A short, informal account of our ever-increasing dependence on a complex multiplicity of messages, records, documents, and data.We live in an information society, or so we are often told. But what does that mean? This volume in the MIT Press Essential...

The whole destiny of America is contained in the first Puritans who landed on these shores, wrote de Tocqueville. These newcomers, and the range of their intellectual achievements and failures, are vividly depicted in The Puritans in America. Exiled from...

D. Nurkse’s Burnt Island explores tragedy both grand and intimate, in city and country, in our own troubled moment and across the greater scope of geological time. Arranged in three “suites” of lucid, often heart-wrenching verse, the book begins with a...

A magical, impressionistic autobiography by China’s legendary poet Bei Dao In 2001, to visit his sick father, the exiled poet Bei Dao returned to his homeland for the first time in over twenty years. The city of his birth was totally unrecognizable. “My...

Kilroy shows, as through a prism, episodes in the lives of Brendan Bracken and William Joyce, including their relationship with Ireland and their conceptions of Britain and Germany in World War II. How these antagonists, given a choice by history,...

A masterly translation of one of the greatest of Greek dramas.Their lives are the briefest concession,My concession, a nod of permission.As if I dozed off and dreamed a little.I take a dream-and Admetos calls it his life.-Death in AlcestisIn the years...

His mind crowded with vivid images of Africa, Graham Greene set off in 1935 to discover Liberia, a remote and unfamiliar republic founded for released slaves. Now with a new introduction by Paul Theroux, Journey Without Maps is the spellbinding record of...

Like Alexis de Tocqueville a century earlier, Jean Cocteau offers a powerful reminder to Americans of their own potential―and issues In 1949, Jean Cocteau spent twenty days in New York, and began composing on the plane ride home this essay filled with...

“The way Harrison has embedded his entire vision of our predicament implicitly in the particulars of two poetic lives, his own and Yesenin’s, is what makes the poem not only his best but one of the best in the past twenty-five years of American writing...

A New York Times Notable Book and a Best Book of the Year at Esquire, Seattle Times, Minnesota Star Tribune, Huffington Post, and Publishers Weekly.From “quite possibly America’s best living writer of short stories” (NPR), Ninety-Nine Stories of God...

Receipt is a collaboration between artist Andy Buck and Carl Adamshick. It is a book that loves names and dialog. Andy Buck's carved, wooden figures alongside Carl Adamshick's poems begin a conversation about friendships and their sometimes peculiar...

Originally the medieval bestiary or book of animals set out to establish safe distinctions - between them and us - but Hughes's poetry works always in a contrary direction: showing what man and beast have in common, the reservoir from which we all draw...

The hero of Darcy O'Brien's A Way of Life, Like Any Other is a child of Hollywood, and once his life was a glittery dream. His father starred in Westerns. His mother was a goddess of the silver screen. The family enjoyed the high life on their estate,...

A brief study of the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert, with selected poems translated into English. This study includes quotations by Joseph Brodsky, Czeslaw Milosz, and Seamus Heaney. All poems translated by Czeslaw Milosz, Peter Dale Scott, Alissa Valles...

Taking a hard look at the crisis afflicting Western economies in recent years, Manuel Castells suggests that the very structures that fostered economic growth since 1945 are the same structures that are now undermining these economics. Pinpointing the...

The best-selling author of Chaos profiles the life and achievements of iconoclastic physicist and Nobel laureate Richard Feynman, describing his unique vision of science and his revolutionary legacy. 100,000 first printing. $100,000 ad/promo. Tour.