"The great poems, plays, novels, stories teach us how to go on living. . . . Your own mistakes, accidents, failures at otherness beat you down. Rise up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can." So Harold Bloom, the most famous literary critic of his generation, exhorts readers of his last book: one that praises the sustaining power of poetry. "Passionate. . . . Perhaps Bloom's most personal work, this is a fitting last testament to one of America's leading twentieth-century literary minds." -- Publishers Weekly "An extraordinary testimony to a long life spent in the company of poetry and an affecting last declaration of [Bloom's] passionate and deeply unfashionable faith in the capacity of the imagination to make the world feel habitable"--Seamus Perry, Literary Review "Reading, this stirring collection testifies, 'helps in staying alive.'"-- Kirkus Reviews , starred review This dazzling celebration of the power of poetry to sublimate death--completed weeks before Harold Bloom died--shows how literature renews life amid what Milton called "a universe of death." Bloom reads as a way of taking arms against the sea of life's troubles, taking readers on a grand tour of the poetic voices that have haunted him through a lifetime of reading. "High literature," he writes, "is a saving lie against time, loss of individuality, premature death." In passages of breathtaking intimacy, we see him awake late at night, reciting lines from Dante, Shakespeare, Milton, Montaigne, Blake, Wordsworth, Hart Crane, Jay Wright, and many others. He feels himself "edged by nothingness," uncomprehending, but still sustained by reading. Generous and clear‑eyed, this is among Harold Bloom's most ambitious and most moving books.

Harold Bloom, our preeminent literary critic, essays to explain the meaning of angels in world literature In this lovely gift book published for the holiday season, Harold Bloom again combines his lifelong interests in religion and literature. He begins by observing our present-day obsession with angels, which reached its greatest intensity as the current millennium approached. For the most part, these popular angels are banal, even insipid. Bloom is especially concerned with a particular subspecies of angels: fallen angels. He proceeds to examine representations of fallen angels from Zoroastrian texts and the Bible to Milton's Paradise Lost to Tony Kushner's Angels in America, arguing that familiarity with this rich literary tradition improves our reading and spiritual lives. Bloom's text is accompanied by more than a dozen original watercolors, line drawings, and illuminated letters by award-winning artist Mark Podwal. Every angel is terrifying, Rilke wrote. For Bloom, too, this is true in one sense, since he maintains that all angels are fallen angels. The image of Satan, the greatest of fallen angels, retains the ability to fascinate and frighten us, he argues, because we share a close kinship with him. Indeed, from a human perspective, we must agree that we are fallen angels. Fallenness is ultimately a human condition: the recognition of our own mortality. Throughout world literature angels have always served as metaphors for death. We may take consolation, however, in our double awareness that angels also represent love and the celebration of human possibilities.