When James Wood's first collection of essays, The Broken Estate, was published in 1999, the reviewers hailed a master critic. John Banville described Wood as a 'a close reader of genius-illuminating and exciting and compelling', and Malcolm Bradbury described him as 'a true critic: an urgent, impassioned reader of literature, a tireless interpreter, a live and learned intellige...(展开全部)

"James Wood has been called our best young critic. This is not true. He is our best critic; he thinks with a sublime ferocity."--Cynthia Ozick Following the collection "The Broken Estate"--which established James Wood as the leading critic of his generation--"The Irresponsible Self" confirms Wood's preeminence, not only as a discerning judge but also as an appreciator of contem...(展开全部)

"James Wood has been called our best young critic. This is not true. He is our best critic; he thinks with a sublime ferocity."--Cynthia Ozick Following the collection "The Broken Estate"--which established James Wood as the leading critic of his generation--"The Irresponsible Self" confirms Wood's preeminence, not only as a discerning judge but also as an appreciator of contem...(展开全部)

For a century, the history of the novel has been written in terms of nations and territories: the English novel, the French novel, the American novel. But what if novels were viewed in terms of the seas that unite these different lands? Examining works across two centuries, "The Novel and the Sea" recounts the novel's rise, told from the perspective of the ship's deck and the a...(展开全部)

For a century, the history of the novel has been written in terms of nations and territories: the English novel, the French novel, the American novel. But what if novels were viewed in terms of the seas that unite these different lands? Examining works across two centuries, "The Novel and the Sea" recounts the novel's rise, told from the perspective of the ship's deck and the a...(展开全部)

Through a series of readings in the work of the decisive triumvirate of Victorian fiction, Dickens, Trollope and Wilkie Collins, Miller investigates the novel as an oblique form of social control. From the Inside Flap With the appearance of D.A. Miller's remarkable book, the Victorian novel has its most dazzling critic in years. . . . Miller's subject is not so much the police ...(展开全部)

Rich in its stories, characters, and imaginative range, "The Book of Laughter and Forgetting" is the novel that brought Milan Kundera his first big international success in the late 1970s. Like all his work, it is valuable for far more than its historical implications. In seven wonderfully integrated parts, different aspects of human existence are magnified and reduced, reorder...(展开全部)

Kundera whirls through comedy and tragedy towards his central question: how does a person, any person, live today? In constructing his answer, he writes of politics, sex, literature, modern man's alienation - and of their antidotes: laughter and forgetting

Kundera whirls through comedy and tragedy towards his central question: how does a person, any person, live today? In constructing his answer, he writes of politics, sex, literature, modern man's alienation - and of their antidotes: laughter and forgetting

René Girard is a Andrew B. Hammond Professor of French Language, Literature and Civilization at Stanford University. Two of his books, The Scapegoat, which was also translated by Yvonne Freccero, and Violence and the Sacred, are available from Johns Hopkins University Press