Against the backdrop of a boozy, restless late-90s Chicago, creative writing graduate student Mary Van Pelt and her eccentric roommate navigate the collision between party life, domestic harmony, and academic ambition in The Girl with the Black Lipstick. Mary Biddinger's novella in linked flash stories conjures outrageous fashion and the oddest of odd jobs, sparing no detail when immersing readers in bedrooms, dancefloors, lakeshore beaches, and university seminars.Set befo...

The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics takes a snapshot of a moving target: the ever-shifting conversation about today's poetry. The ten essays in this collection offer reflections and insights, practical advice for craft matters, and provocative points of departure for those who read and write poetry. This series seeks to further the discussion of poetics in America and beyond, and to showcase the ideas of writers and critics with varied sensibilities. The first volum...

From the four-time Nebula Award–winning novelist and literary critic, essential reading for the creative writer.Award-winning novelist Samuel R. Delany has written a book for creative writers to place alongside E. M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel and Lajos Egri's Art of Dramatic Writing. Taking up specifics (When do flashbacks work, and when should you avoid them? How do you make characters both vivid and sympathetic?) and generalities (How are no...

The candid and far-reaching interview with the public intellectual and author of Illness as Metaphor, conducted in 1978 Paris and New York.Over the summer and fall of 1978, Susan Sontag engaged in a series of deeply stimulating, provocative and intimate conversations with Jonathan Cott of Rolling Stone magazine. While the printed interview was extensive, it covered only a third of their twelve hours of discussion. Now, for the first time, the entir...

Lively, original and highly readable, An Introduction to Literature, Criticism and Theory is the essential guide to literary studies. Starting at ‘The Beginning’ and concluding with ‘The End’, chapters range from the familiar, such as ‘Character’, ‘Narrative’ and ‘The Author’, to the more unusual, such as ‘Secrets’, ‘Pleasure’ and ‘Ghosts’. Now in its fifth edition, Bennett and Royle’s classic textbook successfully illuminates complex ideas by engaging directly with literary works...

As defining as Christopher Lasch’s The Culture of Narcissism, Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, and Dinesh D’Souza’s Illiberal Education were to the 1970s, 1980s, and 1990s, respectively, Marjorie Garber’s The Use and Abuse of Literature is to our times.Even as the decline of the reading of literature, as argued by the National Endowment for the Arts, proceeds in our culture, Garber (“One of the most powerful women in the academic w...

"Everyone who timidly, bombastically, reverently, scholastically--even fraudulently--essays to 'live the life of the mind' should read this book. It's elegant and classy, like caviar and champagne, and like these two items, it's over much too soon." — Los Angeles TimesPulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard's classic work of literary criticismLiving by Fiction is written for—and dedicated to—people who love literature. Dealing with writers such as Nabokov, Barth, Coover...

Known for his work as a performer and songwriter with the Birthday Party, the Bad Seeds and Grinderman, Australian artist Nick Cave has also pursued a variety of other projects, including writing and acting. Covering the full range of Cave's creative endeavours, this collection of critical essays provides a comprehensive overview of his multifaceted career. The contributors, who hail from an array of disciplines, consider Cave's work from many different angles, drawing on historical, psych...

From the four-time Nebula Award–winning author, an indispensable work of science fiction criticism, revised and expanded.Samuel R. Delany's The Jewel-Hinged Jaw appeared originally in 1977, and is now long out of print and hard to find. The impact of its demonstration that science fiction was a special language, rather than just gadgets and green-skinned aliens, began reverberations still felt in science fiction criticism. This edition includes two new essa...

From Charles Johnson—a National Book Award winner, Professor Emeritus at University of Washington, and one of America’s preeminent scholars on literature and race—comes an instructive, inspiring guide to the craft and art of writing.An award-winning novelist, philosopher, essayist, screenwriter, professor, and cartoonist, Charles Johnson has devoted his life to creative pursuit. His 1990 National Book Award-winning novel Middle Passage is a modern classic,...

The most celebrated American novelist of the past half-century, an indispensable figure of postmodernism worldwide, Thomas Pynchon notoriously challenges his readers. This Companion provides tools for meeting that challenge. Comprehensive, accessible, lively, up-to-date and reliable, it approaches Pynchon's fiction from various angles, calling on the expertise of an international roster of scholars at the cutting edge of Pynchon studies. Part I covers Pynchon's fiction novel-by-novel from ...

So much to read, so little time? This brief overview of How to Read Literature Like a Professor tells you what you need to know—before or after you read Thomas C. Foster's book.Crafted and edited with care, Worth Books set the standard for quality and give you the tools you need to be a well-informed reader.This summary of How to Read Literature Like a Professor by Thomas C. Foster includes:Historical contextChapter-b...