Literary essay

Kafka's Creatures: Animals, Hybrids, and Other Fantastic Beings

by YARRI/LUCHT

Kafka's Creatures: Animals, Hybrids, and Other Fantastic Beings is an interdisciplinary collection of essays on Franz Kafka's use of non-human creatures in his writings. It is written from a variety of interpretive...

You Couldn't Ignore Me If You Tried: The Brat Pack, John Hughes, and Their Impact on a Generation

by Susannah Gora

You can quote lines from Sixteen Candles (“Last night at the dancemy little brother paid a buck to see your underwear”), your iPod playlist includes more than one song by the Psychedelic Furs and Simple...

The Rest of Us: Dispatches from the Mother Ship

by Jacquelyn Mitchard

For ten years of Sunday mornings, readers of Jacquelyn Mitchard's newspaper column, "The Rest of Us," have been calling their mothers, boyfriends, and sisters to say, "See? That's exactly what I meant!" Mitchard's...

Morning, Noon, and Night: Finding the Meaning of Life's Stages Through Books

by Arnold Weinstein

From Homer and Shakespeare to Toni Morrison and Jonathan Safran Foer, major works of literature have a great deal to teach us about two of life’s most significant stages—growing up and growing old. Distinguised...

The Barbie Chronicles: A Living Doll Turns Forty

by Yona Zeldis Mcdonough

A THOROUGHLY GROWN-UP LOOK AT A TWENTIETH-CENTURY MUSE OF OUTSTANDING PROPORTIONS

To some she's a collectible, to others she's trash. In The Barbie Chronicles, twenty-three writers join together to scrutinize...

Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground

by Ahdaf Soueif

From the bestselling author of the Booker Prize finalist The Map of Love–an incisive collection of essays on Arab identity, art, and politics that seeks to locate the mezzaterra, or common ground, in an increasingly...

52 McGs.: The Best Obituaries from Legendary New York Times Reporter Robert McG. Thomas

by Robert McG. Thomas & Chris Calhoun

Among his devoted fans, his pieces were known simply as McGs. With a "genius for illuminating that sometimes ephemeral apogee in people's lives when they prove capable of generating a brightly burning spark"...

Walter Benjamin at the Dairy Queen: Reflections on Sixty and Beyond

by Larry Mcmurtry

In a lucid, brilliant work of nonfiction -- as close to an autobiography as his readers are likely to get -- Larry McMurtry has written a family portrait that also serves as a larger portrait of Texas itself,...

Other People's Skin: Four Novellas

by Tracy Price-Thompson & TaRessa Stovall

In Other People's Skin, Tracy Price-Thompson and TaRessa Stovall, along with fellow authors Elizabeth Atkins and Desiree Cooper, take on one of the most controversial topics within the African-American community:...

Rationale of the Dirty Joke: An Analysis of Sexual Humor

by G. Legman

Why do people tell dirty jokes?

And what is it about a joke's dirtiness that makes it funny?

G. Legman was perhaps the foremost scholar of the dirty joke, and as legions of humor writers and comedians know,...

The Devil's Details: A History of Footnotes

by Chuck Zerby

Footnotes have not had it easy. Their dominance of eighteenth- and nineteenth- century literature and scholarship was both hard-won -- following many years of struggle -- and doomed, as it led to belittlement...

Out of Harm's Way

by Terry Crisp

A Simon & Schuster eBook. Simon & Schuster has a great book for every reader.

The Angry Island

by A.A. Gill

Think of England, and anger hardly springs to mind as its primary national characteristic. Yet in The Angry Island, A. A. Gill argues that, in fact, it is plain old fury that is the wellspring for England's...

Gather Together in My Name

by Tracy Price-Thompson

From the nationally bestselling and Hurston/Wright award-winning author Tracy Price-Thompson comes a heartbreaking story of loyalty and love that goes beyond the ultimate sacrifice.

Coming of age in the heart...

The Typewriter Is Holy: The Complete, Uncensored History of the Beat Generation

by Bill Morgan

Anyone who cares to understand the literary and cultural ferment of America in the later twentieth century must be familiar with the writings and lives of those scruffy bohemians known as the Beat Generation....

Contested Will

by James Shapiro

For more than two hundred years after William Shakespeare's death, no one doubted that he had written his plays. Since then, however, dozens of candidates have been proposed for the authorship of what is generally...

The Collected Works of W.B. Yeats Volume IV: Early Essays

by William Butler Yeats, Richard J. Finneran & George Bornstein

The Collected Works of W. B. Yeats, Volume IV: Early Essays is part of a fourteen-volume series under the general editorship of eminent Yeats scholars George Bornstein and George Mills Harper. These volumes...

Turning the Wheel: Essays on Buddhism and Writing

by Charles Johnson

"Were it not for the Buddhadharma, says Charles Johnson in his preface to Turning the Wheel, "I'm convinced that, as a black American and an artist, I would not have been able to successfully negotiate my last...

High Strung: A Novel

by Quinn Dalton

Years after running away from America and the mysteries surrounding her mother's death, Merle Winslow winds up editing trash novels at X Publishing in West London and shacked up with a drug-addled diplomat's...

Agenda: Inside the Clinton White House

by Bob Woodward

The Agenda is a day-by-day, often minute-by-minute account of Bill Clinton's White House. Drawing on hundreds of interviews, confidential internal memos, diaries, and meeting notes, Woodward shows how Clinton...