A thoroughly revised and expanded edition of Thomas C. Foster's classic guide--a lively and entertaining introduction to literature and literary basics, including symbols, themes and contexts, that shows you how to make your everyday reading experience more rewarding and enjoyable.

While many books can be enjoyed for their basic stories, there are often deeper literary meanings interwoven in these texts. How to Read Literature Like a Professor helps us to discover those hidden truths by looking at literature with the eyes--and the literary codes--of the ultimate professional reader, the college professor.

What does it mean when a literary hero is traveling along a dusty road? When he hands a drink to his companion? When he's drenched in a sudden rain shower?

Ranging from major themes to literary models, narrative devices and form, Thomas C. Foster provides us with a broad overview of literature--a world where a road leads to a quest, a shared meal may signify a communion, and rain, whether cleansing or destructive, is never just a shower-and shows us how to make our reading experience more enriching, satisfying, and fun.

This revised edition includes new chapters, a new preface and epilogue, and incorporates updated teaching points that Foster has developed over the past decade.

A novel is a story transmitted from the novelist to the reader. It offers distraction, entertainment, and an opportunity to unwind or focus. But it can also be something more powerful--a way to learn about how to live. Read at the right moment in your life, a novel can--quite literally--change it.

The Novel Cure is a reminder of that power. To create this apothecary, the authors have trawled two thousand years of literature for novels that effectively promote happiness, health, and sanity, written by brilliant minds who knew what it meant to be human and wrote their life lessons into their fiction. Structured like a reference book, readers simply look up their ailment, be it agoraphobia, boredom, or a midlife crisis, and are given a novel to read as the antidote. Bibliotherapy does not discriminate between pains of the body and pains of the head (or heart). Aware that you've been cowardly? Pick up To Kill a Mockingbird for an injection of courage. Experiencing a sudden, acute fear of death? Read One Hundred Years of Solitude for some perspective on the larger cycle of life. Nervous about throwing a dinner party? Ali Smith's There but for The will convince you that yours could never go that wrong. Whatever your condition, the prescription is simple: a novel (or two), to be read at regular intervals and in nice long chunks until you finish. Some treatments will lead to a complete cure. Others will offer solace, showing that you're not the first to experience these emotions. The Novel Cure is also peppered with useful lists and sidebars recommending the best novels to read when you're stuck in traffic or can't fall asleep, the most important novels to read during every decade of life, and many more.

Brilliant in concept and deeply satisfying in execution, The Novel Cure belongs on everyone's bookshelf and in every medicine cabinet. It will make even the most well-read fiction aficionado pick up a novel he's never heard of, and see familiar ones with new eyes. Mostly, it will reaffirm literature's ability to distract and transport, to resonate and reassure, to change the way we see the world and our place in it.

This appealing and helpful read is guaranteed to double the length of a to-read list and become a go-to reference for those unsure of their reading identities or who are overwhelmed by the sheer number of books in the world.--Library Journal

A beautifully illustrated guide to over seventy-five important journeys in world literature, spanning more than thirty countries and twenty-five hundred years

From Homer's Odyssey, Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, and Cervantes's Don Quixote to Melville's Moby-Dick, Kerouac's On the Road, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah, some of the most powerful works of fiction center on a journey. Extending to the ends of the earth and spanning from ancient Greece to today, Literary Journeys is an enthralling book that takes you on a voyage of discovery through some of the most important journeys in literature. In original essays, an international team of literary critics, scholars, and other writers explore exciting, dangerous, tragic, and uplifting journeys in more than seventy-five classic and popular works of fiction from around the world. Chronologically arranged and gorgeously illustrated throughout with paintings, engravings, photographs, and maps in full color, this captivating book will appeal to readers who have travelled widely, who are planning a trip, or who love armchair travel.

• Contributors include Robert McCrum, Susan Shillinglaw, Maya Jaggi, Robert Holden, Suzanne Conklin Akbari, Alan Taylor, Michael Bourne, Sarah Mesle--and dozens more.

Aspiring writers and readers who have long wondered where the mysterious novelist gets his ideas and what inspires his strangely surreal worlds will be fascinated by this engaging book from the internationally best-selling author. Haruki Murakami now shares with readers his thoughts on the role of the novel in our society; his own origins as a writer; and his musings on the sparks of creativity that inspire other writers, artists, and musicians.

Here are the personal details of a life devoted to craft: the initial moment at a Yakult Swallows baseball game, when he suddenly knew he could write a novel; the importance of memory, what he calls a writer's mental chest of drawers; the necessity of loneliness, patience, and his daily running routine; the seminal role a carrier pigeon played in his career and more.

A Publishers Weekly Best Book of 2019 A Poets & Writers Best Books for Writers

As Jane Alison writes in the introduction to her insightful and appealing book about the craft of writing: For centuries there's been one path through fiction we're most likely to travel― one we're actually told to follow―and that's the dramatic arc: a situation arises, grows tense, reaches a peak, subsides . . . But something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculosexual, no? So many other patterns run through nature, tracing other deep motions in life. Why not draw on them, too?

W. G. Sebald's Emigrants was the first novel to show Alison how forward momentum can be created by way of pattern, rather than the traditional arc--or, in nature, wave. Other writers of nonlinear prose considered in her museum of specimens include Nicholson Baker, Anne Carson, Marguerite Duras, Gabriel García Márquez, Jamaica Kincaid, Clarice Lispector, Susan Minot, David Mitchell, Caryl Phillips, and Mary Robison.

Meander, Spiral, Explode is a singular and brilliant elucidation of literary strategies that also brings high spirits and wit to its original conclusions. It is a liberating manifesto that says, Let's leave the outdated modes behind and, in thinking of new modes, bring feeling back to experimentation. It will appeal to serious readers and writers alike.

A beautiful production: a typographic and calligraphic treat as treasurable as a rare magical text itself. Almost every page is filled with wonder.--Suzi Feay, The Spectator

Grimoires, textbooks of magic and occult knowledge, have existed through the ages alongside other magic and religious texts in part because of the need to create a physical record of magical phenomena, but also to enact magic through spells and rituals. To understand the history of these texts is to understand the influence of the major religions, the development of early science, the cultural influence of print, the growth of literacy, the social impact of colonialism, and the expansion of esoteric cultures across the oceans.

In more than two hundred color illustrations from ancient times to the present, renowned scholar Owen Davies examines little-studied artistic qualities of grimoires, revealing a unique world of design and imagination. The book takes a global approach, considering Egyptian and Greek papyri, ancient Chinese bamboo scripts, South American pulp prints, and Japanese demon encyclopedias, among other examples.

This book will enchant readers interested in the history of magic and science, as well as in book and manuscript history.

Searls's philosophy is ultimately one of freedom--to move beyond mere equivalence, to translate how a text communicates rather than simply what it says.--Max Norman, New Yorker

Avoiding theoretical debates and clichéd metaphors, award-winning translator Damion Searls has written a fresh, approachable, and convincing account of what translation really is and what translators actually do. As the translator of sixty books from multiple languages, Searls has spent decades grappling with words on the most granular level: nouns and verbs, accents on people's names, rhymes, rhythm, untranslatable cultural nuances. Here, he connects a wealth of specific examples to larger philosophical issues of reading and perception. Translation, he argues, is fundamentally a way of reading--but reading is much more than taking in information, and translating is far from a mechanical process of converting one word to another. This sharp and inviting exploration of the theory and practice of translation is for anyone who has ever marveled at the beauty, force, and movement of language.

A uniquely personal account of the life and enduring legacy of the Renaissance library

With the advent of print in the fifteenth century, Europe's cultural elite assembled personal libraries as refuges from persecutions and pandemics. Andrew Hui tells the remarkable story of the Renaissance studiolo--a little studio--and reveals how these spaces dedicated to self-cultivation became both a remedy and a poison for the soul.

Blending fresh, insightful readings of literary and visual works with engaging accounts of his life as an insatiable bookworm, Hui traces how humanists from Petrarch to Machiavelli to Montaigne created their own intimate studies. He looks at imaginary libraries in Rabelais, Cervantes, Shakespeare, and Marlowe, and discusses how Renaissance painters depicted the Virgin Mary and St. Jerome as saintly bibliophiles. Yet writers of the period also saw a dark side to solitary reading. It drove Don Quixote to madness, Prospero to exile, and Faustus to perdition. Hui draws parallels with our own age of information surplus and charts the studiolo's influence on bibliographic fabulists like Jorge Luis Borges and Umberto Eco.

Beautifully illustrated, The Study is at once a celebration of bibliophilia and a critique of bibliomania. Incorporating perspectives on Islamic, Mughal, and Chinese book cultures, it offers a timely and eloquent meditation on the ways we read and misread today.

With the infectious curiosity of an inveterate bibliophile and the prose of a fine stylist, Donna Seaman charts the course of her early reading years in a book-by-book chronicle of the significance books have held in her life. River of Books recounts Seaman's journey in becoming an editor for Booklist, a reviewer, an author, and a literary citizen, and lays bare how she nourished both body and soul in working with books. Seaman makes palpable the power and self-recognition that she discovered in a life dedicated to reading.

Fictional stories have long held an uncanny power over hearts and minds, especially those of young people. In Dangerous Fictions, Lyta Gold traces arguments both historical and contemporary that have labeled fiction as dark, immoral, frightening, or poisonous. Within each she asks: How dangerous is fiction, really? And what about it provokes waves of moral panic and even censorship?

Gold argues that any panic about art is largely a disguised panic about power. There have been versions of these same fights over fiction for centuries. By exposing fiction as a social danger and a battleground of immediate public concern, we can see what each side really wants--the right to shape the future of a world deeply in flux and a distraction from more pressing material concerns about money, access, and the hard work of politics.

From novels about people driven insane by reading novels to copaganda TV shows that influence how viewers regard the police, Gold uses her signature wit, research, and fearless commentary to point readers toward a more substantial question: Fiction may be dangerous to us, but aren't we also dangerous to it?

Find creative inspiration in this fascinating rummage through the wastebaskets, secret diaries, and abandoned files of 20 literary superstars.

If you like to write--whether it's a pastime, a passion, or a profession--you've probably found yourself reading something brilliant and thinking, I could never do this! I might as well give up. But if there's one thing every great author has in common, it's this: they've all written some hot garbage.

In Revisionaries, a writing expert takes you on an engrossing tour through the discarded drafts, false starts, and abandoned projects of influential writers. In the process, he dismantles some of our most deeply held--and most suffocating--ideas about what it takes to produce great creative work. You'll learn that:

• Franz Kafka lacked confidence
• Octavia Butler had writer's block
• F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote bad drafts
• Ralph Ellison got overwhelmed
• Louisa May Alcott got off to a bad start
• And more deep, dark secrets about the authors you most admire

Karr is a national treasure--that rare genius who's also a brilliant teacher. This joyful celebration of memoir packs transcendent insights with trademark hilarity. Anyone yearning to write will be inspired, and anyone passionate to live an examined life will fall in love with language and literature all over again. -- George Saunders

Credited with sparking the current memoir explosion, Mary Karr's The Liars' Club spent more than a year at the top of the New York Times list. She followed with two other smash bestsellers: Cherry and Lit, which were critical hits as well.

For thirty years Karr has also taught the form, winning teaching prizes at Syracuse. (The writing program there produced such acclaimed authors as Cheryl Strayed, Keith Gessen, and Koren Zailckas.) In The Art of Memoir, she synthesizes her expertise as professor and therapy patient, writer and spiritual seeker, recovered alcoholic and black belt sinner, providing a unique window into the mechanics and art of the form that is as irreverent, insightful, and entertaining as her own work in the genre.

Anchored by excerpts from her favorite memoirs and anecdotes from fellow writers' experience, The Art of Memoir lays bare Karr's own process. (Plus all those inside stories about how she dealt with family and friends get told-- and the dark spaces in her own skull probed in depth.) As she breaks down the key elements of great literary memoir, she breaks open our concepts of memory and identity, and illuminates the cathartic power of reflecting on the past; anybody with an inner life or complicated history, whether writer or reader, will relate.

Joining such classics as Stephen King's On Writing and Anne Lamott's Bird by Bird, The Art of Memoir is an elegant and accessible exploration of one of today's most popular literary forms--a tour de force from an accomplished master pulling back the curtain on her craft.

What is the heroine's journey? How is it different from the hero's journey? What makes Harry Potter different from Star Wars? Twilight from Wonder Woman?

New York Times and USA Today bestselling author Gail Carriger uses her comedic style to explore the mythological foundation of one of the most joyful and powerful narrative structures we have access to as storytellers. She teaches how to identify, write, and utilize the heroine's journey to recover from writer's block.

FIX YOUR STORY

Explore hidden messages. Learn hacks and tips to improve your writing and make it more commercially viable. Gain insight into under-studied story arcs, tropes, characters, archetypes, and modern market desires.

CHANGE YOUR PERSPECTIVE

Guaranteed to make you look at plot structure in books, video games, movies, and TV differently for the rest of your life.

Take control of narrative while redefining notions of strength and identity. This book will change how you write, read, watch, interact, and think about genre fiction and the world around you.

With over a dozen NYT and USA Today bestsellers and over a million books in print, popular genre author and former archaeologist Gail Carriger brings her cheeky comedic tone and over a decade of making her living as a fiction author to this fascinating look at one of the most popular yet neglected narratives of our time.

A marvelous analysis of screenwriting and, with any luck, should help a great many people achieve their dreams. --Julian Fellowes, creator of Downton Abbey

With examples ranging from The Godfather to True Detective, Mad Men to Macbeth, and fairy tales to Forbrydelsen (The Killing), John Yorke utilizes Shakespearean five-act structure as a key to analyzing all storytelling in all narrative forms, from film and television to theatre and novel-writing--a big step from the usual three-act approach. Chapters here include:

• Three-Act Structure
• Five-Act Structure
• The Importance of Change
• How We Tell Stories
• The Inciting Incident
• Putting It All Together
• Character and Characterization
• Exposition
• Subtext
• And much more!

Into the Woods is destined to sit alongside David Mamet's Three Uses of the Knife, Robert McKee's Story, Syd Field's Screenplay, and Lajos Egri's The Art of Dramatic Writing as one of the most original, useful, and inspiring books ever on dramatic writing.

Brilliant on story structure. --Ken Follett, New York Times bestselling author

Many books have become classics, must-reads, or overnight publishing sensations, but how many can genuinely claim to have changed the way we see and think?

In 100 Books that Changed the World, authors Scott Christianson and Colin Salter bring together an exceptional collection of truly ground-breaking books--from scriptures that founded religions, to scientific treatises that challenged beliefs, to novels that kick-started literary genres. This elegantly designed book, first published in 2018 but updated with an exciting new cover, offers a chronological timeline of three millennia of human thought distilled in print, from the earliest illuminated manuscripts to the age of eBooks and audiobooks.

Entries include:

• The Iliad and The Odyssey, Homer (750 BC)
• Shakespeare's First Folio (1623)
• A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft (1792)
• Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass (1845)
• The Diary of a Young Girl, Anne Frank (1947)
• Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe (1958)
• A Brief History of Time, Stephen Hawking (1988)

A Wolfson History Prize Finalist
A New Statesman Book of the Year
A Sunday Times Book of the Year

Timely and authoritative...I enjoyed it immensely.
--Philip Pullman

If you care about books, and if you believe we must all stand up to the destruction of knowledge and cultural heritage, this is a brilliant read--both powerful and prescient.
--Elif Shafak

Libraries have been attacked since ancient times but they have been especially threatened in the modern era, through war as well as willful neglect. Burning the Books describes the deliberate destruction of the knowledge safeguarded in libraries from Alexandria to Sarajevo, from smashed Assyrian tablets to the torching of the Library of Congress. The director of the world-famous Bodleian Libraries, Richard Ovenden, captures the political, religious, and cultural motivations behind these acts. He also shines a light on the librarians and archivists preserving history and memory, often risking their lives in the process.

More than simply repositories for knowledge, libraries support the rule of law and inspire and inform citizens. Ovenden reminds us of their social and political importance, challenging us to protect and support these essential institutions.

Wonderful...full of good stories and burning with passion.
--Sunday Times

The sound of a warning vibrates through this book.
--The Guardian

Essential reading for anyone concerned with libraries and what Ovenden outlines as their role in 'the support of democracy, the rule of law and open society.'
--Wall Street Journal

Ovenden emphasizes that attacks on books, archives, and recorded information are the usual practice of authoritarian regimes.
--Michael Dirda, Washington Post

When the New York Times referred to Ursula K. Le Guin as America's greatest writer of science fiction, they just might have undersold her legacy. It's hard to look at her vast body of work?novels and stories across multiple genres, poems, translations, essays, speeches, and criticism?and see anything but one of our greatest writers, period.

In a series of interviews with David Naimon (Between the Covers), Le Guin discusses craft, aesthetics, and philosophy in her fiction, poetry, and nonfiction respectively. The discussions provide ample advice and guidance for writers of every level, but also give Le Guin a chance to to sound off on some of her favorite subjects: the genre wars, the patriarchy, the natural world, and what, in her opinion, makes for great writing. With excerpts from her own books and those that she looked to for inspiration, this volume is a treat for Le Guin's longtime readers, a perfect introduction for those first approaching her writing, and a tribute to her incredible life and work.

***2023 Bram Stoker Awards(R) Winner***

The Ultimate List of Must-Read Horror

Curious readers and fans of monsters and the macabre, get ready to bulk up your TBR piles! Sadie Mother Horror Hartmann has curated the best selection of modern horror books, including plenty of deep cuts. Indulge your heart's darkest desires to be terrified, unsettled, disgusted, and heartbroken with stories that span everything from paranormal hauntings and creepy death cults to small-town terrors and apocalyptic disasters. Each recommendation includes a full synopsis as well as a quick overview of the book's themes, style, and tone so you can narrow down your next read at a glance. Featuring a foreword by New York Times bestselling author Josh Malerman and five brand-new essays from rising voices in the genre, this illustrated reader's guide is perfect for anyone who dares to delve into the dark.