'An impressive work of granular Dunesploitation.'
- Empire Magazine
Some writers build worlds. Others birth entire universes.
In the decades since its publication, Frank Herbert's Dune has become arguably the best-selling and certainly the best-known science fiction novel ever written. So how did an ex-Navy newspaperman from Washington State come to write such a world-conquering novel? And how...

"More than two centuries after his birth, Ralph Waldo Emerson remains one of the presiding spirits in American culture. Yet his reputation as the starry-eyed prophet of self-reliance has obscured a much more complicated figure, who spent a lifetime wrestling with injustice, philosophy, art, desire, and suffering. James Marcus introduces readers to this Emerson, a writer of self-interrogating genius whose visionary flights are always grounded in Yankee...

This collection of essays, reviews, diary entries and letters from the late renowned writer includes his thoughts on Salman Rushdie, being spanked by Margaret Thatcher in The House of Lords, and taking his son to the Oscars.