"There isn't a dull or conventional page, or an unlovely sentence in the book."--Scott Eyman, The Palm Beach Post

Skeptical but tolerant, honest but humorous, 16th-century philosopher Montaigne was remarkably modern in his views. These 7 essays are essential reading for students of French language. Introduction, Notes.

'A good essay must draw its curtain round us, but it must be a curtain that shuts us in, not out.' According to Virginia Woolf, the goal of the essay 'is simply that it should give pleasure...It should lay us under a spell with its first word, and we should only wake, refreshed, with its last.' One of the best practitioners of the art she analysed so rewardingly, Woolf displayed her essay-writing skills across a wide range of subjects, with all the craftsmanship, substance, and rich allure of her novels. This selection brings together thirty of her best essays, including the famous 'Mr Bennett and Mrs Brown', a clarion call for modern fiction. She discusses the arts of writing and of reading, and the particular role and reputation of women writers. She writes movingly about her father and the art of biography, and of the London scene in the early decades of the twentieth century. Overall, these pieces are as indispensable to an understanding of this great writer as they are enchanting in their own right. ABOUT THE SERIES: For over 100 years Oxford World's Classics has made available the widest range of literature from around the globe. Each affordable volume reflects Oxford's commitment to scholarship, providing the most accurate text plus a wealth of other valuable features, including expert introductions by leading authorities, helpful notes to clarify the text, up-to-date bibliographies for further study, and much more.

Includes critical essays on Henry James, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, D.H. Lawrence, Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Stendhal, Balzac, Marcel Proust, Andre Malraux, Paul Valery, Thomas Mann, William Shakespeare (Antony and Cleopatra), and other topics.

Lord Kahn was a leading figure in the development of modern economic theory. Not only did he play a vital role in the conception of the new theories of employment and money in the inter-war period, but he also made important contributions to the further development of monetary theory and the theories of economic growth during the last half of the twentieth century. This selection of essays illustrates the broad range of Lord Kahn's achievement, from the path-breaking 'multiplier' article to a recent essay on the growth of corporate firms. It brings together both papers previously published in academic journals and papers published elsewhere, including his important evidence to the Radcliffe Committee and two radio talks on Lord Keynes.

Wilson Harris is one of the outstanding literary innovators of the century. His novels date from The Palace of the Peacock to Jonestown . This long-awaited volume matches Harris's career with his critical writings, from 1961 to the present day. Selected Essays of Wilson Harris brings together twenty-one lectures, addresses and essays to make available Harris's full range of writings on subjects including: * the literate imagination * traditions of myth and fable in Central and South America * the North American literary imagination, from Edgar Allen Poe, Herman Melville and Ralph Ellison, to William Faulkner and Jean Rhys * inheritances and legacies of writers of the postcolonial diaspora This comprehensive collection also comes complete with: * an extensive editorial introduction, providing valuable historical and theoretical context for the essays * a map of Guyana * bibliographies of Harris's fiction and non-fiction * appendices on the legends of El Dorado and the Holy Grail.

National Book Critics Circle Award Winner: Biography Category National Book Award Finalist 2015 Winner of the Sheridan Morley Prize for Theatre Biography American Academy of Arts and Letters’ Harold D. Vursell Memorial Award A Chicago Tribune 'Best Books of 2014' USA Today: 10 Books We Loved Reading Washington Post, 10 Best Books of 2014 The definitive biography of America's greatest playwright from the celebrated drama critic of The New Yorker. John Lahr has produced a theater biography like no other. Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh gives intimate access to the mind of one of the most brilliant dramatists of his century, whose plays reshaped the American theater and the nation's sense of itself. This astute, deeply researched biography sheds a light on Tennessee Williams's warring family, his guilt, his creative triumphs and failures, his sexuality and numerous affairs, his misreported death, even the shenanigans surrounding his estate. With vivid cameos of the formative influences in Williams's life—his fierce, belittling father Cornelius; his puritanical, domineering mother Edwina; his demented sister Rose, who was lobotomized at the age of thirty-three; his beloved grandfather, the Reverend Walter Dakin—Tennessee Williams: Mad Pilgrimage of the Flesh is as much a biography of the man who created A Streetcar Named Desire, The Glass Menagerie, and Cat on a Hot Tin Roof as it is a trenchant exploration of Williams’s plays and the tortured process of bringing them to stage and screen. The portrait of Williams himself is unforgettable: a virgin until he was twenty-six, he had serial homosexual affairs thereafter as well as long-time, bruising relationships with Pancho Gonzalez and Frank Merlo. With compassion and verve, Lahr explores how Williams's relationships informed his work and how the resulting success brought turmoil to his personal life. Lahr captures not just Williams’s tempestuous public persona but also his backstage life, where his agent Audrey Wood and the director Elia Kazan play major roles, and Marlon Brando, Anna Magnani, Bette Davis, Maureen Stapleton, Diana Barrymore, and Tallulah Bankhead have scintillating walk-on parts. This is a biography of the highest order: a book about the major American playwright of his time written by the major American drama critic of his time.

Ramin Jahanbegloo develops the concept of compassion as a practical and ethical response to the problems of today's world. Examining the power of compassion through the lens of multiple world religions, he explores ahimsa in Buddhism, Jainism and Hinduism and neighbourly love in Christianity, before synthesizing the two concepts in the Gandhian theory of non-violence and its impact on Muslim and Christian thinkers such as Abdul Ghaffar Khan and Martin Luther King, Jr. Jahanbegloo considers the idea of a compassionate civilization based on the nonviolent democratic theory put forward by Gandhi with Swaraj, and completed by Martin Luther King, Jr. with the Beloved Community. By scrutinizing compassion in various religious and ethical traditions and exploring the relevance of homo fragilis, Jahanbegloo's comparative approach enriches our understanding of nonviolence as a universal philosophy and practice for the 21st century. He shows that nonviolence is not only a mode of thinking and a way of life, but also a powerful strategy of social and political transformation.

This volume collects twenty-two major essays by Werner Wolf published between 1992 and 2014, all of them revised but retaining the original argument. They form the core of those seminal writings which have contributed to establishing 'intermediality' as an internationally recognized research field, besides providing a by now widely accepted typology of the field and opening intermedial perspectives on areas as varied as narratology, metareferentiality and iconicity. The essays are presented chronologically under the headings of “Theory and Typology”, “Literature–Music Relations”, “Transmedial Narratology”, and “Miscellaneous Transmedial Phenomena” and cover a wide spectrum of topics of both historical and contemporary relevance, ranging from J.S. Bach, Mozart, Schubert and Gulda through Sterne, Hardy, Woolf and Beckett to Jan Steen, Hogarth, Magritte and comics. The volume should be essential reading for scholars of literature, music and art history with an interdisciplinary orientation as well as general readers interested in the fascinating interaction of the arts.