San Antonio College Library

"On December 7, 2010, Mario Vargas Llosa was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. His Nobel Lecture is a resounding tribute to fiction's power to inspire readers to greater ambition, to dissent, and to political action. "We would be worse than we are without the good books we have read, more conformist, not as restless, more submissive, and the critical spirit, the engine of progress, would not even exist," Vargas Llosa writes. "Like writing, reading...

"'We tell ourselves stories in order to live, ' Joan Didion observed in The White Album. Why is this? Michael Austin asks, in Useful Fictions. Why, in particular, are human beings, whose very survival depends on obtaining true information, so drawn to fictional narratives? After all, virtually every human culture reveres some form of storytelling. Might there be an evolutionary reason behind our species' need for stories? Drawing on evolutionary biology,...

"Challenging Fiction" is a double entendre. This book argues that modernist fiction is not only difficult (or challenging) to read, it also provokes readers to challenge the fictions that they live by. To read modernist literature in a way that unlocks its humor, its discomfiting insights, and its strong emotional undercurrents, a reader must be both receptive and resistant to the author's perspective, actively challenging it with his or her own experience,...

"Oprah's Book Club sparked a revolution among readers by bringing serious contemporary novels to the attention of a wider audience. The Oprah's Book Club seal on a book led to instant fame and bestseller status for authors - but, how did Oprah change the way America reads and values books? Reading Oprah suggests that Oprah initiated an all-important mantra - trust readers. Not only did the public start reading accessible novels, but they also would...

"This study examines the fraught relationship Hardy had with his readers. He resented their bourgeois values and beliefs, in particular their hypocritical form of Christianity, with its repression of the body. Initially content to compromise, to provide them with congenial entertainment, Hardy resorted at first to 'back-door' strategies of subversion, smuggling obscene and blasphemous material past his editors, and finally to outspoken attack." "Professor...

Each of us has a narrative compass, a story that has guided our lifework. In this extraordinary collection, women scholars from a variety of disciplines identify and examine the stories that have inspired them, haunted them, and shaped their research, from Little House on the Prairie to Little Women, from the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen and Alice's Adventures in Wonderland to Nancy Drew, Mary Jane, and even the Chinese memoir Jottings from...

"Great art discovers for us who we are," writes literature professor and critic Weinstein in this book about how we can better uncover and understand our own stories by reading five major modern writers who "reinvent the novel by exploding our sense of what we are." He invites us to discover our perceptions, our dreams, our own elusive, deepest stories in these masterpieces of modernist fiction. As he argues with wit and passion, these works are in...