Literary Criticis

In the Restoration and eighteenth century, philosophers emphasized the role of sympathy in collective life and began regarding the passionate expression humans share with animals, rather than the spoken or written word, as the elemental medium of community. Menely shows how poetry came to represent this creaturely voice and, by virtue of this advocacy, facilitated the development of a viable discourse of animal rights in the emerging public sphere. Placing sensibility in dialogue with classical and early-modern antecedents as well as contemporary animal studies, The Animal Claim uncovers crucial connections between eighteenth-century poetry; theories of communication; and post-absolutist, rights-based politics.

Perhaps no other literary critic but Harold Bloom could--or would--undertake a project of this immensity. And certainly no other critic could bring to it the extraordinary knowledge, understanding, and insight that are the hallmark of Bloom's every book. Ranging across centuries and continents, this final book of his career, gives us the inimitable critic on Don Quixote and Book of Numbers; Wuthering Heights and Absalom, Absalom; Les Miserables and Blood Meridian; Vanity Fair and Invisible Man; The Captain's Daughter and The Reef. He writes about works by Austen, Balzac, Dickens, Tolstoy, James, Conrad, Lawrence, Wolff, Le Guin, Sebald, and many more. Whether you have already read these books, or intend to, or simply care about the importance and power of fiction, Harold Bloom serves as an unparalleled guide through the pages of these 52 masterpieces of the genre.

The five iinfluential women writers discussed in Seymour-Jorn's timely work--Salwa Bakr, Nemat el-Behairy, Radwa Ashour, Etidal Osman, and Ibtihal Salem--all emerged on the literary scene in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They came of age at a time when women's writing was attracting critical attention and more venues for publication were opening up. This widening platform enabled these writers to develop and mature as cultural critics, resulting in the creation of a successful blend of politically and socially committed literature with artistically innovative literary techniques.

Artfully combining literary analysis with ethnographic research, Seymour-Jorn explores the ways in which these writers generate new patterns of thinking and talking about women, society, and social change. She describes how the writers conceive of their role as authors, particularly as female authors, and how they refigure the Arabic language to express themselves as women. By examining these authors' works and lives, Seymour-Jorn illuminates the extent to which writing brings women into the public sphere, an arena in which they have traditionally had limited access to positions of power and authority.

"I have tried, as far as possible using the words of the authors themselves, to explain their craft, aiming to take readers on a journey into the concerns, techniques, tricks, flaws, and, occasionally, obsessions of our most luminous writers."--from the Preface

Behind every acclaimed work of literature is a trove of heartfelt decisions. The best authors put painstaking--sometimes obsessive--effort into each element of their stories, from plot and character development to dialogue and point of view.

What made Nabokov choose the name Lolita? Why did Fitzgerald use first-person narration in The Great Gatsby? How did Kerouac, who raged against revision, finally come to revise On the Road? Veteran editor and teacher Richard Cohen draws on his vast reservoir of a lifetime's reading and his insight into what makes good prose soar. Here are Gabriel García Márquez's thoughts on how to start a novel ("In the first paragraph you solve most of the problems with your book"); Virginia Woolf offering her definition of style ("It is all rhythm. Once you get that, you can't use the wrong words"); and Vladimir Nabokov on the nature of fiction ("All great novels are great fairy tales").

Cohen has researched the published works and private utterances of our greatest authors to discover the elements that made their prose memorable. The result is a unique exploration of the act and art of writing that enriches our experience of reading both the classics and the best modern fiction. Evoking the marvelous, the famous, and the irreverent, he reveals the challenges that even the greatest writers faced--and shows us how they surmounted them.

Praise for How to Write Like Tolstoy

"The highest compliment one can pay How to Write Like Tolstoy is that it provokes an overwhelming urge to read and write, to be in dialogue or even doomed competition with the greatest creative minds . . . . That Mr. Cohen is an editor, that his love of literature comes in large part from awe in the presence of better writers than he, is no small matter. His love is infectious, and regardless of how well he ends up teaching us to write, that is miracle enough."--Wall Street Journal

"[A] perfect tasting menu . . . the homage of a passionate reader to the writers who have provided his 'main pastime.' "--The Sunday Times (U.K.)

"This book is a wry, critical friend to both writer and reader. It is filled with cogent examples and provoking statements. You will agree or quarrel with each page, and be a sharper writer and reader by the end."--Hilary Mantel

"Insightful . . . [Cohen] escorts his readers to Iris Murdoch for sage counsel on launching a novel, to Salman Rushdie for shrewd guidance on developing an unreliable narrator, to Rudyard Kipling for a cagey hint on creating memorable minor characters, and to Leo Tolstoy for a master's help in transforming personal experience into fictional art."--Booklist

A stunning collection of essays and memoir from twice Booker Prize winner and international bestseller Hilary Mantel, author of The Mirror and the Light

In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to the editor, Karl Miller, 'I have no critical training whatsoever, so I am forced to be more brisk and breezy than scholarly.' This collection of twenty reviews, essays and pieces of memoir from the next three decades, tells the story of what happened next.

Her subjects range far and wide: Robespierre and Danton, the Hite report, Saudi Arabia where she lived for four years in the 1980s, the Bulger case, John Osborne, the Virgin Mary as well as the pop icon Madonna, a brilliant examination of Helen Duncan, Britain's last witch. There are essays about Jane Boleyn, Charles Brandon, Christopher Marlowe and Margaret Pole, which display the astonishing insight into the Tudor mind we are familiar with from the bestselling Wolf Hall Trilogy. Her famous lecture, 'Royal Bodies', which caused a media frenzy, explores the place of royal women in society and our imagination. Here too are some of her LRB diaries, including her first meeting with her stepfather and a confrontation with a circus strongman.

Constantly illuminating, always penetrating and often very funny, interleaved with letters and other ephemera gathered from the archive, Mantel Pieces is an irresistible selection from one of our greatest living writers.

The Ministry of Truth is the first book to fully examine the origin and legacy of 1984 its roots in the utopian and dystopian literature that preceded it; the personal experiences in the Spanish Civil War and wartime London that Orwell drew on as he struggled to finish his masterpiece in his final years; and the political and cultural shockwaves that the novel triggered at once upon publication and which, far from subsiding, have only grown over the decades. It explores how history informs fiction and fiction explains history.

William Faulkner, one of America's most iconic writers, is an author who defies easy interpretation. Born in 1897 in Mississippi, Faulkner wrote such classic novels as Absolom, Absolom! and The Sound and The Fury, creating in Yoknapatawpha county one of the most memorable gallery of characters ever assembled in American literature. Yet, as acclaimed literary critic Michael Gorra explains, Faulkner has sustained justified criticism for his failures of racial nuance--his ventriloquism of black characters and his rendering of race relations in a largely unreconstructed South--demanding that we reevaluate the Nobel laureate's life and legacy in the twenty-first century, as we reexamine the junctures of race and literature in works that once rested firmly in the American canon.

Interweaving biography, literary criticism, and rich travelogue, The Saddest Words argues that even despite these contradictions--and perhaps because of them--William Faulkner still needs to be read, and even more, remains central to understanding the contradictions inherent in the American experience itself. Evoking Faulkner's biography and his literary characters, Gorra illuminates what Faulkner maintained was "the South's curse and its separate destiny," a class and racial system built on slavery that was devastated during the Civil War and was reimagined thereafter through the South's revanchism. Driven by currents of violence, a "Lost Cause" romanticism not only defined Faulkner's twentieth century but now even our own age.

Through Gorra's critical lens, Faulkner's mythic Yoknapatawpha County comes alive as his imagined land finds itself entwined in America's history, the characters wrestling with the ghosts of a past that refuses to stay buried, stuck in an unending cycle between those two saddest words, "was" and "again." Upending previous critical traditions, The Saddest Words returns Faulkner to his sociopolitical context, revealing the civil war within him and proving that "the real war lies not only in the physical combat, but also in the war after the war, the war over its memory and meaning."

Filled with vignettes of Civil War battles and generals, vivid scenes from Gorra's travels through the South--including Faulkner's Oxford, Mississippi--and commentaries on Faulkner's fiction, The Saddest Words is a mesmerizing work of literary thought that recontextualizes Faulkner in light of the most plangent cultural issues facing America today.