Over the last seven years Etgar Keret has had plenty of reasons to worry. His son, Lev, was born in the middle of a terrorist attack in Tel Aviv. His father became ill. And he has been constantly tormented by nightmarish visions of the Iranian president Ahmadinejad, anti-Semitic remarks both real and imagined, and, perhaps most worrisome of all, a dogged telemarketer who seems likely to chase him to the grave. Emerging from these darkly absurd circumstances is a series of funny, tender ruminations on everything from his three-year-old son's impending military service to the terrorist mindset behind Angry Birds. Moving deftly between the personal and the political, the playful and the profound, The Seven Good Years takes a life-affirming look at the human need to find good in the least likely places, and the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of our capricious world.

Julian Maclaren-Ross, well known in his own lifetime and unfairly neglected after it, is now getting the attention he deserves. None of his letters have ever been published, and this collection comes out of extensive research and selection by Paul Willetts, Maclaren-Ross's biographer, the authority on the writer.

Stunning three-volume slipcased set containing the most comprehensive in-depth companion to Tolkien's life and works ever published, including synopses of all his writings, and a Tolkien gazetteer, who's who and chronology. The three volumes contained in this slipcase, written by two of the foremost experts on J.R.R. Tolkien, comprise the definitive handbook to one of the most popular authors of the 20th century. Tolkien's progress is traced from his birth in South Africa in 1892, to the battlefields of France and the lecture-halls of Leeds and Oxford, to his success as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, until his death in 1973. His many academic and literary achievements, his public reception, and his enduring fame are examined in detail. The first volume in this set is a Chronology of Tolkien's life and works, the most extensive biographical resource about him ever published. Thousands of details have been drawn from letters, contemporary documents in libraries and archives, and a wide variety of other published and unpublished sources. Assembled together, they form a portrait of Tolkien in all his aspects: the distinguished scholar of Old and Middle English, the capable teacher and administrator, the devoted husband and father, the brilliant creator of Middle-earth. The second and third volumes, the Reader's Guide, is an indispensable introduction to Tolkien's life, writings, and art. It includes histories and discussions of his works; analyses of the components of his vast 'Silmarillion' mythology; brief biographies of persons important in his life; accounts of places he knew; essays on topics such as Tolkien's interests and attitudes towards contemporary issues, ideas found in his works, adaptations, and invented languages; and checklists of his published works, his poetry, his pictorial art, and translations of his writing.

For over seven centuries, Dante and his masterpiece, "The Divine Comedy," have held a special place in Western culture. The poem is at once a vivid journey through hell to heaven, a poignant love story, and a picture of humanity's relationship to God. It is so richly imaginative that a first reading can be bewildering. In response, Peter Hawkins has written an inspiring introduction to the poet, his greatest work, and its abiding influence. His knowledge of Dante and enthusiasm for his vision make him an expert guide for the willing reader.

A NEW STATESMAN BOOK OF THE YEAR From one of our greatest living writers, comes a remarkable memoir of a forgotten England. 'The war went. We sang in the playground, "Bikini lagoon, an atom bomb's boom, and two big explosions." David's father came back from Burma and didn't eat rice. Twiggy taught by reciting "The Pied Piper of Hamelin", "The Charge of the Light Brigade" and the thirteen times table. Twiggy was fat and short and he shouted, and his neck was as wide as his head. He was a bully, though he didn't take any notice of me.' In Where Shall We Run To?, Alan Garner remembers his early childhood in the Cheshire village of Alderley Edge: life at the village school as 'a sissy and a mardy-arse'; pushing his friend Harold into a clump of nettles to test the truth of dock leaves; his father joining the army to guard the family against Hitler; the coming of the Yanks, with their comics and sweets and chewing gum. From one of our greatest living writers, it is a remarkable and evocative memoir of a vanished England.

This volume features selections from the New Directions founder's correspondence with Guy Davenport, the polymath artist and author of "The Geography of the Imagination." More than simply detailing an author/publisher relationship, these letters depict two fine minds educating and supporting each other in the service of literature.

A gripping, unforgettable memoir from one of the best, most original writers of the 21st century. Blake Butler has changed the world of language with his mind-melting literary thrillers, and now he brings his abilities to bear on the emotional world.

Blake Butler and Molly Brodak instantly connected, fell in love, married and built a life together. Both writers with deep roots in contemporary American literature, their union was an iconic joining of forces between two major and beloved talents.

Nearly three years into their marriage, grappling with mental illness and a lifetime of trauma, Molly took her own life. In the days and weeks after Molly’s death, Blake discovered shocking secrets she had held back from the world, fundamentally altering his view of their relationship and who she was.

A masterpiece of autobiography, Molly is a riveting journey into the darkest and most unthinkable parts of the human heart, emerging with a hard-won, unsurpassedly beautiful understanding that expands the possibilities of language to comprehend and express true love.

Unrelentingly clear, honest and concise, Molly approaches the impossible directly, with a total empathy that has no parallel or precedent. A supremely important work that will be taught, loved, relied on and passed around for years to come, Blake Butler affirms now beyond question his position at the very top rank of writers.

Many of the earliest books, particularly those dating back to the 1900s and before, are now extremely scarce and increasingly expensive. We are republishing these classic works in affordable, high quality, modern editions, using the original text and artwork.

Since the publication of his first novel, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, launched him to fame, Michael Chabon (b. 1963) has become one of contemporary literature's most acclaimed novelists by pursuing his singular vision across all boundaries of genre and medium. A firm believer that reading even the most challenging literature should be a fundamentally pleasurable experience, Chabon has produced an astonishingly diverse body of work that includes detective novels, weird tales of horror, alternate history science fiction, and rollicking chronicles of swashbuckling adventure alongside tender coming-of-age stories, sprawling social novels, and narratives of intense introspection. Uniting them all is Chabon's utterly distinct prose style--exuberant and graceful, sometimes ironic but never cynical. His work has earned accolades ranging from the Pulitzer Prize to science fiction's Hugo and Nebula Awards. Conversations with Michael Chabon collects eighteen revealing interviews with the renowned author of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, The Yiddish Policemen's Union, and other much-admired works. Spanning nearly twenty years and drawn from science fiction fan magazines and literary journals alike, these interviews shed new light on the central concerns of Chabon's fiction, including the importance of dismantling the false divide between literary and lowbrow, his evolving relationship to Jewish culture and literature, the unique properties of male friendship, and the complexities of race in contemporary America. These interviews are essential reading for anyone seeking a better understanding of the life and work of an author who has been instrumental in defining the landscape of contemporary American fiction.

This new volume in the "Literary Lives" series focuses on the career of the popular Victorian novelist Wilkie Collins (1824-1889), and provides a new account of his professional life in the literary world of nineteenth-century Britain. It draws on recently available business and personal correspondence to establish a fresh portrait of one of Victorian Britain's busiest authors, taking in Collins's notoriously complicated private life and his friendship with Charles Dickens, as well his work as journalist, reviewer and playwright. New insights are given into the international dimensions of Collins's career. There is discussion of Collins's best-known novels, including "The Woman in White," "The Moonstone" and "Armadale," but attention is also given to lesser-known works and to Collins's plays, which have long been neglected. The volume will appeal to all students of Wilkie Collins and also to those interested in the literary world of Victorian Britain and the social and business networks which lay at its heart.

Small wonder that, at nine years old, Monica Holloway develops a fascination with the local funeral home. With a father who drives his Ford pickup with a Kodak movie camera sitting shotgun just in case he sees an accident, and whose home movies feature more footage of disasters than of his children, Monica is primed to become a morbid child.

Yet in spite of her father's bouts of violence and abuse, her mother's selfishness and prim denial, and her siblings' personal battles and betrayals, Monica never succumbs to despair. Instead, she forges her own way, thriving at school and becoming fast friends with Julie Kilner, whose father is the town mortician.

She and Julie prefer the casket showroom, where they take turns lying in their favorite coffins, to the parks and grassy backyards in her hometown of Elk Grove, Ohio. In time, Monica and Julie get a job driving the company hearse to pick up bodies at the airport, yet even Monica's growing independence can't protect her from her parents' irresponsibility, and from the feeling that she simply does not deserve to be safe. Little does she know, as she finally strikes out on her own, that her parents' biggest betrayal has yet to be revealed.

Throughout this remarkable memoir of her dysfunctional, eccentric, and wholly unforgettable family, Monica Holloway's prose shines with humor, clear-eyed grace, and an uncommon sense of resilience. "Driving with Dead People" is an extraordinary real-life tale with a wonderfully observant and resourceful heroine.

A comprehensive exploration of Dr. Faust, the man who sold his soul to the devil, and those who dared to tell his tale.

Volume I includes: New insights into the life and times of the historical Dr. Faustus, the notorious occultist and charlatan who reputedly declared the devil was his 'brother-in-law'. A detailed study of the first Faust books and the popular Faustian folk tales. Original discussion on Christopher Marlowe's famous drama and his 'atheistic' rendition of the Faustian myth, including a unique and controversial analysis of the A and B texts. The days of the Faust puppet plays. Gotthold Ephraim Lessing's unfinished Faust drama.

Volume II features: A unique, in-depth account Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and his masterpiece, Faust, Parts One and Two. An examination of the early sketches of his classic drama. Includes detailed revealations of Goethe's hidden symbolism in the text, his interest in history and science, the occult, alchemy, Freemasonry and his warnings to future generations.

"As a compendium of useful facts, there's not likely to be a replacement any time soon. Bucchianeri pursues every avenue of Faustian analogue with a dogged persistence that would win accolades from Ahab. ... Bucchianeri's unceasing search for source materials brings together in one place the many texts that build the Faust legend from the late Middle Ages onward, ..." - Dr. K.A. Laity, College of Saint Rose, Journal of Folklore Research

..". two large-format volumes is sure to provide enterprising readers with a lavish diet of documentary matter, commentary, and conjecture on the Faust tradition from its medieval origins to the 'almost unapproachable zenith' which it attained in the year of Goethe's demise. ... Bucchianeri investigates each controversial incident in turn, drawing parallels with historical figures, Dante's Divine Comedy, Arthurian and other late medieval legends, and citing sources which range from the Bible to Copernican astronomy. ... The distinctive quality of Bucchianeri's commentary lies in tireless contextualization, with each incident in Faust's career related to specific historical events, cultural phenomena, or to background circumstances; ... In Volume II, key stages of Goethe's career are graphically recounted with the help of over two thousand footnotes ... there is no denying the near-boundless enthusiasm with which Bucchianeri approaches even the most recondite passages of Faust II." - Dr. Osman Durrani, University of Kent, Modern Language Review

With social and political issues providing the foreground of literary studies over the past several years, William Dean Howells has re-emerged as a major author. Yet, among canonical American writers, Howells simultaneously attracts both significant attention and curious neglect. While studies devoted to his novels, The Rise of Silas Lapham and A Hazard of New Fortunes, are proliferating, the attention paid to his later writing, particularly his short fiction, is not only far less sustained but often dismissive, promoting a continuous inattention to the process by which the author discovers new forms and expression. William Dean Howells and the American Memory Crisis confronts the frequent refusal to see Howells as a writer whose lifelong engagement with literature pushed him through generic boundaries in search of new ways of shaping his fiction and questioning American identity. By focusing on Howellss preoccupation with tropes of memory and amnesia, this book positions his work within the American memory crisis, the turn-of-the-centurys pervasive feelings of fragmentation, loss, and dislocation that followed breathtaking transformations in the pace of everyday life and traditional social structures, which contributed to the sense that the linear inheritance of the past was severely weakened, if not broken beyond repair. As Americans engaged in a politics of memorywith various groups battling for their stake in shaping Americas present and future by defining its pastHowellss work interacts with a number of social discourses and practices through which national identity was being (re)constructed and debated. The book explores these sites of memory, including historiography, therhetoric of imperialism, the revival in historical romantic fiction, the rise of photography, the boom in monument construction, the beginnings of modern advertising, the interest in spiritualism and the occult, and literary history itself. By focusing on two neglected areas of Howells studieshis late short fiction and his engagement in the politics of memoryWilliam Dean Howells and the American Memory Crisis clarifies the convergence of his aesthetic and political goals and challenges recent innovative studies that situate Howells and literary realism as reinforcing late-nineteenth-century hierarchies of race, class, and gender. As a major figure of the traditional canon, Howells routinely has been positioned as a powerful cultural authority who was either deceptive of his real goals, willfully hypocritical, or ignorant of the actual political scene in which he was working. Rubins book complicates some of these accepted views by arguing that, while not apolitical, Howells was not as nave or as reactionary as some have claimed. By not accounting for the direction Howells takes in his later work, particularly as it imagines and represents memory, previous studiesso reliant on postmodern-influenced criticism seem to have often overlooked Howellss own postmodern leanings. Tropes of memory and amnesia have become prominent in postmodern theories of history and subjectivity, registering anxiety about the stability of the self and serving as metaphors for the impossibility of objective and secure historical narratives. Howellss work, this book maintains, consistently gestures toward these and other characteristics of the postmodern in its approach to history and questions the versions ofliterary realism that have become sacrosanct within the academy. Ultimately, this book provides other teachers, researchers, and students with a new framework with which to approach Howells and American realism. As his discussion draws on a variety of discourse in its exploration of Americas politics of memory, a secondary, more interdisciplinary audience includes those interested in political and social theory, history, and cultural studies. This is an important book for scholars, students, and te

This first biography of John Erskine views him in the larger contexts of the mass culture and expanded commercialism that helped propel his fame. It also relates a life narrative that demonstrates perils of academic celebrity along a conceptual path from public intellectual to pop icon.

Includes an exciting sneak peek extract from Three Sisters - the conclusion to The Tattooist of Auschwitz Trilogy. Available now. The Tattooist of Auschwitz is one of the bestselling books of the 21st Century. Now, in this essential companion, Heather Morris presents an inspiring manual for life, with a series of tales of the remarkable people she has met, the incredible stories they have shared with her, and the lessons they hold for us all. In Stories of Hope, Heather will explore her extraordinary talents as a listener - a skill she employed when she first met Lale Sokolov, the tattooist at Auschwitz-Birkenau and the inspiration for her bestselling novel. It was this ability that led Lale to entrust Heather with his story, which she told in her novel The Tattooist of Auschwitz and the bestselling follow up, Cilka's Journey. Now Heather shares the story behind her inspirational writing journey and the defining experiences of her life, including her profound friendship with Lale, and explores how she learned to really listen to the stories people told her - skills she believes we can all learn. 'Stories are what connect us and remind us that hope is always possible.' Heather Morris An international phenomenon, The Tattooist of Auschwitz has sold over six million copies. Cilka's Journey has sold over a million copies worldwide.