Cervantes's Don Quixote (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)
Widely regarded as the world's first modern novel, and one of the funniest and most tragic books ever written, Don Quixote chronicles the famous picaresque adventures of the noble knight-errant Don Quixote de La Mancha and his faithful squire, Sancho Panza, as they travel through sixteenth-century Spain. Unless you read Spanish, you've never read Don Quixote.
I Think, Therefore I Laugh: The Flip Side of Philosophy
Wittgenstein once remarked that 'a serious and good philosophical work could be written that consisted entirely of jokes'. Inspired by this idea, John Allen Paulos shows how conceptual humour and analytic philosophy resonate at a very deep level. Both evince a keen concern for language and its (mis)interpretations; both require a free intelligence in a relatively open society, as well as a sceptical tendency towards debunking; and both are quintessentially human.
Much has been written on the contradictory interpretations of Machiavelli's political opinions. This book guides the reader through the maze of interpretations, arguing that the ambiguities of Machiavelli's work contribute to these contradictions. In addition to analyzing the intellectual and social roots of Machiavellian thought and presenting it in a biographical and cultural context, Femia demonstrates the relevance of Machiavelli for the modern worker and his impact on 20th-century thought for both classical and Marxist thinkers.
Don Delillo's White Noise (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)
Winner of the National Book Award, White Noise was immediately hailed as Don DeLillo's "breakout novel" when it first appeared in 1985. The novel entertains a wide array of compelling topics and concerns with consummate agility. Study this spot-on satire of post-war America.
The Waste Land (Bloom's Modern Critical Interpretations)
A cornerstone of the Modernist movement, T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" suggests the fragmentation of civilization following World War I. Because of its changes of speaker, location, and time, as well as its numerous literary and cultural references, it is often used in the classroom to illustrate how to explicate a poem. Bloom's "Modern Critical Interpretations" allows students to approach this challenging poem with confidence.
