English Classics Books

This is one of the best introductions to popular Christian fiction that seeks to draw the reader into the world of meaning. too often modern literature, following earlier reductionist authors, strips the inner meaning of life away, leaving a dark, bleak universe void of any real and lasting meaning by which the reader can transcend the shadows of life. The authors covered in this short intro do the opposite by enlivening the universe with meaning, playfulness, sobriety, and joy.

Lewis, Chesterton, Bunyan, Charles Williams, George MacDonald, Tolkien, L'Engle, and Walter Wangerin are discussed individually with a fantastic apologia for their literary forms as an introduciton. A great read! Enjoy!

In this relatively short work, Rolland Hein manages to successfully review and critique the works of many Christian authors who created mythological stories. The critiques, ranging from Bunyan's "Pilgrim's Progress" to Tolkien's "Lord of the Rings," are arranged chronologically, beginning with Dante and ending with contemporary 'mythmakers.'

The reviews not only cover the works and the Christian elements in them, they also provide useful information and good insight into the lives of these men and women. Quotes are presented, giving the authors' views on the art of Christian mythmaking and their attitudes toward the various ways we can discover truth.

This book is excellent. It is very well-written, and thoughtfully organized. The insight it provides on such authors as Tolkien, Lewis, and MacDonald is invaluable. If you are interested in one or more of these authors, get this book--it may help you to better understand them or even discover new authors and new worlds to explore.

Fantasy's "breaking away" from the primary sensory world offers a journey into the unknown to experience the REAL, according to Rolland Hein. We all have a Mythos (worldview); this cherished text sharpens the Christian sensibility by using the secondary worlds to help us understand spiritual concepts. Out-of-print version has been updated, a superior gift to anyone interested in Christianity, Fantasy, Narnia, Middle Earth, Imagination, or any of the Oxford Christian Writer or their successors.

Carol Chillington Rutter is supreme when it comes to talking clearly and intelligently about the Renaissance, its champion women, its theatre and performance, and stagings of Renaissance plays in more recent times. This book is an invaluable part of Ms Chillington Rutter's impressive and growing bibliography. Witty, perceptive and extremely informative, it is an absolute must for anyone interested in performance, women's roles in male-directed productions, and the theatrical process from first days of rehearsals to final performances.

An edited transcript of interview and round-table discussions amongst five of the best female actors to grace the modern British stage, this book is a wealth of fascinating material not only on female roles in Shakespeare, but also public, directorial, and historical/traditional perceptions of those roles, and of the place of women in Shakespearean productions in particular. Standouts include Harriet Walter's compare'n'contrast of Helena from ALL'S WELL THAT ENDS WELL with Imogen in CYMBELINE; Juliet Stevenson and Fiona Shaw's discussion of the Rosalind/Celia relationship in AS YOU LIKE IT; and Paola Dionisetti and Sinead Cusack comparing two different Kates from two different productions of TAMING OF THE SHREW. Great companion volume to go with the PLAYERS OF SHAKESPEARE series of books.

Five of Britain's best women actors (including Harriet Walter, Juliet Stevenson and Sinead Cusack) offer insights into their portrayals of some of Shakespeare's greatest roles. Lady Macbeth, Isabella (Measure for Measure), Kate (Taming of the shrew) and Rosalind (As you like it) are some of the roles discussed. Comparisons of different productions, directors and leading men are highlights of this wonderful collection of anecdotes, insights and lively discussion of Shakespeare and theatre today.

This book is a children's collection of poetry. However, it appears that Michael Rosen has attempted to balance the chipper, happy poems of many children's anthologies with more intense, darker ones. The overall tone is fairly serious, though beautifully so. He combines such sweet verse as Skating by William Wordsworth, with more wistful or even death-filled ones, such as La Belle Dame Sans Merci by John Keats.

The book is written chronologically, from Shakespeare and William Blake to Langston Hughes and Judith Wright. He includes from one to five poems from each of his 40 or so collected poets, with a short, thoughtful biography of each.

The book is strikingly illustrated by Paul Howard, who alters his style and technique for each poem, aptly evoking the feeling and time period of each poem.

I would consider this as a readaloud for children ages 8+; younger children are likely to be disturbed by some of the darker selections.

This book is more newly published in paperback as The Walker Book of Classic Poetry and Poets .

Michael Rosen's collection of poetry refuses to talk down to children. He has selected classic poems from the seventeenth century to modern day, poems (and poets) that children will hear references to for the rest of their lives. From Shakespeare to Shelley to T. S. Eliot and many more, Rosen has gathered a mixture of beautiful, fun, and significant poetry, complete with biographical information about each of the poets, as well as information on individual poems and poetic forms.

It is Paul Howard's lovely, intriging illustrations that will first grab your attention, however. His illustrations capture the mood of each poem and make them come alive for young readers.

A must for children who love poetry and for parents who want to share poetry with their children.

Wisely chosen and beautifully illustrated,this book shows how entertaining and exciting poetry can be. It instantly held the attention of my six year old. He wanted to write a thank you note to Lord Byron!

When Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980) published two important books in the 1960s -- _The Gutenberg Galaxy: The Making of Typographic Man_ (1962) and _Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man_ (1964) -- he seemed to be a Canadian comet out of nowhere flying across the intellectual horizon. Yes, he had published _The Mechanical Bride: Folklore of Industrial Man_ in 1951. But it received little attention in the 1950s. So when his two important books were published in the 1960s, he seemed to come out of nowhere. Thanks to Gingko Press, we today can now understand where he is coming from in his books published in the 1950s and the 1960s.

_The Classical Trivium: The Place of Thomas Nashe in the Learning of His Time_ is the edited version of McLuhan's 1943 Cambridge University doctoral dissertation. In it McLuhan undertakes an ambitious account of the verbal arts (grammar, rhetoric, and dialectic or logic) from about the time of Cicero down to the time of Nashe. From various comments McLuhan makes elsewhere, it is clear that he was captivated by what he had learned from his study of the history of rhetoric. Rhetoric has long been known in Western culture as the art of persuasion. The ads that McLuhan studies in _The Mechanical Bride_ are designed to persuade us. Even so, he may have been the first person to take ads seriously enough to study them carefully and write intelligent and witty commentaries about them.

Now, if it seems obvious to us today that ads aim to persuade us, it may seem less obvious that other artifacts in our culture, such as books as visual objects that are usually read by visual apprehension, also in a manner of speaking persuade and condition us, even though we may not have paid much attention to how this kind of visual conditioning does in a sense persuade us before we read McLuhan's _The Gutenberg Galaxy_.

McLuhan was on a roll. Shouldn't we extend our reflection to other artifacts around us? And shouldn't we reflect on which other senses and/or parts of our bodies are involved in the other technological artifacts in our culture? And don't they also in certain ways condition or persuade or impact us, even though we may not have reflected on these matters until we read McLuhan's _Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man_?

When we understand where McLuhan is coming from -- from studying the history of the art of persuasion -- we can discern a certain trajectory in his thought over the four books I've discussed here. And what about McLuhan's famous quip that the medium is the message? The medium as such persuades us as it is apprehended by us -- it massages us, so we can say that the medium as such massages us and thereby in a sense persuades us.


--Thomas J. Farrell, author of Walter Ong's Contributions to Cultural Studies: The Phenomenology of the Word and I-Thou Communication (Media Ecology)

Thank you, Gingko Press. Here finally are the roots of all that followed, the back story of every judgment or cryptic comment McLuhan ever made. Here is the restless, rash scholar as young Turk, inventing for himself a necessary intellectual history to place Thomas Nashe in his proper context- and what McLuhan quickly recognized was that this history bears continually on all cultural transformations. Here is the scholarship the academics said McLuhan lacked; rather he shows where the scholars themselves were lacking, and why he abandoned their methods in favor of Joyce, Eliot, et al, a way of living in and experiencing any present with both understanding and electric immediacy. Some of this appears in a very compressed manner in Eric McLuhan's 'The Role of Thunder in Finnegans Wake'; it is developed more slowly in this book. Here McLuhan defined the struggle between art and science as between rhetoric and dialectic. Here is Mcluhan the patristic scholar showing that conservative theology does not mean ossified or dialectical; it means having at hand all the rich tools of the tradition with which to renew the present (remember, this is during the time when de Lubac, who tread the same waters, was under censure). Here McLuhan discovered percept in a living Trivium where dialectic was balanced by rhetoric. The war is indeed in the Word. . .

The Classical Trivium: The Place Of Thomas Nashe In The Learning Of His Time is a previously unpublished work of the late Marshall McLuhan (1911-1980), presenting the story of western literary culture from antiquity to the Elizabethan age. Examining the divisions of classical Rhetoric, Grammar, and Dialectic, in a strategy that he would later refine in his media analysis of the 1960s and 70s, The Classical Trivium, he connects the roots of ancient philosophy with modern-day interpretive and evaluative techniques. More than a half-century after it was written, The Classical Trivium remains a superb lens through which to examine the traditions of Elizabethan writer Thomas Nashe. Divided into four chapters, three devoted to sections of The Trivium and the fourth to Thomas Nashe himself, The Classical Trivium is a "must-read" book, especially for college library shelves and students of classical literature and philosophy.

buy this book. it's brilliant. brilliant. hear me? brilliant!

Robert Vivian's prose is so creatively lush, unexpected and unpredictable, you can hardly believe the "stories" he relates (he calls them essays) are based wholly on personal experiences. They read more like poetic fictions, and yet the style is quite accessible -- nothing self-consciously obscure or tediously "literary." If this is how he treats non-fiction, I can only imagine the delight of reading his fictions.

Robert Vivian has taken the personal essay to new heights, expanding poetic language into a deeply inspirational journey into the human experience. If ever you believed the essay genre to be dull and pedantic, Vivian will change your mind forever with his gorgeous language and important insights. The essay is boring no longer

Was Dylan thomas the consummate craftsman? Indeed, he was; and took real delight in his gifts and his exercise of them; he was a Celtic bard in the truest sense of that role -- the lonely public/private man who carried within him the lyric history of his race, the love of his language and a very vocal sense of wonder over his role in life; that he had song, yes; that he was funny, loud, boisterous, cautious, selfish, rude, unforgettable -- all of that and more; he was the poet's poet and the singer for those who longed for lost boyhood, who raged at death and who marvelled at the all the world's words rediscovered in a dewdrop; his stories, like his poems, should be read aloud; there is an incantatory quality to them -- as if something profoundly old and grandfatherly were suddenly shared with the reader; Thomas himself was a great reader; to hear him is to savor him at his best and to feel deeply and sweetly the majesty and holy compulsion of our mother tongue; the stories, while less charged than the poems, nonetheless captivate and break into a kind of lyricism that gladdens the heart and restores the ear. If he wasn't the best of our poets, he was easily the most tuneful and spoke from a very deep place that only the purest of us can truly know.

With significant exceptions, "The Collected Stories" chronical the life, if read in that order, of a sad and melancholy man, who was aware of but unwilling to accept the burden on consciousness of the futility of modern life. Thomas lightened his load, by and by, with increasingly frequent jokes and essays into humour. In many ways the stories are an accurate account of the everyday absurdity of Everyman; by one who lived at the time personality was displaced by the development of commercial media hype. Thomas died at age 39 in 1953. If he'd lived a few more years he might have described to us the age of common emotion and undifferentiated humanity, which breaks down only under the influence of alcohol to anything interesting and never unique; that he interpolated and prophecied from his eavesdropping into the lives of his comtemporaries. (No, I don't think that sentence is too long and I think Dylan would have approved.) He didn't spare himself from his snooping. Much of the content is autobiographical. But like a reporter, he just tells us the facts. The inferences and insights are your own. You have to read this volume! END

"Annoyingly" this page is devoted to the stories of Dylan Thomas; also"annoyingly", both the Publishers Weekly review as well as that of a disgrunted reader refer stories by Leslie Norris; Norris' book may be splendid; I don't know; I have read Dylan's stories and honor and love them (they are live things wearing incandescent prose -- believe me); perhaps Amazon could reassign the aforementioned reviews and those of us who -- on this page at least -- have (happily) written about the appropriate book will be left to bask unannoyed.

G. K. Chesterton was probably the greatest optimist who ever lived. He BELIEVED where most of us give up and become despondent. The three stories in this volume take place in a strange twilight world in which the author, as he says in THURSDAY, makes you want to see the lamppost by the light of the tree rather than vice versa. This, by the way, is his most profound and eccentric book.

In THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY, we see an incredible global conspiracy dissipate like swamp gas. (As Calvin Coolidge once said, nine out of ten of the troubles one sees down the road swerve off and disappear before they get to you.) THE BALL AND THE CROSS is about two heretics who appear to fight each other to the bitter end, until they find a worse enemy. And THE CLUB OF QUEER TRADES is a delightful entertainment made up of wonderful shaggy dog stories, much like THE PARADOXES OF MR POND.

If life hasn't been going your way, curl up with this volume -- and you WILL feel better.

The Club of Queer Trades - Not quite like the Father Brown mystery stories but very close. GKC traces the adventures of a club comprised of men and women who invented their own trade. You usually don't understand the trade until the end of the story, and the book never disappoints.

The Man Who Was Thursday - This is probably the most famous of all Chesterton books. The book describes the attempts of a Scotland yard detective to infiltrate a secret anarchist society. The garden party conversations between anarchists are laugh out loud funny. I'm still fascinated by the ending, mainly because I don't understand it.

The Ball and Cross - Chesterton's hilarious story of how an adamant Catholic duels to the death with an ardent atheist is a worthy read. Chesterton systematically critiques popular delusions of educated thinking as the book unfolds. The atheist and the Catholic grow closer together through their duel, and realize that they understand each other better than the other characters understand either of them. Chesterton's wit is second to none and if you liked Pilgrim's Regress by C.S. Lewis, you will love this book.

I've loaned two of these books to friends, and both of them were immediate fans. If you find this collection interesting, try the Napoleon of Notting Hill also by GKC.

The Club of Queer Trades is by far the funniest story I have ever read! I assure you that it will keep you rolling on the floor from the beginning to the end of the story.

I received this book as a gift from my father-in-law, who is an English professor specializing in the nineteenth century. It's taken me a while to get through it since as a high school history teacher I have little time for reading outside of my field, but the experience has been well worth it. The essays in the volume are all outstanding--well-informed, lucidly written, and clearly authoritative. What's especially impressive is that the authors assume an intelligent audience but not necessarily one that is in their area of specialization, or even an audience of literary critics. Equally notable is that the essays are fascinating and make the reader want to know more about the subjects they address. In many cases, as in the wonderful essays on ecological narrative and nature writing, the fiction of the Civil War and Reconstruction, children's literature, and consumer culture, I found myself both learning a great deal but also absorbed in topics I previously had little interest in. In other cases, as with the essays on literary genres, on ethnic fiction, Native American culture, urban fiction, and the single author essays, most especially the ones on William Dean Howells and Mark Twain, I felt as though everything I thought I knew was out of date. I can't say enough about this terrific volume. It's one from which I've learned a great deal, and it's one I shall revisit many times in the future. This is a truly valuable and beautifully produced book.

If I could have only one book on American fiction in the second half of the nineteenth century, this would be the book--a stunning and original collection from many of the finest scholars working in the period. The organization of the volume is terrific, with the expected types of essays as well as many innovative topics covered. The quality of the chapters is outstanding, providing a remarkable overview but, as well, original takes on the topics. The book also comes with a very usable detailed index and with individual bibliographies for further study of the period. Although the book is, as one reviewer pointed out, expensive, nevertheless you get your money's worth since the volume is the size of four books. And the production values are excellent--a sewn binding, acid free paper, and illustrations along with small texts attached to these. This book will be read and used for a long time.

This is the best overview of the period that I have yet seen. Not only does it contain very interesting, erudite, and well-written essays on the leading figures of American realism, but it also has splendid thematic chapters on issues like race, gender, the city, the short story, and regionalism. Although the price is a little daunting, the quality of this work is undeniable. The bibliographies that accompany each chapter are wonderful portals into further inquiry. Any serious student of American literature between the Civil War and WWI who seeks a cornerstone for a personal critical library could do no better than to start here. Bravo Blackwell!!

Wu's Companion should be mandatory reading for serious scholars of English Romanticism. With major sections on historical milieux, readings of major canonical (and non-canonical) texts, major genres, and critical debates, the Companion is valuable to those just approaching Romantic writing and those who have studied a long time but want a condensed (?) version of the critical conversations. In addition, Wu had the good sense (and good fortune) to gather together some of the foremost scholars of Romantic literature: among others, contributors are Nelson Hilton, Jonathan Wordsworth, David Bromwich, David Simpson, and Alan Richardson. I know more than one Ph.D. student who credits Wu's book with getting him or her through the Romantic portion of comprehensive exams, and many professors are finding it invaluable for classroom prep.

Wu's Companion should be mandatory reading for serious scholars of English Romanticism. With major sections on historical milieux, readings of major canonical (and non-canonical) texts, major genres, and critical debates, the Companion is valuable to those just approaching Romantic writing and those who have studied a long time but want a condensed (?) version of the critical conversations. In addition, Wu had the good sense (and good fortune) to gather together some of the foremost scholars of Romantic literature: among others, contributors are Nelson Hilton, Jonathan Wordsworth, David Bromwich, David Simpson, and Alan Richardson. I know more than one Ph.D. student who credits Wu's book with getting him or her through the Romantic portion of comprehensive exams, and many professors are finding it invaluable for classroom prep.

Wu's Companion should be mandatory reading for serious scholars of English Romanticism. With major sections on historical milieux, readings of major canonical (and non-canonical) texts, major genres, and critical debates, the Companion is valuable to those just approaching Romantic writing and those who have studied a long time but want a condensed (?) version of the critical conversations. In addition, Wu had the good sense (and good fortune) to gather together some of the foremost scholars of Romantic literature: among others, contributors are Nelson Hilton, Jonathan Wordsworth, David Bromwich, David Simpson, and Alan Richardson. I know more than one Ph.D. student who credits Wu's book with getting him or her through the Romantic portion of comprehensive exams, and many professors are finding it invaluable for classroom prep.

Every aspiring playwright knows that to truly be well-versed in the history and language of theater, one must know the work of Henrik Ibsen. To be honest, until I took an introductory playwriting course, I had never heard of the man or his contributions to modern theater. In a short time, all of that changed. Since then I have been enamored by Ibsen's plays and have searched for a well-organized compilation of his greatest works. In short, this is that book.

Though it doesn't contain any of his lyrical work, such as Peer Gynt, this compilation, containing his twelve major prose plays, is an excellent achievement. Ibsen was a master of drama and desired that his reader or audience-member experience these prose plays in the order they were written. In this way, the work would be understood within its chronology and tell a greater story about the evolution of a playwright's mind. Reading the plays like this has been absolutely wonderful, and I am so grateful that Fjelde has done the work to compile his great translations into a single book. For anyone who speaks English and feels themselves to be a connoisseur of the theater, this book truly deserves its place on the shelf next to the complete works of Shakespeare, Chekhov, and Shaw.

There will not be a better collected edition of these plays in English translation. For both casual readers and scholars unable to read Ibsen in the original Norwegian, Rolf Fjelde's translation and supplementary materials make this volume unbeatable.

Fjelde presents Ibsen's major prose plays (which leaves out, of course, beauties like "Peer Gynt" but includes "A Doll House," "Ghosts," "An Enemy of the People," and "Hedda Gabler," among others) in fresh new translations, often altering standard misuses. He explains, for example, that traditional renderings of "Et dukkehjem" as "A Doll's House" warp its real meaning, which is simply "A Doll House." Pedantic as it may appear, this care is necessary, and evident throughout.

Even better are the almost 100 pages of extras: detailed introductions to each play, as well as minutely researched production histories. Who knew, for example, that "Ghosts" premiered not in Denmark or Norway but...Chicago, in 1882? The production notes and introduction to the volume tell a story we don't often hear about Ibsen, a tale of difficulties in Scandinavia, followed by years of exile and, ultimately, international acclaim. Reading the plays, which seem to have become more and more specifically Norwegian in setting and theme while Ibsen himself became more and more cosmopolitan, conjures memories of another exile who only ever wrote about home: James Joyce, not coincidentally one of Ibsen's greatest admirers.

For the price, you can't do better for English translations of these pieces--many of which can't be found elsewhere--whether you're a scholar in need of the historical context Fjelde obligingly provides, or simply interested in plowing through some of the foundations of 20th century and contemporary drama.

These twelve plays, written in the last quarter of the nineteenth century, Ibsen himself often referred to as a cycle. Each is complete in itself, but regarded together, they form a remarkable artistic achievement.

The earlier works in the cycle achieved notoriety because of their themes, which were considered daring in those days. Nowadays, we can view these works with a greater objectivity. It is clear that Ibsen was still developing what was then a relatively new form - the realistic prose drama; and there are elements - e.g. the attempted blackmail and intercepted letter in "A Doll's House" - where we may still see remnants of the older type of melodrama from which Ibsen was attempting to break out. But they are very fine plays nonetheless, dealing with the individual's relationship with the wider society. Ibsen always remained aware of the extent to which human characters are moulded by the society they inhabit, but from "Rosmersholm" onwards, he focussed more on the characters' inner lives. He also found ways of saying more with less: his later plays are so concentrated, that not a word, not a gesture, is irrelevant.

Instead of re-using old myths, like Wagner or Joyce in their fields, Ibsen creates myths of his own: the white horses of Rosmersholm, for example, or the Master Builder who had defied God, but who dares not climb as high as he builds. A powerful poetic imagination is apparent in these plays, filling them with images of unforgettable intensity. The last play, "When We Dead Awaken", appears in part to forsake the realistic drama that Ibsen had so painstakingly developed, and return to the world of those earlier poetic masterpieces, "Brand" and "Peer Gynt".

"Hedda Gabler", "The Master Builder", "Little Eyolf", "John Gabriel Borkman" - these late plays are worthy to stand alongside the tragic masterpieces of Shakespeare or the Greeks. But a Nordic chill runs through them.

There are distinguished translations by, amongst others, Michael Meyer (Methuen), Una Ellis-Fermor and Peter Watts (Penguin), and here, usefully collected in one volume, by Rolf Fjelde. They all bring out different aspects of these works, and they are all eminently readable. (Having seen many of these translations in various performances, they also work well on stage.) Until I learn Norwegian to read these works in the original, these translations will have pride of place on my shelves.