This second hardcover omnibus edition of Didion's collected nonfiction contains her final four books: Blue Nights, South and West, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, and her bestselling and most famous work, The Year of Magical Thinking.In her essay “Why I...

The moving story of the life and work of novelist Virginia Woolf, revealed through her own letters to those closest to her.Virginia Woolf is considered by many to be one of the greatest British writers and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth...

A new intellectual biography of Goethe, examining the paradox of his thoughtJohann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was a poet, a novelist, a scientist and an essayist on a dizzying range of topics. In the nineteenth century, he was widely regarded as one...

From Poirot to Miss Marple, from The Mousetrap to Witness for the Prosecution, this a fascinating look at the life and work of Agatha Christie, the world's most successful and popular crime writer.Agatha Christie was not only the most successful author...

"Written just over two thousand years ago, Ovid's Metamorphoses is one of the key works of Western culture. Nevertheless, it is also a work that challenges some of the fundamental assumptions of the culture it belongs to, namely that the human is the...

An inquiry into the theories and practices of overhearing When words are not heard but overheard, when phrases are perceived in bits and pieces, and when speakers, failing to do as they intend, state things that they never meant to say, the saying, in...

A New York Times Editors' Choice Book Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by Literary Hub and Goodreads A playful history of the humble index and its outsized effect on our reading lives. Most of us give little thought to the back of the book—it’s...

An exquisite, genre-defying new book from the Booker Prize–winning author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a reckoning with the author’s life and family, and the role of fiction in our times "A spectacular mixture of fierce energy and then control,...

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...

An account of criticism as an urgent response to what moves us.Criticism begins when we put down a book to tell someone about it. It is what we do when we face a work or event that bowls us over and makes us scramble for a response. As Michel Chaouli...