"In the summer of 1977, Allen Ginsberg decided it was time to teach a course on the literary history of the Beat Generation. This was twenty years after the publication of his landmark poem "Howl," and Jack Kerouac's seminal book On the Road. Through the creation of this course, which he ended up teaching five times, first at the Naropa Institute and later at Brooklyn College, Ginsberg saw an opportunity to make a record of the history of Beat Literature....

What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work--over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. This little history is about some that have not. John Carey tells the stories behind the world's greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago...

Orwell's classic novel of one man's nightmare odyssey through a world ruled by warring states and a power structure that controls not only information but individual thought and memory.

"In Don't Read Poetry, award-winning poet and literary critic Stephanie Burt offers an accessible introduction to the seemingly daunting task of reading, understanding, and appreciating poetry. Burt dispels preconceptions about poetry and explains how poems speak to one another -- and how they can speak to our lives. She shows readers how to find more poems once they have some poems they like, and how to connect the poetry of the past to the poetry...

Italo Calvin's unbounded curiosity and masterly imagination are displayed in peak form in Collection of Sand, the last of his works published during his lifetime. Here he applies his gracefjul intellect to the delights of the visual world, in essays on subjects ranging from cuneiform and antique maps to Mexican temples and Japanese gardens. Never before translated into English, Collection of Sand is an incisive and often surprising meditation on...

"An insightful, witty look at Virginia Woolf through the lens of the extraordinary women closest to her"--

"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. The Sinner and The Saint is the deeply researched and immersive tale of how Dostoevsky came to write this great murder story, and why it changed the world. As a young man, Dostoevsky was a celebrated writer, but his involvement with the radical politics of his...

Considered one of the most influential novels in American fiction in structure, style, and drama, As I Lay Dying is a true 20th-century classic. The story revolves around a grim yet darkly humorous pilgrimage, as Addie Bundren's family sets out to fulfill her last wish-to be buried in her native Jefferson, Mississippi, far from the miserable backwater surroundings of her married life. Narrated in turn by each of the family members-including Addie...

From 1950 until just before his death in 1963, Pulitzer Prize winner (for Laughing Boy) Oliver La Farge wrote weekly columns for The Santa Fe New Mexican-a total of some 350,000 words. A collection of these writings was edited in 1966 by his friend, Winfield Townley Scott and published as "The Man With the Calabash Pipe." As Scott says in his introduction, "Though often in the background, and with much said relevant to anywhere in America, a strong

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As he was turning forty, Walt Whitman wrote twelve poems in a small handmade book he entitled "Live Oak, With Moss." The poems were intensely private reflections on his attraction to and affection for other men. They were also Whitman's most adventurous explorations of the theme of same-sex love, composed decades before the word "homosexual" came into use. Whitman never published the cycle. Instead he cut them up, rearranged them, and hid them in...