Catalog Search Results
Literary Reference Center
Novels, short stories, poems, plot summaries and synopses, and literary criticism. Research guides, lesson plans, and citation tools support student learning.
Author
Language
English
Description
"A playful, highly visual exploration of novelistic structure and how novels are created, How to Draw a Novel is a meditation on literary craft that muses on how and why novels communicate with readers. In this witty and finely wrought collection of essays, Martín Solares opens the hood of how fiction operates, exploring the conventions of form, the novel as a house that one must build brick by brick, and the objects and characters that build out...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"Joan Acocella was "one of our finest cultural critics" (Edward Hirsch), and she had the rare ability to examine literature and unearth the lives contained within it-its authors, its subjects, and the communities from which it springs. In her hands, arts criticism was a celebration and an investigation, and her essays pulse with unadulterated enthusiasm. As Kathryn Harrison wrote in The New York Times Book Review, "Hers is a vision that allows art...
Author
Language
English
Description
"A remarkable work about women writers in the Renaissance explodes our notion of the Shakespearean period and brings us in close to four women who were committed to their craft before there was any possibility of "a room of one's own." In a sparkling and engaging narrative of everyday life in Shakespearean England, Ramie Targoff carries us from the sumptuous coronation of Queen Elizabeth in the mid 16th century into the private lives of four women...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
A New York Times article once stated that "the art of the essay as delivered by [Sam] Pickering is the art of the front porch ramble." As Pickering himself puts it, "Well, I have gotten considerably older, and humor has come to mean more and more to me. And if I'm on the front porch, I am in a rocking chair." All My Days Are Saturdays offers fifteen new pieces in which he ponders a world that has changed and, in new ways, still...
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
"Celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece The Color Purple--as well as the acclaimed 1985 film from Steven Spielberg, the Tony-winning Broadway musical, and the all-new film adaptation with this gorgeously designed exploration of the novel’s enduring legacy, featuring contributions from Alice Walker, Oprah Winfrey, Steven Spielberg, Colman Domingo, Fantasia Barrino, Danny Glover, and more. Since its publication in...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
In this uproarious exploration of the joys of reading, a long-time teacher, lifelong reader and The New Yorker contributor shares surprising stories from her life and the poignant ways in which books have impacted her students and shows us how literature can transform us for the better.
Author
Language
English
Formats
Description
Handpicked works from the greatest Argentinian writer of the twentieth century. “Without Borges the modern Latin American novel simply would not exist” (Carlos Fuentes, author and diplomat).
After almost a half a century of scrupulous devotion to his art, Jorge Luis Borges personally compiled this anthology of his work—short stories, essays, poems, and brief mordant “sketches,” which,...
After almost a half a century of scrupulous devotion to his art, Jorge Luis Borges personally compiled this anthology of his work—short stories, essays, poems, and brief mordant “sketches,” which,...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Formats
Description
"A magnificent, foundational reckoning with how Black Americans have used the written word to define and redefine themselves, in resistance to the lies of racism and often in heated disagreement with each other, over the course of the country's history. Distilled over many years from Henry Louis Gates, Jr.'s legendary Harvard introductory course in African American Studies, The Black Box: Writing the Race, is the story of Black self-definition in...
Author
Language
English
Description
This “rollicking newspaperman’s memoir” offers a personal tour of Chicago’s cultural history and makes “a strong case for Second City exceptionalism" (The New York Times).
In 1952 the New Yorker published a three-part essay by A. J. Liebling in which he dubbed Chicago the "Second City." From the skyline to garbage collection, nothing escaped Liebling's...
In 1952 the New Yorker published a three-part essay by A. J. Liebling in which he dubbed Chicago the "Second City." From the skyline to garbage collection, nothing escaped Liebling's...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Formats
Description
"Calvin Trillin can write just about anything-and has. He covered the Civil Rights movement in the South for Time, chronicled stories from small towns and cities for The New Yorker, and wrote comic poetry for The Nation. He has been called "perhaps the finest reporter in America" (The Miami Herald), "our funniest food writer" (The New Yorker), and "one of the most brilliant humorists of our time" (Charleston Post and Courier). But one of his favorite...
Author
Language
English
Appears on these lists
Description
Leslie Jamison has become one of our most beloved contemporary voices, a scribe of the real, the true, the complex. She has been compared to Joan Didion and Susan Sontag, acclaimed for her powerful thinking, deep feeling, and electric prose. But while Jamison has never shied away from challenging material--scouring her own psyche and digging into our most unanswerable questions across four books--Splinters enters a new realm. In her first memoir,...
Author
Language
English
Description
"Dubbed a voice of her generation, poet and writer Morgan Parker has spent much of her adulthood in therapy, trying to square the resonance of her writing with the alienation she feels in nearly every aspect of life, from her lifelong singleness to her battle with depression. She traces this loneliness to an inability to feel truly safe with others and a historic hyper-awareness stemming from the effects of slavery. In this collection of sharp, reflective...
Author
Series
Language
English
Formats
Description
A haunting meditation on love, loss, companionship, and finding one's way through the dark, Raymond Carver's What We Talk About When We Talk About Love is one of the most important and influential short story collections in contemporary literature. In his entry in the esteemed Bookmarked series, acclaimed author Brian Evenson offers his personal and literary take on this classic Carver collection.
Brian Evenson is the author
...Author
Language
English
Description
At lunch, / I ate three cans / of alphabet soup. / An hour later / I had / thesaurus / throat / ever.Brian Cleary brings his trademark humor and wordplay to middle grade readers in this poetry collection. Featuring limericks, concrete poems, haiku, quatrains, acrostics, and much more, the book is in equal parts entertaining and educational. Spot illustrations accompany the poems, as do brief notes about poetic forms and poetic devices. An exceedingly...
Author
Language
English
Description
"For acclaimed writer and environmental activist Rick Bass, it can be wearying to dwell relentlessly upon the broken, the fragmented, the dead and dying and doomed to extinction. Activism is a necessary part of the environmental movement, but so is the time-honored celebration of the beauty that inspires us. Spanning his storied career, these new and selected essays attempt to take a brief step to the side, away from lamentation and prescription,...
Author
Language
English
Appears on list
Description
"The late Anthony Veasna So's debut story collection, Afterparties, was a landmark publication, hailed as a "bittersweet triumph for a fresh voice silenced too soon" (Fresh Air). And he was equally known for his comic, soulful essays, published in n+1, the New Yorker, and The Millions. Songs on Endless Repeat gathers those essays together, along with previously unpublished fiction. Written with razor-sharp wit and an unflinching eye, the essays examine...
Author
Language
English
Description
"More than two centuries after his birth, Ralph Waldo Emerson remains one of the presiding spirits in American culture. Yet his reputation as the starry-eyed prophet of self-reliance has obscured a much more complicated figure, who spent a lifetime wrestling with injustice, philosophy, art, desire, and suffering. James Marcus introduces readers to this Emerson, a writer of self-interrogating genius whose visionary flights are always grounded in Yankee...