A Pulitzer Prize-winning author's revelatory celebration of the novel - at once an anatomy of the art of fiction, a guide for readers and writers and a memoir of literary life.Over her 20 year career, Jane Smiley has written many kinds of novels - mystery, comedy, historical fiction, epic. But when her impulse to write faltered after 9/11, she decided to approach novels from a different angle: she read 100 of them, from the 1000-year-old Tale of Genji to the recent...

Unlock the more straightforward side of Crime and Punishment with this concise and insightful summary and analysis!This engaging summary presents the story of Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky, which revolves around Rodion Raskolnikov, an impoverished ex-student in St. Petersburg who formulates and executes a plan to kill an unscrupulous pawnbroker for her cash, and then follows his mental anguish as he is beset with deep psychological suf...

Unlock the more straightforward side of The Canterville Ghost with this concise and insightful summary and analysis!This engaging summary presents an analysis of The Canterville Ghost by Oscar Wilde, which tells the story of a centuries-dead ghost and his vain attempts to terrify the new inhabitants of his ancestral home. This unusual short story blends fantastic and comic elements and parodies many of the features of the Gothic novel, resulting i...

Unlock the more straightforward side of Death Is My Trade with this concise and insightful summary and analysis!This engaging summary presents an analysis of Death is My Trade by Robert Merle, a brilliant novel in which the author, inspired by his own experience of imprisonment in Germany and the accounts of the Nuremberg trials, chooses to look at the horror of the death camps from the perspective of an S.S. officer. An intriguing psychological p...

Exam Board: ISEBLevel: 11 PlusSubject: ScienceFirst Teaching: September 2015First Exam: Autumn 2018Secure the top marks in 11 plus independent school entrance exams and pre-tests and a better chance at getting into their school of choice with this essential revision guide. Complete coverage of the ISEB 11 Plus Science syllabus and stretching extr...

Swift's parodies are among his most fascinating works, but perhaps require most explication for the modern reader. Valerie Rumbold brings a new depth and detail to the editing of Swift's Bickerstaff papers, 'Polite Conversation', 'Directions to Servants' and other works on language and conduct. Highlights include a fresh investigation of the political and print contexts of the Bickerstaff papers, full commentaries on such smaller works as 'A Modest Defence of Punning' and 'On Barbarous Den...