In 1975 Annie Dillard took up residence on an island in Puget Sound in a wooded room furnished with "one enormous window, one cat, one spider and one person." For the next two years she asked herself questions about time, reality, sacrifice death, and...

Inspired by Mary Shelley's conviction that reading is a socially significant communal activity, this book presents four essays on modern interactions with literary classics. Ancient tragedy, Shakespeare, and Frankenstein are read anew in the context of...

" Exploring literary representations of mass violence, Robbins traces the emergence of a cosmopolitan recognition of atrocity. Mass violence did not always have a name. Like conquest, atrocity was not always seen as violating a moral norm or inviting...

Winner, 2025 Firecracker Awards Winner in Creative Nonfiction, given by the Community of Literary Magazines and Presses Raised in a rural Oregon town plagued by poverty, the artist and writer Jaydra Johnson excelled in school and chased upward mobility,...

Named a Recommended Read of the Year by The New Yorker and a New York Times Critics Top Book of the YearOne of The Los Angeles Times's 15 Best Books of the YearOne of The New Statesman's 20 Best Books of the YearAn Electric Literature and Literary Hub...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • FINALIST FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD • SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2025 PALESTINE BOOK AWARDS • From award-winning novelist and journalist Omar El Akkad comes a powerful reckoning with what it means to live in a West that betrays its...

Daily inspiration from American philosopher and transcendentalist Ralph Waldo EmersonFeaturing excerpts from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s essays, poems, and lectures, Everyday Emerson offers 365 snippets of wisdom and insight from one of America’s greatest...

How modernist women writers used biographical writing to resist their exclusion from literary historyIt’s impossible, now, to think of modernism without thinking about gender, sexuality, and the diverse movers and shakers of the early twentieth century...

A comprehensive history of censorship in modern BritainFor Victorian lawmakers and judges, the question of whether a book should be allowed to circulate freely depended on whether it was sold to readers whose mental and moral capacities were in doubt, by...

How virility and Jewishness became hallmarks of postwar New York’s combative intellectual sceneIn the years following World War II, the New York intellectuals became some of the most renowned critics and writers in the country. Although mostly male and...

How the idea of the author was born in the battleground of genderWhen Sappho sang her songs, the only word that existed to describe a poet was a male one—aoidos, or “singer-man.” The most famous woman poet of ancient Greece, whose craft was one of words,...

Studie over het werk van de Italiaanse dichter Dante Alighieri (1265-1321).

People and Places is a delightful collection of 22 articles and reviews written by Richard Cobb over the past ten years. The selections-- many appearing here for the first time--include recollections of old university friends, essays on authors and...

How decolonization and the cold war influenced literature from Africa, Asia, and the CaribbeanHow did superpower competition and the cold war affect writers in the decolonizing world? In The Aesthetic Cold War, Peter Kalliney explores the various ways...

How Black poets have charted the direction of American poetics for the past two centuriesBefore Modernism examines how Black poetics, in antagonism with White poetics in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, produced the conditions for the...

"Deep Time: A Literary History challenges the exclusive association between deep time and the modern science of geology by focusing on late Enlightenment writings that used narrative form to integrate new empirical data and methods with Western and...

A “delightful” (Vanity Fair) collection from the longest-running, most influential book review in America, featuring its best, funniest, strangest, and most memorable coverage over the past 125 years.Since its first issue on October 10, 1896, The New...

World-renowned folklorist Maria Tatar reveals an astonishing but long-buried history of heroines, taking us from Cassandra and Scheherazade to Nancy Drew and Wonder Woman.The Heroine with 1,001 Faces dismantles the cult of warrior heroes, revealing a...

By acclaimed Forward Prize winner, novelist, and poet, Kei Miller's linked collection of essays blends memoir and literary commentary to explore the silences that exist in our conversations about race, sex, and gender. In a deeply moving, critical and...

A NEW YORK TIMES CRITICS' TOP BOOK OF THE YEAR * One of our most brilliant biographers takes on one of our greatest living playwrights, drawing on a wealth of new materials and on many conversations with him. "An extraordinary record of a vital and...