A feminist manifesto by the great modernist writer contends that women's literature would be on a par with that of men, if women had the same levels of income, privacy, and experience as their counterparts. Her main illustration of this principle is a hypothetical sister to Shakespeare, who, even with the same talents as her brother, would have never been given the chance to display her talents to the world.

Marta, who left Switzerland to find her own way in the world, must come to terms with her faulty yet well-meaning desire to help her daughter, Hildie, find her place, as Hildie becomes a nurse and has a family of her own.

Describes the origins of thirty-one famous Christmas songs, including "Jingle Bells," "O Holy Night," and "Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer," and provides the lyrics to each.

What is a short story? This 1913 study defines the genre, tracing the development of the English-language short story from medieval to modern times-accompanied by some stellar examples by Chaucer, Samuel Johnson, Sir Walter Scott, Edgar Allan Poe, Nathaniel Hawthorne, John Brown, Robert Louis Stevenson, and Rudyard Kipling.

This 900-page survey of world literature, "From Confucius' Day to Our Own" (as the subtitle reads), was the last book written by Ford Madox Ford, one of the seminal figures of the modernist period. Written for general readers rather than scholars and first published in 1938, The March of Literature is a working novelist's view of what is valuable in literature, and why. Convinced that scholars and teachers give a false sense of literature, Ford brings...

"Harold Bloom explores our Western literary tradition by concentrating on the works of twenty-six authors central to the Canon. He argues against ideology in literary criticism; he laments the loss of intellectual and aesthetic standards; he deplores multiculturalism, Marxism, feminism, neoconservatism, Afrocentrism, and the New Historicism." "Insisting instead upon "the autonomy of the aesthetic," Bloom places Shakespeare at the center of the Western...

The first book in the English language on the history of baroque music does not need either apology or justification. Histories of music have been written usually as quick surveys of the entire field and if they specialize at all they concentrate as a rule on a single composer. It is a strange though incontestable fact that by far the great majority of music books deal with composers rather than their music. This attitude is a survival of the hero-worship...

Classical music typically uses very specific instruments, most markedly those invented before mid-10th century and adopted in the 18th and 19th centuries. Instruments like the violin, cello, viola, woodwind instruments, and brass instruments, are just a few examples. There are many styles of music within classical music, including symphony, opera, choral works, chamber music, Gregorian chant, the madrigal, and the Mass.

A nostalgic and unflinchingly funny celebration of the horror fiction boom of the 1970's and 1980's, complete with story summaries and artist and author profiles.

An impassioned call for a return to reading poetry and an incisive argument for poetrys accessibility to all readers, by critically acclaimed poet Matthew Zapruder.