Volume of essays on 20th Century novelists

An anthology about Elizabethan drama.

A short book about Shakespeare and his times.

ISBN: 0 297 84881 X

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`The business of explanation - of elucidation and comparison - has to go on for as long as art goes on, for not being able to speak for itself it always needs someone else to speak for it, about it. The clearer and more lucid the commentary, the better for art’.

Frank Kermode is now widely regarded as Britain’s most distinguished literary critic. Unlike other recent collections of his work, which have confined themselves to particular decades, Pieces of My Mind surveys the whole of his career. It includes, in his own selection, those passages most representative of his earlier books - The Sense of An Ending, The Classic, The Genesis of Secrecy, Forms of Attention - which are themselves now classics, as well as the best of his more occasional criticism.

Among other things, Pieces of My Mind contains more on Shakespeare, the subject of his best-selling book Shakespeare’s Language, and what he calls ‘my best tribute’ to Wallace Stevens, the poet who more than any other hovers over the whole of his work. Kermode’s originality, penetration and elegance, here displayed at their most engaging, show why his writing has attracted such admiration. But the book does not confine itself to literary criticism, history and theory; it also contains pieces about dance, painting, the Bible and opera, and three previously unpublished pieces, on ‘Memory’, ‘Forgetting’ and ‘The Cambridge Connection’. Pieces of My Mind magnificently reminds us why criticism is important, and it shows us, when done clearly and lucidly, how enjoyable it can be.

ISBN: 0 7139 9673 0

Since the 1960s, Frank Kermode, critic and writer, has steadily established himself as one of the most brilliant minds of his generation. Author and editor of over 40 books, his prodigious output includes some of the best literary criticism to be published.

ISBN: 0 415 26186 4

Frank Kermode is often regarded as the leading literary critic now writing in English; his recent book Shakespeare's Language, which became a bestseller in both Britain and America, was a reminder of the originality and humanity - and good sense - of his criticism.

Kermode himself said that much of his best work has been done at shorter length, in the essays he has written on a very wide range of subjects for literary journals of one kind or another. Pleasing Myself brings the best of these pieces from the last decade, on topics as diverse as Donne, Yeats, Howard Hodgkin, gnosticism, the sea and money, as well as further thoughts on Shakespeare. Each of them is concise and entertaining, and has something original or pithy to say about its subject. They will bring as much pleasure to their readers as Kermode unashamedly admits to writing of them brought to the author.

ISBN: 0 7139 9518 1

The true biography of Shakespeare - and only one we really need to care about - is in the plays, and the plays are made of language. This book argues that something extraordinary happened to the language of Shakespeare in mid-career, somewhere around 1600. An initial discussion of the language of some of the earlier plays looks for signs as to what was afoot, and this leads to a central testament of this turning point. The rest of the book is about what came after that, in the great works between "Hamlet" and "The Tempest".

ISBN: 0 14 028592 X

This panoramic survey of one of the most intimate of art forms offers more than 300 letters spanning five centuries. They chronicle the affairs of correspondents from Elizabeth I to Groucho Marx, from politicians to poets, and from the famous to the unknown.

ISBN: 0 19 282522 4

Kermode was born and brought up on the Isle of Man. He became one of Britain's most famous literary critics, but in this biography he chooses to focus on the scenes, values and legacies of his public and private life.

ISBN: 0 00 686329 9

This new selection of Marvell's verse, fully annotated for the student and general reader, includes the political and satiric verses for which he was primarily remembered in the century after his death, but accords pride of place to Marvel's finest achievement - his lyric poetry.

ISBN: 0 19 254183 8

This study, first published in 1960, aims to show how to read Stevens. There have since been many critical accounts of Stevens, which are listed in the bibliography. Kermode also wrote an introduction for this new edition of his essay in which he recalls how insecure Stevens' reputation was in the 1950s.

ISBN: 0 571 14079 3

Frank Kermode returns to the literature of his youth to ask why we appear to have forgotten how urgent and powerful it seemed in a time of economic crisis and imminent world war.

ISBN: 0 19 812224 1

This is a collection of essays on each book of the Bible, and a number that relate to the Bible as a whole. It brings modern literary and historical analysis to this greatest of all works of literature.

ISBN: 0 00 638870 1

ISBN: 0 571 10565 3

ISBN: 0 7100 7003 9