A critical biography of the mysterious but prolific medieval printer. Johannes Gutenberg is famous as the inventor of Europe’s first typographic printing method, and his life and legacy have long fascinated a wide audience. Due to scant and vague...

The untold story of Shakespeare's profound influence on Virginia Woolf and the rest of the Bloomsbury Group "A spirited dance of minds."--Chris Vognar, Boston Globe For the men and women of the Bloomsbury Group, Shakespeare was a constant presence and a...

Can poetry act as an aesthetic amplification device, akin to a microscope, through which we can sense minute or nearly imperceptible phenomena such as the folding of molecules into their three-dimensional shapes, the transformations that make up the life...

A reissue of Susan Sontag’s classic first collection, featuring some of her most beloved writing—on art, life, camp, and criticism—that cemented her legacy as one of the brightest thinkers of, and beyond, her generation.Susan Sontag is widely regarded as...

Miniature books, eighteenth-century novels, Tom Thumb weddings, tall tales, and objects of tourism and nostalgia: this diverse group of cultural forms is the subject of On Longing, a fascinating analysis of the ways in which everyday objects are narrated...

INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • An extraordinary work from the author of The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue NightsIn November 1999, Joan Didion began seeing a psychiatrist because, as she wrote to a friend, her family had had “a rough few years.”...

A stunning collection of essays and memoir from twice Booker Prize winner and international bestseller Hilary Mantel, author of The Mirror and the LightIn 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to the...

“Pure and lovely…to read Zelda’s letters is to fall in love with her.” —The Washington Post Edited by renowned Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W. Barks, with an introduction by Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald's granddaughter, Eleanor Lanahan, this compilation of...

An annotated guide to the work of the Pulitzer Prize–winning writer, teacher, and pioneer of creative nonfictionJohn McPhee has been a staff writer for The New Yorker since 1965 and has written more than thirty acclaimed books that began on the...

A New York Review Books OriginalDuring the eighteenth century, from the death of Louis XIV until the Revolution, French culture set the standard for all of Europe. In Sweden, Austria, Italy, Spain, England, Russia, and Germany, among kings and queens,...

How you can enrich your life by becoming a more skillful and engaged reader of literatureWe are what we read, according to Robert DiYanni. Reading may delight us or move us; we may read for instruction or inspiration. But more than this, in reading we...

Winner of both the National Book Award and the National Book Critics Circle Award and named by the Modern Library one of the twentieth century's 100 Best Non-Fiction Books, Paul Fussell's The Great War and Modern Memory was universally acclaimed on...

"In this book, Meredith Martin presents a historical account of prosodic criticism and, through the example of her own research path, argues for new scholarly practices in literary studies and the humanities more broadly. Challenging the common scholarly...

The "Fresh Air" book critic investigates the enduring power of The Great Gatsby -- "The Great American Novel we all think we've read, but really haven't."Conceived nearly a century ago by a man who died believing himself a failure, it's now a revered...

To illuminate the mysterious greatness of Anton Chekhov’s writings, Janet Malcolm takes on three roles: literary critic, biographer, and journalist. Her close readings of the stories and plays are interwoven with episodes from Chekhov’s life and framed...

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer (now an HBO series) comes a moving and unflinchingly personal meditation on the literary forms of otherness and a bold call for expansive political solidarity.Born in war-ravaged Vietnam, Viet...

Warning!*This book contains the following:Unsafe use of powerful firearms in combination with explosivesCultivation of illegal cropsImpressionable minors being exposed to illicit activitiesPiloting of automobiles under impaired conditionsTransporting...

This collection of essays, which originally appeared as a book in 1962, is virtually the complete works of an editor of Commentary magazine who died, at age 37, in 1955. Long before the rise of Cultural Studies as an academic pursuit, in the pages of the...