“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...

Marina Tsvetaeva ; With A New Introduction By Susan Sontag ; Edited And Translated By J. Marin King.

Blue Cloth

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...

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...

"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...