Showing results by publisher "HighBridge, a division of Recorded Books" in Literary History & Criticism

The influence of the comic book has never been greater, from movies to streaming and beyond, but the journey comics took from little-regarded kids' magazines to literary prize-winning books and global franchises turned on a highly unusual group of writers and artists. Few would have expected a small gathering of British comic book fans and creators in the early 'seventies to be a global cultural pivot-point, but this was the start of a disparate movement of punks, dropouts, and disaffected youths who reinvented a medium and became the imaginative heart of a global success story.

Michael Krasny has been telling Jewish jokes since his bar mitzvah, and it's been said that he knows more of them than anyone on the planet. He certainly states his case in this wise, enlightening, and hilarious book that not only collects the best of Jewish humor passed down from generation to generation but explains the cultural expressions and anxieties behind the laughs.

Jesse Ball has produced fourteen acclaimed works of deeply empathetic absurdism in poetry and fiction. Now, he offers listeners his first memoir, one that invites the listener into a raw and personal account of love, grief, and memory. Inspired by the memoir Édouard Leve put to paper shortly before his death, Autoportrait is an extraordinarily frank and intimate work from one of America's most brilliant young authors. Half-remembered moments are woven together with the joys and triumphs—and the mistakes and humiliations, too—that somehow tell us who we are, why we are here.

Questions of what happens after death were vital in Shakespeare's time, as it is today. And, like today, the answers were by no means universally agreed upon. Exploring how particular texts and characters answer these questions, Shakespeare and the Afterlife showcases the vitality and originality of the author's language and thinking. We encounter characters with very personal visions of what awaits them after death, and these visions reveal new insights into these individuals' motivations and concerns as they navigate the world of the living.

When Nick Flynn was 7 years old, his mother set fire to their house. The event loomed large in his imagination for years, but it's only after having a child of his own that he understands why. He returns with his young daughter to the landscape of his youth, reflecting on how his feral childhood has him still in its reins, and forms his memories into lyrical bedtime stories populated by the both sinister and wounded Mister Mann.

Filled with unforgettable characters, rich in history and social realism, Anna Karenina is a masterpiece of world literature, a story that fires the imagination and touches the heart.

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) changed residences about once a year throughout his life. Driven by a desire for literary success and the pressures of supporting his family, Poe sought work in American magazines, living in the cities that produced them. Scott Peeples chronicles Poe's rootless life in the cities, neighborhoods, and rooms where he lived and worked, exploring how each new place left its enduring mark on the writer and his craft.

As geek culture goes mainstream - from Game of Thrones to the Avengers - it's never been more important to look at the role women play in it and the future they're helping to create. And Kameron is the smart, funny, and profane voice we need to guide listeners through the world of fandom and the coming revolution in pop culture.

Bibliophobia is a book about material books, how they are cared for, and how they are damaged, throughout the 5,000-year history of writing from Sumeria to the smartphone. A global history, covering six continents and seven religions, it discusses topics such as the origins of human script; the development of textual media such as scrolls, codices, printed books, and AI; the collection and destruction of libraries; the use of books as holy relics, talismans, or shrines; and the place of literacy in the history of slavery, heresy, blasphemy, censorship, and persecution.

Horace Everett Hooper - a volatile, self-assured, impulsive, and optimistic American, an autodidact and natural-born salesman - got into the book business at age 16, moved to the Western frontier and on to Chicago, and became hugely successful. With a brilliant adman named Henry Haxton as his partner, he went about buying publishing rights to the Encyclopedia Britannica, a work incredibly distinguished by entries from Charles Darwin, Thomas Malthus, Sir Walter Scott, and more.

In a gauntlet-throwing essay at the start of this brilliant assemblage, Cynthia Ozick stakes the claim that, just as surely as critics require a steady supply of new fiction, novelists need great critics to build a vibrant community on the foundation of literary history. For decades Ozick herself has been one of our great critics, as these essays so clearly display. She offers models of critical analysis of writers from the mid-20th century to today, from Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Kafka to William Gass and Martin Amis, all assembled in provocatively named groups.

What if the American experiment is twofold, encompassing both democracy and tyranny? That is the question at the core of this book, which traces some of ways that Americans across the nineteenth century understood the perversions tyranny introduced into both their polity and society.

For a time, Nelson Algren was America's most famous author, lauded by the likes of Richard Wright and Ernest Hemingway. Millions bought his books. Algren's third novel, The Man with the Golden Arm, won the first National Book Award, and Frank Sinatra starred in the movie. But despite Algren's talent, he abandoned fiction and fell into obscurity. The cause of his decline was never clear. Some said he drank his talent away; others cited writer's block. The truth, hidden in the pages of his books, is far more complicated and tragic.

Intimate and richly detailed, The Beauty of Living begins with E. E. Cummings's Cambridge upbringing and his relationship with his socially progressive but domestically domineering father. It follows Cummings through his undergraduate experience at Harvard, where he fell into a circle of aspiring writers including John Dos Passos, who became a lifelong friend. Steeped in classical paganism and literary Decadence, Cummings and his friends rode the explosion of Cubism, Futurism, Imagism, and other "modern" movements in the arts.

Transforming Harry: The Adaptation of Harry Potter in the Transmedia Age is an edited volume of eight essays that look at how the cinematic versions of the seven Harry Potter novels represent an unprecedented cultural event in the history of cinematic adaptation.

Whether you farm or garden, live in the country or long to move there, or simply enjoy an occasional rural retreat, you will be delighted by this cornucopia of writings about living and working on the land, harvested from the fertile fields of ancient Greek and Roman literature. An inspiring antidote to the digital age, How to Be a Farmer evokes the beauty and bounty of nature with a rich mixture of philosophy, practical advice, history, and humor.  

An engaging examination of Black Girl Magic and its significance in American literature.

"Stories, both my own and those I've taken to heart, make up whoever it is that I've become," Peter Orner writes in this collection of essays about reading, writing, and living. Orner reads and writes everywhere he finds himself: a hospital cafeteria, a coffee shop in Albania, or a crowded bus in Haiti. The result is a book of unlearned meditations that stumbles into memoir.

Jack Zipes has spent decades as a "scholarly scavenger," discovering forgotten fairy tales in libraries, flea markets, used bookstores, and internet searches, and he has introduced countless readers to these remarkable works and their authors. In Buried Treasures, Zipes describes his special passion for uncovering political fairy tales of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, offers fascinating profiles of more than a dozen of their writers and illustrators, and shows why they deserve greater attention and appreciation.

In Search of a Beautiful Freedom brings together the best work from Farah Jasmine Griffin's rich forays on music, Black feminism, literature, the crises of Hurricane Katrina and COVID-19, and the Black artists she esteems. She moves from evoking the haunting strength of Odetta and the rise of soprano popular singers in the 1970s to the forging of a Black women's literary renaissance and the politics of Malcolm X through the lens of Black feminism.