Best Literary Criticism

One of The New York Times Book Review 's 10 Best Books of the Year Millions of readers of Little House on the Prairie believe they know Laura Ingalls―the pioneer girl who survived blizzards and near-starvation on the Great Plains, and the woman who wrote the famous autobiographical books. It was only in her sixties, after losing nearly everything in the Great Depression, that she turned to children’s books, recasting her hardscrabble childhood as a celebratory vision of homesteading―and achieving fame and fortune in the process, in one of the most astonishing rags-to-riches episodes in American letters. “An absorbing new biography [that] deserves recognition as an essential text.... For anyone who has drifted into thinking of Wilder’s ‘Little House’ books as relics of a distant and irrelevant past, reading Prairie Fires will provide a lasting cure.... Richly documented (it contains 85 pages of notes), it is a compelling, beautifully written story.... One of the more interesting aspects of this wonderfully insightful book is its delineation of the fraught relationship between Wilder and her deeply disturbed, often suicidal daughter. We’ve long understood the Little House series to be a great American story, but Caroline Fraser brings it unprecedented new context, as she masterfully chronicles the life of Laura Ingalls Wilder and her family alongside the complicated history of our nation.

A delightful Christmas storybook for adults based on the action-packed Die Hard movie. All John McClane wants for Christmas is to reunite with his estranged family. Author: Doogie Horner is a comedian, author, and illustrator.

A Goodreads Choice Awards nominee. David Sedaris tells all in a book that is, literally, a lifetime in the making For forty years, David Sedaris has kept a diary in which he records everything that captures his attention-overheard comments, salacious gossip, soap opera plot twists, secrets confided by total strangers. These are the three stages that all artists - with some variation - go through in their careers...So it's encouraging to read 25 years of David Sedaris's diaries, and not just because he manages to defeat Bloat. But through all 25 years of "Theft by Finding" - of soap opera addictions and spider feeding, family kookiness (Sedaris notes the day Charles Addams dies; it feels like the passing of a baton) and language lessons - Sedaris's developing voice is the lifeline that pulls him through the murk." Yet David Sedaris has somehow pulled it off...with eviscerating wit and radiant humanity...Fans will no doubt delight in the entries that will turn into Sedaris's most beloved essays." "Sedaris fans will thrill to this opportunity to poke around in the writer's personal diaries, which he has faithfully kept for four decades and used as raw material for his hilarious nonfiction as well as his performances." "Sedaris' diaries are the wellspring for his cuttingly funny autobiographical essays, and he now presents a mesmerizing volume of deftly edited passages...Sedaris is caustically witty about his bad habits and artistic floundering...A candid, socially incisive, and sharply amusing chronicle of the evolution of an arresting comedic artist." "A David Sedaris book is always a welcome addition to any personal library - his hilarity, his self-deprecation, his compassion for (and amusement with) the human condition, and his clear joy at making his readers laugh out loud are all what make a David Sedaris book great.

A beautifully illustrated guide to more than 75 of the world's most celebrated, rare, and seminal books and handwritten manuscripts ever produced, with discussions of their purpose, features, and creators. Michael Collins is a native of Ireland and studied theology at the University College Dublin.

A brilliant book by Nobel Prize winner Eric R. Kandel, The Age of Insight takes us to Vienna 1900, where leaders in science, medicine, and art began a revolution that changed forever how we think about the human mind—our conscious and unconscious thoughts and emotions—and how mind and brain relate to art. Kandel tells the story of how these pioneers—Freud, Schnitzler, Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele—inspired by the Vienna School of Medicine, in turn influenced the founders of the Vienna School of Art History to ask pivotal questions such as What does the viewer bring to a work of art? Kandel, one of the leading scientific thinkers of our time, places these five innovators in the context of today’s cutting-edge science and gives us a new understanding of the modernist art of Klimt, Kokoschka, and Schiele, as well as the school of thought of Freud and Schnitzler. Advance praise for The Age of Insight “Eric Kandel has succeeded in a brilliant synthesis that would have delighted and fascinated Freud: Using Viennese culture of the twentieth century as a lens, he examines the intersections of psychology, neuroscience, and art. No one else could have written this book—all its readers will be amply rewarded.” —Howard Gardner, Hobbs Professor of Cognition and Education, Harvard Graduate School of Education “Eric Kandel’s training as a psychiatrist and his vast knowledge of how the brain works enrich this thoroughly original exploration of the relationship between the birth of psychoanalysis, Austrian Expressionism, and Modernism in Vienna.” —Margaret Livingstone, Professor of Neurobiology, Harvard Medical School “This is the book that Charles Darwin would have produced, had he chosen to write about art and aesthetics. ‘I don’t render the visible,’ said Paul Klee, ‘I make visible.’ He echoed Edna St. Vincent Millay’s ‘Euclid alone looked on beauty bare.’ Eric Kandel is of that company.” —Frederic Morton “Nobel laureate Eric Kandel’s path-setting exploration of the connections between neuroscience and the painters Gustav Klimt, Egon Schiele and Oskar Kokoschka establishes a new frontier in the study of this all-important historical period. The shift toward a biological conception of self, which began in Vienna over a hundred years ago, has since decisively shaped our understanding of human nature.” — Jane Kallir, director, Galerie St. Etienne “With infectuous enthusiasm and limitless reverence for his multiple subjects, Kandel deftly steers the reader through a vast and inviting territory of science, the creative process, the mind, emotion, eroticism, empathy, feminism, and the unconscious.

Our modern image of Santa Claus as a bearded, plump, jolly figure can be traced back to Moore’s famous description of St. Nick: "He had a broad face, and a little round belly, that shook when he laughed, like a bowl full of jelly." PreS Up–Spirin's richly colored and ornate colored-pencil and watercolor illustrations opposite each page of text place this version of the classic poem in a nostalgic, 18th-century European town.

Formatted in an easy-to use A-to-Z layout, this guide is packed with information and thrilling comic book art and features more than 1,100 characters including Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, The Joker, and much more.

As an immigrant from Poland to England, and in travels from Malaya to Congo to the Caribbean, Conrad navigated an interconnected world, and captured it in a literary oeuvre of extraordinary depth. In a compelling blend of history, biography, and travelogue, Maya Jasanoff follows Conrad’s routes and the stories of his four greatest works— The Secret Agent , Lord Jim , Heart of Darkness , and Nostromo . “Brilliant…Jasanoff is an insightful and imaginative historian…The book comes in the form of a biography of Joseph Conrad, but in fact through Conrad she tells the story of a whole phase in world history…Boundless curiosity is also an attribute of Maya Jasanoff...[Her] travels have given her an empathy and an understanding for Conrad, and also for the victims of imperialism, that breathe on every page of this magnificent book…This is the best book on Conrad since [Ian] Watt’s. “Enlightening, compassionate, superb” —John Le Carré “With wit, nuance, and roving insight, Harvard historian Maya Jasanoff’s The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World maps the massively influential and controversial author’s life and work, finding that the themes of his time—dislocation and connection, immigration and xenophobia, power and powerlessness—uncannily mirror our own.” — Megan O’Grady, Vogue.com’s 10 Best Books of 2017 “[A] brilliant study . “[Jasanoff] Skillfully integrates details of Conrad’s life and accounts of his four greatest works, linking the challenges and forces that lie behind and within the novels to those of the 21st century…A powerful encouragement to read his books.” —. The Economist “This is an unobtrusively skillful, subtle, clear-eyed book, beautifully narrated…It is Jasanoff’s warmth towards her subject that comes through.” — Financial Times. “[Conrad’s] life story has been told many times, but Maya Jasanoff’s stands out for its vivid and imaginative writing…she provides rich background details on multiple topics…her attempts to reveal the hidden springs of Conrad’s fiction are often perceptive.” — Sunday Times (UK). “A great biography of Conrad for our times could never be just a biography of Conrad. To read it is to be a stowaway in the hull of a ship sailing from Conrad’s times to our own, as swift as the wind.” —Jill Lepore “In Dawn Watch , Maya Jasanoff has fashioned a singular craft for exploring the rapids and crosscurrents of a newly globalized era. The journey is intellectually exhilarating, and brings us to a richer understanding not only of Conrad’s world but our own.” —Kwame Anthony Appiah "Maya Jasanoff’s masterpiece....one of the most important books on colonialism to be written in our time, and by one of our most brilliant young historians." Maya Jasanoff is an eloquent historian and an erudite storyteller; she almost persuaded me to re-read Nostromo .” —Geoff Dyer “Jasanoff has done her research on sea and land as well as in the archives, and her book is often thrilling to read as it travels the world with Conrad. An admirable and profoundly meditated biography, worthy of its subject.” —Claire Tomalin “A guided tour of the underside of empire, led by the fiction of Joseph Conrad and the erudition of Maya Jasanoff, The Dawn Watch is history, biography, and adventure story.

In this beautifully illustrated compendium of all things Outlandish, Gabaldon covers the first four novels of the main series, including: • full synopses of Outlander, Dragonfly in Amber, Voyager, and Drums of Autumn • a complete listing of the characters (fictional and historical) in the first four novels in the series, as well as family trees and genealogical notes. • a comprehensive glossary and pronunciation guide to Gaelic terms and usage. • The Gabaldon Theory of Time Travel, explained. • frequently asked questions to the author and her (sometimes surprising) answers. • an annotated bibliography. • essays about medicine and magic in the eighteenth century, researching historical fiction, creating characters, and more. • professionally cast horoscopes for Jamie and Claire. • the making of the TV series: how we got there from here, and what happened next (including “My Brief Career as a TV Actor”). • behind-the-scenes photos from the Outlander TV series set. For anyone who wants to spend more time with the Outlander characters and the world they inhabit, Diana Gabaldon here opens a door through the standing stones and offers a guided tour of what lies within. For nine years, four books, and nearly 4,000 pages, Diana Gabaldon has entranced readers with her talent for historical authenticity, dramatic plot lines, and strong characters in the Outlander series.

A delightful Christmas storybook for adults based on the action-packed Die Hard movie. All John McClane wants for Christmas is to reunite with his estranged family. Author: Doogie Horner is a comedian, author, and illustrator.

Includes seven books in one volume: the full texts of. Slouching Towards Bethlehem; The White Album; Salvador; Miami; After Henry; Political Fictions; and Where I Was From. The White Album covers the revolutionary politics and the “contemporary wasteland” of the late sixties and early seventies, in pieces on the Manson family, the Black Panthers, and Hollywood. “[Didion’s is] one of the most recognizable—and brilliant—literary styles to emerge in America during the past four decades . Didion has remained a clearheaded and original writer all her long life.”. — Newsweek. They come at you, if not from ambush, then in gnomic haikus, ice pick laser beams, or waves. Even the space on the page around these sentences is more interesting than it ought to be, as if to square a sandbox for a Sphinx.”. —from the Introduction by John Leonard.