Showing titles in Literary History & Criticism

What do we know about Jesus and Mary? For starters, what the evangelists recorded in the gospels. Throughout Church history, mystics have received visions of the life of Jesus and Mary and recorded them as biographies. One such mystic was Venerable Maria of Agreda who authored The Mystical City of God, a four-volume book totaling more than 2,000 pages. It's a daunting task to read, but Marian theologian Fr. Edward Looney has partnered with TAN Books to read it in a year. Join him as he reads and provides reflections daily.

Sharing her more than 15 years of compelling research—including analysis of Sylvia Plath’s unpublished calendars, notebooks, scrapbooks, book annotations, and underlinings, as well as published memoirs, biographies, letters, journals, and interviews with Plath and her husband, friends, and family—Plath scholar Julia Gordon-Bramer reveals Sylvia Plath’s enduring interest and active practice in mysticism and the occult from childhood until her tragic death in 1963.

Volume 2 of the Nobel Prize-winner’s towering masterpiece: the story of Solzhenitsyn's entrance into the Soviet prison camps, where he would remain for nearly a decade. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum.

George Orwell devoted his career to exposing social injustice and political duplicity, urging his readers to face hard truths about Western society and politics. Now, the uncanny parallels between the interwar era and our own-rising inequality, censorship, and challenges to traditional social hierarchies—make his writing even more of the moment. In Orwell's Ghosts, historian Laura Beers considers Orwell's full body of work—his six novels, three nonfiction works, as well as his brilliant essays—to examine what "Orwellian" means and to take it out of the hands of political pundits.

Welcome to the Black Widow Podcast, where passion meets storytelling in a world crafted just for you. Erotic stories for her. ASMR Boyfriend. Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/black-widow-podcast--3614545/support.

This is a podcast for emerging writers who want to improve the quality of their work and learn more about the publishing industry. Your one host, Bianca Marais (the bestselling author of 'The Witches of Moonshyne Manor') interviews authors, agents, editors and just about anyone and everyone who's involved in bringing a book to market. She's joined by her cohosts, literary agents Carly Watters and CeCe Lyra from P.S. Literary Agency, who read and critique query letters as well as opening pages in their Books with Hooks segment. Expect good advice, honest insights, and a few laughs along the way...

Get obsessed with us. Five days a week, Pop Culture Happy Hour serves you recommendations and commentary on the buzziest movies, TV, music, books, videogames and more. Join arts journalists Linda Holmes, Glen Weldon, Stephen Thompson, and Aisha Harris - plus a rotating cast of guest pop culture aficionados. The Happy Hour team leaves room at the table for exploring a range of reactions and opinions on every bit of the pop universe. From lowbrow to highbrow to the stuff in between, they take it all with a shot of cheer.Make your happy hour even happier with Pop Culture Happy Hour Plus! Your ...

In these widely praised essays, Calvino reflects on literature as process, the great narrative game in the course of which writer and reader are challenged to understand the world. Calvino himself made the selection of pieces to be included in this volume.

This book helps listeners develop practices that will result in deep, formative, and faithful reading so they can contribute to the flourishing of their communities and cultivate their own spiritual and intellectual depth. The authors present reading as a remedy for three prevalent cultural vices—distraction, hostility, and consumerism—that impact the possibility of formative reading. Deep Reading provides resources for engaging in formative and culturally subversive reading practices that teach listeners how to resist vices, love virtue, and desire the good.

Donald Hall lived a remarkable life of letters, one capped most recently by the New York Times bestseller Essays After Eighty, a “treasure” of a book in which he “balance[s] frankness about losses with humor and gratitude” (Washington Post). Before his passing in 2018, nearing ninety, Hall delivered this new collection of self-knowing, fierce, and funny essays on aging, the pleasures of solitude, and the sometimes astonishing freedoms arising from both.

Audiomorphs is an Animorphs podcast which is actually not so much a podcast as a bootleg Animorphs audiobook. Releases every Friday.

The Follow-up to the Award-Winning The Wisdom of Hobbits, Mimetic Theory & Middle-earth: Untangling Desire in Tolkien's Legendarium, by long-time author Matthew J. Distefano, delves deeply into J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth, using René Girard's mimetic theory as the primary lens through which to view the good professor’s legendary texts.

In 2024, one hundred years after his death at the age of forty, customers all over the world will reach for the works of Franz Kafka. Many of them will want to learn more about the enigmatic man behind the classic books. Who, exactly, was Franz Kafka? Karolina Watroba, the first Germanist ever elected as a fellow of Oxford's All Souls College, will tell Kafka's story beyond the boundaries of language, time, and space, traveling from the Prague of Kafka's birth through the work of contemporary writers in East Asia, whose award-winning novels are, in part, homages to the great man himself.

Everyone knows Judy Blume. Her books have garnered her fans of all ages for decades and sold tens of millions of copies. But why were people so drawn to them? And why are we still talking about them now in the 21st century? In The Genius of Judy, her remarkable story is revealed as never before, beginning with her as a mother of two searching for purpose outside of her home in 1960s suburban New Jersey.

"Every morning I jump out of bed and step on a land mine. The land mine is me. After the explosion, I spend the rest of the day putting the pieces back together. Now, it's your turn. Jump!" Zest. Gusto. Curiosity. These are the qualities every writer must have, as well as a spirit of adventure. In this exuberant book, the incomparable Ray Bradbury shares the wisdom, experience, and excitement of a lifetime of writing. Here are practical tips on the art of writing from a master of the craft - everything from finding original ideas to developing your own voice and style.

Newland Archer is about to announce his engagement to the docile May Welland when he meets her cousin, the mysterious, nonconformist Countess Ellen Olenska. Edith Wharton's elegant portrait of desire and betrayal in Old New York earned her the first Pulitzer Prize for literature ever awarded to a woman.

We tend not to talk about books and war in the same breath—one ranks among humanity’s greatest inventions, the other among its most terrible. But as esteemed literary historian Andrew Pettegree demonstrates, the two are deeply intertwined. The Book at War explores the various roles that books have played in conflicts throughout the globe. With precise historical analysis and sparkling prose, The Book at War accounts for the power—and the ambivalence—of words at war.

The Women is the story of one woman gone to war, but it shines a light on all women who put themselves in harm’s way and whose sacrifice and commitment to their country has too often been forgotten. A novel about deep friendships and bold patriotism, The Women is a richly drawn story with a memorable heroine whose idealism and courage under fire will come to define an era.

In a time when our relationship to the natural world is ruled by the violence and greed of unbridled consumerism, Wendell Berry speaks out in these prescient essays, drawn from his 50-year campaign on behalf of American lands and communities. The writings gathered in The World-Ending Fire are the unique product of a life spent farming the fields of rural Kentucky with mules and horses, and of the rich, intimate knowledge of the land cultivated by this work.

From the very first book publication in October 1920 to the film release of Death on the Nile in October 2020, this investigation into Agatha Christie’s Hercule Poirot celebrates a century of probably the world’s favourite fictional detective. This book tells his story decade-by-decade, exploring his appearances not only in the original novels, short stories and plays but also across stage, screen and radio productions.