The Book of (More) Delights

The Book of (More) Delights PDF Author: Ross Gay
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1643755471
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 250

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Book Description
From bestselling author of The Book of Delights and award-winning poet, a book of lyrical mini-essays celebrating the everyday that will inspire readers to rediscover the joys in the world around us. In Ross Gay’s new collection of small, daily wonders, again written over the course of a year, one of America’s most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight. For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the “nefarious” scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren. As always, Gay revels in the natural world—sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbor’s fig tree—and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us. The Book of (More) Delights is a volume to savor and share.

The Book of (More) Delights

The Book of (More) Delights PDF Author: Ross Gay
Publisher: Algonquin Books
ISBN: 1643755471
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 250

Get Book Here

Book Description
From bestselling author of The Book of Delights and award-winning poet, a book of lyrical mini-essays celebrating the everyday that will inspire readers to rediscover the joys in the world around us. In Ross Gay’s new collection of small, daily wonders, again written over the course of a year, one of America’s most original voices continues his ongoing investigation of delight. For Gay, what delights us is what connects us, what gives us meaning, from the joy of hearing a nostalgic song blasting from a passing car to the pleasure of refusing the “nefarious” scannable QR code menus, from the tiny dog he fell hard for to his mother baking a dozen kinds of cookies for her grandchildren. As always, Gay revels in the natural world—sweet potatoes being harvested, a hummingbird carousing in the beebalm, a sunflower growing out of a wall around the cemetery, the shared bounty from a neighbor’s fig tree—and the trillion mysterious ways this glorious earth delights us. The Book of (More) Delights is a volume to savor and share.

The Power of Delight

The Power of Delight PDF Author: John Bayley
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
ISBN: 9780393058406
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 706

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Book Description
I: English literature. The genius of Shandy Hall : Laurence Sterne ; Double life : Jane Austen ; Best and worst : Charles Dickens ; Living with Trollope : Anthony Trollope ; Eminent Victorian : George Eliot ; The two Hardys : Thomas Hardy ; The King's trumpeter : Rudyard Kipling ; Life in the head : John Cowper Powys ; Nothing nasty in the woodshed : P.G. Wodehouse ; Like ink and milk : D.H. Lawrence ; Baby face : William Gerhardie ; The last Puritan : George Orwell ; Mr. Toad : Evelyn Waugh ; God's Greene : Graham Greene -- II: The English poets. Family man : William Wordsworth ; Unmisgiving : John Keats ; The all-star Victorian : Alfred, Lord Tennyson ; An art of self-discovery : Edward Thomas ; Fun while it lasted : Rupert Brooke ; Gallant pastiche : Cecil Day Lewis ; The best of Betjeman : John Betjeman ; The flight of the disenchanter : W.H. Auden ; The last romantic : Philip Larkin -- III: Mother Russia. Cutting it short : Alexander Pushkin ; Under the overcoat : Nikolai Gogol ; The strengths of his passivity : Ivan Turgenev ; An excellent man : Anton Chekhov ; The backward look : Ivan Bunin ; Poems with a heroine : Anna Akhmatova ; A poet's tragedy : Marina Tsvetaeva ; On the horse parsnip : Boris Pasternak ; The hard hitter : Isaac Babel ; A prig of genius : Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn -- IV: American poetry. Songs of a furtive self : Walt Whitman ; Mothermonsters and fatherfigures : E.E. Cummings ; Lowellship : Robert Lowell ; "One life, one writing" : James Merrill ; Richly flows contingency : John Ashbery -- V: Out of Eastern Europe. The power of delight : Bruno Schulz ; Something childish : Witold Gombrowicz ; Poet of holy dread : Paul Celan ; The art of austerity : Zbigniew Herbert ; Return of the native : Czeslaw Milosz -- VI: Aspects of novels. The point of novels ; Gossip in fiction ; Little green crabs : Marcel Proust ; The order of battle at Trafalgar ; In which we serve : Patrick O'Brian ; Seer of the ego : Stendhal ; What will you do to keep the s

Lonely Impulse of Delight

Lonely Impulse of Delight PDF Author: Dana Gioia
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780967833934
Category : Books and reading
Languages : en
Pages : 11

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Book Description


On Reading Well

On Reading Well PDF Author: Karen Swallow Prior
Publisher: Brazos Press
ISBN: 1493415468
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 288

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Book Description
★ Publishers Weekly starred review A Best Book of 2018 in Religion, Publishers Weekly Reading great literature well has the power to cultivate virtue, says acclaimed author Karen Swallow Prior. In this book, she takes readers on a guided tour through works of great literature both ancient and modern, exploring twelve virtues that philosophers and theologians throughout history have identified as most essential for good character and the good life. Covering authors from Henry Fielding to Cormac McCarthy, Jane Austen to George Saunders, and Flannery O'Connor to F. Scott Fitzgerald, Prior explores some of the most compelling universal themes found in the pages of classic books, helping readers learn to love life, literature, and God through their encounters with great writing. The book includes end-of-chapter reflection questions geared toward book club discussions, original artwork throughout, and a foreword by Leland Ryken. The hardcover edition was named a Best Book of 2018 in Religion by Publishers Weekly. "[A] lively treatise on building character through books.'"--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

Rescuing Socrates

Rescuing Socrates PDF Author: Roosevelt Montas
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691224390
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 248

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Book Description
A Dominican-born academic tells the story of how the Great Books transformed his life—and why they have the power to speak to people of all backgrounds What is the value of a liberal education? Traditionally characterized by a rigorous engagement with the classics of Western thought and literature, this approach to education is all but extinct in American universities, replaced by flexible distribution requirements and ever-narrower academic specialization. Many academics attack the very idea of a Western canon as chauvinistic, while the general public increasingly doubts the value of the humanities. In Rescuing Socrates, Dominican-born American academic Roosevelt Montás tells the story of how a liberal education transformed his life, and offers an intimate account of the relevance of the Great Books today, especially to members of historically marginalized communities. Montás emigrated from the Dominican Republic to Queens, New York, when he was twelve and encountered the Western classics as an undergraduate in Columbia University’s renowned Core Curriculum, one of America’s last remaining Great Books programs. The experience changed his life and determined his career—he went on to earn a PhD in English and comparative literature, serve as director of Columbia’s Center for the Core Curriculum, and start a Great Books program for low-income high school students who aspire to be the first in their families to attend college. Weaving together memoir and literary reflection, Rescuing Socrates describes how four authors—Plato, Augustine, Freud, and Gandhi—had a profound impact on Montás’s life. In doing so, the book drives home what it’s like to experience a liberal education—and why it can still remake lives.

A Feeling for Books

A Feeling for Books PDF Author: Janice A. Radway
Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Press
ISBN: 0807863971
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 458

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Book Description
Deftly melding ethnography, cultural history, literary criticism, and autobiographical reflection, A Feeling for Books is at once an engaging study of the Book-of-the-Month Club's influential role as a cultural institution and a profoundly personal meditation about the experience of reading. Janice Radway traces the history of the famous mail-order book club from its controversial founding in 1926 through its evolution into an enterprise uniquely successful in blending commerce and culture. Framing her historical narrative with writing of a more personal sort, Radway reflects on the contemporary role of the Book-of-the-Month Club in American cultural history and in her own life. Her detailed account of the standards and practices employed by the club's in-house editors is also an absorbing story of her interactions with those editors. Examining her experiences as a fourteen-year-old reader of the club's selections and, later, as a professor of literature, she offers a series of rigorously analytical yet deeply personal readings of such beloved novels as Marjorie Morningstar and To Kill a Mockingbird. Rich and rewarding, this book will captivate and delight anyone who is interested in the history of books and in the personal and transformative experience of reading.

The Delight of Great Books

The Delight of Great Books PDF Author: John Erskine
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 328

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Book Description


Delight

Delight PDF Author: J. B. Priestley
Publisher: HarperCollins UK
ISBN: 0008585717
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 189

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Book Description
‘An exquisitely-written, generous, funny, thoughtful book about the everyday joys of being alive. I love it.’ Dolly Alderton ‘J. B. Priestley is one of our literary icons of the 20th Century and it is time that we all became re-acquainted with his genius.’ Dame Judi Dench

Words of Delight

Words of Delight PDF Author: Leland Ryken
Publisher: Baker Books
ISBN: 1585580635
Category : Religion
Languages : en
Pages : 496

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Book Description
In this introduction to Scripture, Leland Ryken organizes biblical passages into literary genres including narratives, poetry, proverbs, and drama, demonstrating that knowledge of a genre's characteristics enriches one's understanding of individual passages. Ryken offers a volume brimming over with wonderful insights into Old and New Testament books and passages--insights that have escaped most traditional commentators.

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction

The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction PDF Author: Alan Jacobs
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 019983167X
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 172

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Book Description
In recent years, cultural commentators have sounded the alarm about the dire state of reading in America. Americans are not reading enough, they say, or reading the right books, in the right way. In this book, Alan Jacobs argues that, contrary to the doomsayers, reading is alive and well in America. There are millions of devoted readers supporting hundreds of enormous bookstores and online booksellers. Oprah's Book Club is hugely influential, and a recent NEA survey reveals an actual uptick in the reading of literary fiction. Jacobs's interactions with his students and the readers of his own books, however, suggest that many readers lack confidence; they wonder whether they are reading well, with proper focus and attentiveness, with due discretion and discernment. Many have absorbed the puritanical message that reading is, first and foremost, good for you--the intellectual equivalent of eating your Brussels sprouts. For such people, indeed for all readers, Jacobs offers some simple, powerful, and much needed advice: read at whim, read what gives you delight, and do so without shame, whether it be Stephen King or the King James Version of the Bible. In contrast to the more methodical approach of Mortimer Adler's classic How to Read a Book (1940), Jacobs offers an insightful, accessible, and playfully irreverent guide for aspiring readers. Each chapter focuses on one aspect of approaching literary fiction, poetry, or nonfiction, and the book explores everything from the invention of silent reading, reading responsively, rereading, and reading on electronic devices. Invitingly written, with equal measures of wit and erudition, The Pleasures of Reading in an Age of Distraction will appeal to all readers, whether they be novices looking for direction or old hands seeking to recapture the pleasures of reading they first experienced as children.