Uneducated and non-conformist, Shakespeare nevertheless attained the heights of literary iconhood. In Becoming Shakespeare, scholar John Lynch traces the history—politics and prejudice, fraud and forgery—that made the great poet, under-valued in his own time, into a modern literary heavyweight.
Submitted by stevecastle on Mon, 2007-05-28 18:07.
They played together under the Nazi shadow. One became a tragic icon, the other waited years to tell her story. Alice Fordham meets Anne Frank's best friend.
Free Food for Millionaires promises to be an engaging read. In her debut novel, Min Jin Lee focuses on the journey from naivety to disillusionment and the many transformations along the way that ultimately lead to self-knowledge.
Rotten English" is the first anthology to collect a large sample of international literature written in what has often been called English-in-Situation
Stephen Pinker, in Language as a Window Into Human Nature, says humans are verbivores—that is, we live on words—and linguistics reveals hidden operations of the mind. “...words determine our reality, or at least a large part of it. Semantics is no arcane intellectual quibble; it lies at the core of our existence”, says Pinker. Thought-provoking stuff.
While on the surface Margaret Atwood’s “The Handmaid’s Tale” paints the picture of a time and place not far from our own where the utopic ideals of one group of people appear to be a dystopic hell for another, beneath these circumstances it is, among other things, a story about freedom and choice; the freedom to make your own choices, and the freedom from making your own choices.
"These are the books that are disappointing only because they have to end. They’re the ones we mention to friends. They’re the ones worth taking on vacation, and they are well executed, whatever their genre or subject matter. They are what we’d read even if Michiko Kakutani, William Grimes and I weren’t designated readers."
