"An exploration of the nature of reading by critic and scholar Heather Cass White"--

Hamlet is commonly, regarded as one of the greatest plays ever written. Drawing on Danish chronicles and the Elizabethan vogue for revenge tragedy, Shakespeare created a play that is at once a philosophic treatise, a family drama, and a supernatural thriller. In the wake of his father's death, Prince Hamlet finds that his Uncle Claudius has swiftly taken the throne and married his mother, Queen Gertrude. The ghost of the dead king then, appears and...

Likely written around 1607 or 1608 and attributed at least in part to Shakespeare, "Pericles, Prince of Tyre" is an adventure-filled play that follows the extended sailing journeys of a young prince. Pericles, a young prince from Phoenicia, is forced to flee Antioch when he correctly guesses a riddle that reveals the incestuous activity of King Antiochus. Unable to stay at home in Tyre because of Antiochus' vengeance, he sails away and ends up shipwrecked...

"An examination of how the romantic narrative from Pride and Prejudice was born out of Gothic horror, how it influenced pop culture since its publishing, and how it has reinforced harmful cultural concepts of real-life romance"--

In its front-page review of Alternating Current, The New York Times Book Review called Octavio Paz "an intellectual literary one-man band" for his ability to write incisively and with dazzling originality about a wide range of subjects. This collection of his essays is divided into three parts. Part 1 sets forth his credo as an artist and poet, steeped in his knowledge of world literature and Mexican art and history and buttressed by readings of writers...

Uncensored: Views & (Re)views is Joyce Carol Oates's most candid gathering of prose pieces since (Woman) Writer: Occasions & Opportunities. Her ninth book of nonfiction, it brings together thirty-eight diverse and provocative pieces from the New York Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement, and the New York Times Book Review.

Oates states in her preface, "In the essay or review, the dynamic of storytelling is hidden but not

...

"World-renowned folklorist Maria Tatar reveals an astonishing but long buried history of heroines, taking us from Cassandra and Scheherazade to Nancy Drew and Wonder Woman. How do we explain our newfound cultural investment in empathy and social justice? For decades, Joseph Campbell had defined our cultural aspirations in The Hero with a Thousand Faces, emphasizing the value of seeking glory and earning immortality. His work became the playbook for...

"This is a book about the importance of fiction not alone as an aesthetic phenomenon but as a means of knowledge and discovery. The book argues that superior fiction is able to rise to levels of understanding-of worldly events, of human relationships, of human nature itself-unavailable to other disciplines or forms of learning. It goes on to argue that especially in our day, a time when so many various ideas are afloat, fiction is of the greatest...

"Considers twenty-one elements of the Sierra Nevada-from granite to aspen to a species of butterfly-in pairs of essays. The first looks at the natural history and science of each element; the second treats the element through poetry and the lens of mysticism. Interwoven are vignettes from a 2017 backpacking trip"--Provided by publisher