Grammars of Creation
10 best books like Grammars of Creation (George Steiner): New Maps Of Hell: A Survey Of Science Fiction, The Rough Guide to Cult Fiction, Nomad Codes: Adventures in Modern Esoterica, The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium: American Culture on the Brink, Art and Scholasticism With Other Essays, Merriam-Webster's Encyclopedia of Literature, Culture and the Death of God, Slavoj Žižek, Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity, J.G. Ballard
| Author | Kingsley Amis |
| ISBN | 0405063210 |
I could barely put down this wonderful essay by the late Kingsley Amis, who turns out to have had exactly the same prejudices about science-fiction as I do. From the identity of the first known SF story (Plato's Critias, what else?), glancing at The Tempest with its astonishingly durable mad-scientist-and-beautiful-daughter...
| Author | Paul Simpson |
| ISBN | 1843533871 |
This new Rough Guide will make you a literary buff in the time it takes to say Jack Kerouac. Even if you already know your Hunter S Thompson from your Jim Thompson, you''ll still find it hard to resist a book which tells you which cult novel has been implicated in assassinations, which world famous novelist...
| Author | Erik Davis |
| ISBN | 1891241540 |
In these wide-ranging essays, Erik Davis explores the codes — spiritual, cultural, and embodied — that people use to escape the limitations of their lives and enrich their experience of the world. These include Asian religious traditions and West African trickster gods, Western occult and esoteric...
| Author | Mark Dery |
| ISBN | 0802136702 |
From the far left to the far right, on talk radio and the op-ed page, more and more Americans believe that the social fabric is unraveling. Celebrity worship and media frenzy, suicidal cultists and heavily armed secessionists: modern life seems to have become a "pyrotechnic insanitarium," Mark Dery...
| Author | Jacques Maritain |
| ISBN | 0766163725 |
Amazing.
“A sort of conflict may therefore be observed between the transcendence of beauty and the material narrowness of the work to be made, between, on the one hand, the formal ratio of beauty, the splendor of being and of all the transcendentals combined, and, on the other hand, the formal...
| Author | Kathleen Kuiper |
| ISBN | 0877790426 |
To say that I've "read" it is a bit misleading since it's an encyclopedia, but I've had this reference book for many years and it's well-worn with affection. I love literature, but I also have a goofy passion for encyclopedic books.
This literary encyclopedia is kind of old, published in 1995,...
Culture and the Death of God
| Author | Terry Eagleton |
| ISBN | 0300203993 |
New observations on the persistence of God in modern times and why “authentic” atheism is so very hard to come by
How to live in a supposedly faithless world threatened by religious fundamentalism? Terry Eagleton, formidable thinker and renowned cultural critic, investigates in this...
| Author | Tony Myers |
| ISBN | 0415262658 |
Slavoj Zizek is no ordinary philosopher. Approaching critical theory and psychoanalysis in a recklessly entertaining fashion, Zizek's critical eye alights upon a bewildering and exhilarating range of subjects, from the political apathy of contemporary life, to a joke about the man who thinks...
Cosmopolis: The Hidden Agenda of Modernity
| Author | Stephen Toulmin |
| ISBN | 0226808386 |
In the seventeenth century, a vision arose which was to captivate the Western imagination for the next three hundred years: the vision of Cosmopolis, a society as rationally ordered as the Newtonian view of nature. While fueling extraordinary advances in all fields of human endeavor, this vision...
| Author | V. Vale |
| ISBN | 0965046974 |
This is the most comprehensive introduction to this visionary writer, the William Burroughs of England. J.G. Ballard finally achieved world recognition when Steven Spielberg filmed his autobiography (childhood til age 15) in Empire of the Sun. But Ballard has been a visionary iconoclast since...
| Author | John N. Gray |
| ISBN | 0374261180 |
Compared with that of humans, the life of the marionette looks more like an enviable state of freedom
In his brilliantly enjoyable and freewheeling new book, John Gray draws together the religious, philosophic, and fantastical traditions that question the very idea of human freedom. We...
| Author | James Wood |
| ISBN | 0375752633 |
This book recalls an era when criticism could change the way we look at the world. In the tradition of Matthew Arnold and Edmund Wilson, James Wood reads literature expansively, always pursuing its role and destiny in our lives. In a series of essays about such figures as Melville, Flaubert, Chekhov,...
Who Killed Homer: The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom
| Author | Victor Davis Hanson |
| ISBN | 1893554260 |
For hundreds of years, the study of the classics was at the heart of a liberal education, thought essential to the cultivation of free men. Yet today speaking Latin would be regarded as a sign of eccentricity, not erudition. People now attend university for technical expertise in fields like business,...
| Author | J.M. Coetzee |
| ISBN | 0670038652 |
A new collection of essays and literary criticism from Nobel Prize winner J. M. Coetzee In addition to being one of the most acclaimed and accomplished fiction writers in the world, J. M. Coetzee is also a literary critic of the highest caliber. As Derek Attridge observes in his illuminating introduction,...
Hermeneutics & the Human Sciences: Essays on Language, Action & Interpretation
| Author | Paul Ricœur |
| ISBN | 0521280028 |
YIKES.
Some necessary background: I read this book for a class. I have almost zero familiarity with western philosophical thought after circa 1400 (Dont' judge! I'm a medievalist!), and honestly I was not entirely sure what hermeneutics entailed when I picked up this book. I thought it had...
| Author | Harold Bloom |
| ISBN | 1573223778 |
In Harold Bloom's New York Times bestselling Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, the world's foremost literary critic theorized on the authorship of the historic play Hamlet. In this engaging new stand-alone work, he offers a full and warmly personal account of the play itself, explores...
| Author | Gilles Deleuze |
| ISBN | 0816614369 |
Deleuze—ere he embarks upon an excellent and edifying exegesis of the three great Kantian Critiques over sixty-five dense and still difficult pages—sets the stage for the reader by proffering four poetic formulas which might summarize the Kantian philosophy that, in my opinion, manage quite...
| Author | Simon Critchley |
| ISBN | 0415251214 |
Does humour make us human, or do the cats and dogs laugh along with us? On Humour is a fascinating, beautifully written and funny book on what humour can tell us about being human. Simon Critchley skilfully probes some of the most perennial but least understood aspects of humour, such as our tendency to...
| Author | Rita Felski |
| ISBN | 1405147245 |
Uses of Literature bridges the gap between literary theory and common-sense beliefs about why we read literature.
Explores the diverse motives and mysteries of why we read
Offers four different ways of thinking about why we read literature: for recognition, enchantment, knowledge,...
| Author | Cynthia Ozick |
| ISBN | 0679734252 |
From the author of The Messiah of Stockholm and Art and Ardor comes a new collection of supple, provocative, and intellectually dazzling essays. In Metaphor & Memory, Cynthia Ozick writes about Saul Bellow and Henry James, William Gaddis and Primo Levi. She observes the tug-of-war between written...
Gates of Eden: American Culture in the Sixties
The turbulent 1960s, almost from its outset, produced a dizzying display of cultural images and ideas that were as colorful as the psychedelic T-shirts that became part of its iconography. It was not, however, until Morris Dickstein's landmark Gates of Eden, first published in 1977, that we could...
| Author | Hans-Georg Gadamer |
| ISBN | 0521339537 |
Hans-Georg Gadamer was born February 11, 1900 in Marburg, Germany.
(Arabic: هانز جورج غادامير)
Gadamer showed an early aptitude for studies in philosophy and after receiving his doctoral degree in 1922 he went on to work directly under Martin Heidegger for a period...
