Джон Сазерленд – лучшие книги

Один из самых важных и загадочных писателей XX века, прекрасный мастер слова, простого, внимательного, достоверного и точного, Джордж Оруэлл полон загадок и тайн. В 2012 году автор этой книги, Джон Сазерленд, теряет обоняние. Читая романы Оруэлла в этот период, он обнаружил, что "Скотный двор" отныне лишен ароматных сигар Наполеона, а книги, как и весь мир, потеряли важный смысл. Сазерленд вдыхает неприятные запахи, зловоние и вонь, застрявшие на страницах книг Оруэлла, и исследует ароматические повествования, которые изобилуют в литературном мире британского писателя. Попутно он проясняет вопросы, оставшиеся без ответа в предыдущих…

With the literary forest growing by 10,000 novels per year, readers have long needed the kind of map Sutherland provides here. Some of the guidance he offers is cautionary: warnings against the snares in deceptive covers, misleading reviews, and best-selling groupthink. But Sutherland equips readers for the tasks of actually selecting a novel, understanding its text, and tracing the connections linking fiction to the real world around it. Readers thus learn how to negotiate the boundaries between various fictional genres, how to tease interpretive insights out of a book's dedication, and how to recognize the allusions tying one fictional…

200 years on from the first publication of Frankenstein, John Sutherland delves into the deepest, darkest corners of Mary Shelley's gothic masterpiece to see what strange and terrifying secrets lie within.

Is Victor Frankenstein a member of the Illuminati? Was Mary Shelley really inspired by spaghetti? Whoever heard of a vegan monster?

Exploring the lesser-known byways of both the original tale and its myriad film and pop culture spinoffs, from the bolts on Boris Karloff's neck to the role of Igor in Young Frankenstein, Frankenstein's Brain is a fascinating journey behind the scenes of this seminal work of literature and imagination.

'I rejoice', said Doctor Johnson, 'to concur with the Common Reader.' For the last century, the tastes and preferences of the common reader have been reflected in the American and British bestseller lists, and this Very Short Introduction takes an engaging look through the lists to reveal what we have been reading - and why. John Sutherland shows that bestseller lists monitor one of the strongest pulses in modern literature and are therefore worthy of serious study. Along the way, he lifts the lid on the bestseller industry, examines what makes a book into a bestseller, and asks what separates bestsellers from canonical…

How much heavier was Thackeray's brain than Walt Whitman's? Which novels do American soldiers read? When did cigarettes start making an appearance in English literature? And, while we're about it, who wrote the first Western, is there any link between asthma and literary genius, and what really happened on Dorothea's wedding night in Middlemarch?
In Curiosities of Literature, John Sutherland contemplates the full import of questions such as these, and attempts a few answer

How well do you really know your favourite author? Ace literary detective turned quizmaster John Sutherland and Austen buff Deirdre Le Faye challenge the reader to find out. Starting with easy, factual questions that test how well you remember a novel and its characters, the quiz progresses to a level of greater difficulty, demanding close reading and interpretative deduction. What really motivates the characters, and what is going on beneath the surface of the story? Designed to amuse and divert, the questions and answers take the reader on an imaginative journey into the world of Jane Austen, where hypothesis and speculation produce…

Literature suffers from appearing both deceptively easy and dauntingly difficult. We all like to think we can read a novel and understand what 'genre', 'style' and 'narrative' mean, but do we really understand them fully and how they can enrich our reading experience? How should we approach the works of great writers such as William Shakespeare, T.S. Eliot, Charles Dickens and Jane Austen? And what can we hope to learn from apparently difficult ideas such as 'hermeneutics', 'affective fallacy' and 'bricolage'? 50 Literature Ideas you Really Need to Know is the essential guide to all the important forms, concepts, themes and movements in…

Did Charlotte Brontë take opium? Did the Reverend Brontë carry a loaded pistol? What, precisely, does ‘wuthering’ mean?

Distinguished literary critic John Sutherland takes an idiosyncratic look at the world of the Brontës, from the bumps on Charlotte’s head to the nefarious origins of Mr Rochester’s fortune, by way of astral telephony, letter-writing dogs, an exploding peat bog, and much, much more.

Also features ‘Jane Eyre abbreviated’ by John Crace, author of the Guardian’s ‘Digested Reads’ column – read Charlotte Brontë’s masterpiece in five minutes!

There is much more to policing than tackling crime. Every one of us will need the help of an officer at some point in our lives, often when we're at our most vulnerable. Yet how much do we really know about the realities of policing? Using real life stories from his twenty-five years of service with the Metropolitan Police, John Sutherland invites us beyond the cordon tape to bear witness to all he has seen. In doing so, he offers a hopeful vision for how we

Book DescriptionOne of the leading poets and cultural icons of the 20th century, Stephen Spender was a prominent writer, literary critic, and social commentator--and close friend of some of the best-know creative talents of his day. Now, in this