Professor Weinstein of Brown University presents eighty-four lectures on the great classics of American literature, showing how such authors as Irving, Poe, Thoreau, Hemingway, and Faulkner bring the past to life, changing as each generation steps forward to interpret it anew.

"This is a continuation of Mimi Pond's book Over Easy, a memoir of her time working amongst the hippies and punks of the wisecracking, fast-talking, drug-taking Imperial Café. Pond's story is equal parts time capsule of late 1970s life in California - with its deadheads, punks, disco rollers, casual sex and drug use - and bildungsroman of a young woman from naïve, sexually inexperienced art-school dropout to self-aware, self-confident artist. Mimi...

In this first of two lectures about Joyce’s first novel, encounter the ways that Parnell, the Home Rule movement, the Catholic Church, and other themes from the era’s history are key to understanding his Bildungsroman. Review some of the most important scenes in the first half of the book.

Ned, a bullied outsider, and Conor, a star athlete, are forced to room together at their boarding school. The boys take an instant dislike to each other, and seem destined to remain enemies until an English teacher, Mr. Sherry, begins to drill into them the value of finding one's own voice. This lesson, however, isn't appreciated by everyone, particularly rugby coach Pascal, who has his own agenda and harbors some deep suspicions about the boys' teacher....

Adapted from a 1909 novel by Jack London yet set in a provocatively unspecified moment in Italy’s history, MARTIN EDEN is a passionate and enthralling narrative fresco in the tradition of the great Italian classics. Martin (played by the marvelously committed Luca Marinelli) is a self-taught proletarian with artistic aspirations who hopes that his dreams of becoming a writer will help him rise above his station and marry a wealthy young university...