The exciting new series that began in Fall 2004 with "Macbeth," "A Midsummer Night's Dream," and "Henry IV" continues...
"Shakespeare's Julius Caesar is an immensely sympathetic character, benign yet dangerous. He is, of course, self-centered, and always conscious of being Caesar, perhaps even sensing his deification in advance." - Harold Bloom
Each edition in the Harold Bloom Shakespeare series will include the full text of the play, with editorial revisions and commentary by Harold Bloom.

Harold Bloom on "The Merchant of Venice" "Shylock's prose is Shakespeare's best before Falstaff's...His utterances manifest a spirit so potent, malign, and negative as to be unforgettable."

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.

"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."

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 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.

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.

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.

Hailed as 'the indispensable critic' by The New York Review of Books, Harold Bloom has for decades been sharing with readers and students his genius and passion for understanding literature and explaining why it matters. In The Daemon Knows, he turns his attention to the writers of his own national literature in a book that is one of his most incisive and profoundly personal to date. Pairing Walt Whitman with Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson with Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne with Henry James, Mark Twain with Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens with T. S. Eliot, and William Faulkner with Hart Crane, Bloom places these writers' works in conversation with one another, exploring their relationship to the 'daemon'-the spark of genius or Orphic muse-in their creation, and helping us understand their writing with new immediacy and relevance. It is above all the intensity of their preoccupation with the sublime, Bloom suggests, that distinguishes these American writers from their European predecessors. A product of five years of writing and a lifetime of reading and scholarship, The Daemon Knows may be Bloom's most masterly book yet.

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.

Originally published in 1949, Gilbert Highet's seminal The Classical Tradition is a herculean feat of comparative literature and a landmark publication in the history of classical reception. As Highet states in the opening lines of his Preface, this book outlines "the chief ways in which Greek and Latin influence has moulded the literatures of western Europe and America. " With that simple statement, Highet takes his reader on a sweeping exploration of the history of western literature. To summarize what he covers is a near-impossible task. Discussions of Ovid and French literature of the Middle Ages and Chaucer's engagement with Virgil and Cicero lead, swiftly, into arguments of Christian versus "pagan " works in the Renaissance, Baroque imitations of Seneca, and the (re)birth of satire. Building momentum through Byron, Tennyson, and the rise of "art of art's sake, " Highet, at last, arrives at his conclusion: the birth and establishment of modernism. Though his humanist style may appear out-of-date in today's postmodernist world, there is a value to ensuring this influential work reaches a new generation, and Highet's light touch and persuasive, engaging voice guarantee the book's usefulness for a contemporary audience. Indeed, the book is free of the jargon-filled style of literary criticism that plagues much of current scholarship. Accompanied by a new foreword by renown critic Harold Bloom, this reissue will enable new readers to appreciate the enormous legacy of classical literature in the canonical works of medieval, Renaissance, and modern Europe and America.

"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

In the bestselling Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, Harold Bloom showed us how Shakespeare shaped human consciousness, and addressed the question of authorship in Hamlet. In Hamlet: Poem Unlimited, America's most celebrated critic turns his attention to a reading of the play itself and to Shakespeare's most enigmatic and memorable character. This is Bloom's attempt to uncover the mystery of both Prince Hamlet and the play, how both prince and drama are able to break through the conventions of theatrical mimesis and the representation of character, making us question the very nature of theatrical illusion. Hamlet: Poem Unlimited is a hugely insightful and yet highly accessible exploration of Shakespeare's crowning achievement by a critic who is seen by many as his greatest living champion.

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

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.

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.

Our foremost literary critic on our most essential writers, from Emerson and Whitman to Hurston and Ellison, from Faulkner and O'Connor to Ursula K. LeGuin and Philip Roth. No critic has better understood the ways writers influence one another--how literary traditions are made--and no writer has helped readers understand this better, than Harold Bloom. Over the course of a remarkable sixty-year career, in such bestselling books as The Western Canon, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, and How to Read and Why, Bloom brought enormous insight and infectious enthusiasm to the great writers of the Western tradition, from Shakespeare and Cervantes to the British Romantics and the Russian masters. Now, for the first time, comes a collection of his brilliant writings about the American tradition, the ultimate guide to our nation's literature. Assembled with David Mikics (Slow Reading in a Hurried Age), this unprecedented collection gathers five decades' worth of Bloom's writings-- much of it hard to find and long unavailable--including essays, occasional pieces, and introductions as well as excerpts from his books. It offers deep readings of 47 essential American writers, reflecting on the surprising ways they have influenced each other across more than two centuries. The story it tells, of American literature as a recurring artistic struggle for selfhood, speaks to the passion and power of the American spirit. All of the visionary American writers who have long preoccupied Bloom Emerson and Whitman, Hawthorne and Melville, and Dickinson, Faulkner, Crane, Frost, Stevens, and Bishop make their appearance in The American Canon, along with Hemingway, James, O'Connor, Ellison, Hurston, Le Guin, Ashbery and many others. Bloom's passion for these classic writers is contagious, and he reminds readers how they have shaped our sense of who we are, and how they can summon us to be better versions of ourselves. Bloom, Mikics writes, "is still our most inspirational critic, still the man who can enlighten us by telling us to read as if our lives depended on it: Because, he insists, they do." For readers who want to deepen their appreciation of American literature, there's no better place to start than The American Canon.

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.

Anyone who has ever said one thing and meant another has spoken in the mode of allegory. The allegorical expression of ideas pervades literature, art, music, religion, politics, business, and advertising. But how does allegory really work and how should we understand it? For more than forty years, Angus Fletcher's classic book has provided an answer that is still unsurpassed for its comprehensiveness, brilliance, and eloquence. With a preface by Harold Bloom and a substantial new afterword by the author, this edition reintroduces this essential text to a new generation of students and scholars of literature and art.

"Allegory" puts forward a basic theory of allegory as a symbolic mode, shows how it expresses fundamental emotional and cognitive drives, and relates it to a wide variety of aesthetic devices. Revealing the immense richness of the allegorical tradition, the book demonstrates how allegory works in literature and art, as well as everyday speech, sales pitches, and religious and political appeals.

In his new afterword, Fletcher documents the rise of a disturbing new type of allegory--allegory without ideas.

"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.

"The indispensable critic on the indispensable writer." --Geoffrey O'Brien, New York Review of Books A landmark achievement as expansive, erudite, and passionate as its renowned author, Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, writing about, and teaching Shakespeare. Preeminent literary critic Harold Bloom leads us through a comprehensive reading of every one of the dramatist's plays, brilliantly illuminating each work with unrivaled warmth, wit and insight. At the same time, Bloom presents one of the boldest theses of Shakespearean scholarships--that Shakespeare not only invented the English language, but also created human nature as we know it today.