From the New York Times–bestselling author of The Unspeakable and The Problem with Everything comes a new collection of unputdownable essays.“For the last five or six years, on many afternoons around 4 or 5 p.m., I’ve been overcome with the sensation...

A trans essayist with a checkered past takes on the big questions of human existence Move over Michel de Montaigne, there's a new girl in town ABA Indie Next Pick * Vulture Best Book of 2025 So Far * Publishers Weekly starred review * San Francisco...

Lasting from September 1980 to August 1988, the Iran-Iraq War was the longest conventional war fought between two states in the twentieth century. It marked a period that began just after a revolutionary government in Iran became an Islamic Republic and...

“How to Read Now explores the politics and ethics of reading, and insists that we are capable of something better: a more engaged relationship not just with our fiction and our art, but with our buried and entangled histories.”“A book that doesn’t seek...

Blue Cloth

-- Susan Sontag

A collection of essays from the visionary storyteller Gianni Rodari about fairy tales and folk tales and their great advantages in teaching creative storytelling."Rodari grasped children's need to play with life's rules by using the grammar of their own...

The Discarded Image paints a lucid picture of the medieval world view, providing the historical and cultural background to the literature of the middle ages and renaissance. It describes the 'image' discarded by later years as 'the medieval synthesis...

Albert Camus’s lively journals from his eventful visits to the United States and South America in the 1940s, available again in a new translation. In March 1946, the young Albert Camus crossed from Le Havre to New York. Though he was virtually unknown...

How Victorian authors engaged the imaginations of their readers and elevated the novel to new heightsAs novel publication exploded in nineteenth-century Britain, writers such as Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and George Eliot learned from...

A unique look at Thomas Mann’s intellectual and political transformation during the crucial years of his exile in the United StatesIn September 1938, Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize–winning author of Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain, fled Nazi Germany...

A groundbreaking account of translation and identity in the Chinese literary tradition before 1850—with important ramifications for todayDebates on the canon, multiculturalism, and world literature often take Eurocentrism as the target of their critique...