The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes

The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes PDF Author: John Gross
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199543410
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 400

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Book Description
In The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, master anthologist John Gross brings together a delectable smorgasbord of literary tales, offering striking new insight into some of the most important writers in history. Many of the anecdotes here are funny, others are touching, outrageous, sinister, inspiring, or downright weird. They show writers from Chaucer to Bob Dylan acting both unpredictably and deeply in character. The range is wide--this is a book which finds room for Milton and Shakespeare, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, Kurt Vonnegut and P. G. Wodehouse, Chinua Achebe and Salman Rushdie, James Baldwin and Tom Wolfe. It is also a book in which you can find out which great historian's face was once mistaken for a baby's bottom, which film star experienced a haunting encounter with Virginia Woolf not long before her death, and what Agatha Christie really thought of her popular character Hercule Poirot. It is in short an unrivalled collection of literary gossip offering intimate glimpses into the lives of authors ranging from Shakespeare to Philip Roth--a book not just for lovers of literature, but for anyone with a taste for the curiosities of human nature.

The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes

The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes PDF Author: James Runcieman Sutherland
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780192819369
Category : Humor
Languages : en
Pages : 404

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Book Description
A collection of nearly 500 stories covering 1300 years. Includes tall tales, portraits, and anecdotes about the men and women of English letters.

The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes

The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes PDF Author: John Gross
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199543410
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 400

Get Book Here

Book Description
In The New Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, master anthologist John Gross brings together a delectable smorgasbord of literary tales, offering striking new insight into some of the most important writers in history. Many of the anecdotes here are funny, others are touching, outrageous, sinister, inspiring, or downright weird. They show writers from Chaucer to Bob Dylan acting both unpredictably and deeply in character. The range is wide--this is a book which finds room for Milton and Shakespeare, Mark Twain and Walt Whitman, Kurt Vonnegut and P. G. Wodehouse, Chinua Achebe and Salman Rushdie, James Baldwin and Tom Wolfe. It is also a book in which you can find out which great historian's face was once mistaken for a baby's bottom, which film star experienced a haunting encounter with Virginia Woolf not long before her death, and what Agatha Christie really thought of her popular character Hercule Poirot. It is in short an unrivalled collection of literary gossip offering intimate glimpses into the lives of authors ranging from Shakespeare to Philip Roth--a book not just for lovers of literature, but for anyone with a taste for the curiosities of human nature.

The Oxford Book of American Literary Anecdotes

The Oxford Book of American Literary Anecdotes PDF Author: Donald Hall
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780195033885
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 388

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Book Description
A companion volume to The Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes, this volume covers the whole range of American literary history from the 17th century to the present. Taken from biographies, letters, memoirs, and table-talk, the stories form an irreverent history of American literature.

Eurekas and Euphorias

Eurekas and Euphorias PDF Author: Walter Gratzer
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 9780198609407
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 374

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Book Description
A collection of fascinating stories, entertainingly told, revealing the human face of science. Eurekas and Euphorias encompasses some 200 anecdotes brilliantly illustrating scientists in all their shapes: the obsessive and the dilettantish, the genial, the envious, the preternaturally brilliant and the slow-witted who sometimes see further in the end, the open-minded and the intolerant, recluses and arrivistes. Told with wit and relish by Walter Gratzer, here are stories to delight, astonish, instruct, and most especially, entertain the general reader, scientist and non-scientist alike.

The Oxford Book of Theatrical Anecdotes

The Oxford Book of Theatrical Anecdotes PDF Author: Gyles Brandreth
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0191066524
Category : Performing Arts
Languages : en
Pages : 511

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Book Description
This is the ultimate anthology of theatrical anecdotes, edited by lifelong theatre-lover Gyles Brandreth in the Oxford tradition, and covering every kind of theatrical story and experience from the age of Shakespeare and Marlowe to the age of Stoppard and Mamet, from Richard Burbage to Richard Briers, from Nell Gwynn to Daniel Day-Lewis, from Sarah Bernhardt to Judi Dench. Players, playwrights, prompters, producers—they all feature. The Oxford Book of Theatrical Anecdotes provides a comprehensive, revealing, and hugely entertaining portrait of the world of theatre across four hundred years. Many of the anecdotes are humorous: all have something pertinent and illuminating to say about an aspect of theatrical life—whether it is the art of playwriting, the craft of covering up missed cues, the drama of the First Night, the nightmare of touring, or the secret ingredients of star quality. Edmund Kean, Henry Irving, John Gielgud, Laurence Olivier, Ellen Terry, Edith Evans, Maggie Smith, Helen Mirren—the great 'names' are all here, of course, but there are tales of the unexpected, too—and the unknown. This is a book—presented in five acts, with a suitably anecdotal and personal prologue from Gyles Brandreth—where, once in a while, the understudy takes centre-stage and Gyles Brandreth treats triumph and disaster just the same, including stories from the tattiest touring companies as well as from Broadway, the West End and theatres, large and small, in Australia, India, and across Europe.

“The” Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes

“The” Oxford Book of Literary Anecdotes PDF Author: James Sutherland
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description


The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories

The Oxford Book of Japanese Short Stories PDF Author: Theodore William Goossen
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0192803727
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 486

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Book Description
Beginning with the first writings to assimilate and rework Western literary traditions, through the flourishing of the short story genre in the cosmopolitan atmosphere of the Taisho era, to the new breed of writers produced under the constraints of literary censorship, and the current writings reflecting the pitfalls and paradoxes of modern life, this anthology offers a stimulating survey of the entire development of the Japanese short story.

The Oxford Book of Exploration

The Oxford Book of Exploration PDF Author: Robin Hanbury-Tenison
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0192805568
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 595

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Book Description
Selected by Robin Hanbury-Tenison, whom the Sunday Times called the 'greatest explorer of the last twenty years', this is a comprehensive anthology of the writings of explorers through the ages, now fully revised and updated. The ultimate in travel writing, these are the words of those who changed the world through their pioneering search for new lands, new peoples, and new experiences. Divided into geographical sections, the book takes us to Asia with Vasco da Gama, Francis Younghusband, and Wilfred Thesiger, to the Americas with John Cabot, Sir Francis Drake, and Alexander Von Humboldt, to Africa with Dr David Livingstone and Mary Kingsley, to the Pacific with Ferdinand Magellan and James Cook, and to the Poles with Robert Peary and Wally Herbert. Driven by a desire to discover that transcends all other considerations, the vivid writings of these extraordinary people reveal what makes them go beyond the possible and earn the right to be known as explorers.

The Oxford Book of French Short Stories

The Oxford Book of French Short Stories PDF Author: Elizabeth Fallaize
Publisher: OUP Oxford
ISBN: 0191614920
Category : Literary Collections
Languages : en
Pages : 376

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Book Description
This collection of French short stories in translation expands our idea of French writing by including new stories by women writers and by authors of Francophone origin. Spanning the centuries from the late eighteenth to the late twentieth, the collection opens with a rumbustious tale from the Marquis de Sade, takes in the masters of the nineteenth century, from Stendhal and Balzac to Maupassant, and reaches to Quebec, Africa, and the French Caribbean in the twentieth century. Women writers include relatively well known figures such as Renee Vivien, Colette, and Beauvoir, and newer writers such as Assia Djebar, Christiane Baroche, and Annie Saumont. The French short story is a rich and diverse medium, but all the stories selected share a common characteristic: they make exciting reading.

The Oxford Book of Military Anecdotes

The Oxford Book of Military Anecdotes PDF Author: Max Hastings
Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA
ISBN: 0195205286
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 530

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Book Description
This colleciton of anecdotes is principally concerned with American and British conflicts. Hastings has sought stories that illustrate the military condition through the ages, both on the battlefield and in the barracks.