From Harold Bloom, one of the greatest Shakespeare scholars of our time, comes an intimate, wise, deeply compelling portrait of Cleopatra--one of the Bard's most riveting and memorable female characters--in "a masterfully perceptive reading of this seductive play's endless wonders" (Kirkus Reviews). Cleopatra is one of the most famous women in history--and thanks to Shakespeare, one of the most intriguing personalities in literature. She is lover of Marc Antony, defender of Egypt, and, perhaps most enduringly, a champion of life. Cleopatra is supremely vexing, tragic, and complex. She has fascinated readers and audiences for centuries and has been played by the greatest actresses of their time, from Elizabeth Taylor to Vivien Leigh to Janet Suzman to Judi Dench. Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom writes about Cleopatra with wisdom, joy, exuberance, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character: Just as we encounter one Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are in high school and college and another when we are adults, Bloom explains his shifting understanding of Cleopatra over the course of his own lifetime. The book becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our own humanity. Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare's characters make. With Cleopatra, "Bloom brings considerable expertise and his own unique voice to this book" (Publishers Weekly), delivering exhilarating clarity and inviting us to look at this character as a flawed human who might be living in our world. The result is an invaluable resource from our greatest literary critic.

A paperback original, Bloom's stand-alone introduction to "The Best Poems of the English Language."

A notable feature of Harold Bloom's poetry anthology "The Best Poems English Language" is his lengthy introductory essay, here reprinted as a separate book. For the first time Bloom gives his readers an elegant guide to reading poetry--a master critic's distillation of a lifetime of teaching and criticism. He tackles such subjects as poetic voice, the nature of metaphor and allusion, and the nature of poetic value itself. Bloom writes "the work of great poetry is to aid us to become free artists of ourselves." This essay is an invaluable guide to poetry.

This edition will also include a recommended reading list of poems.

"If readers are to come to Shakespeare and to Chekhov, to Henry James and to Jane Austen, then they are best prepared if they have read Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling," writes Harold Bloom in his introduction to this enchanting and much-needed anthology of exceptional stories and poems selected to inspire a lifelong love of reading. As television, video games, and the Internet threaten to distract young people from the solitary pleasures of reading, Bloom presents a volume that will amuse, challenge, and beguile readers with its myriad voices and subjects.

Here are old favorites by beloved writers of children's literature, as well as exciting rediscoveries and wonderful works penned by writers better known for their adult classics, such as Herman Melville, Leo Tolstoy, Edith Wharton, and Walt Whitman. Encompassing the natural world and the supernatural; childhood, romance, and death; pets, wild animals, and goblins; mystery, adventure, and humor; the selections reflect the passion and erudition of our most revered literary critic. Arranged by season, Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages is a must-have anthology, sure to delight readers young and old for years to come.

"The fulfilled renown of Moby-Dick and of As I Lay Dying is augmented by Blood Meridian, since Cormac McCarthy is the worthy disciple both of Melville and Faulkner," writes esteemed literary scholar Harold Bloom in his Introduction to the Modern Library edition. "I venture that no other living American novelist, not even Pynchon, has given us a book as strong and memorable."

Cormac McCarthy's masterwork, Blood Meridian, chronicles the brutal world of the Texas-Mexico borderlands in the mid-nineteenth century. Its wounded hero, the teenage Kid, must confront the extraordinary violence of the Glanton gang, a murderous cadre on an official mission to scalp Indians and sell those scalps. Loosely based on fact, the novel represents a genius vision of the historical West, one so fiercely realized that since its initial publication in 1985 the canon of American literature has welcomed Blood Meridian to its shelf.

"A classic American novel of regeneration through violence," declares Michael Herr. "McCarthy can only be compared to our greatest writers."

From Harold Bloom, the greatest Shakespeare scholar of our time, comes a portrait of Macbeth, one of William Shakespeare's most complex and compelling anti-heroes--the final volume in a series of five short books about the great playwright's most significant personalities: Falstaff, Cleopatra, Lear, Iago, and Macbeth. From the ambitious and mad titular character to his devilish wife Lady Macbeth to the mysterious Three Witches, Macbeth is one of William Shakespeare's more brilliantly populated plays and remains among the most widely read. Macbeth is a distinguished warrior hero, who over the course of the play, transforms into a brutal, murderous villain and pays an extraordinary price for committing an evil act. A man consumed with ambition and self-doubt, Macbeth is one of Shakespeare's most vital meditations on the dangerous corners of the human imagination. Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom investigates Macbeth's unthinkable actions with razor-sharp insight, agility, and compassion. He also writes about his shifting understanding--over the course of his own lifetime--of this endlessly compelling figure. "Acclaimed critic Bloom once again plumbs the depths of a Shakespeare play to reveal new insights [that]...will shift the reader's perceptions of a literary classic" (Publishers Weekly). "A lingering and deeply curious, even troubled, look at the titular character in the legendary play...this clear, concise, empathetic" (Kirkus Reviews) volume delivers that kind of exhilarating intimacy and clarity in Macbeth, the final book in an essential series.

From one of the greatest Shakespeare scholars of our time, Harold Bloom presents Othello's Iago, perhaps the Bard's most compelling villain--the fourth in a series of five short books about the great playwright's most significant personalities. Few antagonists in all of literature have displayed the ruthless cunning and deceit of Iago. Denied the promotion he believes he deserves, Iago takes vengeance on Othello and destroys him. One of William Shakespeare's most provocative and culturally relevant plays, Othello is widely studied for its complex and enduring themes of race and racism, love, trust, betrayal, and repentance. It remains widely performed across professional and community theatre alike and has been the source for many film and literary adaptations. Now award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom investigates Iago's motives and unthinkable actions with razor-sharp insight, agility, and compassion. Why and how does Iago use lies and deception--the fake news of the 15th century--to destroy Othello and several other characters in his path? What can Othello tell us about racism? Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, treating Shakespeare's characters like people he has known all his life. He delivers exhilarating intimacy and clarity in these pages, writing about his shifting understanding--over the course of his own lifetime--of this endlessly compelling figure, so that Iago also becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity. "There are few readers more astute than Bloom" (Publishers Weekly), and his Iago is a provocative study for our time.

This delicious anthology of primary texts brings together the major English and French nineteenth-century writings on the arts and pleasures of the table. With the invention of the restaurant and a public scene of dining after the French Revolution, gastronomy emerged as a distinct genre of writing, treating food with philosophical significance. Romantic Gourmand recognizes that more goes into the making of a good meal than food itself, and they transformed dining into a fine art and a medium for self-expression. This excellent book examines the theories of ettiquette and food connoisseruship and how it became the foundation for our modern food culture with gourmet magazines, reviews and televized cuisine. Presenting texts, some of which appear in English for the fitst time, Diane Gigante's looks at the French genius behind modern gastronomy, essays include: Grimod de la Reyniere; Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's Physiology of Tast; Alexandre Dumas' Dictionary of Cuisine; Charles Lamb's Dissertation on Roast Pig; William Thackeray's Dinner-Giving Snobs; lesser-known works by pseudonymous authors such as Launcelot Sturgeon and Dick Humelbergius Secundus. with an intereste in, the history of food.

This delicious anthology of primary texts brings together the major English and French nineteenth-century writings on the arts and pleasures of the table. With the invention of the restaurant and a public scene of dining after the French Revolution, gastronomy emerged as a distinct genre of writing, treating food with philosophical significance. Romantic Gourmand recognizes that more goes into the making of a good meal than food itself, and they transformed dining into a fine art and a medium for self-expression. This excellent book examines the theories of ettiquette and food connoisseruship and how it became the foundation for our modern food culture with gourmet magazines, reviews and televized cuisine. Presenting texts, some of which appear in English for the first time, Diane Gigante's looks at the French genius behind modern gastronomy, essays include: Grimod de la Reyniere; Jean-Anthelme Brillat-Savarin's Physiology of Tast; Alexandre Dumas' Dictionary of Cuisine; Charles Lamb's Dissertation on Roast Pig; William Thackeray's Dinner-Giving Snobs; and lesser-known works by pseudonymous authors such as Launcelot Sturgeon and Dick Humelbergius Secundus. with an intereste in, the history of food.

This comprehensive anthology attempts to give the common reader possession of six centuries of great British and American poetry. The book features a large introductory essay by Harold Bloom called "The Art of Reading Poetry," which presents his critical reflections of more than half a century devoted to the reading, teaching, and writing about the literary achievement he loves most. In the case of all major poets in the language, this volume offers either the entire range of what is most valuable in their work, or vital selections that illuminate each figure′s contribution. There are also headnotes by Harold Bloom to every poet in the volume as well as to the most important individual poems. Much more than any other anthology ever gathered, this book provides readers who desire the pleasures of a sublime art with very nearly everything they need in a single volume. It also is regarded as his final meditation upon all those who have formed his mind.

Edith Grossman's definitive English translation of the Spanish masterpiece. Widely regarded as one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the adventures of the self-created knight-errant Don Quixote of La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. You haven't experienced Don Quixote in English until you've read this masterful translation.This P.S. edition features an extra 16 pages of insights into the book, including author interviews, recommended reading, and more.

"By definition, all living poets are excluded from this book. Myself seventy-nine years of age, I grieve still for many of these poets who were my friends. But knowledge, not pathos, is my purpose in gathering this anthology. Lastness is a part of knowing". (Harold Bloom). From Harold Bloom, the foremost literary critic of our time, comes a delightful anthology of the final works of great poets. In "Till I End My Song", Bloom has meticulously curated the last poems of one hundred influential poets. These poems, sometimes the literal end and other times the imagined conclusion to a poetic career, offer a lens through which to contemplate the enduring nature of art and the inevitability of death. Bloom's selections highlight the work of the canonized poets T.S. Eliot, Alexander Pope, W.B. Yeats, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and William Shakespeare, but also revive interest in distinguished but long-neglected poets, such as Conrad Aiken, William Cowper, Edwin Arlington Robinson, George Meredith, and Louis MacNeice. An authoritative collection of last poems, "Till I End My Song" will reverberate long into the coming silence.

""[Blake] was a visionary, rather than a mystic, and like D. H. Lawrence and Sigmund Freud he hoped to encourage us to exalt our human potential. Perhaps William Blake can best be termed an apocalyptic humanist, who urges us never to forget that all deities reside within the human breast."" Harold Bloom, from the new foreword

"The great poems, plays, novels, stories teach us how to go on living. . . . Your own mistakes, accidents, failures at otherness beat you down. Rise up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can."So Harold Bloom, the most famous literary critic of his generation, exhorts readers of his last book: one that praises the sustaining power of poetry. "Passionate. . . . Perhaps Bloom's most personal work, this is a fitting last testament to one of America's leading twentieth-century literary minds."-Publishers Weekly "An extraordinary testimony to a long life spent in the company of poetry and an affecting last declaration of [Bloom's] passionate and deeply unfashionable faith in the capacity of the imagination to make the world feel habitable"-Seamus Perry, Literary Review "Reading, this stirring collection testifies, 'helps in staying alive.'"-Kirkus Reviews, starred review This dazzling celebration of the power of poetry to sublimate death-completed weeks before Harold Bloom died-shows how literature renews life amid what Milton called "a universe of death." Bloom reads as a way of taking arms against the sea of life's troubles, taking readers on a grand tour of the poetic voices that have haunted him through a lifetime of reading. "High literature," he writes, "is a saving lie against time, loss of individuality, premature death." In passages of breathtaking intimacy, we see him awake late at night, reciting lines from Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, Blake, Wordsworth, Hart Crane, Jay Wright, and many others. He feels himself "edged by nothingness," uncomprehending, but still sustained by reading. Generous and clear-eyed, this is among Harold Bloom's most ambitious and most moving books.

Comprehensive reading and study guides provide concise critical excerpts that offer a scholarly overview of each work, "The Story Behind the Story" that details the conditions under which the work was written, a biographical sketch of the author, a descriptive list of characters, and more.

Harold Bloom, one of the great literary critics and champion of written culture, asserts that we read in order to better understand and fortify our sense of our own individuality. In this essential book he offers a reading list of works, some famous, some less well-known, that allows readers to fully explore dimensions of themselves. Practical, inspirational and learned, How to Read and Why reveals that the close reading and re-reading of great literature can sustain, enrich and strengthen every aspect of our own lives.

A richly insightful reading of the King James Bible as a literary masterwork, published for the text's 400-year anniversary The King James Bible stands at "the sublime summit of literature in English," sharing the honor only with Shakespeare, Harold Bloom contends in the opening pages of this illuminating literary tour. Distilling the insights acquired from a significant portion of his career as a brilliant critic and teacher, he offers readers at last the book he has been writing "all my long life," a magisterial and intimately perceptive reading of the King James Bible as a literary masterpiece. Bloom calls it an "inexplicable wonder" that a rather undistinguished group of writers could bring forth such a magnificent work of literature, and he credits William Tyndale as their fountainhead. Reading the King James Bible alongside Tyndale's Bible, the Geneva Bible, and the original Hebrew and Greek texts, Bloom highlights how the translators and editors improved upon-or, in some cases, diminished-the earlier versions. He invites readers to hear the baroque inventiveness in such sublime books as the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Job, and alerts us to the echoes of the King James Bible in works from the Romantic period to the present day. Throughout, Bloom makes an impassioned and convincing case for reading the King James Bible as literature, free from dogma and with an appreciation of its enduring aesthetic value.

What is genius? It is the trait, says Harold Bloom, of standing both of and above an age, the ancient principle that recognizes and hallows the God within us, and the gift of breathing life into what is best in every living person. Now, in a monumental achievement of scholarship, America's preeminent literary critic presents an unprecedented celebration of one hundred of the most creative literary minds in history.

From the Bible to Socrates, through the transcendent masterpieces of Shakespeare and Dante, down through the ages to Hemingway, Faulkner, and Ralph Ellison, Harold Bloom explores the many parallels among his chosen geniuses and the surprising ways in which they have influenced one another over the centuries. Accompanied by revealing excerpts from their works that continue to astonish, enchant, and move readers, Bloom's insightful and spirited analyses illuminate and enlarge our common understanding of Western literary and spiritual culture…and offer us a grand yet intimate tour of it in one magnificent volume.

A Split Main Selection of Book-of-the-Month Club® and of Quality Paperback Book Club® and an Alternate Selection of Traditions, One Spirit, and History Book Club

Eugene O'Neill was the first American playwright to win the Nobel Prize in Literature. He completed "The Iceman Cometh" in 1939, but he delayed production until after the war, when it enjoyed a long run of performances in 1946 after receiving mixed reviews. Three years after O'Neill's death, Jason Robards starred in a Broadway revival that brought new critical attention to O'Neill's darkest and most nihilistic play. In the half century since, "The Iceman Cometh" has gained enormously in stature, and many critics now recognize it as one of the greatest plays in American drama. "The Iceman Cometh" focuses on a group of alcoholics and misfits who endlessly discuss but never act on their dreams, and Hickey, the traveling salesman determined to strip them of their pipe dreams.

"Mr. Yerushalmi's previous writings . . . established him as one of the Jewish community's most important historians. His latest book should establish him as one of its most important critics. Zakhor is historical thinking of a very high order - mature speculation based on massive scholarship." - New York Times Book Review

This contains Aiken's own choice of the best and most representative of his poems, spanning more than forty years of work. Much of Aiken's prose and poetry is out of print, yet his unique influence upon modern writers and critics remains. For this edition, Harold Bloom will contirbute a new foreword to reintroduce Aiken to a new generation of readers. The Aiken estate has selected several pivotal poems from other volumes to add to the reissue, broadening the scope of works that represents his legacy.

The story of Victor Frankenstein and the monstrous creature he created has held readers spellbound ever since it was published almost two centuries ago. On the surface, it is a novel of tense and steadily mounting horror; but on a more profound level, it offers searching illumination of the human condition in its portrayal of a scientist who oversteps the bounds of conscience, and of a monster brought to life in an alien world, ever more desperately attempting to escape the torture of his solitude. A novel of hallucinatory intensity, "Frankenstein" represents one of the most striking flowerings of the Romantic imagination.
With a New Introduction by Douglas Clegg
And an Afterword by Harold Bloom

Widely acclaimed as one of the finest short story writers and known for her acerbic wit, complex themes, and acutely observed portrayals of the American South, Flannery O'Connor is a favorite among students, scholars, and general readers. Her stories "A Good Man Is Hard to Find" and "Everything That Rises Must Converge" are considered classics of the form, fusing the ludicrous and mundane with O'Connor's powerful explorations of redemption and morality. This new collection of critical essays presents a chronology of O'Connor's life, a bibliography of her works, an index, and an introductory essay by literary critic Harold Bloom.

Harold Bloom, the doyen of American literary critics and author of The Western Canon, has spent a professional lifetime reading, writing about and teaching Shakespeare. In this magisterial interpretation, Bloom explains Shakespeare's genius in a radical and provocative re-reading of the plays. How to understand Shakespeare, whose ability so far exceeds his predecessors and successors, whose genius has defied generations of critics' explanations, whose work is of greater influence in the modern age even than the Bible? This book is a visionary summation of Harold Bloom's reading of Shakespeare and in it he expounds a brilliant and far-reaching critical theory: that Shakespeare was, through his dramatic characters, the inventor of human personality as we have come to understand it. In short, Shakespeare invented our understanding of ourselves. He knows us better than we do: 'The plays remain the outward limit of human achievement: aesthetically, cognitively, in certain ways morally, even spiritually. They abide beyond the end of the mind's reach; we cannot catch up to them. Shakespeare will go on explaining us in part because he invented us... ' In a chronological survey of each of the plays, Bloom explores the supra-human personalities of Shakespeare's great protagonists: Hamlet, Lear, Falstaff, Rosalind, Juliet. They represent the apogee of Shakespeare's art, that art which is Britain's most powerful and dominant cultural contribution to the world, here vividly recovered by an inspired and wise scholar at the height of his powers.