Feel Free: Essays
To open Feel Free is to be admitted, for four hundred or so pages, into the company of a mind that refuses to stand still. Zadie Smith's…
Retailers that deliver to: USNineteen Ways of Looking at Wang Wei: How a Chinese Poem Is Translated
There is something faintly improbable about a fifty-page book, built around a four-line poem written in the eighth century, becoming a touchstone…
How Fiction Works
James Wood's How Fiction Works arrives with a title that dares you to call its bluff, and for roughly two-thirds of its compact 250 pages it…
Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays
Few contemporary essayists can make a book review feel like an ethical ambush, and fewer still can turn a puff piece for a food magazine into a…
The Western Canon
Harold Bloom's 1994 defence of Western literature is a book that arrives already lit. Before you even reach the text proper, there is the…
The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination
Few works of literary criticism have managed to feel simultaneously of their moment and stubbornly permanent, but Sandra Gilbert and Susan…
Lectures on Literature
Reading Nabokov's collected lectures feels like being ushered into a private chamber where an aristocratic Russian butterfly collector is…
Aspects of the Novel
Nearly a century after E.M. Forster delivered the Clark Lectures at Trinity College in 1927, this slim volume remains one of the stranger classics…
My Sister’s Keeper
Jodi Picoult built her reputation on picking at the knots most novelists leave alone, and My Sister's Keeper is the book where that instinct…
Artemis Fowl
When Artemis Fowl arrived in 2001, it was saddled with the "new Harry Potter" label and has spent the two decades since either suffering…
The Giver
There are certain books that lodge themselves permanently in the architecture of your reading memory, and Lois Lowry's 1993 novel is one of…
Fever Pitch
There are sports memoirs, and there are memoirs that happen to involve sport, and Fever Pitch belongs defiantly in the second camp. First published…
