Bruce Handy revisits the classics of every American childhood, from fairy tales to The Very Hungry Caterpillar, and explores the back stories of their creators, using context and biography to understand how some of the most creative authors and illustrators of their times created their often deeply personal masterpieces. Along the way, Handy learns what The Cat in the Hat says about anarchy and absentee parenting, which themes are shared by The Runaway...

The New York Times bestselling author of How to Read Literature Like a Professor uses the same skills to teach how to access accurate information in a rapidly changing 24/7 news cycle and become better readers, thinkers, and consumers of media.

Focusing on twelve American writers--including Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain, and Hart Crane--a renowned American literary critic discusses the greatest authors of American literature whose works make up what he calls the American sublime.

Presents the original text of Shakespeare's play side by side with a modern version, discusses the author and the theater of his time, and provides quizzes and other study activities.

In this practical and engaging guide, Roy Peter Clark teaches the fine art of X-ray reading. When we X-ray read, we look beneath the surface of a text to discover the strategies that create the effects we experience -- such as suspense, humor, or pain ; we can then adopt these strategies as our own.

"In arguably his most personal and lasting book, America's most daringly original and controversial critic gives us brief, luminous readings of more than eighty texts by canonical authors-- texts he has had by heart since childhood"--

"A brilliant examination of literary invention through the ages, from ancient Mesopotamia to Elena Ferrante, showing how writers created technical breakthroughs as sophisticated and significant as any in science, and in the process, engineered enhancements to the human heart and mind"--

Book connoisseur Tom Nissley has combed literary history to capture the stories that make writers' lives perennially fascinating: their epiphanies, embarrassments and achievements. Each handsome page in A Reader's Book of Days is devoted to a day of the year, featuring original accounts of events in the lives of great writers, and fictional events that took place within beloved books.

"Streaming Now: Postcards from the Thing That Is Happening is a collection of hybrid feminist narratives that perfectly captures the many paradoxes of the COVID-19 pandemic, contrasting the seemingly never-ended public catastrophes we experienced as a collective with the isolated, often-mundane lives we carried out in private. Shifting effortless between social commentary and memoir, glimpses of history and threads of fiction, Stone, a lifelong feminist...