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"A nuanced, passionate exploration of the life and work of one of the most misunderstood writers of the twentieth century. Sylvia Plath is an object of enduring cultural fascination--the troubled patron saint of confessional poetry, a writer whose genius is buried under the weight of her status as the quintessential literary sad girl. Emily Van Duyne--a superfan and scholar--radically reimagines the last years of Plath's life, confronts her suicide...

"With a history stretching back nearly 1,500 years, Japan literature encompasses a vast range of forms and genres. Since the eighth century, poetry and the non-philosophical lyric voice have occupied a central position in Japanese literary expression. The art of narrative blossomed in the eleventh century with one of the world's great literary masterpieces, Murasaki Shikibu's The Tale of Genji and later in the work of the great modern novelists Natsume...

"A delightful romp through the Shakespeare authorship question, exploring how doubting that William Shakespeare wrote the plays attributed to him became an act of blasphemy... and who the Bard might really be"-- Provided by publisher.

In the first major history of crime fiction in fifty years, The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and their Creators traces the evolution of the genre from the eighteenth century to the present, offering brand-new perspective on the world's most popular form of fiction. "The Life of Crime is the result of a lifetime of reading and enjoying all types of crime fiction, old and new, from around the world. In what will surely be regarded...

"A fun, illustrated history of the umbrella's surprising place in life and literature. Humans have been making, using, perfecting, and decorating umbrellas for millennia--holding them over the heads of rulers, signalling class distinctions, and exploring their full imaginative potential in folk tales and novels. In the spirit of the best literary gift books, Brolliology is a beautifully designed and illustrated tour through literature and history....

"The Serpent and the Fire breaks out of deeply entrenched models that limit 'American' literature to work written in English within the present boundaries of the United States. Editors Jerome Rothenberg and Javier Taboada gather vital pieces from all parts of the Western Hemisphere and the range of European and Indigenous languages within: a unique range of cultures and languages going back several millennia, an experiment in what the editors call...

"A collection of ten essays by the poet Jane Hirshfield, about reading and understanding poetry, and about the power of poetry"-- Provided by publisher.

"The Great American Read: The book of books celebrates America's 100 best-loved novels--the books whose ideas, characters, and themes have shaped our country and reflect it back to us. This companion volume to PBS's series The Great American Read profiles the books, their authors, and their impact on our culture, as well as the little-known stories about how they came to be..."--Dust jacket.

"Over the last decade William Giraldi has established himself as a charismatic and uncompromising literary essayist. American Audacity gathers Giraldi's fierce and witty considerations of American writers and themes, including a never-before-published appreciation of James Baldwin and an introductory call to arms for twenty-first-century American literature. With deep seeing and enormous learning, Giraldi considers giants from the past (Herman Melville,...

"Offering an ecofeminist approach to the interdisciplinary readings of the early to mid-Victorian Gothic of canonical narratives as well as ephemeral penny bloods and dreadfuls, Nicole C. Dittmer identifies assumed "monstrous" women as monistic mind-body figurations who reject social confines and reclaim nature"-- Provided by publisher.