A manifesto reclaiming the wives and mistresses of literary modernism that inspired a generation of writers and scholars, reissued after more than a decade.I am beginning to realize that taking the self out of our essays is a form of repression. Taking...

Ali Smith melds the tale and the essay into a magical hybrid form, a song of praise to the power of stories in our livesIn February 2012, the novelist Ali Smith delivered the Weidenfeld lectures on European comparative literature at St. Anne’s College,...

A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • NATIONAL BESTSELLER • A timely, passionate, provocative, blisteringly smart interrogation of how we make and experience art in the age of cancel culture, and of the link between genius and monstrosity. Can we love the work...

Text: French

Life as Creative Constraint is the first book to focus on the extraordinary life-writing of the French experimental writing group, the Oulipo. The Oulipo's enthusiasm for literary games and formal gymnastics has seen its work caricatured as 'lifeless' -...

The impact of the Oulipo (Ouvroir de Litterature Potentielle), one of the most important groups of experimental writers of the late twentieth century, is still being felt in contemporary literature, criticism, and theory, both in Europe and the US...

Publication of the Bernard Shaw diaries is a major literary event. The 1885–1897 diaries, originally written in old-fashioned Pitman shorthand, detailed the day-to-day life of Bernard Shaw from his twenty-ninth year, when he was still a nobody, to his...

Gleaned from antiquated dictionaries, dialect glossaries, studies of folklore, nautical lexicons, historical writings, letters, novels, and miscellaneous sources, Informal English offers a captivating treasure trove of linguistic oddities that will not...

The Geographic Imagination of Modernity traces the emergence of the geographic paradigm in modern Western thought in the decades around 1800. This period represents an extraordinary intellectual threshold, a time when European society invented new...

Partial Payments: Essays on Writers and Their Lives Hardcover by Joseph Epstein (Author)

Essays on American Writing. In stock

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER – The true story behind Jon Krakauer’s bestselling novel and Sean Penn’s acclaimed film Into the Wild, from the sister of Chris McCandless, filling in questions about Chris’ journey of self-discovery and the dysfunctional...

What Hemingway's A Moveable Feast did for Paris in the 1920s, this charming yet undeceivable memoir does for Greenwich Village in the late 1940s. In 1946, Anatole Broyard was a dapper, earnest, fledgling avant-gardist, intoxicated by books, sex, and the...

Barbara Browning follows the trail of "infectious rhythm" from the ecstatic percussion of a Brazilian carnival group to the eerily silent video image of the LAPD beating a man like a drum. Throughout, she identifies the metaphoric strain of contagion...

Bhabha, in his preface, writes 'Nations, like narratives, lose their origins in the myths of time and only fully encounter their horizons in the mind's eye'.From this seemingly impossibly metaphorical beginning, this volume confronts the realities of the...

A unique bibliography of literary works that survive from Greek antiquity, this Canon is a register of all the information stored in the Thesaurus Linguae Graecae, a vast computerized database of Greek literature ranging from Homer to the closing of the...