Showing results by publisher "Random House Audio" in Literary History & Criticism

The cats of America are under siege! Long gone are the good old days when a cat’s biggest worries were mean dogs or a bath. Modern cats must confront satanists, online predators, the possibility of needing to survive in a post-apocalyptic wasteland, and countless other threats to their nine...

From the much-acclaimed novelist and essayist, a beautifully rendered, poignant collection of personal essays, chronicling immigrant and Iranian-American life in our contemporary moment. Novelist Porochista Khakpour's family moved to Los Angeles after fleeing the Iranian Revolution, giving up...

With the writers of the Golden Age as her guides—Pushkin, Tolstoy, Gogol, and Turgenev, among others—Sara Wheeler searches for a Russia not in the news, traveling from rinsed northwestern beet fields and the Far Eastern Arctic tundra to the cauldron of nation­alities, religions, and...

Western thought on leadership is trait-oriented; it emphasizes the importance of ‘being a leader’. Indian leadership offers a contrast―it focuses on the ‘exercise of leadership’. Power Within introspects on this practice as it captures the civilizational wisdom of Bharat through the...

Get more out of reading with this radical guide to shelf-improvement, which reveals your core preferences and helps you choose books based on why you read, not what you’ve read before. Includes the viral quiz taken by more than two million people! Read Your Color introduces a six-type system...

A sweeping and intellectually rigorous work of literary criticism that moves the field forward, from one of the preeminent public scholars “[Said’s] book is relaxed and discursive, original, immensely learned, fluently written.”―John Bayley, The New York Times Book Review Edward W. Said...

A raw and masterful memoir about becoming a woman and going mad—and doing both at once. When Suzanne Scanlon was a student at Barnard in the 90s, grieving the loss of her mother—feeling untethered and swimming through inarticulable pain—she made a suicide attempt that landed her in the New...

From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Empire Falls One of the most valuable spaces for an artist is the inner life—the sacred place where, outside of the constraints of time and space, meaning is extracted from raw experience and fashioned into art. In this timely new essay, Pulitzer...

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR From "one of our most nuanced thinkers on the intersections of race, class, and feminism" (Cathy Park Hong, New York Times bestselling author of Minor Feelings) comes a memoir "as electric as the title suggests" (Maggie Nelson, author of On Freedom). A...

What’s a novelist supposed to do with contemporary culture? And what’s contemporary culture sup­posed to do with novelists? In The Ecstasy of Influence, Jonathan Lethem, tangling with what he calls the “white elephant” role of the writer as public intellectual, arrives at an astonishing...

A wise, lyrical memoir about the power of literature to help us read our own lives—and see clearly the people we love most. “Transcendent.”—The Washington Post “You’d be hard put to find a more moving appreciation of Woolf’s work.”—The Wall Street Journal NAMED ONE OF THE...

Five decades of selected writings from the Irish Times by the beloved and best-selling author, filled with her hallmark humor, candor, and wisdom-a timeless gift to her legion of fans. Maeve Binchy once confessed: "As someone who fell off a chair not long ago trying to hear what they were saying...

From the internationally best-selling author of the His Dark Materials trilogy, a spellbinding journey into the secrets of his art--the narratives that have shaped his vision, his experience of writing, and the keys to mastering the art of storytelling. One of the most highly acclaimed and...

Sparky Sweets, PhD, and Wisecrack proudly present this outrageously funny, ultra-sharp guide to literature based on the hit online series, Thug Notes. Inside, you'll find hilarious plot breakdowns and masterful analyses of sixteen of literature's most beloved classics, including: Things Fall...

From the author of the bestselling Why We Suck comes a searing comic look at these divisive times, skewering liberals and conservatives alike with a signature dose of sarcasm and common sense. In an America so gluten-free that a box of jelly donuts is now a bigger threat than Vladimir Putin...

"Rich and compelling. . .Lynskey’s account of the reach of 1984 is revelatory.” --George Packer, The Atlantic An authoritative, wide-ranging, and incredibly timely history of 1984--its literary sources, its composition by Orwell, its deep and lasting effect on the Cold War, and its vast...

From the widely acclaimed poet, novelist, critic, and scholar, a lucid and edifying exploration of the building blocks of poetry and how they've been used over the centuries to assemble the most imperishable poems. “Anyone wanting to learn how to remodel, restore, or build a poem from the...

From the acclaimed biographer of Jane Jacobs and Srinivasa Ramanujan comes the first full life and work of arguably the most influential classical scholar of the twentieth century, who overturned long-entrenched notions of ancient epic poetry and enlarged the very idea of literature. In this...

An electrifying new study that investigates the challenges of the Bard’s inconsistencies and flaws, and focuses on revealing—not resolving—the ambiguities of the plays and their changing topicality A genius and prophet whose timeless works encapsulate the human condition like no other. A...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER ONE OF TIME’S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE A ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian American consciousness “Brilliant . . . To read this...