Literary essay

CliffsNotes on Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby

by Kate Maurer

The original CliffsNotes study guides offer a look into key elements and ideas within classic works of literature. The latest generation of titles in this series also features glossaries and visual elements...

Bookclub-in-a-Box Discusses The Paris Wife, by Paula McLain

by Marilyn Herbert, Laura Godfrey & Graeme Bayliss

Ernest Hemingway was an iconic writer of the 20th century who gave modern literature a unique shape and form. Papa Hemingway was larger than life and created his own personal and professional mythical status....

Bookclub-in-a-Box Discusses The Help, by Kathryn Stockett

by Marilyn Herbert

It's 1962 in Jackson, Mississippi, and 22-year-old Skeeter has just graduated from Ole Miss. She comes home with a diploma, but no husband, in a world where her friends are all married and raising children,...

How to Read Literature Like a Professor

by Thomas C. Foster

What does it mean when a fictional hero takes a journey?. Shares a meal? Gets drenched in a sudden rain shower? Often, there is much more going on in a novel or poem than is readily visible on the surface—a...

Secret Society: A Novel

by Miasha

"It had been a year and a half since I graduated high school and a year since I been workin' -- workin' niggas, that is."

It's 2001, and Celess and Tina are at the top of their game. With Celess's fine features...

Shameless Hoodwives: A Bentley Manor Tale

by Meesha Mink & De'nesha Diamond

Hearts break, lives shatter, and liars prevail at Bentley Manor, where everyone sins shamelessly.

In the second novel from the authors of Desperate Hoodwives, four women will try to escape Bentley Manor --...

It Looked Different on the Model

by Laurie Notaro

All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age

by Hubert Dreyfus & Sean Dorrance Kelly

In unrelenting flow of choices confronts us at nearly every moment of our lives, and yet our culture offers us no clear way to choose. This predicament seems inevitable, but in fact it’s quite new. In medieval...

Thong on Fire: An Urban Erotic Tale

by Noire

I was just a lost little girl forced to make it in a grown woman's world. A child turned out by the rulers of the game. When you get thrown into a snakepit you better learn how to wiggle! It's all about survival,...

The Dangerous Summer

by Ernest Hemingway

The Dangerous Summer is Hemingway's firsthand chronicle of a brutal season of bullfights. In this vivid account, Hemingway captures the exhausting pace and pressure of the season, the camaraderie and pride of...

Secrets of The Lost Symbol: The Unauthorized Guide to the Mysteries Behind The Da Vinci Code Sequel

by Daniel Burstein & Arne de Keijzer

Unlock the secrets of The Lost Symbol

There is only one Dan Brown—and there is only one Secrets team that has achieved worldwide bestselling success by providing curious readers with compelling and authoritative...

HELP!: How to Become Slightly Happier and Get a Bit More Done

by Oliver Burkeman

How do you solve the problem of human happiness? It's a subject that has occupied some of the greatest philosophers of all time, from Aristotle to Paul McKenna - but how do we sort the good ideas from the terrible...

Flora Curiosa: Cryptobotany, Mysterious Fungi, Sentient Trees, and Deadly Plants in Classic Science Fiction and Fantasy

by Chad Arment

Flora Curiosa is an anthology of 20 classic short stories involving all manner of strange plants and fungi. These are the precursors (and often direct influences) of contemporary "killer plants" books and movies...

How Proust Can Change Your Life

by Alain De Botton

Alain de Botton combines two unlikely genres--literary biography and self-help manual--in the hilarious and unexpectedly practical How Proust Can Change Your Life.

Who would have thought that Marcel Proust, one...

The Narnia Code: C. S. Lewis and the Secret of the Seven Heavens

by Michael Ward

Millions of readers have been captivated by C. S. Lewis's famed Chronicles of Narnia, but why? What is it about these seven books that makes them so appealing? For more than half a century, scholars have attempted...

Beyond the Wall: Exploring George R. R. Martin's A Song of Ice and Fire, From A Game of Thrones to A Dance with Drago

by James Lowder, Daniel Abraham & R. A. A. Salvatore

"There were a number of books about A Game of Thrones (the HBO series) and A Song of Ice and Fire (the books) published last year . . . the one that impressed me most was James Lowder's Beyond the Wall."

—George...

Vintage Reading: From Plato to Bradbury: A Personal Tour of Some of the World's Best Books

by Robert Kanigel

Vintage Reading brings eighty of the world's most unforgettable books out from behind the high castle walls, lowers the drawbridge, and welcomes readers inside. With lively and concise commentary, award-winning...

Art Spiegelman’s Private Museum

by Art Spiegelman

Art Spiegelman’s Private Museum is a 100% digital essay on the history and aesthetics of comics trip.

This text, previously unpublished in France, summarizes Art Spiegelman’s thoughts and reflections....

Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, an American Slave & Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl

by Harriet Jacobs, Frederick Douglass & Kwame Anthony Appiah

This Modern Library Paperback Classics edition combines the two most important African American slave narratives into one volume.

Frederick Douglass's Narrative, first published in 1845, is an enlightening and...

The Graphic Mythology of Tintin - a Primer

by Tim Mountford

From the black and white pages of a Belgian Catholic newspaper in the late 1920s to the virtual world of a 3D CGI Hollywood movie in 2011, the young adventurous reporter Tintin has come a long way.

When Georges...