Books by Peter Brooks

""'There's nothing in the world more powerful than a good story. Nothing can stop it. Nothing can defeat it.' Thus spake Tyrion in the final episode of Game of Thrones, claiming the throne for Bran the Broken. Many viewers liked neither the choice of king nor its rationale. But the claim that story brings you to world dominance seems by now so banal that it's common wisdom. Narrative seems to have become accepted as the one and only form of knowledge and speech that regulates human affairs." So begins the scholar and literary critic Peter Brooks's reckoning with today's flourishing cult of story. Forty years after Brooks published his seminal work Reading for the Plot, his own important contribution to what came to be known as the "narrative turn" in contemporary criticism and philosophy, he returns to question the unquestioning fashion in which story is now embraced as excuse or explanation and the fact that every brand or politician comes equipped with one. In a discussion that ranges from Gone Girl to legal argument, to the power storytellers exercise over their audiences, to what it means for readers and listeners to project themselves imaginatively into fictional characters, Brooks reminds us that among the powers of narrative is the power to deceive. Precisely because story does command our attention so, we must be skeptical of it and cultivate ways of thinking about our world and ourselves that run counter to our penchant for a good story"--

Enter the mind of French literary giant Honoré de Balzac through a study of nine of his greatest characters and the novels they inhabit. Balzac's Lives illuminates the writer's life, era, and work in a completely original way.Balzac, more than anyone, invented the nineteenth-century novel, and Oscar Wilde went so far as to say that Balzac had invented the nineteenth century. But it was above all through the wonderful, unforgettable, extravagant characters that Balzac dreamed up and made flesh-entrepreneurs, bankers, inventors, industrialists, poets, artists, bohemians of both sexes, journalists, aristocrats, politicians, prostitutes-that he brought to life the dynamic forces of an era that ushered in our own. Peter Brooks's Balzac's Lives is a vivid and searching portrait of a great novelist as revealed through the fictional lives he imagined.

In 1963 George Wilson, the landlord of the Fox and Grapes public house in Sneinton, Nottingham was brutally stabbed to death outside his pub. The pub was known to all of the citizens of Nottingham as ?The Pretty Windows? and this name became synonymous with one of Nottingham?s most vicious and frenzied murders.George Wilson?s attacker was never brought to justice.This book charts a brief history of Sneinton and the part that the pub played, and still plays, in the local community. It uses contemporary newspaper reports to examine the murder, and explores the possible links to other murders committed in the same area in the years immediately prior to and just after 1963.

From a distinguished literary historian, a look at Gustave Flaubert and his correspondence with George Sand during France's "terrible year" - summer 1870 through spring 1871

"e;We know that it matters crucially to be able to say who we are, why we are here, and where we are going,"e; Peter Brooks writes in Enigmas of Identity. Many of us are also uncomfortably aware that we cannot provide a convincing account of our identity to others or even ourselves. Despite or because of that failure, we keep searching for identity, making it up, trying to authenticate it, and inventing excuses for our unpersuasive stories about it. This wide-ranging book draws on literature, law, and psychoanalysis to examine important aspects of the emergence of identity as a peculiarly modern preoccupation. In particular, the book addresses the social, legal, and personal anxieties provoked by the rise of individualism and selfhood in modern culture. Paying special attention to Rousseau, Freud, and Proust, Brooks also looks at the intersection of individual life stories with the law, and considers the creation of an introspective project that culminates in psychoanalysis. Elegant and provocative, Enigmas of Identity offers new insights into the questions and clues about who we think we are.

Presents the story of the year - 1875 to 1876 - when the young novelist Henry James moved to Paris, drawn by his literary idols living at the center of the early modern movement in art. This narrative combines biography and criticism and uses James' writings to tell the story from his point of view.

A book which should appeal to both literary theorists and to readers of the novel, this study invites the reader to consider how the plot reflects the patterns of human destiny and seeks to impose a new meaning on life.