Acclaimed for centuries as the "Father of English Literature," Geoffrey Chaucer enjoys widespread and effusive praise for his classic Canterbury Tales-and rightfully so. Still, even the greatest of authors cannot claim perfection, and so Bad Chaucer: The Great Poet's Greatest Mistakes in the Canterbury Tales analyzes his various missteps, missed opportunities, and other blunders in this peerless masterpiece. From a vexing catalog of trees in the Knight's...

"No ancient poet has a wider following today than Sappho; her status as the most famous woman poet from Greco-Roman antiquity has, down the centuries, ensured a continuing fascination with her work. The ancient edition of her poems, which filled probably nine books and thus over 10,000 lines, did not survive; but the fragments of those poems which have been preserved, both as quotations in authors whose works did outlast antiquity, and on ancient...

"On March 23, 1849, Henry Brown climbed into a large wooden postal crate and was mailed from slavery in Richmond, Virginia to freedom in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. "Box Brown," as he came to be known after this astounding feat, went on to carve out a career as an abolitionist speaker, actor, magician, hypnotist, and even faith healer, traveling the US, the UK, and Canada until his death in 1897. The Many Resurrections of Henry Box Brown shows how...