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Conspire Recommends:
The
Hobbit and the Lord of the Rings Boxed Set (Trade Paperback Edition)
J. R. R. Tolkien, Alan Lee (Illustrator) From The Critics (Gale Research)
J. R. R. Tolkien is best known to most readers as the author of The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings, regarded by Charles Moorman in Tolkien and the Critics as "unique in modern fiction," and by Augustus M. Kolich in the Dictionary of Literary Biography as "the most important fantasy stories of the modern period." From 1914 until his death in 1973, Tolkien drew on his familiarity with Northern and other ancient literatures and his own invented languages to create not just his own story, but his own world: Middle-earth, complete with its own history, myths, legends, epics and heroes.
The Barnes & Noble Review from Discover Great New Writers
Shockingly original and completely unforgettable, The Lovely Bones is the story of a family devastated by a gruesome murder -- a murder recounted by the teenage victim. Upsetting, you say? Remarkably, first-time novelist Alice Sebold takes this difficult material and delivers a compelling and accomplished exploration of a fractured family's need for peace and closure.
From Other Critics
Time
...a personal and artistic triumph...
Entertainment Weekly
...Sebold has worked wonders...marvelous pacing...
Amy Bloom
...explores, with clear-eyed affection and wit, the romance of family
life, the shy, funny turbulence of adolescence and the painful tracks
love and loss make...
Michael Chabon
... painfully funny terribly sad,it is a feat of imagination and a tribute
to the healing power of grief.
Joanna Scott
This is an extraordinary novel, deeply unsettling, beautiful, tender,
unbearably sad, wise...
The New York Times Bestseller The Corrections by Jonathan
Franzen Winner of the 2001 National Book Award, Fiction.
Synopsis
Winner of the 2001
National Book Award for Fiction Stretching from the Midwest at mid-century
to Wall Street and Eastern Europe in the age of globalized greed, The
Corrections is a grandly entertaining novel for a new century--a comic,
tragic masterpiece of an American family breaking down in an age of
easy fixes.
Poetry
Speaks: Hear Great Poets Read Their Work from Tennyson to PlathFrom The Critics (Publishers Weekly)
"This is the definitive anthology to date of canonical poets reading short selections of their own work. Though some of the audio here has been widely available for decades, it is certainly exciting to hear Tennyson, Browning, Yeats, Eliot and Co. reading their work and to read easily along in the provided text indeed, a huge first printing of 100,000 is riding on that excitement. Former Poetry Society of America executive director Paschen and National Public Radio reporter Mosby have assembled a very high-wattage team of living poets to write short essays on the historic ones whose voices we hear.
Galway
Kinnell's A New Selected Poems About the Author
Galway Kinnell is a former MacArthur Fellow and has been the state poet of Vermont. In 1982 his SELECTED POEMS won the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. He is translator, with Hannah Lebmann, of THE ESSENTIAL RILKE. Kinnell teaches at New York University, where he is the Erich Maria Remarque Professor of Creative Writing.
From The Critics (Library Journal)
If example is the best teacher, than students new to traditional poetic forms can learn much from this collection of villanelles, sestinas, sonnets, elegies, pastorals, ballads, pantoums, odes, and other familiar structures that have shaped English poetry since Beowulf. Each chapter focuses on a single form, but explanatory material is kept to a minimum: a concise list of formal characteristics, a summary history, a short discussion of the form's contemporary context, and a brief "close up" on an individual poem. Most useful are the selections themselves, which illustrate how particular forms have been employed over time, from canonical classics by Chaucer, Shelley, and Elizabeth Bishop through newer pieces by Hayden Carruth, Michael Palmer, and Thylias Moss.