"Translated, edited, and with an Introduction by Stanley Corngold Featuring essays by Philip Roth, W. H Auden, and Walter Benjamin "When Gregor Samsa woke up one morning from unsettling dreams, he found himself changed in his bed into a monstrous vermin." With this startling, bizarre, yet surprisingly funny first sentence, Franz Kafka begins his masterpiece, The Metamorphosis. It is the story of a young man who, transformed overnight into a giant...

Poet Robert Bly stands out even among the celebrated, revolutionary generation of American artists who burst forth in the 1950s. ROBERT BLY: A THOUSAND YEARS OF JOY charts Bly’s singular path as a farmer’s son on a wintry Minnesota farm to a radical anti-Vietnam War activist to a wild man of the 1990’s men’s movement. The bespectacled, white-haired Bly is every inch the politically and spiritually engaged mystic, seeking each moment’s fervid...

A new collection of critical and personal essays on writing, obsession, and inspiration from National Book Award-winning and New York Times bestselling author Joyce Carol Oates. "Why do we write?" With this question, Joyce Carol Oates begins an imaginative exploration of the writing life, and all its attendant anxieties, joys, and futilities, in this collection of seminal essays and criticism. Leading her quest is a desire to understand the source...

"New York Times opinion writer and bestselling author Lindy West was once the in-house movie critic for Seattle's alternative newsweekly The Stranger, where she covered film with brutal honesty and giddy irreverence. In Shit, Actually, Lindy returns to those roots, re-examining beloved and iconic movies from the past 40 years with an eye toward the big questions of our time: Is Twilight the horniest movie in history? Why do the zebras in The Lion...

"Winner of the 2012 Edgar Allan Poe Awards, Best Critical/Biographical Category, Mystery Writers of America" "Finalist for the 2012 Marfield Prize, The National Award for Arts Writing, Arts Club of Washington" "One of The Times Literary Supplement's Books of the Year 2014, chosen by Joyce Carol Oates" Michael Dirda is a Pulitzer Prize–winning critic and longtime book columnist for the Washington Post. He is the author of four collections of essays,...

Dylan: Disc by Disc features each of Bob Dylan's studio LPs--thirty-six releases in all. Rock 'n' roll musicians, songwriters, and critics sound off about each release, bringing from the shadows not only Dylan's extraordinary musical accomplishments but the factors in his life that influenced his musical expressions. From The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan to Blonde on Blonde, from Blood on the Tracks to Shadows in the Night, Dylan: Disc by Disc rouses generations...

Draws on the author's first-hand experience with Franz Schubert's "Winterreise," his musical knowledge, and his training as a scholar to explore the meanings of the songs comprising this masterpiece, one of the greatest pieces of music ever written for the male solo voice.