In 1345, when Petrarch recovered a lost collection of letters from Cicero to his best friend Atticus, he discovered an intimate Cicero, a man very different from either the well-known orator of the Roman forum or the measured spokesman for the ancien...

"The Great William" is the first book to explore how seven renowned writers – Samuel Taylor Coleridge, John Keats, Virginia Woolf, Charles Olson, John Berryman, Allen Ginsberg, and Ted Hughes – wrestled with Shakespeare in the very moments when they...

Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! "Crossing Between Tradition and Modernity" presents thirteen essays written in honor of Milena Dolezelova-Velingerova (1932-2012), a member of the Prague School of Sinology and an importan...

Not for sale in Estonia! The titular essay is a meditation on Pieter Bruegel the Elder's 1563 painting of the Tower of Babel: the first painting in European art history to feature a building as a protagonist. An engineer by trade, Benet brings his...

Taking its inspiration from Walter Benjamin's seminal 1931 essay, the "Unpacking My Library" series charts a spirited exploration of the reading and book collecting practices of today's leading thinkers. "Artists and Their Books" showcases the person...

While largely unknown today, Danish writer and Darwin translator Jens Peter Jacobsen was the leading prose writer in Scandinavia in the late nineteenth century and part of a generation that included Henrik Ibsen, Knut Hamsun, and August Strindberg. H...

For decades, James Joyce's modernism has overshadowed his Irishness, as his self-imposed exile and association with the high modernism of Europe's urban centers has led critics to see him almost exclusively as a cosmopolitan figure. In "Joyce's Ghost...

In their celebration of 'little matters' – the regular round of visiting, dining out, drinking tea, of reading and walking to the shops and sending to the post – Jane Austen's letters and novels have many similarities. The thirteen letters collected...

Ever wondered how ink is made? Or what is the bestselling book of all time? Or which are the oldest known books in the world? Highbrow to lowbrow, all aspects of the book are celebrated and explored in "The Book Lovers' Miscellany". From a list of u...

A scholarly and deeply sensitive study that explores how religion and secularism are tightly interwoven in the major works of modernist literature Matthew Mutter provides a broad survey of modernist literature, examining key works against a backgrou...