Essays

The art of fiction is considered under a wide range of headings, such as the Intrusive Author, Suspense, the Epistolary Novel, Time-shift, Magical Realism and Symbolism, and each topic is illustrated by a passage or two taken from classic or modern fiction. Drawing on writers as diverse as Henry James and Martin Amis, Jane Austen and Fay Weldon and Henry Fielding and James Joyce, David Lodge makes accessible to the general reader the richness and variety of British and American fiction. Technical terms, such as Interior Monologue, Metafiction, Intertextuality and the Unreliable Narrator, are lucidly explained and their application demonstrated.

Bringing to criticism the verve and humour of his own novels, David Lodge has provided essential reading for students of literature, aspirant writers, and anyone who wishes to understand how literature works.

Have we become beauty-blind? For two decades or more in the humanities, various political arguments have been put forward against beauty: that it distracts us from more important issues; that it is the handmaiden of privilege; and that it masks political interests. In On Beauty and Being Just Elaine Scarry not only defends beauty from the political arguments against it but also argues that beauty does indeed press us toward a greater concern for justice. Taking inspiration from writers and thinkers as diverse as Homer, Plato, Marcel Proust, Simone Weil, and Iris Murdoch as well as her own experiences, Scarry offers up an elegant, passionate manifesto for the revival of beauty in our intellectual work as well as our homes, museums, and classrooms.

Scarry argues that our responses to beauty are perceptual events of profound significance for the individual and for society. Presenting us with a rare and exceptional opportunity to witness fairness, beauty assists us in our attention to justice. The beautiful object renders fairness, an abstract concept, concrete by making it directly available to our sensory perceptions. With its direct appeal to the senses, beauty stops us, transfixes us, fills us with a "surfeit of aliveness." In so doing, it takes the individual away from the center of his or her self-preoccupation and thus prompts a distribution of attention outward toward others and, ultimately, she contends, toward ethical fairness.

Scarry, author of the landmark The Body in Pain and one of our bravest and most creative thinkers, offers us here philosophical critique written with clarity and conviction as well as a passionate plea that we change the way we think about beauty.

The Best American series is the premier annual showcase for the country's finest short fiction and nonfiction. Each volume's series editor selects notable works from hundreds of magazines, journals, and websites. A special guest editor, a leading writer in the field, then chooses the best twenty or so pieces to publish. This unique system has made the Best American series the most respected -- and most popular -- of its kind.

The Best American Essays 2012 includes

Marcia Angell, Miah Arnold, Mark Doty, Joseph Epstein, Jonathan Franzen,
Malcolm Gladwell, Francine Prose, Lauren Slater,
Sandra Tsing Loh, Jose Antonio Vargas, and others

Now featuring an Introduction by Don Henley, founder of the Walden Woods Project, this beautiful commemorative edition of Thoreau's masterpiece features spectacular color photographs that capture Walden as vividly as Thoreau's words do.

Henry David Thoreau was just a few days short of his twenty-eighth birthday when he built a cabin on the shore of Walden Pond and began one of the most famous experiments in living in American history. Originally he was not, apparently, intending to write a book about his life at the pond, but nine years later, in August of 1854, Houghton Mifflin's predecessor, Ticknor and Fields, published Walden; or, aLife in the Woods. At the time the book was largely ignored, and it took five years to sell out the first printing of two thousand copies. It was not until 1862, the year of Thoreau's death, that the book was brought back into print, and it has never been out of print since. Published in hundreds of editions and translated into virtually every modern language, it has become one of the most widely read and influential books ever written. Proceeds from the sales of the book will be donated to the Walden Woods Project.

Among the passages appropriate for readings by parents, friends, or the bride and groom are selections from Plato and Sappho, Rilke and Auden, Ecclesiastes and Euripedes, Shakespeare and Donne, pascal and Montaigne, Emily Dickinson and Anne Morrow Lindbergh. There are love songs from the Aztecs and Eskimos, Hindu and African wedding prayers, a Buddhist marriage homily, a Shaker hymn, and Irish blessing, excerpts from Coptic Orthodox and Greek Orthodox marriage services, and passages from the Old and New Testaments, some familiar, some surprising. With myriad choices, Wedding Readings will help you add a special, personal touch to your marriage ceremony.