Volume 1 of The Cambridge History of Literary Criticism focuses on criticism in the Classical period up to about A.D. 325. This first survey examines the beginnings of critical consciousness in Greece, including the functions of poetry and the role of...

'To be taught to write or to speak - but what is the use of speaking, if you have nothing to say? To be taught to think - nay, what is the use of being able to think, if you have nothing to think of? But to be taught to see is to gain word and thought at...

Every line we succeed in publishing today ... is a victory wrested from the powers of darkness. So wrote Walter Benjamin in January 1940. Not long afterward, he himself would fall prey to those powers, a victim of suicide following a failed attempt to...

This is an invaluable collection of essays and diary entries that sheds as much light on Benjamin himself as it does on his truculent and difficult friend Brecht. Another way of putting that is that the Brecht this book sheds light on is Benjamin's...

Pore over the letters of Eve Babitz—queen of the witty, gossipy, and thoroughly engrossing missive. Joan Didion, Joseph Heller, Annie Leibovitz, Paul Ruscha, Anne Rice, Steve Martin, and many others appear in this first-of-its-kind collection...

V.S. Naipaul stands as the most lionized literary mediator between First and Third World experience and is ordinarily viewed as possessing a unique authority on the subject of cross-cultural relations in the post-colonial era. In contesting this orthodox...

NPR's Favorite Books of 2019Rachel Cusk redrew the boundaries of fiction with the Outline Trilogy, three “literary masterpieces” (The Washington Post) whose narrator, Faye, perceives the world with a glinting, unsparing intelligence while remaining...

In recognition of the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s long and lauded career as a master essayist, a landmark collection, including her most beloved pieces and some rarely seen work, rigorously curated by the author herself.“A writer who never seems...

An erudite and witty collection of Umberto Eco's essays on mass culture from the 1960s through the 1980s, including major pieces which have not been translated into English before. The discussion is framed by opposing characterizations of current...

Professor Olney gathers together in this book some of the best and most important writings on autobiography produced in the past two decades. Originally published in 1980. The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again...

Professor Korshin delineates the development of typology from the theological to the secular sphere through a study of abstracted typology, or types that writers transferred from their customary religious contexts and put into various genres of...

Lost in an art—the art of translation. Thus, in an elegant anagram (translation = lost in an art), Pulitzer Prize-winning author and pioneering cognitive scientist Douglas Hofstadter hints at what led him to pen a deep personal homage to the witty...

The last of the canonical Kurt Vonnegut books, A Man Without a Country spent eight weeks on the New York Times hardcover nonfiction bestseller list, selling over a quarter-million copiesThis 20th anniversary edition features a new introduction by Lewis...

The acclaimed New York Times–bestselling biography and “emotionally detailed portrait of the artist as a young man” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times)In the first biography of the iconic David Foster Wallace, D.T. Max paints the portrait of a man,...

A provocative and wide-ranging conversation between two distinctive women—one American and one French—on the dilemmas, rewards, and demands of womanhood.Lisa Alther and Françoise Gilot have been friends for more than twenty-five years. Although from...