The Book of J
10 best books like The Book of J (Harold Bloom): The Tartar Steppe, Claire of the Sea Light, Confessions, The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir, Medea, Vathek, Coriolanus, Fear and Trembling, Poetics, Half Blood Blues
| Author | Dino Buzzati |
| ISBN | 1567923046 |
Often likened to Kafka's The Castle, The Tartar Steppe is both a scathing critique of military life and a meditation on the human thirst for glory. It tells of young Giovanni Drogo, who is posted to a distant fort overlooking the vast Tartar steppe. Although not intending to stay, Giovanni suddenly finds...
A stunning work of fiction that brings us deep into the intertwined lives of a small seaside town where a little girl, the daughter of a fisherman, has gone missing.
From the best-selling author of Brother, I'm Dying and The Dew Breaker: a stunning new work of fiction that brings us deep into the...
| Author | Augustine of Hippo |
| ISBN | 0192833723 |
Augustine's Confessions is one of the most influential and most innovative works of Latin literature. Written in the author's early forties in the last years of the fourth century A.D. and during his first years as a bishop, they reflect on his life and on the activity of remembering and interpreting...
The Education of an Idealist: A Memoir
| Author | Samantha Power |
| ISBN | 0062820710 |
Pulitzer Prize winner Samantha Power, widely known as a relentless advocate for promoting human rights, has been heralded by President Barack Obama as one of America's "foremost thinkers on foreign policy."
In her memoir, Power offers an urgent response to the question "What can one person...
| Author | Euripides |
| ISBN | 0486275485 |
One of the most powerful and enduring of Greek tragedies, Medea centers on the myth of Jason, leader of the Argonauts, who has won the dragon-guarded treasure of the Golden Fleece with the help of the sorceress Medea. Having married Medea and fathered her two children, Jason abandons her for a more favorable...
| Author | William Beckford |
| ISBN | 0192836560 |
An odd book, and not a completely successful one. I cannot deny it a wealth of ironic observation and an elegant style, but I believe the author indulges his hobbies and obsessions--his Orientalism, his ephebophilia, his loathing of his mother and other termagants--to an extent that distorts...
| Author | William Shakespeare |
After the exotic eroticism of Antony and Cleopatra, Shakespeare returned to Rome for one of his final tragedies, and the change could not have been more dramatic. Coriolanus is one of Shakespeare's harshest and most challenging studies of power, politics and masculinity, based around the life of...
| Author | Søren Kierkegaard |
| ISBN | 0143037579 |
Soren Kierkegaard was a Danish philosopher, theologian, and religious author interested in human psychology. He is regarded as a leading pioneer of existentialism and one of the greatest philosophers of the 19th Century.
In Fear and Trembling, Kierkegaard wanted to understand the anxiety...
| Author | Aristotle |
| ISBN | 0140446362 |
‘The plot is the source and the soul of tragedy’
In his near-contemporary account of Greek tragedy, Aristotle examines the dramatic elements of plot, character, language and spectacle that combine to produce pity and fear in the audience, and asks why we derive pleasure from this apparently...
| Author | Esi Edugyan |
| ISBN | 1846687756 |
The aftermath of the fall of Paris, 1940. Hieronymus Falk, a rising star on the cabaret scene, is arrested in a cafe and never heard from again. He is twenty years old. A German citizen. And he is black.
Fifty years later, Sid, Hiero's bandmate and the only witness that day, is going back to Berlin....
| Author | Gaius Julius Caesar |
We had to read this in second year high school Latin in "the original." Of course, the text was modernized in ways which would have perplexed the author(s). It had punctuation, distinguished between upper and lower cases in accord with established rules, included diacriticals to facilitate pronunciation...
| Author | Kristin Hannah |
| ISBN | 0345471172 |
Annie Colwater’s husband has just confessed that he’s in love with a younger woman. Devastated, Annie retreats to the small town where she grew up. There, she is reunited with her first love, Nick Delacroix, a recent widower who is unable to cope with his silent, emotionally scarred young daughter....
| Author | Aristophanes |
| ISBN | 0198143958 |
This new paperback edition of Aristophanes' popular play includes the complete Greek text and extensive notes and commentary. Dover examines the two versions of the play, recounts the history of the text, and analyzes a number of problems surrounding the play's overall interpretation, including...
Gentleman Jack: The Real Anne Lister (Movie Tie-In)
| Author | Anne Choma |
| ISBN | 0143134566 |
The official companion book to the HBO series Gentleman Jack created by Sally Wainwright and starring Suranne Jones
In 1834, Anne Lister made history by celebrating and recording the first ever known marriage to another woman. This is her remarkable, true story.
Anne Lister was...
God Is in the Crowd: A Model for Post-Diaspora Judaism
| Author | Tal Keinan |
| ISBN | 0771048408 |
A book for anyone who cares about the fate of Judaism--through a personal story, Keinan makes a highly original argument about the importance of keeping Judaism alive through innovative means, including Crowd Wisdom.
Tal Keinan was born to a secular Jewish family in Miami, learning little...
The Body Tourist: a Memoir
In 1983, Shavin graduated from college with a BA in psychology. It had been a difficult venture that included an expulsion, a multitude of transfers, and a four-month institutionalization for depression and anorexia. By the time it was over, she was convinced she was cured, and that it was time to start...
The Four Horsemen: The Conversation That Sparked an Atheist Revolution
| Author | Christopher Hitchens |
At the dawn of the new atheist movement, the thinkers who became known as “the four horsemen,” the heralds of religion's unraveling—Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett—sat down together over cocktails. What followed was a rigorous, pathbreaking, and...
| Author | Camille Paglia |
| ISBN | 0851706517 |
So credit where credit is due: by sadistically characterizing the terrorized schoolchildren as "little snacks" for the birds, Paglia has offhandedly offered one of the funniest things I've read in film writing in a long, long time (and I'm up to my ears in it these days).
I was fully expecting...
