Praised by great writers from Flannery O’Conner to Jonathan Lethem, Miss Lonelyhearts is an American classic. A newspaper reporter assigned to write the agony column in the depths of the Great Depression seeks respite from the poor souls who send in their sad letters, only to be further tormented by his viciously cynical editor, Shrike. This single volume of Miss Lonelyhearts features its original Alvin Lustig jacket design, as well as a new introduction by Harold Bloom, who calls it “my favorite work of modern American fiction.”

Why Shakespeare? What explains our continued fascination with his poems and plays? In Living with Shakespeare, Susannah Carson invites forty actors, directors, scholars, and writers to reflect on why his work is still such a vital part of our culture.

We hear from James Earl Jones on reclaiming Othello as a tragic hero, Julie Taymor on turning Prospero into Prospera, Camille Paglia on teaching the plays to actors, F. Murray Abraham on gaining an audience’s sympathy for Shylock, Sir Ben Kingsley on communicating Shakespeare’s ideas through performance, Germaine Greer on the playwright’s home life, Dame Harriet Walter on the complexity of his heroines, Brian Cox on social conflict in his time and ours, Jane Smiley on transposing King Lear to Iowa in A Thousand Acres, and Sir Antony Sher on feeling at home in Shakespeare’s language. Together these essays provide a fresh appreciation of Shakespeare’s works as a living legacy to be read, seen, performed, adapted, revised, wrestled with, and embraced by creative professionals and lay enthusiasts alike.

F. Murray Abraham ? Isabel Allende ? Cicely Berry ? Eve Best ? Eleanor Brown ? Stanley Cavell ? Karin Coonrod ? Brian Cox ? Peter David ? Margaret Drabble ? Dominic Dromgoole ? David Farr ? Fiasco Theater ? Ralph Fiennes ? Angus Fletcher ? James Franco ? Alan Gordon ? Germaine Greer ? Barry John ? James Earl Jones ? Sir Ben Kingsley ? Maxine Hong Kingston ? Rory Kinnear ? J. D. McClatchy ? Conor McCreery ? Tobias Menzies ? Joyce Carol Oates ? Camille Paglia ? James Prosek ? Richard Scholar ? Sir Antony Sher ? Jane Smiley ? Matt Sturges ? Julie Taymor ? Eamonn Walker ? Dame Harriet Walter ? Bill Willingham ? Jess Winfield

In the year of his one-hundredth birthday, preeminent literary critic, scholar, and teacher M. H. Abrams brings us a collection of nine new and recent essays that challenge the reader to think about poetry in new ways. In these essays, three of them never before published, Abrams engages afresh with pivotal figures in intellectual and literary history, among them Kant, Keats, and Hazlitt. The centerpiece of the volume is Abrams's eloquent and incisive essay “The Fourth Dimension of a Poem” on the pleasure of reading poems aloud, accompanied by online recordings of Abrams's revelatory readings of poems such as William Wordsworth's “Surprised by Joy,” Alfred Tennyson's “Here Sleeps the Crimson Petal,” and Ernest Dowson's “Cynara.” The collection begins with a foreword by Abrams's former student Harold Bloom.

Anyone who has ever said one thing and meant another has spoken in the mode of allegory. The allegorical expression of ideas pervades literature, art, music, religion, politics, business, and advertising. But how does allegory really work and how should we understand it? For more than forty years, Angus Fletcher's classic book has provided an answer that is still unsurpassed for its comprehensiveness, brilliance, and eloquence. With a preface by Harold Bloom and a substantial new afterword by the author, this edition reintroduces this essential text to a new generation of students and scholars of literature and art.

Allegory puts forward a basic theory of allegory as a symbolic mode, shows how it expresses basic emotional and cognitive drives, and relates it to a wide variety of aesthetic devices. Revealing the immense richness of the allegorical tradition, the book demonstrates how allegory works in literature and art, as well as everyday speech, sales pitches, and religious and political appeals.

In his new afterword, Fletcher documents the rise of a disturbing new type of allegory--allegory without ideas.

The Relic is an irreverent fictional autobiography narrating the picaresque adventures of Teodorico, a Portuguese playboy determined to be the sole heir of his absurdly pious, sexually repressed, and tyrannical Auntie. Sent to the Holy Land, he returns with what he presumes is the 'relic of relics' in hopes of persuading Auntie to bequeath her vast fortune to him. While in Jerusalem, Teodorico has a vision in which he witnesses Christ's trial and crucifixion and the founding of Christianity--with a twist.

A personal meditation on great literary works looks at such authors as Shakespeare, Walt Whitman, Stephen Crane, and Ralph Waldo Emerson, drawing connections and influences between them.

Kurt Vonnegut is one of the most popular and admired authors of post-war American literature famous both for his playful and deceptively simple style as well as for his scathing critiques of social injustice and war. His lauded works such as Slaughterhouse-Five are frequently studied in high school and college literature courses. Bloom's How to Write about Kurt Vonnegut assists young writers with composing effective essays about Vonnegut, with a chapter devoted to good essay writing. Bibliographies, an index, and an introduction from literary scholar Harold Bloom complete the volume.

Sylvia Plath's short life and intense poetry continue to draw considerable critical and popular attention. Among her more recognizable works are the poetry collection Ariel and the novel The Bell Jar. Her suicide and tumultuous marriage to Ted Hughes, as well as his choices in posthumously publishing some of her work (and not publishing other parts of it), add to the cult of romance and mystery surrounding Plath's life. Bloom's How to Write about Sylvia Plath provides valuable advice for students on writing compelling essays about Plath and her work. Bibliographies, an index, and an introduction from Yale scholar Harold Bloom complete the title.

Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, a novel she composed at the age of 19, is a widely read and studied work to this day, noted for the deft way its young author combined Romantic sensibility with a meditation on the ethical considerations to which advancements in science and technology give rise. Bloom's How to Write about Mary Shelley includes guidance on ways students can write effective essays about this noted author. An introduction from noted scholar Harold Bloom, bibliographies, and an index are also featured.

From Harold Bloom, the foremost literary critic of our time, comes a delightful anthology of the final works of great poets. In Till I End My Song, Bloom has meticulously curated the last poems of one hundred influential poets. These poems, sometimes the literal end and other times the imagined conclusion to a poetic career, offer a lens through which to contemplate the enduring nature of art and the inevitability of death. Bloom's selections highlight the work of the canonized poets T. S. Eliot, Alexander Pope, W. B. Yeats, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and William Shakespeare, but also revive interest in distinguished but long-neglected poets, such as Conrad Aiken, William Cowper, Edwin Arlington Robinson, George Meredith, and Louis MacNeice. An authoritative collection of last poems, Till I End My Song will reverberate long into the coming silence.

From William Blake to Samuel Taylor Coleridge and from William Wordsworth to Percy Shelley, this volume provides critical overviews of the poets who defined the English Romantic period. The essays included target seminal works and major figures such as John Keats and offer as well important background and general information on the period and its far-reaching influences. Along with a chronology, bibliography, and index, this volume of critical essays features an introduction from Harold Bloom of Yale University.

Building on the rich tradition of English-language poetry that preceded them, the major British poets of the 20th century subjected their art form to the influence and permutations of modernism, postmodernism, and beyond. This essential survey of a century of innovation and eloquence includes such seminal early and midcentury figures as T.S. Eliot, William Butler Yeats, and Philip Larkin and concludes with analysis and discussion of the more recent contributions of such well-regarded poets as Ted Hughes and Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney. Professor Harold Bloom introduces this volume of critical essays, which also features a chronology, bibliography, and index for reference.

J.R.R. Tolkien drew on his professorial expertise in Anglo-Saxon literature and the early mythology and folklore of Great Britain in creating this popular classic centering on the perils of Bilbo Baggins. Bilbo became one of the author's most enduring and vividly realized creations in this precursor to the legendary The Lord of the Rings trilogy. Yale literary scholar Harold Bloom introduces this compilation of concise critical excerpts, which also includes an annotated bibliography and an index for easy reference.

The King James Bible stands at 'the sublime summit of literature in English,' sharing the honor only with Shakespeare, Harold Bloom contends in the opening pages of this illuminating literary tour. Distilling the insights acquired from a significant portion of his career as a brilliant critic and teacher, he offers readers at last the book he has been writing 'all my long life,' a magisterial and intimately perceptive reading of the King James Bible as a literary masterpiece.

Bloom calls it an 'inexplicable wonder' that a rather undistinguished group of writers could bring forth such a magnificent work of literature, and he credits William Tyndale as their fountainhead. Reading the King James Bible alongside Tyndale's Bible, the Geneva Bible, and the original Hebrew and Greek texts, Bloom highlights how the translators and editors improved upon—or, in some cases, diminished—the earlier versions. He invites readers to hear the baroque inventiveness in such sublime books as the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Job, and alerts us to the echoes of the King James Bible in works from the Romantic period to the present day. Throughout, Bloom makes an impassioned and convincing case for reading the King James Bible as literature, free from dogma and with an appreciation of its enduring aesthetic value.

Though known for his classic novels centering on young men coming of age, Mark Twain is equally esteemed for his short fiction, which often feature Connecticut Yankees, princes and paupers, and celebrated jumping frogs. Marked by their characteristic blend of humor and homespun insight, these major short fiction stories are discussed in this new volume, as well as other widely read tales such as 'The Stolen White Elephant,' 'The Second Advent,' and 'The Man Who Corrupted Hadleyburg.' Yale literary scholar Harold Bloom introduces this compilation of critical essays, which features a chronology of this prolific writer's life, a bibliography, and an index for quick reference.

Though it was the adolescent honesty and attitude of The Catcher in the Rye's Holden Caulfield that initially put J.D. Salinger on the American literary map, it is his short fiction, mostly initially published in The New Yorker magazine, that has added immeasurably to his growing reputation through the years. The well-known tales of Nine Stories and the longer stories and novellas, including Franny and Zooey and Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters, are discussed in this volume offering a rare critical overview of Salinger's shorter prose offerings. Scholar Harold Bloom introduces this book of critical essays, which comes complete with a chronology of Salinger's life, a bibliography, and an index for easy reference.

Toni Morrison, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1993, is one of America's most popular American authors, and her works are frequently studied in college and high school courses. Her novels, including The Bluest Eye, Song of Solomon, Beloved, and Paradise, have won almost every major award available to them. In addition, her influence as a critic, book editor, and mentor to other writers has been incalculable. This latest addition to the Bloom's Modern Critical Views series delves into Morrison's life and works, providing a chronology and bibliography, plus an index for quick reference.

Brave New World is Aldous Huxley's most influential novel. It presents a dystopian depiction of the state of the world in the distant future. Many credit the bold scope of his vision with popularizing interest in scientific study. In an age of genetic engineering and virtual reality, Harold Bloom suggests in his introduction that the work is at once threadbare and more relevant than ever. This new collection of full-length critical essays includes a chronology, bibliography, and index for student researchers.

Albert Camus's landmark existentialist novel traces the aftermath of a shocking crime and the man whose fate is sealed with one rash and foolhardy act. The Stranger presents readers with a new kind of protagonist, a man unable to transcend the tedium and inherent absurdity of everyday existence in a world indifferent to the struggles and strivings of its human denizens. Complete with an introduction from master literary scholar Harold Bloom, this new edition of full-length critical essays includes a chronology, bibliography, and index for easy reference.

Hailed for his novels of post-Depression American life, John Steinbeck has received equal acclaim for his short fiction. This volume examines the reception and legacy of such enduring works as 'The Red Pony,' 'The Pearl,' and 'The Chrysanthemums.' Critical essays on these works and others are found in this new volume, giving students studying Steinbeck's short stories assistance in understanding and writing about this author. A chronology, bibliography, index, and introduction by Yale scholar Harold Bloom enhance this new title.

For many, The Tempest constitutes Shakespeare's farewell to the stage and stands as one of the most evocative and moving explorations of human possibilities and limits. Though today the play is typically called a romance, Harold Bloom suggests that it is a comedy marked by a sobering awareness of finality and the advance of time. In this new collection of critical essays, The Tempest is examined from a variety of schools of criticism. A chronology of Shakespeare's life, a bibliography of his works, an index for quick reference, and an introduction by Shakespearean scholar Harold Bloom round out this volume.

This collection of stories from Tim O'Brien paints an often-brutal portrait of soldiers' lives during the Vietnam War. More than two decades after its initial publication, this new classic of American fiction is being featured for the first time in the long-running Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations series. Complete with an introduction from the venerable Harold Bloom, and featuring a chronology of O'Brien's life, a bibliography of his works, and an index for reference, this volume of critical essays is a valuable source for students of literature studying The Things They Carried.

Kate Chopin's The Awakening has been seen as an early evocation of the ideas that would galvanize the women's liberation movement. Critic Harold Bloom sees the work as arising from the autoerotic energies inherent to the poems of Walt Whitman. 'Edna emulates Whitman,' he writes, 'by falling in love with her own body.' This new volume containing a selection of critical essays from various schools of criticism will assist students reading and studying this great American work. Notes on the contributing critics, a chronology of Chopin's life, an index, a bibliography, and an introduction written by the inestimable Harold Bloom complete the volume.

To many, Henrik Ibsen is seen as the father of modern drama. By tightening the theatrical scope of his work and by fixing his authorial gaze on the quotidian struggles, both domestically and professionally, of his characters, Ibsen achieved a realism, freshness, and clarity of vision rarely seen in European theater up to that point. Explored in this new volume of critical essays are Ibsen's classic works including The Doll's House, Hedda Gabler, and An Enemy of the People. A chronology, bibliography, index, and introductory from literary scholar Harold Bloom complete the title.

The rise of modernism marked one of the major transitional periods in contemporary literature. The American modernist poets created a rich legacy in their verse explorations of a world touched by war, rapid industrialization, and the growing perceived alienation of the individual. The innovators featured in this volume include Ezra Pound, e.e. cummings, Edna St. Vincent Millay, and Carl Sandburg and their abiding influences. Critical essays examine these poets and their works, with a chronology, bibliography, index, and an introductory essay by master scholar Harold Bloom completing the title.

The American and British poets of the Victorian period balanced tradition and innovation, paving the way for the stylistic departures of modernism. The poets featured in this title include Alfred, Lord Tennyson; Elizabeth Barrett Browning; Robert Browning; Rudyard Kipling; Christina Rossetti; Gerard Manley Hopkins; and Ralph Waldo Emerson. Students studying this period in literature will find this selection of critical essays helpful in understanding these poets and their works. An introductory essay by Harold Bloom, a bibliography, a chronology, and an index add to this volume.