This text argues that melodrama is a crucial mode of expression in modern literature. After studying stage melodrama as a dominant popular form in the 1800s, the author looks at Balzac and Henry James, to show how these "realist" novelists created fiction using rhetoric and excess of melodrama.

An officer in His Majesty’s Secret Service during World War II, Fleming burst onto the literary scene in 1953 with the first in his series of spy novels, thrilling readers for over fifty years.

007 is the ultimate man of action, his high-stakes missions propelling him to exotic locales where he seduces exceptional (and exceptionally named) women. He bests some of literature’s most sinister masterminds and he does it all mixing glamour and grit, subterfuge and style.

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God's Secretaries - The Making of the King James Bible

A net of complex currents flowed across Jacobean England. This was the England of Shakespeare, Jonson and Bacon; of the Gunpowder Plot; the worst outbreak of the plague England had ever seen; Arcadian landscapes; murderous, toxic slums; and, above all, of sometimes overwhelming religious passion. Jacobean England was both more godly and less godly than it had ever been, and the entire culture was drawn taut between the polarities.

Stephen King - Under the Dome

The town of Chesters Mill (pop. approximately 2000) is suddenly cut off from the rest of the world by an invisible barrier, preventing anything other than a small amount of air from passing through. What follows is mostly told from the perspective of Dale "Barbie" Barbara, a former Army lieutenant.

When an old friend’s body is found in the Alps 20 years after he disappeared, James Bond quickly finds himself caught between Nazi gold, the Chinese Tongs and the savage, eight-armed embrace of Octopussy! And Bond finds more mortal danger beneath the waves whilst trailing a missing submarine in The Hildebrand Rarity