Modern critical views

A collection of critical esays on the fiction of John Updike, arranged in chronological order of original publication.

A collection of twelve critical essays on the work of Dryden, arranged in chronological order of original publication.

Through his distinctive fusion of modernist daring and traditional storytelling, Bernard Malamud became one of postwar America's most important writers, his work an inspiration for and lasting influence on novelists who have come after him, Cynthia Ozick and Philip Roth most notably among them. The second volume of the Library of America's Malamud edition brings together three novels of the 1960s: A New Life (1961), a satiric campus novel set in the Pacific Northwest (based on the author's experiences at Oregon State), in which native New Yorker Seymour Levin finds himself confronted not only with a new landscape but with erotic intrigue, university politics, and an appointment that isn't quite what he had expected it to be. The Fixer (1966) is the gripping saga of a Jew imprisoned in pre-Revolutionary Russia after being falsely accused of the ritual murder of a twelve-year-old boy. The novel-in-stories Pictures of Fidelman: An Exhibition (1969) follows the comic misadventures, sexual and otherwise, of a failed American painter in Italy. In the ten unforgettable stories concluding the collection, Malamud shows himself to be an heir to the tradition of Hawthorne, Chekhov, and Kafka, and at his best--"Idiots First," "The Jewbird," "The German Refugee"--their equal.

"Nobody in the world was more inadequate to act the heroine than I was." Why did Agatha Christie spend her career pretending that she was “just” an ordinary housewife, when clearly she wasn’t? Her life is fascinating for its mysteries and its passions and, as Lucy Worsley says, "She was thrillingly, scintillatingly modern." She went surfing in Hawaii, she loved fast cars, and she was intrigued by the new science of psychology, which helped her through devastating mental illness. So why—despite all the evidence to the contrary—did Agatha present herself as a retiring Edwardian lady of leisure? She was born in 1890 into a world that had its own rules about what women could and couldn’t do. Lucy Worsley’s biography is not just of a massively, internationally successful writer. It's also the story of a person who, despite the obstacles of class and gender, became an astonishingly successful working woman. With access to personal letters and papers that have rarely been seen, Lucy Worsley’s biography is both authoritative and entertaining and makes us realize what an extraordinary pioneer Agatha Christie was—truly a woman who wrote the twentieth century.

Describes the life of the writer James Baldwin, focusing on his experiences as an African-American civil rights worker and as a gay man.

Editor Renate Stendhal has selected 360 photographs (more than 100 of those seen here for the first time) of Gertrude Stein, her companion Alice B. Toklas, and the many familiar and famous faces who surrounded her.

Its an anthology of his biggest plays: Tamburlaine, The Jew of Malta, Edward Second and Dr Faustus.

A collection of critical essays on the plays of Eugene O'Neill, arranged in chronological order of original publication.

A collection of thirteen critical essays, arranged in chronological order of publication, devoted to the works of the nineteenth-century English writer.

Sixteen critical essays on the Elizabethan poet and his works.

A collection of nine critical essays on the work of James Dickey, arranged in chronological order of original publication.

Critical essays on the writings of Elizabeth Bowen.

Provides a representative selection of the best critical essays published on his work.

A collection of nineteen critical essays on the Chilean writer and his work, arranged chronologically in the order of their original publication.