Showing results by publisher "Penguin Audio" in Literary History & Criticism

An illuminating new biography of one of the greatest American poets of the twentieth century, Elizabeth Bishop Elizabeth Bishop's friend James Merrill once observed that "Elizabeth had more talent for life—and for poetry—than anyone else I've known." This new biography reveals just how she...

A magnificent volume of short novels and an essential World War II report from one of America's great twentieth-century writers A Penguin Classic On the heels of the enormous success of his masterwork The Grapes of Wrath and at the height of the American war effort John Steinbeck, one of the...

Now, with the publication of Homeless in My Heart, Felix Dennis' extraordinary talents have come to fruition - from ironic tales of darkness and savagery to hymns of praise for the glories of nature. Homeless in My Heart fulfils the promise predicted by the author and critic Tom Wolfe, who has called Dennis 'a 21st-century Kipling [whose poetry] rollicks and rolls with rhyme, meter, and melody'.

Andrew Dickson's startlingly original and joyously entertaining Worlds Elsewhere traverses centuries and continents to reveal Shakespeare and his works in a fantastic array of new guises.... Antiapartheid activist, Bollywood screenwriter, Nazi pin-up, hero of the Wild West: this is Shakespeare as you have never seen him before.

*A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * One of The East Hampton Star's 10 Best Books of the Year* From the New York Times bestselling author of The Most Dangerous Book, the true story behind the creation of another masterpiece of world literature, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment...

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2021 BY THE NEW YORKER AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY “[Warmth] is lyrical and erudite, engaging with science, activism, and philosophy . . . [Sherrell] captures the complicated correspondence between hope and doubt, faith and despair—the pendulum of emotional states that...

A collection of essays from historians, linguists, martial artists, and other experts to help you write more compelling fantasy by getting the facts right Whether it's correctly naming the parts of a horse, knowing how lords and ladies address one another, or building a realistic fantasy army...

"A great story--how modernism brought down the regime of censorship--told as a great story. Kevin Birmingham's imaginative scholarship brings Joyce and his world to life. There is a fresh detail on nearly every page."--Louis Menand, Pulitzer prize-winning author of The Metaphysical Club For more...

The power, anger and fluency of Liang Qichao's writings make him one of the towering figures in modern Chinese literature. He saw his great, almost unmanageable task as an attempt to write China into the new era - to provide an ancient country, devastated by civil war and foreign predators, with the intellectual equipment to renew itself. This selection of pieces shows Liang's extraordinary range and the burning sense of mission which drove him on, attempting to galvanize and refresh an entire nation.

To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee is one of the best loved novels of the twentieth century. But for the last fifty years, the novel’s celebrated author, Harper Lee, has said almost nothing on the record. Journalists have trekked to her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, where Harper Lee...

It will come as a surprise to some readers that the greater part of Jorge Luis Borges's extraordinary writing was not in the genres of fiction or poetry, but in the various forms of non-fiction prose. His thousands of pages of essays, reviews, prologues, lectures, and notes on politics and...

From the National Book Award–winning author of Lighthead, Terrance Hayes, a fascinating collection of graphic reviews and illustrated prose addressing the last century of American poetry—to be published simultaneously with his latest poetry collection, So to Speak Canonized, overlooked, and...

A New York Times bestseller The author of the beloved #1 New York Times bestseller Reading Lolita in Tehran returns with the next chapter of her life in books—a passionate and deeply moving hymn to America Ten years ago, Azar Nafisi electrified readers with her multimillion-copy bestseller...

“Kate Zambreno has invented a new form. It is a kind of absolute present, real life captured in closeup.“ —Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature From “one of our most formally ambitious writers” (Esquire), a moving account of caretaking in a time of uncertainty and loss...

A dual-language volume of poems on darkness and light—many appearing in English for the first time—by one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century Revered for his magnificent works of fiction, Jorge Luis Borges thought of himself primarily as a poet. Poems of the Night is a...

A collection of humorous tales about disaster dates features Cheryl's encounter with her date's boa constrictor, Jessica's escape from her blind date out the window of the restaurant bathroom, and Tom's Elvis-obsessed blind date...

A fully illustrated guide to Deborah Harkness's #1 New York Times bestselling All Souls trilogy--"an irresistible . . . wonderfully imaginative grown-up fantasy" (People) A Discovery of Witches introduced Diana Bishop, Oxford scholar and reluctant witch, and vampire geneticist Matthew Clairmont...

One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year THE TRUE BUT UNLIKELY STORIES OF LIVES DEVOTED―ABSURDLY! MELANCHOLICALLY! BEAUTIFULLY!―TO THE RUSSIAN CLASSICS No one who read Elif Batuman's first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. "Babel in California" told the true story of...

Rilke's powerfully touching letters to an aspiring young poet, now available in a beautiful hardcover Penguin edition At the start of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of letters to a young officer cadet, advising him on writing, love, sex, suffering, and the nature of...

A New York Times Notable Book of 2019 A unique exploration of the life and work of Rudyard Kipling in Gilded Age America, from a celebrated scholar of American literature At the turn of the twentieth century, Rudyard Kipling towered over not just English literature but the entire literary world...