Best British & Irish Literary Criticism

Authentic and updated -- nearly one third of the maps are new, and the text is fully revised -- the atlas illuminates the enchanted world created in THE SILMARILLION, THE HOBBIT, and THE LORD OF THE RINGS. Karen Wynn Fonstad is a qualified geographer and cartographer who first mapped Middle-Earth in 1981 and has since added much new detail based on those endless volumes of drafts, abandoned passages, alternative versions, and laundry lists published since Tolkien's death.

Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life is the first book to explore the origins of Beatrix Potter’s love of gardening and plants and show how this passion came to be reflected in her work. a biography written through plants.” — The New York Times Book Review “With wit and expertise, McDowell highlights the stamp of Potter’s horticultural know-how on her indelible books and chronicles a year in her exuberant gardens to create a visually exciting, pleasurably informative appreciation of Potter’s devotion to art and nature.” — Booklist. “A richly illustrated exploration of Beatrix Potter’s evolution as an author-illustrator, gardener, sheep farmer and land preservationist.” — Shelf Awareness. “In her new book, Beatrix Potter’s Gardening Life , Marta McDowell expands our knowledge of Miss Potter horticultural expertise and background, explaining what she grew and where. The book recounts Potter’s life through a gardening lens and is copiously illustrated with her sketches and watercolors of plants.” — American Gardener. From a watercolor of Jemima Puddle-duck hiding from a fox among the foxgloves, to sepia photos of Potter strolling the garden paths on a frosty morning, the book is a visual delight.” — The Seattle Times.

And it breathed new life into a holiday that had fallen into disfavor, undermined by lingering Puritanism and the cold modernity of the Industrial Revolution. With warmth, wit, and an infusion of Christmas cheer, Les Standiford whisks us back to Victorian England, its most beloved storyteller, and the birth of the Christmas we know best. As Tiny Tim might say, ‘God Bless Everyone,’ in this case Standiford, for creating such a delightful and engaging gem—part history, part literary analysis, and all heart, just like the book that inspired it.”. —Madeleine Blais, winner of the Pulitzer Prize and author of Uphill Walkers --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps--a community devoted exclusively to sickness--as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. “[Woods’s translation] succeeds in capturing the beautiful cadence of [Mann’s] ironically elegant prose.” – Washington Post Book World.

A new single-volume edition of an early anti-slavery novel When Prince Oroonoko’s passion for the virtuous Imoinda arouses the jealousy of his grandfather, the lovers are cast into slavery and transported from Africa to the colony of Surinam. She wrote poetry, short stories, stage plays, and political propaganda for the Tory party, as well as her great amorous and political novel, Love Letters Between a Nobleman and His Sister .

In her Introduction, Spacks considers Austen’s life and career, the continuing appeal of Pride and Prejudice , and its power as a stimulus for fantasy (Maureen Dowd, writing in The New York Times , can hold forth at length on Obama as a Darcy-figure, knowing full well her readers will “understand that she wished to suggest glamour and sexiness”). Reading Pride and Prejudice with Spacks as a guide illuminates the richness of Austen's historical context, as the annotations draw attention to important material that might initially be missed...This beautifully produced and informative guide to reading Austen's brilliant and beloved novel in its historical context will be a welcome addition to the library of anyone who has read, or plans to read, Pride and Prejudice more than once...Both specialists and fans will find it a great pleasure to read, learn from, and argue with Spacks's annotated edition of this classic novel. So interesting and comprehensive are Spacks's notes on Austen, she could conceivably even introduce the author to a few male readers who might otherwise have veered away from all the bonnets and ruffles...Spacks is fascinating on the topic of Austen, and especially on the author's deft use of dialogue and observation to layer dense levels of meaning into her stories, the notes do open up new vistas of enjoyment and understanding, especially for those approaching the goings-on at Longbourn for the first time...Spacks's notes can be invaluable...For history buffs and period fetishists, who must surely comprise some significant part of the audience for historical romance, this annotated Pride and Prejudice is a treasure trove...This edition should prove equally refreshing to even the most ardent of Miss Bennet's amateur readers. A treat for the legions of Jane Austen enthusiasts, Pride and Prejudice: The Annotated Edition is an oversized volume packed with period illustrations and notation, illuminating the text and the life of Austen. [A] handsomely produced annotated edition...Spacks' annotations are illuminating...The dozens of illustrations--a watercolor of Austen by her sister, for example, and images of late 18th-century drawing rooms--add a layer of visual delight and edification to the clarifying notes Spacks offers. Austen's most famous novel needs no introduction, but it does benefit from the hundreds of loving notes--historical references, vocab tips, and more--provided by Austen scholar Patricia Meyer Spacks.

Combining the best of Hitchens's polemical punch and intellectual elegance in a tightly woven and subtle argument, this book addresses not only why Orwell matters today, but how he will continue to matter in a future, uncertain world.Christopher Hitchens, one of the most incisive minds of our own age, meets Orwell on the page in this provocative encounter of wit, contention and moral truth. Christopher Hitchens is a contributing editor to Vanity Fair .

Unfurling like a medieval book of days, each page of Eduardo Galeano's Children of the Days has an illuminating story that takes inspiration from that date of the calendar year, resurrecting the heroes and heroines who have fallen off the historical map, but whose lives remind us of our darkest hours and sweetest victories. His writing is full of candour, empathy, humane concern and also predictable convictions Herein lies Galeano's central appeal: he evokes the marvels of a remarkable world that is not so bad after all.” Financial Times “The stories themselves, broken into pieces, present both Galeano's aesthetic and his view of history. The impact of this literary approach to the history of violent disappearances is a lasting and universal one.” The Independent (UK). Good and evil, beauty and ugliness, generosity and greed-all are juxtaposed to great effect.... [T]his is a heady portrait of the human story rendered in broad, though no less incisive and affecting, strokes." Children of the Days , his Calendar of Human History, is an immensely varied gathering of facts and oddments and truths and stories of every kind. He keeps me morally awake, while also lifting my spirits with his ability to reveal in story-form the deep, sweet humanity which rebounds even after the cruelest moments of history. Reading Galeano, I'm often reminded of Joseph Conrad's claims for what writing should do: 'art itself may be defined as a single-minded attempt to render the highest kind of justice to the visible universe, by bringing to light the truth, manifold and one, underlying its every aspect.'. "It's May, but this is a Christmas kind of a book: giftable, covetable, hefty, handsome, a veritable plum pudding of a thing, its lovely midnight-blue cover designed to look as though dotted with stars, or perhaps dusted with sugar, and slathered all over with generous custardy recommendations from both Philip Pullman and John Berger... Galeano chronicles events and anniversaries from the history of oppressed nations, adding the odd dash of fictional fun and philosophical musing... "Galeano's genre is his own - a mixture of fiction, journalism and history that, as always, is conveyed in orderly fragments of various sizes and is best understood as an outgrowth of his first midteen self-expressions as a socialist cartoonist. If you think of every short individual Galeano piece in the mammoth collection of them that comprises his life's work as a kind of verbal cartoon - or a set of variations on a verbal cartoon - then you understand both the striking singularity of his work and its innovation...Galeano's fire is unquenched.

"On what slender threads do life and fortune hang" Thrown in prison for a crime he has not committed, Edmond Dantes is confined to the grim fortress of If. Robin Buss (1939–2006) was a writer and translator who worked for the Independent on Sunday and as television critic for the Times Educational Supplement .

This is the first volume of a new prose translation of Dante's epic - the first in twenty-five years. 'This new edition of Inferno is distinctly user-friendly....Serious students-in or out of the classroom-who...examine the original poem alongside a readable and reliable prose translation will find this edition excellently suited to their needs.'. 'Like the Inferno edition that preceded it, the Durling-Martinez Purgatorio, with its beautiful translation and superb apparatus of notes, is simply the best edition of Dante's second canticle in English. --David Young, translator of The Poetry of Petrarch "Durling and Martinez deliver Paradiso in elegant English prose faithful to Dante's Italian. --Michael Wyatt, author of The Italian Encounter with Tudor England "At the end of his poem Dante claims that his 'high imagining failed of power,' but Durling and Martinez have suffered no such fate in completing their translation of the Divine Comedy .

The characteristics, behavior, habits, and habitats of gnomes are pictured and described in a complete survey of gnome life, gnome history, and gnome lore. Text: English, Dutch (translation).

Included are a detailed map of nineteenth-century St. Petersburg, selections from Dostoevsky’s notebooks and letters, and a crucial passage from an early draft of his novel. Fyodor Dostoevsky wrote The Brothers Karamazov, Crime and Punishment, The Idiot, and many other novels.

A #1 international bestseller in the vein of Fredrik Bachman's A Man Called Ove. : an irresistible, funny, charming, and tender-hearted tale about friendship, love, and an old man who is young at heart. A bestselling phenomenon that has captured imaginations around the world, The Secret Diary of Hendrik Groen is inspiring, charming, and laugh-out-loud funny with a deep and poignant core: a page-turning delight for readers of any age.