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The American Canon: Literary Genius from Emerson to Pynchon
Harold Bloom, David MikicsOur foremost literary critic celebrates the American pantheon of great writers from Emerson and Whitman to Hurston and Ellison, to Ursula K. LeGuin, Philip Roth, and Thomas Pynchon.

Harold Bloom is our greatest living student of literature, "a colossus among critics" (The New York Times) and a "master entertainer" (Newsweek). Over the course of a remarkable career spanning more than half a century, in such best-selling books as The Western Canon and Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, he transformed the way we look at the masterworks of western literature. Now, in the first collection devoted to his illuminating writings specifically on American literature, Bloom reflects on the surprising ways American writers have influenced each other across more than two centuries. The American Canon gathers five decades of Bloom's essays, occasional pieces, and introductions as well as excerpts from several of his books, weaving them together into an unrivalled tour of the great American bookshelf. Always a champion of aesthetic power, Bloom tells the story of our national literature in terms of artistic struggle against powerful predecessors and the American thirst for selfhood. All of the visionary American writers who have long preoccupied Bloom—Emerson and Whitman, Hawthorne and Melville, and Dickinson, Faulkner, Crane, Frost, Stevens, and Bishop—are here, along with Hemingway, James, O'Connor, Ellison, Hurston, LeGuin, Ashbery and many others. Bloom's enthusiasm for these American geniuses is contagious, and he reminds us how these writers have shaped our sense of who we are, and how they can summon us to be yet better versions of ourselves.
The American Religion: The Emergence of The Post-Christian Nation
Harold BloomThe author of The Book of J analyzes the American religious imagination to produce this brilliant examination of a national soul. His consensus: America is a nation of Gnostics, believers in a pre-Christian tradition of individual divinity.
American Religious Poems: An Anthology by Harold Bloom
Harold BloomNo more profound and intimate expression of America's spiritual life can be found than the work of its poets. From Anne Bradstreet to the Beats, from Native American chant and Shaker hymnody to Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson, religion and spirituality have always been central to American poetry. In this unique anthology, world-renowned scholar Harold Bloom weaves a tapestry from the many strands of American religious experience and practice: the searching meditations of Puritan pioneers, the evangelical fervor of the Great Awakenings, the mystical currents of Transcendentalism, the diverse influences of the world religions that have taken root in modern America.

Spanning four centuries and more than 200 poets, American Religious Poems is a bountiful and moving gathering of voices that offers countless moments of inspiration, solace, meditation, and transcendence. The poems in this unprecedented volume are a lasting testimony to the American spirit and its unremitting quest for ultimate truth and meaning.

This deluxe collector's edition features:

- an introduction by Harold Bloom
- a reader's guide to significant topics and themes in the poems
- Smyth-sewn binding and flexible, leatherette covers
- and a ribbon page-marker
The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life
Harold Bloom"Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it," writes Harold Bloom in The Anatomy of Influence, "is in the first place literary, that is to say, personal and passionate."

For more than half a century, Bloom has shared his profound knowledge of the written word with students and readers. In this, his most comprehensive and accessible study of influence, Bloom leads us through the labyrinthine paths which link the writers and critics who have informed and inspired him for so many years. The result is "a critical self-portrait," a sustained meditation on a life lived with and through the great works of the Western canon: Why has influence been my lifelong obsessive concern? Why have certain writers found me and not others? What is the end of a literary life?

Featuring extended analyses of Bloom's most cherished poets—Shakespeare, Whitman, and Crane—as well as inspired appreciations of Emerson, Tennyson, Browning, Yeats, Ashbery, and others, The Anatomy of Influence adapts Bloom's classic work The Anxiety of Influence to show us what great literature is, how it comes to be, and why it matters. Each chapter maps startling new literary connections that suddenly seem inevitable once Bloom has shown us how to listen and to read. A fierce and intimate appreciation of the art of literature on a scale that the author will not again attempt, The Anatomy of Influence follows the sublime works it studies, inspiring the reader with a sense of something ever more about to be.
Anthony Burgess
Harold Bloom
The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry
Harold BloomHarold Bloom's The Anxiety of Influence has cast its own long shadow of influence since it was first published in 1973. Through an insightful study of Romantic poets, Bloom puts forth his central vision of the relations between tradition and the individual artist. Although Bloom was never the leader of any critical "camp," his argument that all literary texts are a response to those that precede them had an enormous impact on the practice of deconstruction and poststructuralist literary theory in this country. The book remains a central work of criticism for all students of literature and has sold over 17,000 copies in paperback since 1984. Written in a moving personal style, anchored by concrete examples, and memorably quotable, Bloom's book maintains that the anxiety of influence cannot be evaded—neither by poets nor by responsible readers and critics.
This second edition contains a new Introduction, which explains the genesis of Bloom's thinking and the subsequent influence of the book on literary criticism of the past twenty years.criticism of the past twenty years. Here, Bloom asserts that the anxiety of influence comes out of a complex act of strong misreading, a creative interpretation he calls "poetic misprision." The influence-anxiety does not so much concern the forerunner but rather is an anxiety achieved in and by the story, novel, play, poem, or essay. In other words, without Keats's reading of Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth, we could not have Keats's odes and sonnets and his two Hyperions.
Given the enormous attention generated by Bloom's controversial The Western Cannon, this new edition is certain to find a readymade audience among the new generation of scholars, students, and layreaders interested in the Bloom cannon.
The Art of Reading Poetry
Harold Bloom
The Book of J
Harold BloomA controversial national best seller upon its initial publication, The Book of J is an audacious work of literary restoration revealing one of the great narratives of all time and unveiling its mysterious author. J is the title that scholars ascribe to the nameless writer they believe is responsible for the text, written between 950 and 900 BCE, on which Genesis, Exodus, and Numbers is based. In The Book of J, accompanying David Rosenberg's translation, Harold Bloom persuasively argues that J was a woman—very likely a woman of the royal house at King Solomon's court—and a writer of the stature of Homer, Shakespeare, and Tolstoy. Rosenberg's translations from the Hebrew bring J's stories to life and reveal her towering originality and grasp of humanity. Bloom argues in several essays that "J" was not a religious writer but a fierce ironist. He also offers historical context, a discussion of the theory of how the different texts came together to create the Bible, and translation notes.
Cleopatra: I Am Fire and Air
Harold BloomFrom Harold Bloom, one of the greatest Shakespeare scholars of our time, comes an intimate, wise, deeply compelling portrait of Cleopatra—one of the Bard’s most riveting and memorable female characters.

Cleopatra is one of the most famous women in history—and thanks to Shakespeare, one of the most intriguing personalities in literature. She is lover of Marc Antony, defender of Egypt, and, perhaps most enduringly, a champion of life. Cleopatra is supremely vexing, tragic, and complex. She has fascinated readers and audiences for centuries and has been played by the greatest actresses of their time, from Elizabeth Taylor to Vivien Leigh to Janet Suzman to Judi Dench.

Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom writes about Cleopatra with wisdom, joy, exuberance, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character: Just as we encounter one Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are in high school and college and another when we are adults, Bloom explains his shifting understanding of Cleopatra over the course of his own lifetime. The book becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our own humanity.

Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare’s characters make. With Cleopatra, he delivers exhilarating clarity and invites us to look at this character as a flawed human who might be living in our world. The result is an invaluable resource from our greatest literary critic.
The Daemon Knows: Literary Greatness and the American Sublime
Harold BloomHailed as “the indispensable critic” by The New York Review of Books, Harold Bloom—New York Times bestselling writer and Sterling Professor of Humanities at Yale University—has for decades been sharing with readers and students his genius and passion for understanding literature and explaining why it matters. Now he turns at long last to his beloved writers of our national literature in an expansive and mesmerizing book that is one of his most incisive and profoundly personal to date. A product of five years of writing and a lifetime of reading and scholarship, The Daemon Knows may be Bloom’s most masterly book yet.
 
Pairing Walt Whitman with Herman Melville, Ralph Waldo Emerson with Emily Dickinson, Nathaniel Hawthorne with Henry James, Mark Twain with Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens with T. S. Eliot, and William Faulkner with Hart Crane, Bloom places these writers’ works in conversation with one another, exploring their relationship to the “daemon”—the spark of genius or Orphic muse—in their creation and helping us understand their writing with new immediacy and relevance. It is the intensity of their preoccupation with the sublime, Bloom proposes, that distinguishes these American writers from their European predecessors.
 
As he reflects on a lifetime lived among the works explored in this book, Bloom has himself, in this magnificent achievement, created a work touched by the daemon.
 
Praise for Harold Bloom and The Daemon Knows

“The sublime The Daemon Knows is a veritable feast for the general reader (me) as well as the advanced (I assume) one.”—John Ashbery

“[Bloom] is, by any reckoning, one of the most stimulating literary presences of the last half-century.”—Sam Tanenhaus, The New York Times Book Review

“As always, Bloom conveys the intimate, urgent, compelling sense of why it matters that we read these canonical authors.”—Kirkus Reviews (starred review)

“Bloom thinks in the sweep of millennia, of intellectual patterns that unfold over centuries, of a vast and intricate labyrinth of interconnections between artists from Plato to Pater.”—Michael Lindgren, The Washington Post

“A colossus among critics.”—Adam Begley, The New York Times Magazine

“Probably the most celebrated literary critic in the United States.”—Frank Kermode, The Guardian
Fallen Angels
Harold BloomIn this lovely gift book published for the holiday season, Harold Bloom again combines his lifelong interests in religion and literature. He begins by observing our present-day obsession with angels, which reached its greatest intensity as the current millennium approached. For the most part, these popular angels are banal, even insipid. Bloom is especially concerned with a particular subspecies of angels: fallen angels.  He proceeds to examine representations of fallen angels from Zoroastrian texts and the Bible to Milton’s Paradise Lost to Tony Kushner’s Angels in America, arguing that familiarity with this rich literary tradition improves our reading and spiritual lives. Bloom’s text is accompanied by more than a dozen original watercolors, line drawings, and illuminated letters by award-winning artist Mark Podwal.

 

Every angel is terrifying, Rilke wrote. For Bloom, too, this is true in one sense, since he maintains that all angels are fallen angels. The image of Satan, the greatest of fallen angels, retains the ability to fascinate and frighten us, he argues, because we share a close kinship with him. Indeed, from a human perspective, we must agree that we are fallen angels. Fallenness is ultimately a human condition: the recognition of our own mortality. Throughout world literature angels have always served as metaphors for death. We may take consolation, however, in our double awareness that angels also represent love and the celebration of human possibilities.
Falstaff: Give Me Life
Harold BloomFrom Harold Bloom, one of the greatest Shakespeare scholars of our time as well as a beloved professor who has taught the Bard for over half a century, an intimate, wise, deeply compelling portrait of Falstaff—Shakespeare’s greatest enduring and complex comedic character.

Falstaff is both a comic and tragic central protagonist in Shakespeare’s three Henry plays: Henry IV, Parts One and Two, and Henry V. He is companion to Prince Hal (the future Henry V), who loves him, goads, him, teases him, indulges his vast appetites, and commits all sorts of mischief with him—some innocent, some cruel. Falstaff can be lewd, funny, careless of others, a bad creditor, an unreliable friend, and in the end, devastatingly reckless in his presumption of loyalty from the new King.

Award-winning author and beloved professor Harold Bloom writes about Falstaff with the deepest compassion and sympathy and also with unerring wisdom. He uses the relationship between Falstaff and Hal to explore the devastation of severed bonds and the heartbreak of betrayal. Just as we encounter one type of Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are young adults and another when we are middle-aged, Bloom writes about his own shifting understanding of Falstaff over the course of his lifetime. Ultimately we come away with a deeper appreciation of this profoundly complex character, and the book as a whole becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity.

Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare’s characters make. He delivers that kind of exhilarating intimacy and clarity in Falstaff, inviting us to look at a character as a flawed human who might live in our world. The result is deeply intimate and utterly compelling.
The Flight to Lucifer: A Gnostic Fantasy
Harold BloomThe Flight to Lucifer: A Gnostic Fantasy Harold Bloom First Vintage Books Edition May 1980
Genius: a Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds
Harold BloomGenius: a Mosaic of One Hundred Exemplary Creative Minds
How to Read and Why
Harold BloomInformation is endlessly available to us; where shall wisdom be found?" is the crucial question with which renowned literary critic Harold Bloom begins this impassioned book on the pleasures and benefits of reading well. For more than forty years, Bloom has transformed college students into lifelong readers with his unrivaled love for literature. Now, at a time when faster and easier electronic media threatens to eclipse the practice of reading, Bloom draws on his experience as critic, teacher, and prolific reader to plumb the great books for their sustaining wisdom.

Shedding all polemic, Bloom addresses the solitary reader, who, he urges, should read for the purest of all reasons: to discover and augment the self. His ultimate faith in the restorative power of literature resonates on every page of this infinitely rewarding and important book.
Iago: The Strategies of Evil
Harold BloomFrom one of the greatest Shakespeare scholars of our time, Harold Bloom presents Othello’s Iago, perhaps the Bard’s most compelling villain—the fourth in a series of five short books about the great playwright’s most significant personalities.

In all of literature, few antagonists have displayed the ruthless cunning and unscrupulous deceit of Iago, the antagonist to Othello. Often described as Machiavellian, Iago is a fascinating psychological specimen: at once a shrewd expert of the human mind and yet, himself a deeply troubled man.

One of Shakespeare’s most provocative and culturally relevant plays, Othello is widely studied for its complex and enduring themes of race and racism, love, trust, betrayal, and repentance. It remains widely performed across professional and community theatre alike and has been the source for many film and literary adaptations. Now award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom investigates Iago’s motives and unthinkable actions with razor-sharp insight, agility, and compassion. Why and how does Iago uses fake news to destroy Othello and several other characters in his path? What can Othello tell us about racism?

Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, treating Shakespeare’s characters like people he has known all his life. He delivers that kind of exhilarating intimacy and clarity in these pages, writing about his shifting understanding—over the course of his own lifetime—of this endlessly compelling figure, so that Iago also becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity. This is a provocative study for our time.
Jesus and Yahweh: The Names Divine
Harold BloomHarold Bloom has written about religion and the Bible throughout his career, but now, with Jesus and Yahweh, he has written what may well be his most explosive, and important, book yet.

There is very little evidence of the historical Jesus-who he was, what he said. As Bloom writes, "There is not a sentence concerning Jesus in the entire New Testament composed by anyone who ever had met the unwilling King of the Jews." And so Bloom has used his unsurpassed skills as a literary critic to examine the character of Jesus, noting the inconsistencies, contradictions, and logical flaws throughout the Gospels. He also examines the character of Yahweh, who he finds has more in common with Mark's Jesus than he does with God the Father of the Christian and later rabbinic Jewish traditions. Bloom further argues that the Hebrew Bible of the Jews and the Christian Old Testament are very different books with very different purposes, political as well as religious.

Jesus and Yahweh is a thrilling and mind-opening read. It is paradigm-changing literary criticism that will challenge and illuminate Jews and Christians alike, and is sure to be one of the most discussed, debated, and celebrated books of the year. At a time when religion has come to take center stage in our political arena, Bloom's shocking conclusion, that there is no Judeo-Christian tradition-that the two histories, Gods, and even Bibles, are not compatible-may make readers rethink everything we take for granted about what we believed was a shared heritage.
Kabbalah And Criticism (Continuum Impacts)
Harold Bloom*****The kabbalah, the mystical Judaic system, is given a compelling analysis by the world's leading literary critic. "Kabbalah and Criticism" may justly be regarded as the cardinal work in Harold Bloom's enterprise. It is the keystone in the arch, clarifying the development of his earlier books, and pointing to the direction of his later ones. "Kabbalah and Criticism" provides a study of the Kabbablah itself, of its commentators - the 'revisionary ratios' they employed - and of its significance as a model for contemporary criticism.
Lear: The Great Image of Authority
Harold BloomHarold Bloom, regarded by some as the greatest Shakespeare scholar of our time, presents an intimate, wise, deeply compelling portrait of King Lear—the third in his series of five short books about the great playwright’s most significant personalities, hailed as Bloom’s “last love letter to the shaping spirit of his imagination” on the front page of The New York Times Book Review.

King Lear is perhaps the most poignant character in literature. The aged, abused monarch—a man in his eighties, like Harold Bloom himself—is at once the consummate figure of authority and the classic example of the fall from majesty. He is widely agreed to be William Shakespeare’s most moving, tragic hero.

Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom writes about Lear with wisdom, joy, exuberance, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character: Just as we encounter one Emma Bovary or Hamlet when we are seventeen and another when we are forty, Bloom writes about his shifting understanding—over the course of his own lifetime—of Lear, so that this book also explores an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity.

Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare’s characters make. He delivers that kind of exhilarating intimacy, pathos, and clarity in Lear.
Macbeth: A Dagger of the Mind
Harold BloomFrom the greatest Shakespeare scholar of our time, comes a portrait of Macbeth, one of William Shakespeare’s most complex and compelling anti-heroes—the final volume in a series of five short books about the great playwright’s most significant personalities: Falstaff, Cleopatra, Lear, Iago, Macbeth.

From the ambitious and mad titular character to his devilish wife Lady Macbeth to the moral and noble Banquo to the mysterious Three Witches, Macbeth is one of William Shakespeare’s more brilliantly populated plays and remains among the most widely read, performed in innovative productions set in a vast array of times and locations, from Nazi Germany to Revolutionary Cuba. Macbeth is a distinguished warrior hero, who over the course of the play, transforms into a brutal, murderous villain and pays an extraordinary price for committing an evil act. A man consumed with ambition and self-doubt, Macbeth is one of Shakespeare’s most vital meditations on the dangerous corners of the human imagination.

Award-winning writer and beloved professor Harold Bloom investigates Macbeth’s interiority and unthinkable actions with razor-sharp insight, agility, and compassion. He also explores his own personal relationship to the character: Just as we encounter one Anna Karenina or Jay Gatsby when we are seventeen and another when we are forty, Bloom writes about his shifting understanding—over the course of his own lifetime—of this endlessly compelling figure, so that the book also becomes an extraordinarily moving argument for literature as a path to and a measure of our humanity.

Bloom is mesmerizing in the classroom, wrestling with the often tragic choices Shakespeare’s characters make. He delivers that kind of exhilarating intimacy and clarity in Macbeth, the final book in an essential series.
A Map of Misreading
Harold BloomIn print for twenty-seven years, A Map of Misreading serves as a companion volume to Bloom's other seminal work, The Anxiety of Influence. In this finely crafted text, Bloom offers instruction in how to read a poem, using his theory that patterns of imagery in poems represent both a response to and a defense against the influence of precursor poems. Influence, as Bloom conceives it, means that there are no texts, but only relationships between texts. Bloom discusses British and American poets including Milton, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Warren, Ammons and Ashbery. A full-scale reading of one poem, Browning's "Childe Roland to the Dark Tower Came," represents this struggle between one poet and his precursors, the poem serving as a map for readers through the many versions of influence from Milton to modern poets.

For the first time, in a new preface, Bloom will consider the map of misreading drawn by contemporary poets such as Ann Carson and Henri Cole. Bloom's new exploration of contemporary poetry over the last twenty years will illuminate how modern texts relate to previous texts, and contribute to the literary legacy of their predecessors.
Novelists and Novels
Harold BloomHarold Bloom is America's most esteemed literary critic and one of the greatest critical minds of our time. Gathered here are his writings on the indispensable novels and novelists in the Western tradition. "Novelists and Novels" contains the best of Bloom's writing on the greatest novels and novelists of our time - from Daniel Defoe to Philip Roth, from Charles Dickens to Amy Tan. In addition to critical essays by Bloom, this compelling book features his overview of the genre and thoughts on its development, as well as genre-specific bibliographic information with suggestions for further reading on the topic. Bloom's brilliant insights and lively discourse serve not only to illuminate, but also to inspire readers to turn again to some of the finest works of literature ever written. The novelists profiled include: Jane Austen; Miguel de Cervantes; Daniel Defoe; Don DeLillo; Charles Dickens; George Eliot; Ralph Ellison; William Faulkner; Nathaniel Hawthorne; Ernest Hemingway; James Joyce; Franz Kafka; Toni Morrison; John Steinbeck; Leo Tolstoy; Mark Twain; Edith Wharton; and more.
Omens of the Millennium: The Gnosis of Angels, Dreams, and Resurrection
Harold BloomIn this impassioned, erudite, and provocative work, Harold Bloom, bestselling author and America's foremost literary and cultural critic, examines society's "New Age" obsessions: angels, prophetic dreams, and near-death experiences. Omens of Millennium traces these cultural phenomena from their ancient and traditional origins to their present-day, millennial manifestations. In addition, it is a personal account of Bloom's Gnosticism. Certain to educate, challenge, and entertain, Omens of Millennium is as fascinating as it is timely.
Poetics of Influence
Harold Bloom
Possessed by Memory: The Inward Light of Criticism
Harold BloomIn arguably his most personal and lasting book, America's most daringly original and controversial critic gives us brief, luminous readings of more than eighty texts by canonical authors— texts he has had by heart since childhood.

Gone are the polemics. Here, instead, in a memoir of sorts—an inward journey from childhood to ninety—Bloom argues elegiacally with nobody but Bloom, interested only in the influence of the mind upon itself when it absorbs the highest and most enduring imaginative literature. He offers more than eighty meditations on poems and prose that have haunted him since childhood and which he has possessed by memory: from the Psalms and Ecclesiastes to Shakespeare and Dr. Johnson; Spenser and Milton to Wordsworth and Keats; Whitman and Browning to Joyce and Proust; Tolstoy and Yeats to Delmore Schwartz and Amy Clampitt; Blake to Wallace Stevens—and so much more. And though he has written before about some of these authors, these exegeses, written in the winter of his life, are movingly informed by "the freshness of last things."

As Bloom writes movingly: "One of my concerns throughout Possessed by Memory is with the beloved dead. Most of my good friends in my generation have departed. Their voices are still in my ears. I find that they are woven into what I read. I listen not only for their voices but also for the voice I heard before the world was made. My other concern is religious, in the widest sense. For me poetry and spirituality fuse as a single entity. All my long life I have sought to isolate poetic knowledge. This also involves a knowledge of God and gods. I see imaginative literature as a kind of theurgy in which the divine is summoned, maintained, and augmented."
Romanticism and Consciousness: Essays in Criticism
Harold BloomRomanticism and Consciousness is a comprehensive collection of essays on Romanticism - its intellectual and political backgrounds, its place in literary history, its continued relevance to the present age, its relation to psychoanalysis and other modern trends of thought - and on the major English Romantic poets. The topics covered include the relations between nature and consciousness, nature and revolution, and nature and literary form; the principal poets studied are Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, and Keats. Some of the essays have been especially revised by their disinguished authors for this volume; some others appear here for the first time. The scholars and critics represented are Samual H. Monk, Owen Barfield, Geoffrey H. Hartman, J.H. Van den Berg, Paul de Man, W.K. Wimsatt, Jr., M.H. Abrams, Northrop Frye, Alfred Cobban, Walter Jackson Bate, Josephine Miles, John Hollander, Martin Price, Frederick A. Pottle, Humphry House, Alvin B. Kernan, and Harold Bloom.
The Shadow of a Great Rock: A Literary Appreciation of the King James Bible
Harold BloomThe King James Bible stands at "the sublime summit of literature in English," sharing the honor only with Shakespeare, Harold Bloom contends in the opening pages of this illuminating literary tour. Distilling the insights acquired from a significant portion of his career as a brilliant critic and teacher, he offers readers at last the book he has been writing "all my long life," a magisterial and intimately perceptive reading of the King James Bible as a literary masterpiece.

Bloom calls it an "inexplicable wonder" that a rather undistinguished group of writers could bring forth such a magnificent work of literature, and he credits William Tyndale as their fountainhead. Reading the King James Bible alongside Tyndale's Bible, the Geneva Bible, and the original Hebrew and Greek texts, Bloom highlights how the translators and editors improved upon—or, in some cases, diminished—the earlier versions. He invites readers to hear the baroque inventiveness in such sublime books as the Song of Songs, Ecclesiastes, and Job, and alerts us to the echoes of the King James Bible in works from the Romantic period to the present day. Throughout, Bloom makes an impassioned and convincing case for reading the King James Bible as literature, free from dogma and with an appreciation of its enduring aesthetic value. (20110523)
Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human
Harold Bloom*****
Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages
Harold Bloom"If readers are to come to Shakespeare and to Chekhov, to Henry James and to Jane Austen, then they are best prepared if they have read Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling," writes Harold Bloom in his introduction to this enchanting and much-needed anthology of exceptional stories and poems selected to inspire a lifelong love of reading. As television, video games, and the Internet threaten to distract young people from the solitary pleasures of reading, Bloom presents a volume that will amuse, challenge, and beguile readers with its myriad voices and subjects.

Here are old favorites by beloved writers of children's literature, as well as exciting rediscoveries and wonderful works penned by writers better known for their adult classics, such as Herman Melville, Leo Tolstoy, Edith Wharton, and Walt Whitman. Encompassing the natural world and the supernatural; childhood, romance, and death; pets, wild animals, and goblins; mystery, adventure, and humor; the selections reflect the passion and erudition of our most revered literary critic. Arranged by season, Stories and Poems for Extremely Intelligent Children of All Ages is a must-have anthology, sure to delight readers young and old for years to come.
Take Arms Against a Sea of Troubles: The Power of the Reader’s Mind over a Universe of Death
Harold Bloom
The Best Poems of the English Language : From Chaucer Through Frost
Harold Bloom*****
Till I End My Song: A Gathering of Last Poems
Harold BloomFrom Harold Bloom, the foremost literary critic of our time, comes a delightful anthology of the final works of great poets. In Till I End My Song, Bloom has meticulously curated the last poems of one hundred influential poets. These poems, sometimes the literal end and other times the imagined conclusion to a poetic career, offer a lens through which to contemplate the enduring nature of art and the inevitability of death. Bloom's selections highlight the work of the canonized poets T. S. Eliot, Alexander Pope, W. B. Yeats, Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, and William Shakespeare, but also revive interest in distinguished but long-neglected poets, such as Conrad Aiken, William Cowper, Edwin Arlington Robinson, George Meredith, and Louis MacNeice. An authoritative collection of last poems, Till I End My Song will reverberate long into the coming silence.
The Visionary Company: A Reading of English Romantic Poetry
Harold BloomThis is a revised and enlarged edition of the most extensive and detailed critical reading of English Romantic poetry ever attempted in a single volume. It is both a valuable introduction to the Romantics and an influential work of literary criticism. The perceptive interpretations of the major poems of Blake, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Beddoes, Clare, and Darley develop the themes of Romantic myth-making and the dialectical relationship between nature and imagination.For this new edition, Harold Bloom has added an introductory essay on the historical backgrounds of English Romantic poetry and an epilogue relating his book to literary trends.
Wallace Stevens: The Poems of Our Climate
Harold BloomThis dazzling book is at once an indispensable guide to Stevens's poetic canon and a significant addition to the literature on the American Romantic movement. It gives authoritative readings of the major long poems and sequences of Stevens and deals at length with the important shorter works as well, showing their complex relations both to one another and to the work of Stevens's precursors, Wordsworth, Shelley, Keats, Emerson, and Whitman. No other book on Stevens is as ambitious or comprehensive as this one: everyone who writes on Stevens will have to take it into account. The product of twenty years of meditating, thinking, and writing about Stevens, this truly remarkable book is a brilliant extension of Bloom's theories of literary interpretation.
Where Shall Wisdom Be Found?
Harold BloomIn this inspiring book, Harold Bloom, our preeminent literary critic, takes us from the Bible to twentieth-century writing, searching for the ways in which literature can inform our lives. Through comparisons of the Book of Job and Ecclesiastes; Plato and Homer; Cervantes and Shakespeare; Montaigne and Bacon; Johnson and Goethe; Emerson and Nietzsche; Freud and Proust; and finally a discussion of the Gospel of Thomas and St. Augustine, Where Shall Wisdom Be Found? distills for us the various-and even contrary-forms of wisdom that have shaped our thinking.

For anyone who reads to find meaning, Bloom's new book will not only further understanding but also send readers with renewed enthusiasm and urgency back to the pages of the writers who have contributed most to our sense of who we are. It is a profound and illuminating work that itself is certain to become part of our literary canon.
William Faulkner's the Sound and the Fury
Harold Bloom"Get your "A" in gear!
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