Book interviews tagged Literature

GIANTS: The Parallel Lives of Frederick Douglass and Abraham Lincoln
- ISBN: 978 0 446 58009 0
- featured in: Douglass’s and Lincoln’s intertwined story of change and self-making is the nation’s storyDecember 5, 2008

Children of the Revolution: The French, 1799—1914
- ISBN: 978 0 674 03209 5
- featured in: The coming together of many Frances which had so long been in conflictDecember 19, 2008

The Death and Afterlife of Achilles
- ISBN: 978 0 801890291
- featured in: What past Homeric audiences did and did not know about AchillesMarch 10, 2009

The Romantic Economist: Imagination in Economics
- ISBN: 978 0 521 73515 5 pb
- featured in: All good citizens of intellectual persuasion should be interested in the philosophical basis of economic thinkingMay 22, 2009

The American 1930s: A Literary History
- ISBN: 978 0521734318
- featured in: Against the simplification of history
June 12, 2009

Exemplarity and Mediocrity: The Art of the Average from Bourgeois Tragedy to Realism
- ISBN: 978 0804758901
- featured in: How modern art embraces mediocre life without falling prey to itJuly 24, 2009

On Tarzan
- ISBN: 978 0820332055
- featured in: Wanting to see if the pursuit of dilettantism and trivia can be intellectually fruitfulAugust 10, 2009

Essaying Shakespeare
- ISBN: 978 0816655892 hb
- featured in: Being a world citizen of culture, and, paradoxically, a ShakespeareanAugust 24, 2009

Frantic Panoramas: American Literature and Mass Culture, 1870-1920
- ISBN: 978 0812241747
- featured in: A kind of prehistory of our own media-saturated cultureAugust 31, 2009

The Program Era: Postwar Fiction and the Rise of Creative Writing
- ISBN: 978 0674033191
- featured in: Institutions are the medium of collective human endeavorSeptember 7, 2009

The Conservative Turn: Lionel Trilling, Whittaker Chambers and the Lessons of Anti-Communism
- ISBN: 978 0674032583
- featured in: Even in a simple color scheme, there is no red without blue and no blue without redSeptember 11, 2009

Mainland Passage: The Cultural Anomaly of Puerto Rico
- ISBN: 978 0816655885
- featured in: A cultural history of a departure from conventional political and national formsSeptember 13, 2009

Febris Erotica: Lovesickness in the Russian Literary Imagination
- ISBN: 978 0295988955 hb
- featured in: The case history of lovesickness as a literary-medical conceptSeptember 16, 2009

On the Origin of Stories: Evolution, Cognition, and Fiction
- ISBN: 978 0674033573
- featured in: Why we engage in art and fiction, and why these make us a special speciesSeptember 23, 2009

Thinking in Place: Art, Action, and Cultural Production
- ISBN: 978 1594515972 pb
- featured in: About wandering as a way of organizing the experience of the worldNovember 11, 2009

True Crimes in Eighteenth-Century China: Twenty Case Histories
- ISBN: 978 0295989075
- featured in: These true stories, from Chinese archives, show how justice was sought through the art of writingDecember 18, 2009

Knut Hamsun: The Dark Side of Literary Brilliance
- ISBN: 978-0295989457 (hb)
- featured in: The mix of brilliant art and repugnant politics compelled me to write this bookDecember 23, 2009

The Arts and the Definition of the Human: Toward a Philosophical Anthropology
- ISBN: 978 0804759540 pb
- featured in: The human self is a “natural artifact”January 11, 2010

Aging by the Book: The Emergence of Midlife in Victorian Britain
- ISBN: 978 0791476574
- featured in: We inherited our obsession with being “over the hill” from the nineteenth centuryJanuary 13, 2010

Birthright: The True Story that Inspired Kidnapped
- ISBN: 978 0393066159
- featured in: The real-life saga of James Annesley
January 25, 2010

The Language of the Heart: A Cultural History of the Recovery Movement from Alcoholics Anonymous to Oprah Winfrey
- ISBN: 978 0807833193
- featured in: How recovery ideas migrated into the popular imaginationJanuary 27, 2010

Mark Twain’s Other Woman: The Hidden Story of His Final Years
- ISBN: 978 0 307 27344 4
- featured in: A story that Mark Twain was determined no one would ever tellMarch 15, 2010

Helen of Troy: From Homer to Hollywood
- ISBN: 978 1405126359
- featured in: She is the literary equivalent of the Mona Lisa’s smile: absence is her essenceMarch 17, 2010

From Utopia to Apocalypse: Science Fiction and the Politics of Catastrophe
- ISBN: 978 0816650798 pb
- featured in: Is mass violence justified if it brings about a better world?March 22, 2010

Forbidden Fruit: Counterfactuals and International Relations
- ISBN: 978 0691132907
- featured in: Spelling out the counterfactual method improves policy analysisApril 7, 2010

The Ecological Thought
- ISBN: 978 0674049208
- featured in: To survive, we must do things based not on concepts of selfApril 30, 2010

Children’s Literature: A Reader’s History from Aesop to Harry Potter
- ISBN: 978 0226473017
- featured in: The best dreams come from having been read to sleepMay 17, 2010

Pen of Iron: American Prose and the King James Bible
- ISBN: 978 0691128818
- featured in: For the importance of style in the understanding and the enjoyment of literatureMay 31, 2010

Animal Characters: Nonhuman Beings in Early Modern Literature
- ISBN: 978 0812242492
- featured in: How animals changed at the dawn of the modern ageJune 28, 2010

Inventing the Israelite: Jewish Fiction in Nineteenth-Century France
- ISBN: 978 0804763844
- featured in: I reconsider what we thought we knew about French Jewish history and literatureJuly 5, 2010