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...

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...

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for CriticismA new edition of Susan Sontag’s groundbreaking critique of photography—its problems, politics, and possibilities.“To photograph is to appropriate the thing photographed,” Sontag writes in the...

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...