A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain , Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade
10 best books like A Summer of Hummingbirds: Love, Art, and Scandal in the Intersecting Worlds of Emily Dickinson, Mark Twain , Harriet Beecher Stowe, and Martin Johnson Heade (Christopher E.G. Benfey): One Matchless Time: A Life of William Faulkner, From the Terrace, Thomas Hardy, The Second Common Reader, Dickinson: Selected Poems and Commentaries, The Life of Emily Dickinson, Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece, The Complete Works of Emily Dickinson, All Day Permanent Red: The First Battle Scenes of Homer's Iliad Rewritten, William James: In the Maelstrom of American Modernism
| Author | Jay Parini |
| ISBN | 0060935553 |
“Nothing less than spellbinding . . . It’s an eye-opener. Anecdotal without being tawdry, analytical without being academic, it captures the essence of Faulkner’s life with the narrative drive of a novel.” — Houston Chronicle
“A splendid life of William Faulkner . . . Not...
| Author | John O'Hara |
| ISBN | 0786706821 |
Two stars for effort. For the enormous effort it took to create this 981 page behemoth. 981 pages of tiny print and tiny margins. There are no chapters. Just little breaks in the text here and there.
I suspect if Ayn Rand and Herman Wouk birthed a novel together, this would be it.
According...
| Author | Claire Tomalin |
| ISBN | 1594201188 |
The novels of Thomas Hardy have a permanent place on every booklover's shelf, yet little is known about the interior life of the man who wrote them. A believer and an unbeliever, a socialist and a snob, an unhappy husband and a desolate widower, Hardy challenged the sexual and religious conventions of...
| Author | Virginia Woolf |
| ISBN | 0156028166 |
3.5 stars
Last year I came across The Common Reader Vol. I at a Kinokuniya Bookstore in Bangkok and ordered Vol. II immediately. In fact, these famed two volumes have been published in various editions since 1932 and I've tried to buy them for a long time. Enticed by the simple title, I've since...
| Author | Helen Vendler |
| ISBN | 0674048679 |
Seamus Heaney, Denis Donoghue, William Pritchard, Marilyn Butler, Harold Bloom, and many others have praised Helen Vendler as one of the most attentive readers of poetry. Here, Vendler turns her illuminating skills as a critic to 150 selected poems of Emily Dickinson. As she did in The Art of Shakespeare's...
| Author | Richard B. Sewall |
| ISBN | 0674530802 |
The life of Emily Dickinson, Richard B. Sewall's monumental biography of the great American poet (1830-1886), won the National Book Award when it was originally published in two volumes. Now available in a one-volume edition, it has been called "by far the best and most complete study of the poet's...
| Author | Michael Gorra |
| ISBN | 0871404087 |
Henry James (1843 1916) has had many biographers, but Michael Gorra has taken an original approach to this great American progenitor of the modern novel, combining elements of biography, criticism, and travelogue in re-creating the dramatic backstory of James 's masterpiece, Portrait of a Lady...
This is the second volume of a new series of publications by Delphi Classics, the best-selling publisher of classical works. Many poetry collections are often poorly formatted and difficult to read on eReaders. The Delphi Poets Series offers readers the works of literature's finest poets, with superior...
| Author | Christopher Logue |
| ISBN | 0374529299 |
Setting down her topaz saucer heaped with nectarine jelly,
Emptying her blood-red mouth—set in her ice-white face—
Teenaged Athena jumped up and shrieked:
"Kill! Kill for me!
Better to die than live without killing!"
Who says prayer does no good?
Christopher...
| Author | Robert D. Richardson Jr. |
| ISBN | 0618433252 |
The definitive biography of the fascinating William James, whose life and writing put an indelible stamp on psychology, philosophy, teaching, and religion -- on modernism itself
Pivotal member of the Metaphysical Club, author of The Varieties of Religious Experience, eldest sibling...
| Author | William Faulkner |
| ISBN | 1931082898 |
The Library of America edition of the novels of William Faulkner culminates with this volume presenting his first four, each newly edited, and, in many cases, restored with passages that were altered or (in the case of Mosquitoes) expurgated by the original publishers. This is Faulkner as he was meant...
Death and the Maidens: Fanny Wollstonecraft and the Shelley Circle
| Author | Janet Todd |
| ISBN | 1582433399 |
From the Romantic period's star circle, the story of its saddest casualty--Fanny Wollstonecraft, daughter of an original feminist, sister of a literary star, and hopeful object of a poet's affection, dead of suicide at the age of nineteen. Little contemporary information was written about Fanny...
Revolutionary Road / The Easter Parade / Eleven Kinds of Loneliness
| Author | Richard Yates |
| ISBN | 0307270890 |
Three classic works--including the virtuosic "Revolutionary Road, "soon to be a major motion picture--that exemplify the remarkable gifts of this great American master.
Richard Yates's first novel, "Revolutionary Road "is the unforgettable portrait of a marriage built on dreams that...
| Author | Raymond Chandler |
| ISBN | 0375415025 |
(Book Jacket Status: Jacketed)
Creator of the famous Philip Marlowe, Raymond Chandler elevated the American hard-boiled detective genre to an art form. Chandler’s last four novels, published here in one volume, offer ample opportunity to savor the unique and utterly compelling fictional...
| Author | John Steinbeck |
| ISBN | 1883011019 |
John Steinbeck, from the very start of his career, evoked the landscape and people of central California with lyrical intensity and unflinching frankness. The Library of America presents for the first time in one volume Steinbeck’s early writings, which expressed his abiding concerns for community,...
Regarded as one of the key figures of nineteenth century realism, Henry James has become famous for his novels and tales that explore the clash between the Old World Europeans and New World Americans. Using an innovative method of writing from a character’s point of view within a tale, James’ intellectual...
The Pleasures of the Imagination: English Culture in the Eighteenth Century
| Author | John Brewer |
| ISBN | 0374234582 |
This is a difficult book to review, mostly because I don’t consider myself qualified to properly criticize the amount of work that went into this well-crafted, well-written brick (and it is a brick – it’s a read-at-a-table-because-it’s-too-heavy-to-comfortably-hold-for-long-stretches-of-time...
| Author | John Gardner |
| ISBN | 0394493176 |
The facts about Geoffrey Chaucer's life are plentiful enough. It is the connections between the facts that seem to elude us--those subtle nuances of feeling & emotion that a biographer relies on to paint a true, complete portrait. Lacking these, we are almost compelled to make the story up as we...
| Author | R.W.B. Lewis |
| ISBN | 0880640200 |
This biography of Edith Wharton won the Pulitzer and Bancroft prizes when it came out. And I am only on p. 31 at this moment, but I am already finding a lot of thud moments in the writing. His big interpretations seem labored, prosaic, and debatable. I am simultaneously reading Edith Wharton: An Extraordinary...
| Author | Ron Rash |
| ISBN | 1891885847 |
I was eager to read this most recent (2011) book of collected poetry by Ron Rash after reading his first three poetry offerings in recent weeks. Rash started with poetry and reviewers of his more recent novels note that as they praise his poetic use of words in his prose work. He is rapidly becoming more...
| Author | Francine du Plessix Gray |
| ISBN | 0140286772 |
Much has been written about the Marquis de Sade (1740-1814), the flamboyant aristocrat whose years indulging in sexual aberrations inspired his celebrated works 120 Days of Sodom and Justine -- and landed him in the Bastille. However, scant attention has been paid to the two women who were closest...
| Author | A.N. Wilson |
| ISBN | 0393047458 |
During the course of the 19th century, the idea of God became unknowable and then scientifically impossible. And yet, as award-winning novelist and biographer A.N. Wilson asserts in this dazzling synthesis of biography and intellectual history, "the God-Question does not go away".Drawing on his...
| Author | Maureen Adams |
| ISBN | 0345484061 |
“Move over Marley. Make room for Carlo (Emily Dickinson's giant Newfoundland). Or Flush (Elizabeth Barrett Browning's golden cocker spaniel). Or, maybe, Keeper (Emily Bronte's intimidating mastiff mix). In self-contained chapters of "Shaggy Muses," the work of each author is viewed intimately...
