The Anatomy of Influence: Literature as a Way of Life

Gnostic assembler and defender of the Western literary canon, Harold Bloom at age eighty shows no sign of slowing down or banking his intellectual embers, as he here anatomizes the vast rivers of literature that have fed into and enriched his personal ocean, showing us how great works of fiction inform each other and, most tellingly, one man's life.

May 25: On this day in 1938 Raymond Carver was born. Carver's poem "Luck," about a nine-year-old who wakes to an empty house and the leftovers of his parents' party, is all too autobiographical: "What luck, I thought. / Years later,…

Angry robots! Aren't they all? Well, not the line of fine science fiction and fantasy books that comes to readers under the rubric Angry Robot. In fact, their offerings…

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