Showing results by publisher "HarperCollins Publishers Limited" in Literary History & Criticism

Shakespeare's life, despite the scrutiny of generations of biographers and scholars, is still a thicket of myths and traditions, some preposterous, some conflicting, arranged around the few scant facts known about the Bard: from his birth in Stratford to the bequest of his second best bed to his wife when he died.

A magisterial life of Ted Hughes - identified recently as the only English poet since the First World War with a claim to true greatness and one of Britain's most important writers - to be published on National Poetry Day by prize-winning biographer Jonathan Bate. Ted Hughes, Poet Laureate, was one of the greatest writers of the 20th century. He is one of Britain's most important poets, a poet of claws and cages: Jaguar, Hawk and Crow. Event and animal are turned to myth in his work.

When the Nobel Prize for Literature was awarded to Bob Dylan in 2016, the literary world was up in arms. How could the world's most prestigious book prize be awarded to a famously cantankerous singer-songwriter in his 70s, who wouldn't even deign to make a victory speech? In Why Dylan Matters, Harvard professor Richard F. Thomas answers that question with magisterial erudition.

I know hardly any other writer who seems to be closer, or more continually close, to the Spirit of Christ Himself." So wrote C. S. Lewis of George MacDonald, the Scottish pastor and novelist who had a profound impact on Lewis' own literary and spiritual career. Here Lewis gathers 365 of MacDonald's most inspirational lines, prefacing them with details of the effects MacDonald had on Lewis himself.

A collection of three medieval English poems, translated by Tolkien for the modern-day reader and containing romance, tragedy, love, sex and honour.

For many years an atheist, C. S. Lewis vividly describes the spiritual quest that convinced him of the truth and reality of Christianity, in his famous autobiography. "In the Trinity Term of 1929 I gave in, and admitted that God was God...perhaps the most dejected and reluctant convert in all England." Thus Lewis describes memorably the crisis of his conversion. Surprised by Joy reveals both that crisis and its momentous conclusion that would determine the shape of Lewis' entire life.

Tolkien and the Great War tells for the first time the full story of how he embarked on the creation of Middle-earth in his youth as the world around him was plunged into catastrophe. This biography reveals the horror and heroism that he experienced as a signals officer in the Battle of the Somme and introduces the circle of friends who spurred his mythology to life.

A real-life detective story, investigating how Agatha Christie and colleagues in a mysterious literary club transformed crime fiction, writing books casting new light on unsolved murders whilst hiding clues to their authors' darkest secrets. This is the first book about the Detection Club, the world's most famous and most mysterious social network of crime writers. Drawing on years of in-depth research, it reveals the astonishing story of how members such as Agatha Christie and Dorothy L. Sayers reinvented detective fiction.

A droll and dazzling compendium of observations, stories, lists and brief essays about babies. One August day a baby was born, or, as it seemed to Rivka Galchen, a puma moved into her apartment. Her arrival felt supernatural; she seemed to come from another world. And suddenly the world seemed ludicrously, suspiciously, adverbially sodden with meaning. But Galchen didn't want to write about the puma. She had never been interested in babies or in mothers before. Now everything seemed directly related to them.

An entertaining history of British thrillers from Casino Royale to The Eagle Has Landed, in which award-winning crime writer Mike Ripley reveals that, though Britain may have lost an empire, her thrillers helped save the world. With a foreword by Lee Child.

Joan Didion has always kept notebooks: of overheard dialogue, observations, interviews, drafts of essays and articles. Here is one such draft that traces a road trip she took with her husband, John Gregory Dunne, in June 1970, through Louisiana, Mississippi and Alabama. She interviews prominent local figures, describes motels, diners, a deserted reptile farm, a visit with Walker Percy, a ladies' brunch at the Mississippi Broadcasters' Convention.

In The End of the End of the Earth, which gathers essays and speeches written mostly in the past five years, Jonathan Franzen returns with renewed vigour to the themes - both human and literary - that have long preoccupied him. Whether exploring his complex relationship with his uncle, recounting his young adulthood in New York or offering an illuminating look at the global seabird crisis, these pieces contain all the wit and disabused realism that we’ve come to expect from Franzen....

Laura Dockrill (aka Dockers MC) is a performance and spoken word artist who delivers her own written work, characters, and thoughts in such a way that her audiences just keep getting bigger and bigger. Through her sheer ability to culminate a sense of rhythms, wonderful sounds through enunciation, narrative, and comedy, Laura has the ability to draw her fans into a sense of nostalgia. This enables them to use their imagination and reminisce through her ever changing performances

The definitive biography of Edward Gorey, the eccentric master of macabre nonsense. From The Gashlycrumb Tinies to The Doubtful Guest, Edward Gorey's wickedly funny and deliciously sinister little books have influenced our culture in innumerable ways, from the works of Tim Burton and Neil Gaiman to Lemony Snicket. Some even call him the Grandfather of Goth. But who was this man, who lived with over 20,000 books and six cats, who roomed with Frank O'Hara at Harvard?

How did truth become an endangered species? This decline began decades ago, and in The Death of Truth, former New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani takes a penetrating look at the cultural forces that contributed to this gathering storm. In social media and literature, television, academia, and political campaigns, Kakutani identifies the trends - originating on both the right and the left - that have combined to elevate subjectivity over factuality, science and common values. And she returns us to the words of the great critics of authoritarianism, writers like George Orwell and Hannah Arendt, whose work is newly and eerily relevant.

This powerful and moving anthology includes poems of war from the 18th century to our own days in the long shadow of the bomb. The poets evoke the glory and the horror, the exhilaration and the despair, the humanity and the insanity of war.

An extended train journey frames the action - and the author turns not to self-help manuals but to the fictions that have shaped our emotional and romantic landscape. Listeners will find themselves propelled into Anna Karenina’s world of steam, commuting down the Northern Line with the Railway Children and checking out a New York L-train with Anthony Trollope’s forgotten muse, Kate Field.

Tess, the young and lovely heroine of Hardy's classic tale, knows instinctively that the path she is choosing is the wrong one. But, a child of her times, what can she do but follow the dictates of her family?

Here are 154 poems performed by by the wonderful Sir John Gielgud in this Shakepseare collection of the Sonnets.

Shakespeare's sonnets deal with such themes as the passage of time, love, beauty, and mortality. All but two of the poems were first published in a 1609 quarto entitled Shake-Speares Sonnets: Never before imprinted.

Published to commemorate the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare's death in April 2016, a breathtaking exploration into Shakespeare as a global poet. Whilst travelling in Luxor, Edward Wilson-Lee encountered a man who called out to him from the summer shade with lines from Shakespeare's Macbeth: 'Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow...' Unable to resist the temptation, Wilson-Lee responded with the next line, and so began a fascination with unexpected cultural encounters.