To write or read a poem is often to think in distinctively poetic ways – guided by metaphors, sound, rhythms, associative movement, and more. Poetry's stance toward language creates a particular intelligence of thought and feeling, a compressed artic...

Pierre Reverdy's surrealistic tale Maison hantee was written in 1928 and first published in 1930. Andre Breton would later include it in a list of the ten books he would most like to take to a desert island. John Ashbery's translation of this modern...

After the failed revolutions of 1848, Galicia has been brought under the rule of the Habsburg Empire, and the Zemka family find themselves embroiled in the struggle for Polish independence. This is a history of Eastern Europe told in miniature throug...

Rene Char (1907-1988) is considered the most important French poet of his generation. A member of the surrealists in the early 1930s, he became increasingly preoccupied by the rise of Nazi Germany and later played a key role in the French Resistance....

Though modern readers no longer believe in the four humors of Galenic naturalism – blood, choler, melancholy, and phlegm – early modern thought found in these bodily fluids key to explaining human emotions and behavior. In "Humoring the Body", Gail K...

In works of Western literature ranging from Homer's "Odyssey" to Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" The giving and taking of hospitality are sometimes pleasurable, but more often perilous. Heffernan traces this leitmotiv through the history of...

For about three thousand years comedy has applied a welcome humanist perspective to the world's religious beliefs and practices. From the ancient Greek comedies of Aristophanes, the famous poem by Lucretius and dialogues of Cicero to early modern and...

For Tom Pickard poetry is a free, and freeing, space. His pen "demands / complete autonomy", and finds it as it explores both harsh and lyrical realities with a northern working-class sensibility. A lifelong counter-cultural figure, Pickard transcend...

"Sometimes I'm tempted to throw away all I've written so far and start again, write quite a different kind of book, in the first person perhaps. Or write it in the third person but like a novel, with more freedom to go where a critical study could no...

From its beginnings in "Twilight" fan-fiction to its record-breaking sales as an e-book and paperback, the story of the erotic romance novel "Fifty Shades of Grey" and its two sequels is both unusual and fascinating. Having sold over seventy million...