Bright Book of Life

<b><b><b>America's most original and controversial literary critic writes trenchantly about forty-eight masterworks spanning the Western tradition--from <i>Don Quixote</i> to <i>Wuthering Heights</i> to <i>Invisible Man</i>--in his first book devoted exclusively to narrative fiction.</b></b></b> <p/>In this valedictory volume Yale professor Harold Bloom--who for more than half a century was regarded as America's most daringly original and controversial literary critic--gives us his only book devoted entirely to the art of the novel. With his hallmark percipience remarkable scholarship and extraordinary devotion to sublimity Bloom offers meditations on forty-eight essential works spanning the Western canon from <i>Don Quixote</i> to <i>Book of Numbers</i>; from <i>Wuthering Heights</i> to <i>Absalom Absalom!</i>; from <i>Les Misérables</i> to <i>Blood Meridian</i>; from <i>Vanity Fair</i> to <i>Invisible Man</i>. Here are trenchant appreciations of fiction by among many others Austen Balzac Dickens Tolstoy James Conrad Lawrence Le Guin and Sebald. <p/>Whether you have already read these books plan to or simply care about the importance and power of fiction Harold Bloom is your unparalleled guide to understanding literature with new intimacy.