What if the Renaissance had the right idea about character? Most readers today think that characters are individuals. Poets of the Renaissance understood characters as types. They thought the job of a character was to collect every example of a kind, in the same way that an entry in a dictionary collects definitions of a word. Character as Form celebrates the old meaning of character. The advantage of the old meaning is that it allows for generalization. Characters funnel whole societies of beings into shapes that are compact, elegant, and portable. This book tests the old meaning of character against modern examples from poems, novels, comics, and performances in theater and film by Shakespeare, Moliere, Austen, the Marx Brothers, Raul Ruiz, Denton Welch, and Lynda Barry. The heart of the book is the character of the misanthrope, who, in Shakespeare's phrase, "banishes the world."

Love Three is a study of a seventeenth-century devotional poem by George Herbert; an essay on eroticizing power; and a memory palace of sexual experiences, fantasies, preferences, and limits-with Herbert's poem as the key. It is unlike anything you have ever read-a deep, attentive reading of a text and a broad analysis (personal, historical, philosophical) of humanity's most enduring theme.

The United Fruit Company during the Cold War; two myths about the discovery of laughter. Tender love lyrics in a domestic setting; vows of love are exchanged. An extended verse essay on tickling. Like Antonin Scalia, this book believes in the devil. The human soul figures.

"History is the soft medium into which you cut; love "is the" instrument that cuts. "Love is the" drill.
"Love" "cuts" to "the" depth of "the" jokes, "which" flow out. Puns "flow out" gaily from "the" wound made by "love.""

Aaron Kunin is author of two previous collections, and a professor at Pomona College.