The anticipated follow-up to the book lovers' favorite, Literary Wonderlands, LITERARY LANDSCAPES delves deep into the geography, location, and terrain of our best-loved literary works and looks at how setting and environmental attributes influence storytelling, character, and our emotional response as readers. Fully-illustrated with hundreds of full-color images throughout. Some stories couldn't happen just anywhere. As is the case with all great literature, the setting, scenery, and landscape are as central to the tale as any character, and just as easily recognized. LITERARY LANDSCAPES brings together more than 50 literary worlds and examines how their description is intrinsic to the stories that unfold within their borders. Follow Leopold Bloom's footsteps around Dublin. Hear the music of the Mississippi River steamboats that set the score for Huckleberry Finn. Experience the rugged bleakness of New Foundland in Annie Proux's The...

I touched bottom, as alcoholics like to say, on 12 February 1983 (the date is slightly fuzzy).Thirty-one years ago John Sutherland nearly lost everything to drink. A married man, with family, working as a visiting professor of English on the west coast of America, he awoke from a blackout to find he was lying next to a stranger a very strange stranger. This was his morning of clarity; it was time to sober up. Or die.Last Drink To LA is part reportage, part confession, in which John takes a frank look at drinking culture on both sides of the Atlantic, weighing up the pros and cons of Alcoholics Anonymous, which since its launch nearly a century ago has sparked hot debate. Is it a cult, or the best life-saver drinkers have?What John courageously shares here is not a temperance tale (told to terrify, inform and instruct), not what AA calls a "drunkalog", but a moving and thought-provoking meditation some thinking about drinking and the devastating...

In this absorbing companion to literature's rich past, arranged by days of the year, acclaimed critics and friends John Sutherland and Stephen Fender turn up the most inspiring, enlightening, surprising and curious artefacts literature has to offer.Why did 16 June 1904 matter so much to James Joyce? Which great literary love affair was brought to a tragic end on 11 February 1963? And why did Roy Campbell punch Stephen Spender on the nose on 14 April 1949? Love, Sex, Death and Words provides an unrivalled, sumptuous voyage through the highs and lows of literature's bejewelled past.

In 2012 writer John Sutherland permanently lost his sense of smell. At about the same time, he embarked on a rereading of George Orwell and—still coping with his recent disability—noticed something peculiar: Orwell was positively obsessed with smell. In this original, irreverent biography, Sutherland offers a fresh account of Orwell's life and works, one that sniffs out a unique, scented trail that wends from Burmese Days through Nineteen Eighty-Four and on to The Road to Wigan Pier.Sutherland airs out the odors, fetors, stenches, and reeks trapped in the pages of Orwell's books. From Winston Smith's apartment in Nineteen Eighty-Four, which "smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats," to the tantalizing aromas of concubine Ma Hla May's hair in Burmese Days, with its "mingled scent of sandalwood, garlic, coconut oil, and jasmine," Sutherland explores the scent narratives that abound in Orwell's literary world. Along the way...

Why is Dracula aristocratic?Where does the word 'nosferatu' really come from?Just what is the point of R.M. Renfield?For 120 years, Bram Stoker's Dracula and its shape-shifting, bloodsucking Count have thrilled and terrified readers, abetted by stage and screen versions from Nosferatu and Bela Lugosi to the Hammer films and Gary Oldman.Here, John Sutherland, author of Is Heathcliff a Murderer? and Can Jane Eyre Be Happy?, presents a toothsome new collection of literary puzzles, scrutinising the fine and not-so-fine points of this beloved text to raise some curious questions and reach some surprising conclusions.Along the way we learn about Stoker's love-rivalry with Oscar Wilde, his 'dreadful' stage adaptation of Dracula, performed to an audience of two, a tantalising dropped prelude set in Munich, and much more.Who is Dracula's father? Who, for that matter, is Quincy P. Morris? Why does the Count take such pointless risks? And why...