What is jazz? Louis Armstrong purportedly said: “If you have to ask, you’ll never know.” Music scholar and distinguished professor Ted Buehrer conducts a captivating series of lectures designed to help musical enthusiasts become more astute, sophisticated jazz listeners.
The Words You Should Know to Sound Smart: 1200 Essential Words Every Sophisticated Person Should Be Able to Use
This book is a tongue-in-cheek guide to words that any well-educated, witty person should be able to drop into cocktail conversation. For those who want to improve the quality and sophistication of their speech and writing, this is the book to keep on the nightstand.
Philosophical Chaucer: Love, Sex, and Agency in the Canterbury Tales
Mark Miller's innovative study argues that Chaucer's Canterbury Tales represent an extended mediation on agency, autonomy and practical reason. This philosophical aspect of Chaucer's interests can help us understand what is both sophisticated and disturbing about his explorations of love, sex and gender.
A beautiful and distinguished family. A private island. A brilliant, damaged girl; a passionate, political boy. A group of four friends—the Liars—whose friendship turns destructive. A revolution. An accident. A secret. Lies upon lies. True love. The truth. We Were Liars is a modern, sophisticated suspense novel from National Book Award finalist and Printz Award honoree E. Lockhart. Read it. And if anyone asks you how it ends, just LIE
Poetry is the primal literary art form, the oldest and arguably the most supple.
For its combination of conciseness and richly suggestive expression, it has no rival. A favorite poem is your friend and companion forever. It can move you, delight you, and enrich your hours of reflection over and over again.
Now you can learn to savor poetry—the joys that come from "the best words in the best order"—to a fuller degree than you might otherwise have imagined.
Professor Willard Spiegelman's friendly yet sophisticated approach to poetry has been delighting students at SMU for more than 30 years, and he has twice been named an Outstanding Professor there