painters, philosophers, scientists, and mathematicians on how they subtly maneuver the many (self-inflicted) obstacles and (self-imposed) daily rituals to get done the work they love to do.Franz Kafka, frustrated with his living quarters and day job, wrote in a letter to Felice Bauer in 1912, “time is short, my strength is limited, the office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant, ...

From the National Book Critics Circle Award–winning poet and critic: "A lovely book, full of joy and wisdom." — The Baltimore SunHow to Read a Poem is an unprecedented exploration of poetry, feeling, and human nature. In language at once acute and emotional, Edward Hirsch describes why poetry matters and how we can open up our imaginations so that its message can make a difference. In a marvelous reading of verse from around the world, including wo...

From America's most trusted and highly visible film critic, 100 more brilliant essays on the films that define cinematic greatness.Continuing the pitch-perfect critiques begun in The Great Movies, Roger Ebert's The Great Movies II collects 100 additional essays, each one of them a gem of critical appreciation and an amalgam of love, analysis, and history that will send readers back to films with a fresh set of eyes and renewed enthusiasm—or perhap...