John Carey

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What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it will be remembered and valued. It does not always work - over the centuries countless thousands of poems have been forgotten. This little history is about some that have not. John Carey tells the stories behind the world's greatest poems, from the oldest surviving one written nearly four thousand years ago...

The articles collected in George Orwell's Essays illuminate the life and work of one of the most individual writers of this century-a man who elevated political writing to an art. This outstanding collection brings together Orwell's longer, major essays and a fine selection of shorter pieces that includes "My Country Right or Left," "Decline of the English Murder," "Shooting an Elephant," and "A Hanging." With great originality and wit, Orwell unfolds...

"I think I could be a good woman, if I had five thousand a year," observes beautiful and clever Becky Sharp, one of the wickedest and most appealing women in all of literature. Becky is just one of the many figures that populate William Makepeace Thackeray's novel Vanity Fair, a satirical panorama of upper-middle-class life and manners in London at the beginning of the nineteenth century

"An African American who performed in blackface to challenge racial stereotypes; a woman whose song, "I Don't Care," became emblematic of the modern "New Woman"; and a female impersonator whose act was created to uphold the traditional values of American femininity. These stories are at the center of David Hajdu's new work of graphic nonfiction, which recounts the lives and careers of Bert Williams, Eva Tanguay, and Julian Eltinge, three of the most...

A poem seems a fragile thing. Change a word and it is broken. But poems outlive empires and survive the devastation of conquests. Celebrated author John Carey here presents a uniquely valuable anthology of verse based on a simple principle: select the one-hundred greatest poets from across the centuries, and then choose their finest poems.0 Ranging from Homer and Sappho to Donne and Milton, Plath and Angelou, this is a delightful and accessible introduction...