Christian Wiman braids poetry, memoir, and criticism to create an inspired, career-defining work. Few contemporary writers ask the questions about faith, morality, and God that Christian Wiman does, and even fewer—perhaps none—do so with his urgency and...

Garner gathers a literary chorus to capture the joys of reading and eating in this comic, personal classic. Reading and eating, like Krazy and Ignatz, Sturm und Drang, prosciutto and melon, Simon and Schuster, and radishes and butter, have always, for...

“Tom Wolfe at his very best” (The New York Times Book Review), The Right Stuff is the basis for the 1983 Oscar-winning film of the same name and the eight-part Disney+ miniseries.Reissued for today’s reader with a cover by the renowned artist Seymour...

A timely and urgent inquiry by one of global literature's leading lights In this concisely argued and illuminating book, the PEN/Faulkner Award-winning author Rabih Alameddine takes the subject of politics and art head-on, questioning the very premise...

A feast of observations about everything from the particular beauty of lemons on a table, to the allure of Colette, to the streets of Paris, by the inimitable Deborah Levy.Deborah Levy’s vital literary voice speaks about many things.On footwear: “It has...

One of the Washington Post’s 50 Best Nonfiction Books of 2024 | A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice | A Boston Globe Best Book of 2024“Ambitious, intelligent, and happily unpretentious.” —Louis Menand, The New Yorker“Convincing, idiosyncratic...

Informed by a provocative exhibition at the Louvre curated by the author, The Severed Head unpacks artistic representations of severed heads from the Paleolithic period to the present. Surveying paintings, sculptures, and drawings, Julia Kristeva turns...

Julia Kristeva is a true polymath, an intellectual of astonishingly wide range whose erudition and insight have been brought to bear on psychoanalysis, literary criticism, gender and sex, and cultural critique. Passions of Our Time showcases recent...

Julia Kristeva refracts the impulse to hate (and our attempts to subvert, sublimate, and otherwise process it) through psychoanalysis and text, exploring worlds, women, religion, portraits, and the act of writing. Her inquiry spans themes, topics, and...

"Opening with the re-working of an opera she wrote entitled Lady Loathly as a kind of parable for feminist criticism, the author of The Scandal of Pleasure and Venus in Exile here re-evaluates both the tropes of female desire, rape, beauty, and art and...

Marcel Proust once wrote, “There is no longer anybody, not even myself, since I cannot leave my bed, who will go along the Rue du Repos to visit the little Jewish cemetery where my grandfather, following a custom that he never understood, went for so...

From beloved and bestselling author Roxane Gay, “a strikingly fresh cultural critic” (Washington Post) comes an exhilarating collection of her essays on culture, politics, and everything in between.Since the publication of the groundbreaking Bad Feminist...

Thoroughly revised and expanded for a new generation of readers, this classic guide to enjoying literature to its fullest--a lively, enlightening, and entertaining introduction to a diverse range of writing and literary devices that enrich these works,...

G.K. Chesterton was a master essayist. But reading his essays is not just an exercise in studying a literary form at its finest, it is an encounter with timeless truths that jump off the page as fresh and powerful as the day they were written.The only...

Post-war American publishing has been ruthlessly transformed since André Schiffrin joined its ranks in 1956. Gone is a plethora of small but prestigious houses that often put ideas before profit in their publishing decisions, sometimes even deliberately...

Charlotte Higgins, the Guardian's chief culture writer, steps behind the polished doors of Broadcasting House and investigates the BBC. Based on her hugely popular essay series, this personal journey answers the questions that rage around this...

As a practising mortician, Caitlin Doughty has long been fascinated by our pervasive terror of dead bodies. In From Here to Eternity she sets out in search of cultures unburdened by such fears. With curiosity and morbid humour, Doughty introduces us to...