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...

“Superb . . . [The] final, splendid, most personal work of [Janet Malcolm’s] long career.” —Charles Finch, The New York Times Book ReviewFor decades, Janet Malcolm’s books and dispatches for The New Yorker and The New York Review of Books poked and...

An inside look at the politics of book reviewing, from the assignment and writing of reviews to why critics think we should listen to what they have to sayTaking readers behind the scenes in the world of fiction reviewing, Inside the Critics’ Circle...

Newly published in paperback, Myths of the English is a fascinating exploration of Englishness: the images, characters, myths and peculiarities that have contributed to the self-image of a nation.

The English Romantic period―when, as Wordsworth wrote, "the whole earth/The beauty wore of promise"―was also a time in which many of our contemporary attitudes, conventions, and institutions originated. The present book explores, in fascinating depth,...