Laura Ingalls Wilder, author of the well-known Little House series, wrote stories from her childhood because they were “too good to be altogether lost.” And those stories seemed far from being lost during the remainder of her lifetime and through most of...

A guide and history of the town and young girl that inspired Lewis Caroll's famous Alice stories.Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass are two of the most famous fantasies in world literature, and yet their roots are firmly in...

"Politics is will and not truth. A very primitive formulation, but rich in consequences." Robert Musil was keenly aware of literature's vulnerability to what he called "the over-reach and encroachment of politics", but he was also an acute observer of...

Essays by international bestselling author Edward Tenner that explore both the negative and positive surprises of human ingenuity How did the addition of lifeboats after the Titanic shipwreck contribute to another tragedy in Chicago harbor three years...

In a lucid, brilliant work of nonfiction, Larry McMurtry has written a family portrait that also serves as a larger portrait of Texas itself, as it was and as it has become.Using an essay by the German literary critic Walter Benjamin that he first read...

The story of the most acclaimed literary biography of the twentieth century—an ingeniously plotted, behind-the-scenes account of how the literary critic and scholar Richard Ellmann shaped James Joyce’s reputation.Richard Ellmann’s James Joyce, published...

Book by Hayden, John O.

“In our imaginations, war is the name we give to the extremes of violence in our lives, the dark dividing opposite of the connecting myth, which we call love. War enacts the great antagonisms of history, the agonies of nations; but it also offers...

Featuring some of the most ferocious and humorous book curses ever inscribed, this is a lively, engaging introduction to the history and development of bookish maledictions. Have you ever wanted to protect your books from forgetful borrowers, merciless...

In this third of five volumes tracing the history of Japanese literature through Mishima Yukio, Jin'ichi Konishi portrays the high medieval period. Here he continues to examine the influence of Chinese literature on Japanese writers, addressing in...

A searing and exhilarating new collection from the award-winning author of The Boys of My Youth and In Zanesville, who "honors the beautiful, the sacred, and the comic in life" (Sigrid Nunez, National Book Award winner for The Friend). A New York Times...

A deeply personal yet broadly relevant exploration of the ephemeral life of the classic in art, from the eighteenth century to our own day Is there such a thing as a timeless classic? More than a decade ago, Rochelle Gurstein set out to explore and...

"Emily Hodgson Anderson is an English professor who specializes in eighteenth-century British literature. At the age of thirty-nine, she found herself as a newly single mother to two boys aged two and five. In the years that followed, she turned to the...

A striking mosaic of memories, observations, and legends that together reveal the author's own story and a grand, compassionate vision of life itselfIn this kaleidoscope of reflections, renowned South American author Eduardo Galeano ranges widely, from...

"In the tradition of When Time Stopped and The Hare with Amber Eyes, this extraordinary family memoir investigates the dark legacy of the author's great-grandfather, a talented German-Jewish chemist specializing in radioactive household products who...

New York Times Bestseller In the spirit of her bestselling book Hope in the Dark, Rebecca Solnit explores how our actions can shape the future and the liberatory possibilities of embracing uncertainty. Beginning with an essay about a...

In this iconoclastic and sure to be contentious re-casting by a renowned critic, the great American novel Moby Dick is presented as a work that has been widely misread, an error that continues to this day. According to Barry Sanders, Herman Melville's...

This collection of essays by leading scholars insists on a larger recognition of the importance and diversity of crime fiction in U.S. literary traditions. Instead of presenting the genre as the property of Dashiell Hammett and Raymond Chandler, this...

This study of the writing of Roland Barthes breaks down the divide between lived experience and the language of a literary work. In The Barthes Fantastic, John Lurz explores the intersection of literature and everyday life--and confronts some habits...