Literature

Marvin Mudrick, whom James Wolcott of Vanity Fair called “a one-man commando squad and independent operator, . . . ferocious, funny, and fearlessly honest,” introduces us to some of Anthony Trollope’s most successful and intriguing short stories. Mudrick emphasizes the importance of women in Trollope’s stories and novels, writing that what “distinguishes the short stories is an interest in the power of women so persistent and concentrated that sometimes it almost amounts to the whole story.” ePub and PDFs can be read on many different devices. Click here to learn how to send your downloaded ePub file to your Kindle.

Discover the surprising truths behind Jane Austen’s novels and how they continue to challenge societal norms. In Jane Austen’s Irony: Defense and Discovery, Marvin Mudrick delves into Austen’s use of irony and how it exposes the flaws of society. This book will open your eyes to the genius of Austen’s writing and how it still resonates in today’s world.

The Waste Land and Other Poems is based on the 1922 edition produced by Leonard and Virginia Woolf, and includes translations of non-English passages. QIU Xiaolong’s foreword explains what Eliot’s poetry means to readers around the world. Karen Christensen’s afterword comments on the women connected with The Waste Land. Read it here.)

The man the Village Voice called “the Mickey Spillane of Belles Lettres” and the Washington Post called a “literary curmudgeon, randy iconoclast, and a delight” outdoes himself in his fifth book, an outrageous and virtuoso display of literary and historical portraiture.

A collection such as Books Are Not Life, But Then What Is? is an invitation to meet some of them. We meet heroes and monsters and plenty of people in between: Chaucer, Pepys, Rochester, Boswell, Jane Austen (and Anne Elliot), Dickens (and Pecksniff), Pushkin, Tolstoy, Kafka, Edmund Wilson, and many other novelists, scholars, and critics.

In On Culture and Literature Marvin Mudrick explores the work of major figures in a wide range of fields: literature, political and musical criticism, autobiography, the novel and science.

Invisible Poets: Afro-Americans of the Nineteenth Century brings into view over 130 other Black men and women who published poetry in America during the century between Phillis Wheatley and Paul Laurence Dunbar. The Berkshire Edition includes a foreword by Jaki Shelton Green, 9th Poet Laureate of North Carolina.

Writing Great Tom is the journal T. S. Matthews kept as he worked on the first major biography of T. S. Eliot. It shows how he brought to light unknown women including Eliot’s first wife Vivien, and how the widow Valerie Eliot tried to repress the book. Read the foreword here.

The Man in the Machine consists of new assessments of major writers and critics by the author of whose last book Roger Sale wrote: “T. S. Eliot was not so good a reviewer as Marvin Mudrick is.”

Mudrick Transcribed contains riveting and comical dialogue from transcripts made in the early 1980s of Marvin Mudrick’s classes and talks. “A one-man commando squad and independent operator, Marvin Mudrick was the most maverick literary critic of his time and ours—ferocious, funny, and fearlessly honest,” says James Wolcott of Vanity Fair.