A dreamlike novel set in Pennsylvania in the 1990s, Here Is a Game We Could Play is the story of Claudia, an intelligent eccentric trapped in the rundown industrial town she grew up in – a place plagued with troubling memories and hidden threats. See...

Myths are usually seen as stories from the depths of time – fun and fantastical, but no longer believed by anyone. Yet, as Philip Ball shows, we are still writing them – and still living them – today. From Robinson Crusoe and Frankenstein to Batman,...

In Machines of the Mind, Katharine Breen proposes that medieval personifications should be understood neither as failed novelistic characters nor as instruments of heavy-handed didacticism. She argues that personifications are instead powerful tools...

Jurek Becker (1937-1997) is best known for his novel "Jacob the Liar", which follows the life of a man, who, like Becker, lived in the Lodz ghetto during the German occupation of Poland in World War II. Throughout his career, Becker also wrote nonfic...

For distinguished philosopher Hans Blumenberg, lions were a life-long obsession. "Lions", translated by Kari Driscoll, collects thirty-two of Blumenberg's philosophical vignettes to reveal that the figure of the lion unites two of his other great pre...

<p>The ancient Greeks hard-wired a tragic sensibility into their culture. By looking disaster squarely in the face, by understanding just how badly things could spiral out of control, they sought to create a communal sense of responsibility and coura...

More than the persistent beat of a song or the structural frame of poetry, rhythm is a deeply imbedded force that drives our world and is also a central component of the condition of human existence. It's the pulse of the body, a power that orders ma...

"To love is to act" – "Aimer, c'est agir".  These words, which Victor Hugo wrote three days before he died, epitomize his life's philosophy. His love of freedom, democracy, and all people – especially the poor and wretched – drove him not only to wri...

In "Mood and Trope", John Brenkman introduces two provocative propositions to affect theory: that human emotion is intimately connected to persuasion and figurative language; and that literature, especially poetry, lends precision to studying affect...

"The next day Wordsworth arrived from Bristol at Coleridge's cottage", William Hazlitt recalled, "He answered in some degree to his friend's description of him, but was more quaint and Don Quixote-like... there was a convulsive inclination to laughte...