"A brilliant, invigorating account of the great writers on both sides of the Iron Curtain who played the dangerous games of espionage, dissidence and subversion that changed the course of the Cold War. During the Cold War, literature was both sword and noose. Novels, essays and poems could win the hearts and minds of those caught between the competing creeds of capitalism and communism. They could also lead to exile, imprisonment or execution if...

Drawing on newly declassified files, this is the story of how a book forbidden in the Soviet Union became a secret CIA weapon in the ideological battle between East and West. In May 1956, an Italian publishing scout paid a visit to Russia's greatest living poet, Boris Pasternak. He left carrying the manuscript of Pasternak's first and only novel, entrusted to him with these words: "This is Doctor Zhivago. May it make its way around the world." Pasternak...

"As an aging, tenacious Elizabeth I clung to power, a talented playwright probed the social causes, the psychological roots, and the twisted consequences of tyranny. In exploring the psyche (and psychoses) of the likes of Richard III, Macbeth, Lear, Coriolanus, and the societies they rule over, Stephen Greenblatt illuminates the ways in which William Shakespeare delved into the lust for absolute power and the catastrophic consequences of its execution."--...

Includes a brief biography of the author, thematic and structural analysis of the work, critical views, and an index of themes and ideas.

From the Publisher: Poetic visionary Ezra Pound catalyzed American literature's modernist revolution. From the swirling center of poetic change he excited the powerful energies of Eliot, Joyce, and William Carlos Williams and championed the Imagism and Vorticism movements. This volume, the most comprehensive collection of his poetry and translations ever assembled, gathers all his verse except The Cantos. In addition to the famous poems that transformed...

In the wake of the election of Donald Trump to the presidency, this "is Almond's effort to make sense of our historical moment, to connect certain dots that go unconnected amid the deluge of hot takes and think pieces. Almond looks to literary voices--from Melville to Orwell, from Bradbury to Baldwin--to help explain the roots of [what he sees as] our moral erosion as a people"--