Catalog Search Results
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"Plants, borders, and various horticultural paraphernalia make surprisingly frequent appearances in mystery plots. In this wide-ranging survey of classic and contemporary murder fiction, Marta looks at the detectives, motives, methods, opportunities, and writers that have used the garden as their point of departure. The result is a diverting and eye-opening study that deepens our appreciation of the great crime fiction writers while illuminating the...
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"From the award-winning biographer of Chaucer, the story of his most popular and scandalous character, from the Middle Ages to #MeToo Ever since her triumphant debut in Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the Wife of Bath, arguably the first ordinary and recognizably real woman in English literature, has obsessed readers-from Shakespeare to James Joyce, Voltaire to Pasolini, Dryden to Zadie Smith. Few literary characters have led such colourful lives or matched...
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This volume "really contains two books: a fondly sardonic autobiography and a tough-love lesson for aspiring novelists", written by American author of contemporary horror, suspense, science fiction and fantasy, Stephen King (b. 1947). The first third of the book contains King's memoir, which includes heartfelt tidbits about his brother, mother and his long battles with alcohol and drug addiction. The second part of the book, "On Writing, " is where...
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This landmark book is a founding work in the literature of black protest. W. E. B. Du Bois (1868–1963) played a key role in developing the strategy and program that dominated early 20th-century black protest in America. In this collection of essays, first published together in 1903, he eloquently affirms that it is beneath the dignity of a human being to beg for those rights that belong inherently to all mankind. He also charges that the strategy...
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Includes criticism and interpretation of William Shakespeare, Dante, Cervantes, Montaigne, Moliere, John Milton, Samuel Johnson, Goethe, William Wordsworth, Jane Austen and Persuasion, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Charles Dickens and Bleak House, George Eliot and Middlemarch, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Freud, Proust, James Joyce and Ulysses, Virginia Woolf and Orlando, Franz Kafka, Jorge Luis Borges, Pablo Neruda, and Fernando Pessoa.
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Describes how the "protagonists of folklore and religion enact simultaneously the various phases of their common story" and relates "their timeless symbols to those rediscovered in dream by contemporary depth psychology."
Joseph Campbell presents the composite hero. Apollo, the Frog King of the fairy tale, Wotan, the Buddha, and numerous other protagonists of folklore and religion, enact simultaneously the various phases of their common story. The...
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"'Swifterature' captures a unique fusion of different elements: fandom, feminism, and a defense of both literature and popular culture. The narrative is split into thirteen chapters that use Swift's lyrics as departure points. The reader experiences the inspiring influence of English literature as Swift's lens breathes new vitality and urgency into older texts. McCausland also writes about her own experiences as she copes with intense media scrutiny...
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"After making his debut in 1997's 'Killing floor,' Jack Reacher has quickly become one of the most popular--and most enduring--fictional heroes to emerge in the past half century. Now, his creator tells the stories behind the stories. These are the origin tales of all of the Reacher novels written solely by Lee Child, chock full of colorful anecdotes and intriguing inspirations. One by one, they expand upon each novel and place it in the context not...
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"Few contemporary writers ask the questions about faith, morality, and God that Christian Wiman does, and even fewer--perhaps none--do so with his urgency and eloquence. Wiman, an award-winning poet and the author of My Bright Abyss, lays the motion of his mind on the page in this genre-defying work, an indivisible blend of poetry, criticism, theology, and searing memoir. As Marilynne Robinson wrote, "[Wiman's] poetry and his scholarship have a purifying...
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Extracts from two of Bell's most compelling works of travel writing, Persian Pictures and Syria: The Desert and the Sown, as well as some of her most fascinating letters
A woman far ahead of her time, Gertrude gained a first from Oxford at a time when very few subjects were even open to women. She went on to take an active interest in politics before embarking on her one-woman travels across the Middle East. She chronicled
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"From the New York Times bestselling author of The Most Dangerous Book, the true story behind the creation of another masterpiece of world literature, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment. The Sinner and The Saint is the deeply researched and immersive tale of how Dostoevsky came to write this great murder story-and why it changed the world. As a young man, Dostoevsky was a celebrated writer, but his involvement with the radical politics of his...
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Drawing on her experiences as a woman and voracious reader in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a multi-award-winning New York Times best-selling author explores the most probing questions of our time, arming readers with a resistance reading list that includes Toni Morrison, Salman Rushdie, James Baldwin, and Margaret Atwood.
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"In Orwell's Ghosts, historian Laura Beers considers Orwell's full body of work--his six novels, three nonfiction works, and brilliant essays on politics, language, and the class system--to examine what "Orwellian" truly means and reveal the misconstrued thinker in all his complexity. She explores how Orwell's writing on free speech addresses the proliferation of "fake news" and the emergence of cancel culture, highlights his vivid critiques of capitalism...
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Using original, deep-access reporting, extensive research, and insightful commentary, The Spice Must Flow brings the true popularity of Dune out into the light for the very first time. With original interviews with the beloved actors and directors behind the films--including Timothée Chalamet, Kyle Maclachlan, Denis Villeneuve, Patrick Stewart, Rebecca Ferguson, Alec Newman, and many more-- The Spice Must Flow also examines the far-reaching influence...
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"1851: a year of political unrest and social inequality, industrial progress and artistic innovation, it is also a turbulent year in the private life of Charles Dickens, as he copes with a double bereavement and a home in danger of falling apart. But this formative year will become perhaps the greatest turning point in his life and writing, as he embraces his calling as a chronicler of ordinary people's lives and establishes himself as an important...
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In this ambitious successor to The Great Derangement, acclaimed writer Amitav Ghosh finds the origins of our contemporary climate crisis in Western colonialism's violent exploitation of human life and the natural environment.
A powerful work of history, essay, testimony, and polemic, Amitav Ghosh's new book traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean....
A powerful work of history, essay, testimony, and polemic, Amitav Ghosh's new book traces our contemporary planetary crisis back to the discovery of the New World and the sea route to the Indian Ocean....
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Discover the science of forensics through Agatha Christie's novels in the ultimate true crime investigation.
Agatha Christie is the bestselling novelist of all time, and nearly every story she ever wrote involves one-or, more commonly, several-dead bodies. And the cause of death, the motives behind violent crimes, the clues that inevitably are left behind, and the people who put the pieces together to solve the mystery invite the reader to analyze...
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"Something is rotten in the state of Denmark." Brooding Hamlet, the son of the recently deceased king, is about to discover the royal family's corruption firsthand. Taken by the castle watchman to meet the apparition they see at night, Hamlet is surprised to find it is his father's ghost. Hamlet seeks to avenge his father's dishonorable death, but the casualties along the way may prove to be just as tragic. Enter William Shakespeare's famous world...
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In the wake of her mother's death, Cheryl Strayed's family scattered and her marriage was destroyed. Four years later, twenty-six years old with nothing to lose, Cheryl made the decision to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert to Washington State - alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker and the trail was little more than an idea. But it was a promise of piecing back together a life that had come undone.
