A Fred Will Reader samples writings from poetry to philosophy. Naming the world, Will says, is half the world. The other half is supplied by the reader. By reading each other globally, we can learn to reconstruct the broken totality of the human condition.
Frederic Will
Author's books
This chronological survey of Ancient Greece’s major writers explores genres from epic and drama to philosophy. It also features essays on Greek culture, including mythology, theater, government, and science. The book serves as a launchpad for our enduring Hellenic heritage.
A Literary Journey through the Development of Mediaeval Thought
This survey of mediaeval texts tracks the power of the premodern mind, from Boethius to Chaucer and Dante. Exploring scorching lyric poetry, the darkness of Beowulf, and the travels of Marco Polo, it reveals the crucial role of mediaeval thought in making us who we are today.
A social and cultural study of a Nigerian city where hustle and insecurity define the everyday. The book explores the struggle for progress, the dynamics of religious faith in a city of a thousand churches, and the nature of time in an undocumented culture.
The thirteen highly personal essays in this volume anatomize the elements of our lives—the habits that make us what we are. Readers will emerge refreshed from this excursion into the hidden mysteries of that most obvious of conditions: daily life.
An autobiography of a writer’s existence in poetry—the tracks left by a clumsy bear taming himself in public. It will light fires, inspiring you to find language as daring as your life and proving that poetry is essential to a good life.
This collection of sixteen British comedies from the 16th and 17th centuries includes everything from broad humour to heavy social satire. The analysis digs into each play’s embedded assumptions and social role, connecting the works to Elizabethan culture and our own time.
This book explores the constraints of language, the healing rhythms of drama, and the vigor of the Greek tradition. Its conviction is that the imagination has the power to establish new worlds in language—a perennial home for constructive thought.
Will deals with inwardness in two different senses, the first as the center of existence, and the second as a quest for the meaning of the center of one’s existence. The text culminates with tales of searching for the meaning of interiority, as it self-characterises.
Exploring the Making of the Modern Mind Through Selected Texts
An anthology of texts from significant writers between the Renaissance and the late seventeenth century, from Ficino to Dryden. The study traces a growth of self-awareness, worldview scepticism, and aesthetic exuberance.
Film and the Heat of Life
This collection of film profiles explores the relevance of twentieth-century films to literature and culture. The films are viewed as moves in mind, trading the look of things brought to presence by the shocking directness of eyesight.
Historia is a series of observations on temporality, the practice of writing history, and the histories all things accumulate. The book does not define historia, but views the term from many angles to refresh the reader’s sense of the historical.
This book highlights the act of writing—humanity’s greatest cultural investment. It is the labor we use to record our past and construct our future. The essays within explore writing’s role at the heart of all enterprise, from identifying things to inventing new realities.
Montaigne’s essays probe the intimate feelings, anxieties, and hopes of daily life. This blend of his observations with the author’s offers a mirror to your own experiences, and the solace of knowing that his wisdom applies precisely to your world.
Poetry and Philosophy as Handlung offers verbal “doings” where sentences show both complicity and dissonance. Through this tactical sequence, time and place emerge, capturing the era’s peculiar aroma in a text that remains open to its own immediate future.
Seventy Moral (and Immoral) Polarities of the Everyday
Will explores polarities through a set of seventy mini-meditations on opposite states of moral and emotional life. He studies the operational energy at play, which is partly prayer or mantra and partly half-completed logical conundrum.
Seventy Moral (and Immoral) Polarities of the Everyday Volume II
Will explores polarities through a set of seventy mini-meditations on opposite states of moral and emotional life. He studies the operational energy at play, which is partly prayer or mantra and partly half-completed logical conundrum.
Shakespeare as a Portable Guide to the Human Condition
This book introduces the critical issues in Shakespeare’s plays. What is the secret of a character like Falstaff? What philosophical arguments do the problem plays introduce? What is the value of Shakespeare’s perspective for thinking effectively in our world now?
Structure, Commentary, and Culture in Ancient Greek Drama
This book explores the works of Aeschylus, Sophocles, Euripides, and Aristophanes. It considers their principal characters, their motivations, and what their legacies mean to us today, revealing the enduring influence of Classical Greek drama on modern culture.