From July 1741 to March 1744, Samuel Johnson composed speeches based on the actual debates in Parliament for publication in the "Gentleman's Magazine". Because it was then illegal to print any account of parliamentary activities, the magazine publish...

"The Elizabethan Club of Yale University and Its Library" was first published in 1986 to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Elizabethan Club. This second, greatly enlarged edition is being published in celebration of the Club's cen...

Members of adoption triangles-adoptees, birthparents, and adopting parents-must struggle with difficult and sometimes heartrending issues. Should adopted children be enabled to trace their biological parents? Does the individual's right to self-disco...

As words and stories are increasingly disseminated through digital means, the significance of the book as object – whether pristine collectible or battered relic – is growing as well. "Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books" spotlights the per...

At the end of the sixteenth century, scholars and intellectuals were seen as Faustian magicians, dangerous and sexy. By the nineteenth century, they were perceived as dusty and dried up, "dead from the waist down", as Browning so wickedly put it. In...

By the time she was twenty-four, Virginia Woolf had suffered a series of devastating losses that later she would describe as "sledge-hammer blows", beginning with the death of her mother when she was thirteen years old and followed by those of her ha...

"Visionary" writers, says Edward Ahearn in this original book, seek a personal way to explode the normal experience of the "real", using prophetic visions, fantastic tales, insane rantings, surrealistic dreams, and drug- or sex-induced dislocations i...

This book explores the historical insights of Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837), Russia's most celebrated poet and arguably its greatest thinker. Svetlana Evdokimova examines for the first time the full range of Pushkin's fictional and nonfictional writi...

In this major collection of his essays, Alberto Manguel, whom George Steiner has called "the Casanova of reading", argues that the activity of reading, in its broadest sense, defines our species. "We come into the world intent on finding narrative in...

The novel contains imagined lives that achieve a kind of meaning and intensity our own lives do not. Out of the novelist's moral imagination-the breadth and depth of his awareness of human motivations, tensions, and complexities-emerge fictional pers...