Showing titles in Literary History & Criticism

Brought to you by Penguin. A love letter to all those who come alive when they pull a new treasure off the shelf, stay up late reading just one more page and pack their suitcases with clothes wedged between books instead of the other way around. From well-worn literary classics to steamy...

Drawing from exclusive interviews and previously unseen archival materials, this one-of-its-kind biography of Hannibal Lecter documents the cannibal’s journey from terrifying villain to unexpectedly adored antihero. This unique biography traces the many lives and crimes of Hannibal Lecter: his...

The epitaph John Keats composed for his own gravestone - 'Here lies one whose name was writ in water' - seemingly damned him to oblivion. When he died at the age of 25, having taken a battering from the conservative press, few critics imagined he would be considered one of the great English poets 200 years later, though he himself had an inkling. In this brief life, Lucasta Miller takes Keats' best-known poems - the ones you are most likely to have read - and excavates their backstories.

As a woman used to traveling and living the high life in Bangkok, Leanne Shirtliffe recognized the constant fodder for humor while pregnant with twins in Asia's sin city. But in spite of deep-fried bug cuisine and nurses who cover newborn bassinets with plastic wrap, Shirtliffe manages to keep her babies alive for a year with help from a Coca-Cola deliveryman, several waitresses, and a bra factory. Then she and her husband return home to the isolation of North American suburbia.

In search of a new history of queer culture, Diarmuid Hester travels from Cambridge's ancient cloisters to the smoky clubs of Jazz Age Paris, through the bunkers of Nazi-occupied Jersey to the newly liberated gaybourhoods of New York and beyond. Authoritative and not a little irreverent, Hester brings to life the bars and basements, homes and studios, cities and landscapes that shaped the sexual identities of such extraordinary figures as E. M. Forster, Josephine Baker, James Baldwin and Derek Jarman.

This classic personal time-management book, originally published in 1908, has inspired generations of men and women to live deliberate lives. Not just another collection of timesaving tips, this book is more of a challenge to leave behind mundane everyday concerns, focus on pursuing one's true desires, and live the fullest possible life. Reflection, concentration, and study techniques make it easier to accomplish more truly rewarding undertakings than anyone ever dreamed possible.

Monsters, spirits, fantastic beings, and supernatural creatures haunt the folklore and popular culture of Japan. Broadly labeled yōkai, they appear in many forms, from tengu mountain goblins and kappa water sprites, to shape-shifting kitsune foxes and long-tongued ceiling-lickers. Popular today in anime, manga, film, and video games, many yōkai originated in local legends, folktales, and regional ghost stories. The Book of Yōkai invites listeners to examine how people create, transmit, and collect folklore, and how they make sense of the mysteries in the world around them.

A masterly new recording by Ralph Fiennes. Four Quartets is the culminating achievement of T. S. Eliot's career as a poet. While containing some of the most musical and unforgettable passages in 20th-century poetry, its four parts, 'Burnt Norton', 'East Coker', 'The Dry Salvages' and 'Little Gidding', present a rigorous meditation on the spiritual, philosophical and personal themes which preoccupied the author.

Come obsess over A Song of Ice and Fire and Game of Thrones with us! Our show is an enthusiastic and heavily-detailed look at the past, present and future of Westeros and the realms beyond.

This is a book about books, about the subversive power of reading and the strange, enduring magic of books as objects. Ever since childhood, books have been at the centre of Ian Patterson's life, as a poet, teacher, translator, bookseller and collector. As he constructs the last of many...

Out of Africa: In this audiobook, the author of Seven Gothic Tales gives a true account of her life on her plantation in Kenya. She tells with classic simplicity of the ways of the country and the natives: of the beauty of the Ngong Hills and coffee trees in blossom: of her guests, from the...

In 1572, Montaigne - nobleman, humanist, and thoroughly Renaissance man - retired to the seclusion of his estate in the Dordogne and started to write. From his pen poured a stream of "essays" - attempts to capture the observations that came to him on an idiosyncratic range of subjects, from ancient customs, cannibals, and books to thumbs, war-horses, and the wearing of clothes. He made the study of himself the starting point for investigations into how to live, and wrote with a startlingly modern candor about love, grief, friendship, sex, and death.

The Time Machine is a science fiction novella by H. G. Wells, published in 1895. It is generally credited with the popularisation of the concept of time travel by using a vehicle that allows an operator to travel purposefully and selectively. The term "time machine", coined by Wells, is now universally used to refer to such a vehicle. This work is an early example of the Dying Earth subgenre.The Time Machine has since been adapted into two feature films of the same name, as well as two television versions, and a large number of comic book adaptations. It has also indirectly inspired many more ...

Penguin presents A Life of My Own by Claire Tomalin, read by Dame Penelope Wilton. As one of the best biographers of her generation, Claire Tomalin has written about great novelists and poets to huge success: now, she turns to look at her own life. This enthralling memoir follows her through...

Arthur Miller’s deeply moving drama reunites two long estranged middle-aged brothers. Nostalgia and recrimination erupt as they sell off an attic full of furniture, their last link to a family and a world that no longer exists. This 1968 classic is a wrenching saga of plaintive gestures and missed opportunities. A co-production with the BBC.

Generations of children have fallen in love with the pioneer saga of the Ingalls family, of Pa and Ma, Laura and her sisters, and their loyal dog. Laura Ingalls Wilder's Little House books have taught millions of Americans about frontier life, giving inspiration to many and in the process becoming icons of our national identity. Yet few realize that this best-selling series wandered far from the actual history of the Ingalls family and from what Laura herself understood to be central truths about pioneer life.

Grigori Aleksandrovich Pechorin is an enigma: arrogant, cocky, melancholic, brave, cynic, romantic, loner, socialite, soldier, free soul, and yet, victim of the world, he eludes definition and remains a mystery to those who know him. Just who is he? And what does he hope to achieve? Evolving from first person to third person, and then into a diary, A Hero of Our Time takes on a variety of forms to interrogate Pechorin's cryptic character and his unusual philosophy, providing breathtaking descriptions of the Caucasus along the way.

A collection of three medieval English poems, translated by Tolkien for the modern-day reader and containing romance, tragedy, love, sex and honour. Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and Pearl are two poems by an unknown author written in about 1400. Sir Gawain is a romance, a fairy-tale for...

A startling and revelatory examination of Nabokov’s life and works—notably Pale Fire and Lolita—bringing new insight into one of the twentieth century’s most enigmatic authors. Novelist Vladimir Nabokov witnessed the horrors of his century, escaping Revolutionary Russia then Germany under Hitler, and fleeing France with his Jewish wife and son just weeks before Paris fell to the Nazis. He repeatedly faced accusations of turning a blind eye to human suffering to write artful tales of depravity. But does one of the greatest writers in the English language really deserve the label of amoral aesthete bestowed on him by so many critics?

More than a decade ago, number one New York Times best-selling author Diana Gabaldon delighted her legions of fans with The Outlandish Companion, an indispensable guide to all the Outlander books at the time. But that edition was just a taste of things to come. Since that publication, there have been four more Outlander novels, a side series, assorted novellas, and one smash-hit Starz original television series. Now Gabaldon serves up The Outlandish Companion, Volume Two, an all-new guide to the latest books in the series.