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

A major new biography that takes an unusual and illuminating approach to the great writer—immersing us in one year of his life—from the award-winning author of Becoming Dickens and The Story of Alice. The year is 1851. It's a time of radical change in Britain, when industrial miracles and...

A dazzling new look into the short but intense, tragic life and remarkable work of John Keats, one of the greatest lyric poets of the English language, seen in a whole new light, not as the mythologized Victorian guileless nature-lover, but as the subversive, bawdy complex cynic whose life and...

This national bestseller is "a significant contribution to discussions of the art of fiction and a necessary challenge to received views about whose stories are told, how they are told and for whom they are intended" (Laila Lalami, The New York Times Book Review). The traditional writing...

On the heels of the bestseller success of her novel The Wedding, Dorothy West, the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance, presents a collection of essays and stories that explore both the realism of everyday life, and the fantastical, extraordinary circumstances of one woman's life in...

An expansive, exhilarating work of criticism by one of the most significant writers of our day. So often deployed as a jingoistic, even menacing rallying cry, or limited by a focus on passing moments of liberation, the rhetoric of freedom both rouses and repels. Does it remain key to our...

A brilliant psychoanalyst and professor of literature invites us to contemplate profound questions about the human experience by focusing on some of the best-known characters in literature—from how Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway copes with the inexorability of midlife disappointment to...

Can I get a “ramen” from the congregation?! Behold the Church of the Flying Spaghetti Monster (FSM), today’s fastest growing carbohydrate-based religion. According to church founder Bobby Henderson, the universe and all life within it were created by a mystical and divine being: the Flying...

Pulitzer Prize–winning literary critic Michiko Kakutani shares her enthusiasm for more than 100 books in a series of succinct, thought-provoking essays. “An ebullient celebration of books and reading.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Books can connect people across time zones and...

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 urgent and compelling account of great bravery and passion." ―Susan Orlean Award-winning journalist Delphine Minoui recounts the true story of a band of young rebels, a besieged Syrian town, and an underground library built from the rubble of war Reading is an act of resistance. Daraya is...

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...

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...

A lost nineteenth-century literary life, brilliantly rediscovered--Letitia Elizabeth Landon, hailed as the female Byron; she changed English poetry; her novels, short stories, and criticism, like Byron though in a woman's voice, explored the dark side of sexuality--by the acclaimed author of The...

A wide-ranging, rule-bending collection of nonfiction from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Netanyahus “Attention reveals a fresh, vital literary voice as it covers seemingly every imaginable topic relating to modern life.”—Entertainment Weekly NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF...

At a time when speculative fiction seems less and less far-fetched, Margaret Atwood lends her distinctive voice and singular point of view to the genre in a series of essays that brilliantly illuminates the essential truths about the modern world. This is an exploration of her relationship with...

How does Shakespeare remain Shakespeare when every word is changed? In this playful, meditative exploration of translating the world’s most beloved playwright, Daniel Hahn guides us through the magic of bringing the Bard to a global audience. "For those who care deeply about language, and...

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALIST In this part-memoir, part-manifesto, an acclaimed poet interprets Black radical literary traditions to reimagine freedom through refusal. “In these fierce yet tender pages, Camonghne Felix reveals how imagination can become a form of governance—an instrument...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR SO FAR BY THE NEW YORK TIMES, THE NEW YORKER, VULTURE, ESQUIRE, THE GUARDIAN, BOOK RIOT, AND LIT HUB An illuminating, electrifying exploration of the work of Toni Morrison by an award-winning novelist and Harvard professor—“a revelatory...