Finalist for the 2025 Wainwright Prize in Nature Writing"Extraordinary . . . Surprising at every turn and rewarding in ways you never expect."--Marlon James"An extraordinary, necessary book from a brilliant writer. A new song of the earth."--Robert...

The first translation of painter and writer Józef Czapski's inspiring lectures on Proust, first delivered in a prison camp in the Soviet Union during World War II.During the Second World War, as a prisoner of war in a Soviet camp, and with nothing but...

When Agatha Christie died in 1976, at age eighty-five, she had become the world's most popular author. At the end of 2004, following the death of Christie's daughter, Rosalind, a remarkable legacy was revealed: seventy-three handwritten volumes of...

Built on the grounds of a former cotton plantation, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, offered agricultural and industrial education as a strategy for Black self-determination. There--and in many other communities in the U.S. South,...

Hesiod describes himself as a Boeotian shepherd who heard the Muses call upon him to sing about the gods. His exact dates are unknown, but he has often been considered a younger contemporary of Homer.The first volume of this revised Loeb Classical...

A guy walks into a bar car and...From here the story could take many turns. When this guy is David Sedaris, the possibilities are endless, but the result is always the same: he will both delight you with twists of humor and intelligence and leave you...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The inspiration for the major motion picture Rebel in the Rye One of the most popular and mysterious figures in American literary history, the author of the classic Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger eluded fans and journalists for...

"Mrs. Dalloway is a novel about almost everything. Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary: "I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense." Edward Mendelson concedes that...

If you’re writing about your life in real time, are you inherently fucked? Over the years that Chloé Caldwell had been married and hoping to conceive a child, she’d read everything she could find on infertility. But no memoir or message board reflected...

My ignorance was on my side. I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t know what to be afraid of. I did one thing, I did another. I did what I now call crashing about. One day I started to write.This collection of Jamaica Kincaid’s nonfiction writing, including early...

Named a Recommended Read by The New YorkerA book of mischief and improvisation that answers fundamentalism with rage, music, and delight in this earth. A book of mischief and improvisation, The Salt of the Universe answers fundamentalism of all kinds...

The story of the international struggle to preserve Kafka’s literary legacy.Kafka’s Last Trial begins with Kafka’s last instruction to his closest friend, Max Brod: to destroy all his remaining papers upon his death. But when the moment arrived in 1924,...

The life of the German-Jewish literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) is a veritable allegory of the life of letters in the twentieth century. Benjamin’s intellectual odyssey culminated in his death by suicide on the Franco–Spanish...

AN NYRB CLASSICS ORIGINALVirginia Woolf called Max Beerbohm “the prince” of essayists, F. W. Dupee praised his “whim of iron” and “cleverness amounting to genius,” while Beerbohm himself noted that “only the insane take themselves quite seriously.” From...

Postwar French writers were at the vanguard of global literary innovation―from the experimental minimalism of the Nouveau Roman to the literary games of the OuLiPo―but less often appreciated is the extent to which they worked closely with US editors and...

"If you told Aiden Arata in 1995 that the internet would one day crown her the "meme queen of depression" and mega corporations would fly her to conferences to speak about commodifying one's emotions for views, she would have asked you what a meme was...

A meditation on time, violence, and chance by "one of America's most dazzling poets" (O, The Oprah Magazine)Fanny Howe's The Needle's Eye: Passing through Youth is a sequence of essays, short tales, and lyrics that are intertwined by an inner visual...