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...

'A passionate, hilarious, joyful love letter to Russian literature' Allison Pearson, Sunday Telegraph 'A delightful primer and companion to all the authors you are ashamed to admit you haven't read' The Times Viv Groskop has discovered the meaning of...

The Maker of the Omnibus: The Lives of English Writers Compared

A beautifully illustrated guide to over seventy-five important journeys in world literature, spanning more than thirty countries and twenty-five hundred yearsFrom Homer’s Odyssey, Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and Cervantes’s Don Quixote to Melville’s...

How nineteenth-century “disciplines of attention” anticipated the contemporary concern with mindfulness and being “spiritual but not religious”Today, we’re driven to distraction, our attention overwhelmed by the many demands upon it—most of which emanate...

A rich cultural history of the creation, explosive impact, and enduring influence of T. S. Eliot’s modernist masterpieceWhen T. S. Eliot published The Waste Land in 1922, it put the thirty-four-year-old author on a path to worldwide fame and the Nobel...

The life and times of Dante’s soaring poetic allegory of the soul’s redemptive journey toward GodWritten during his exile from Florence in the early 1300s, Dante Alighieri’s Divine Comedy describes the poet’s travels through hell, purgatory, and...

A worldwide exploration of the history, purpose, and inescapable influence of the Iliad and the Odyssey that will inspire readers to think anew about Homer’s workNo one knows whether Homer was a real person, but there is no doubt that the epic poems...

A deep dive into the nature of translation from one of its most acclaimed practitioners   Avoiding theoretical debates and clichéd metaphors, award‑winning translator Damion Searls has written a fresh, approachable, and convincing account of what...

Taking his title from the wounded cry of the once great Max Bialystock in The Producers -- "Look at me now! Look at me now! I’m wearing a cardboard belt!” -- the charming essayist Joseph Epstein gives us his largest and most adventurous collection to...

Gathers essays about the writings of Italo Svevo, Ben Hecht, Robert Louis Stevenson, Henry James, H.L. Mencken, George Orwell, Isaac Bashevis Singer, Carl Sandburg, and Anthony Burgess

This collection of intimate portraits of eleven famous men and women originally published by Eyre Methuen, Ltd. in 1980, is based on Rowse's own friendship with his subjects, all of whom have made significant contributions to modern literature or...

How are we to understand, define, and critically evaluate the function, origin, and types of art and establish criteria for describing a work as "superior?" While such esthetic questions are unchanging, the answers vary markedly from decade to decade and...

An anthology of twenty-five years of writing, collected for the first time, by the nation's best-selling satirist--author of Parliament of Whores--shows his transition from hippie to neo-conservative. 150,000 first printing. $150,000 ad/promo. Tour.

From twenty-seven of today’s leading writers, an anthology of original pieces on the author of WaldenFeatures essays by Jennifer Finney Boylan • Kristen Case • George Howe Colt • Gerald Early • Paul Elie • Will Eno • Adam Gopnik • Lauren Groff • Celeste...

A compelling portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft that shows the intimate connections between her life and workMary Wollstonecraft’s A Vindication of the Rights of Woman, first published in 1792, is a work of enduring relevance in women's rights advocacy...

A literary and cultural history of coral—as an essential element of the marine ecosystem, a personal ornament, a global commodity, and a powerful political metaphorToday, coral and the human-caused threats to coral reef ecosystems symbolize our ongoing...