Cultural historian Rosenbaum gives readers a way of rethinking the greatest works of the human imagination, as he shakes up much that we thought we understood about a vital subject and renews our sense of excitement and urgency. Rather than raking over worn-out fragments of biography, Rosenbaum focuses on cutting-edge controversies about the true source of Shakespeare's enchantment and illumination--the astonishing language itself. He takes readers into the midst of fierce battles among the most brilliant Shakespearean scholars and directors over just how to delve deeper into the mind of Shakespeare. He makes ostensibly arcane textual scholarship seductive, and he shows us great directors as Shakespearean scholars in their own right. This book offers a thrilling opportunity to engage with Shakespeare's work at its deepest levels.--From publisher description.

Dubbed-some would say drubbed-the "godfather behind creative nonfiction" by Vanity Fair, Lee Gutkind takes the opportunity of these essays, and the rich material of his own life, to define, defend, and further expand the genre he has done so much to shape. The result is an explosive and hilarious memoir of Gutkind's colorful life as a motorcyclist, a medical insider, a sailor, a college professor, an over-aged insecure father, and a literary whipping boy. In Forever Fat Gutkind battles his weight, his ex-wives, his father, his rabbi, his psychiatrist, and his critics in a lifelong cross-country, cross-cultural search for stability and identity. And from Gutkind's battles, the reader emerges a winner, treated to a sometimes poignant, sometimes harrowing, sometimes uproarious, and always engrossing story of the simultaneous awakening of a man and his mission, and of the constant struggle, in literature and in life, to sort out memory and imagination. Here, enacted in technicolor terms, is the universal, symbolic truth that no matter how far you travel, over how many years, you will never completely shed the weighty baggage of adolescence. Yet, as Gutkind proves again and again, he has learned to describe his burden with an ever-lightening brilliance. Lee Gutkind is the founder and editor of the journal Creative Nonfiction. The author and editor of a dozen books, including the award-winning Many Sleepless Nights: The World of Organ Transplantation, he is a professor of English at the University of Pittsburgh and the director of the Mid-Atlantic Creative Nonfiction Writers' Conference at Goucher College.