Kevin Hart

"Kevin Hart, like Ernest Hemingway, JK Rowling, and Chocolate Droppa before him, was able to defy the odds and turn [his disadvantaged childhood] around. In his literary debut, he takes the reader on a journey through what his life was, what it is today, and how he's overcome each challenge to become the man he is today"--Amazon.com.

Life Lessons

I Can't Make This Up

Neil Strauss

Superstar comedian and Hollywood box office star Kevin Hart turns his immense talent to the written word by writing some words. Some of those words include: the, a, for, above, and even even. Put them together and you have the funniest, most heartfelt, and most inspirational memoir on survival, success, and the importance of believing in yourself since Old Yeller. It begins in North Philadelphia. He was born an accident, unwanted by his parents. His father was a drug addict who was in and out of jail. His brother was a crack dealer and petty thief. And his mother was overwhelmingly strict, beating him with belts, frying pans, and his own toys. The odds, in short, were stacked against our young hero, just like the odds that are stacked against the release of a new book in this era of social media (where Hart has a following of over 100 million, by the way). But Kevin Hart, like Ernest Hemingway, JK Rowling, and Chocolate Droppa before him, was able to defy the odds and turn it around. In his literary debut, he takes the reader on a journey through what his life was, what it is now, and how he's overcome each challenge to become the man he is today. And that man happens to be the biggest comedian in the world, with tours that sell out football stadiums and films that have collectively grossed over $3.5 billion. He achieved this not just through hard work, determination, and talent: It was through his unique way of looking at the world. Because just like a book has chapters, Hart sees life as a collection of chapters that each person gets to write for himself or herself. "Not only do you get to choose how you interpret each chapter, but your interpretation writes the next chapter," he says. "So why not choose the interpretation that serves your life the best?" Candid, wickedly funny, and unforgettable, I Can't Make This Up is more than a memoir. It is a training manual designed to teach you a positive, drama-free outlook on life and code of conduct that will serve you, serve others, and serve your biggest, boldest dreams.

I Can't Make this Up

A Wall Street Journal bestseller

Entertainment icon Kevin Hart, the number one New York Times bestselling author of I Can’t Make This Up: Life Lessons, shares fifteen heartfelt lessons about harnessing your potential in the here and now.

YOU CAN DO IT.

You’ve heard this advice before. Yes, of course you have. It’s straight out of the self-help bible.

But wait. Are you ready to hear it from a guy who’s made so many mistakes he could fill eighteen other books about them? A guy who went to community college for exactly two weeks and earned a degree in nothing? A guy who wore long tights for a marathon?

That’s this guy: Kevin Hart. He wants to share some lessons he’s learned along the way—lessons that helped him get to where he is now. He wants to talk to you about “what-is-ness,” “cowboying up,” and “teddy bearing.”

No idea what those are? Don’t worry. That’s why you’re here. In this funny, heartfelt collection of pep talks, Kevin Hart reveals the power of a positive mindset.

In this book, the tables are turned. Kevin Hart isn’t just a box office juggernaut and superstar comedian.

He’s your biggest fan.

This Is How We Do It: A Pep Talk

Morning knowledge

Selected Poems

Flame Tree

The poems in YOUNG RAIN have a lucidity that makes them seem almost casual, so that it is with a feeling of surprise that you realize that you have been drawn into a conversation of the utmost gravity concerning the private reaches of the self, darkness and death. YOUNG RAIN is Kevin Hart's sixth collection of poetry.

Young Rain

Dark-Land: Memoir of a Secret Childhood is Kevin Hart's searing and at times hilarious narrative of his first thirteen years. It is a story of survival and transformation, of deception and recovery. It passes from a frightening childhood in the East-End of London to the disorientation of life in sub-tropical Australia. Throughout, Hart draws on John Bunyan's evocation of "Dark-Land" in his Pilgrim's Progress, the place Valiant-for-Truth leaves in order to seek the Celestial City. But Dark-Land is no allegory. We see Hart's hidden inner life, his family's penchant for keeping secrets about their past, and their illusions about the nature of that shared past. We see Hart pass from being a backward boy, the despair of his teachers in a rough primary school, to experiencing a strange "conversion" in a math class in Brisbane, Australia, which turned him into a Christian, a poet, and an academic. Written in elegant, lucid prose, without a trace of sentimentality, Dark-Land is a memoir of a working-class childhood, a narrative of a migrant, and the story of a convert to Christianity.

Memoir of a Secret Childhood

Dark-Land

The Trespass of the Sign offers an account of the relations between deconstruction and theology. Kevin Hart argues that, contrary to popular thought on the topic, deconstruction does not have an antitheological agenda. Rather, deconstruction seeks to question the metaphysics of any theology. Hart pays particular attention to mystical theology as nonmetaphysical theology. --From publisher's description.

Deconstruction, Theology and Philosophy

The Trespass of the Sign

Major literary critics in Britain, France, and the United States engage with Maurice Blanchot's immense, fascinating, and difficult body of creative work.

Philosophy in the Narratives of Maurice Blanchot

Clandestine Encounters

Jean-Luc Marion is a leading figure in French phenomenology as well as one of the proponents of the so-called 'theological turn' in European philosophy. In this text, a stellar group of philosophers and theologians examine Marion's work, especially his later work, from a variety of perspectives.

Reading Jean-Luc Marion

Counter-experiences

Blanchot and his writings on three major poets, Mallarmé, Hölderlin, and Char, provide a decisive new point of departure for English language criticism of his philosophical writings on narrative in this study by leading Blanchot scholar, Kevin Hart. Connecting his work to later leading figures of 20th-century French philosophy, including Emmanuel Levinas, Simone Weil, and Jacques Derrida, Hart highlights the importance of Jewish philosophy and political thought to his overall conception of literature. Chapters on community and negation reveal Blanchot's emphasis on the relationship between narrative and politics over the more commonly connected narrative and aesthetics. By fully discussing Blanchot's elusive concept of “the Outside” for the first time, this book progresses scholarly understandings of his entire oeuvre further. This central concept engages Franz Rosenzweig's work on Abrahamic faiths, enabling a reckoning on the role of suffering and literature in the wake of the Shoah, with significant implications for Jewish studies more generally.

Ethics of the Image

Maurice Blanchot on Poetry and Narrative

A collection of poems by only one of Australia's most important poets and a major figure in world poetry.

Alan Gould

The Acc02.215 instalment mainly comprises word-processed drafts of poety and prose (1 A3 carton, 1 small carton).

Papers of Kevin Hart

"In Lands of Likeness, philosopher, theologian, and poet Kevin Hart utilizes the history of Christian thought and secular philosophy to develop a novel and profound hermeneutics of contemplation. Drawing in particular on the work of Arthur Schopenhauer, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Edmund Husserl, Hart traces the development of notions of contemplation in modernity and refines the approaches he finds there. Utilizing his refined approach, Hart trains our attention on modern poems from G. M. Hopkins, Wallace Stevens, A. R. Ammons, Geoffrey Hill and others as sites for a kind of contemplative reading that phenomenology can make precise. Delivered in its original form as the prestigious Gifford Lectures, Lands of Likeness is a revelatory meditation on contemplation for the modern world"--

For a Poetics of Contemplation

Lands of Likeness

The Last Day and Other Poems by Kevin Hart

Kevin Hart traces the vast literary legacy and reputation of Samuel Johnson. Through detailed analyses of the biographers, critics and epigones who carefully crafted and preserved Johnson's life for posterity, Hart explores the emergence of what came to be called 'The Age of Johnson'. Hart shows how late seventeenth- and early eighteenth-century Britain experienced the emergence and consolidation of a rich and diverse culture of property. In dedicating himself to Johnson's death, Hart argues, James Boswell turned his friend into a monument, a piece of public property. Through subtle analyses of copyright, forgery and heritage in eighteenth-century life, this study traces the emergence of competing forms of cultural property: a Hanoverian politics of property engages a Jacobite politics of land. Kevin Hart places Samuel Johnson within this rich cultural context, demonstrating how Johnson came to occupy a place at the heart of the English literary canon.

Samuel Johnson and the Culture of Property

Kevin Hart traces the vast literary legacy and reputation of Samuel Johnson. Through detailed analyses of the biographers and critics who carefully crafted and preserved Johnson's life for posterity, Hart explores the emergence of "The Age of Johnson." Hart argues that James Boswell turned his friend into a monument, a piece of public property. Through subtle analyses of copyright, forgery and heritage in eighteenth-century life Kevin Hart demonstrates how Johnson came to occupy a place at the heart of the English literary canon.

Associate Professor of English and Comparative Literature Kevin Hart

Wild Track is a compilation of the best of Kevin Hart's poetry from eight different collections.

New and Selected Poems

Wild Track

Religious poetry has often been regarded as minor poetry and dismissed in large part because poetry is taken to require direct experience; whereas religious poetry is taken to be based on faith, that is, on second or third hand experience. The best methods of thinking about "experience" are given to us by phenomenology. Poetry and Revelation is the first study of religious poetry through a phenomenological lens, one that works with the distinction between manifestation (in which everything is made manifest) and revelation (in which the mystery is re-veiled as well as revealed). Providing a phenomenological investigation of a wide range of “religious poems”, some medieval, some modern; some written in English, others written in European languages; some from America, some from Britain, and some from Australia, Kevin Hart provides a unique new way of thinking about religious poetry and the nature of revelation itself.

A New Phenomenology of Religious Poetry

Poetry and Revelation

From celebrity author Kevin Hart comes the laugh-out-loud highly illustrated sequel to Marcus Makes a Movie about a young boy who has big Hollywood dreams--and the hustle to make it happen. "Everybody, grab a ticket and run for a front row seat to Marcus Makes a Movie!" —Judd Winick, New York Times bestselling author of the Hilo series Marcus’s movie, Toothpick vs. the Doom, is a HIT! But the only thing harder than making a movie is making a SECOND one. Marcus needs to come up with another great idea fast. Too bad his film crew (aka friends) are too preoccupied with their MeTube channels to notice. An invite to The Helen Show has Marcus thinking they’ll be back on top, but will nerves, unchecked ambition, and a rivalry between friends shut down this show before it even begins? In the laugh-out-loud sequel, actor and comedian Kevin Hart delivers a message about being creative, working hard, and learning that sometimes the best dreams are the ones you achieve with your friends.

Kevin Hart

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