Why melancholia is a vital form of social critique and a catalyst for political renewalMelancholia is wrongly condemned as a condition of withdrawal and despair that alienates its sufferer from community. Countering that misconception, A Politics of...

"This book serves as both a cultural and reception history of Homer's great epic, the Odyssey, and as an in-depth exploration of the literary styles that mark the narrative out as so unique and influential. It begins with a broad survey of the Odyssey's...

The New York Times bestseller and one of Barack Obama's Favorite Books of 2024 "The gift book of the year, a volume that should have broad appeal and deliver many hours of pleasure to the recipient. The Work of Art is a gorgeous book.” —John Warner, The...

A biography of Native Son's Bigger Thomas that examines his continued relevance in debates over Black men and the violence of racism Bigger Thomas, the central figure in Richard Wright's novel Native Son (1940), eludes easy categorization. A violent and...

Radical universalism vs postcolonial theoryThe World in a Grain of Sand offers a framework for reading literature from the global South that goes against the grain of dominant theories in cultural studies, especially, postcolonial theory. It critiques...

The radical history of space exploration from the Russian Cosmists to Elon MuskMany societies have imagined going to live in space. What they want to do once they get up there - whether conquering the unknown, establishing space "colonies," privatising...

A USA Today Must Read New BookFrom the bestselling author of Women Rowing North and Reviving Ophelia-a memoir in essays reflecting on radiance, resilience, and the constantly changing nature of reality.In her luminous new memoir in essays, Mary Pipher-as...

A defense and celebration of the discipline of literary studies and its most distinctive practice—close reading. Does literary criticism offer truths about the world? In Criticism and Truth, Jonathan Kramnick offers a new and surprising account of...

A seminal figure in American literature and philosophy, Ralph Waldo Emerson is considered the apostle of self-reliance, fully alive within his ideas and disarmingly confident about his innermost thoughts. Yet the circumstances around "The American...

Long recognized as the outstanding reference on world literature, Benet's Reader's Encyclopedia is the one against which all others are measured, and is the single-most complete one-volume encyclopedia available for those with a serious interest in the...

John D. Kerkering's study examines the literary history of racial and national identity in nineteenth-century America. Kerkering argues that writers such as DuBois, Lanier, Simms, and Scott used poetic effects to assert the distinctiveness of certain...

In this new volume of Kafka studies, which is addressed to both beginning readers of Kafka as well as Kafka scholars, Stanley Corngold discusses Kafka's work in a variety of novel perspectives, including Goethe's The Sufferings of Young Werther;...

As Debby Boone and Rocky Balboa raised the hopes of a country in financial and political crisis, U.S. colleges sought to meet the needs of a growing and increasingly diverse student body while also responding to the public outcry for tangible results...

From essays about the Salem witch trials to literary uses of ghosts by Twain, Wharton, and Bierce to the cinematic blockbuster The Sixth Sense, this book is the first to survey the importance of ghosts and hauntings in American culture across time. From...

For nearly half a century, James D. Hart's Oxford Companion to American Literature has offered a matchless guided tour through American literary culture, both past and present. Hart now presents the first abridgement of the Companion in a paperback...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The powerful story of an inspiring doctor who made a difference, by helping to create a program to care for Boston’s homeless community—by the Pulitzer Prize–winning, New York Times bestselling author of Mountains Beyond...

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...