Partial Portraits is a book of literary criticism by Henry James published in 1888. The book collected essays that James had written over the preceding decade, mostly on English and American writers. But the book also offered treatments of Alphonse Daudet, Guy de Maupassant and Ivan Turgenev.

This is a book about everything blue--sex and sleaze and sadness, among other things--and about everything else. It brings us the world in a word as only William H. Gass, among contemporary American writers, can do. Gass writes: Of the colors, blue and green have the greatest emotional range. Sad reds and melancholy yellows are difficult to turn up. Among the ancient elements, blue occurs everywhere: in ice and water, in the flame as purely as in...

In her new collection, Fiona Sze-Lorrain offers a nuanced yet dynamic vision of humanity marked by perils, surprises, and the transcendence of a "ruined elegance." Through an intercultural journey that traces lives, encounters, exiles, and memories from France, America, and Asia, the poet explores a rich array of historical and literary allusions to European masters, Asian sources, and American influences. With candor and humor, each lyrical foray...

Classics and Commercials: A Literary Chronicle of the Forties showcases Edmund Wilson's critical writings spanning decades and continents. Many of these essays first appeared in the New Yorker. Here is Wilson on Jane Austen, Thackeray, Edith Wharton, Tolstoy, Swift (the classics) as well as brilliant observations on Poe, H.P Lovecraft, detective stories, and other commercial literature. This wide-ranging study from one of the most influential man...

A collection of essays on the joys of great literature from the New York Times–bestselling author and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. One of America's foremost novelists and critics, Cynthia Ozick has won praise and provoked debate for taking on challenging literary, historical, and moral issues. Her new collection of spirited essays focuses on the essential joys of great literature, with particular emphasis on the novel. With...

Twenty-three biographical essays on writers admired by the award-winning author of The Education of Oscar Fairfax. For Louis Auchincloss, life and letters are not two things but one. It therefore comes as no surprise that when he writes about writers, their lives are considered as closely as their works. He takes what today is a refreshingly unpopular position: that the artist and his art cannot be teased apart, that biography of criticism and criticism...

Morris Dickstein (1940–2021) was Distinguished Professor of English at the City University of New York Graduate Center and a widely published literary and cultural critic. His work has appeared in the New York Times Book Review, the Times Literary Supplement, Partisan Review, The Nation, and the Chronicle of Higher Education. His books include Gates of Eden: American culture in the 1960's, which was nominated for a National Book Critics Circle Award...

What will 21st century fiction look like? Acclaimed literary critic Adam Kirsch examines some of our most beloved writers, including Haruki Murakami, Elena Ferrante, Roberto Bolano, and Margaret Atwood, to better understand literature in the age of globalization. The global novel, he finds, is not so much a genre as a way of imagining the world, one that allows the novel to address both urgent contemporary concerns -- climate change, genetic engineering,...

For centuries, a central goal of art has been to make us see the world with new eyes. Thinkers from Edmund Burke to Elaine Scarry have understood this effort as the attempt to create new forms. But as anyone who has ever worn out a song by repeated listening knows, artistic form is hardly immune to sensation-killing habit. Some of our most ambitious writers-Keats, Proust, Nabokov, Ashbery-have been obsessed by this problem. Attempting to create an...

Readers will delight at the best scenes ever written. They will find old favorites and savor scenes new to them. With each scene, Barnaby Conrad provides insights as to what the author wishes to accomplish with this passage and the literary devices he or she employs. Any avid reader will enjoy Conrad's ""101 Best Scenes Ever Written,"" but countless fledgling and established writers will benefit enormously by sampling and studying these gems from...