Orem Library

Edward W. Said locates Joseph Conrad's fear of personal disintegration in his constant re-narration of the past. Using the author's personal letters as a guide to understanding his fiction, Said draws an important parallel between Conrad's view of his own life and the manner and form of his stories. The critic also argues that the author, who set his fiction in exotic locations like East Asia and Africa, projects political dimensions in his work that...

"A work of gripping non-fiction, North by Shakespeare presents the twinning narratives of rogue scholar Dennis McCarthy, called "the Steve Jobs of the Shakespeare community," and Sir Thomas North, an Elizabethan courtier whom McCarthy believes to be the undiscovered source for Shakespeare's plays. For the last fifteen years, Dennis McCarthy has obsessively pursued the true source of Shakespeare's works, with fascinating results. Using plagiarism software,...

Likely written around 1607 or 1608 and attributed at least in part to Shakespeare, "Pericles, Prince of Tyre" is an adventure-filled play that follows the extended sailing journeys of a young prince. Pericles, a young prince from Phoenicia, is forced to flee Antioch when he correctly guesses a riddle that reveals the incestuous activity of King Antiochus. Unable to stay at home in Tyre because of Antiochus' vengeance, he sails away and ends up shipwrecked...

In 1971, the anonymously published Go ask Alice-- the supposed diary of a middle-class addict-- reinvented the young adult genre with a blistering portray of sex, psychosis, and teenage self-destruction. In 1979 Jay's journal- the posthumous memoir of an alleged teenage Satanist-- poisoned whole communities. In reality the two books were written by Beatrice Sparks, a serial con artist who betrayed a grieving family stole a dead boy's memory, and lied...

Living by Fiction is written for -- and dedicated to -- people who love literature. Dealing with writers such as Nabokov, Barth, Coover, Pynchon, Borges, García Márquez, Beckett, and Calvino, Annie Dillard shows why fiction matters and how it can reveal more of the modern world and modern thinking than all the academic sciences combined. Like Joyce Cary's Art and Reality, this is a book by a writer on the issues raised by the art of literature....

The Waves by an English writer, who is considered as one of the most important modernist 20th Century authors and also a pioneer in the use of the stream of consciousness as a narrative device, Virginia Woolf. It is an experimental novel which is considered a key text of the Modernist literary movement. Interspersed with lyrical descriptions of waves breaking against the shoreline, the novel traces the intertwining lives of six friends from childhood...

Charles Baxter's new collection of essays, Wonderlands, joins his other works of nonfiction, Burning Down the House and The Art of Subtext. In the mold of those books, Baxter shares years of wisdom and reflection on what makes fiction work, including essays that were first given as craft talks at the Bread Loaf Writers' Conference. The essays here range from brilliant thinking on the nature of wonderlands in the fiction of Haruki Murakami and other...

A masterful work by a master poet, this brilliant summation of poetry and human nature will speak to all readers who long to place poetry in their lives. How to Read a Poem is an unprecedented exploration of poetry and feeling. In language at once acute and emotional, National Book Critics Circle award-winning distinguished poet and critic Edward Hirsch describes why poetry matters and how we can open up our imaginations so that its message can...

The Anthropocene is the current geologic age, in which humans have profoundly reshaped the planet and its biodiversity. In this remarkable symphony of essays, bestselling author John Green reviews different facets of the human-centered planet on a five-star scale--from QWERTY keyboard and sunsets to Canada geese and Penguins of Madagascar. Funny, complex, and rich with detail, the reviews chart the contradictions of contemporary humanity. John Green's...

Too many people have come to dread the approach of the holidays, a season that should -- and can -- be the most relaxed, intimate, joyful, and spiritual time of the year. In this book, Bill McKibben offers some suggestions on how to rethink Christmastime, so that our current obsession with present-buying becomes less important than the dozens of other possible traditions and celebrations. Working through their local churches, McKibben and his colleagues...