A collection of essays by American art critic Dave Hickey, nicknamed “The Bad Boy of Art Criticism.”When Dave Hickey was twelve, he rode the surfer’s dream: the perfect wave. And, like so many things in life we long for, it didn’t quite turn out—he shot...

Published for the first time in a beautiful collectible edition, the essential lecture delivered by the 2022 recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, Annie Ernaux.«J’écrirai por venger ma race»It was as a young woman that Annie Ernaux first wrote...

"Definitive. . . . This is the first comprehensive treatment of its subject; it is so thoroughly presented that competition is unlikely."--Mary T. Reynolds, author of Joyce and Dante"A major contribution to the study of the incidence of Greek literary...

"Exceptionally well written in a lively, often funny, attention-arresting style. . . . A tour de force explanation of the enormous body of secular classical allusion and language in Joyce’s work . . . [it] will become a staple of Joyce reference and...

In the view of David Leverenz, such nineteenth-century American male writers as Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman were influenced more profoundly by the popular model of the entrepreneurial "man of force" than they were by their literary...

From New York Times bestselling author Ross Gay comes a "brilliant" intimate and electrifying collection of essays about the joy that comes from connection (Ada Limón, U.S. poet laureate). In these gorgeously written and timely pieces, prizewinning...

A witty, refreshing, and fun book on the experience of reading Marcel Proust.What would the world be like without this work, where would we be if it hadn't happened? This is how Michael Wood found himself writing about Proust's work as an event and about...

The second volume of the Library of America's definitive two-volume selection of the nonfiction writings of our greatest living advocate for sustainable culture.Writing with elegance and clarity, Wendell Berry is a compassionate and compelling voice for...

Why has Anglo-American culture for so long regarded "theory" with intense suspicion? In this important contribution to the history of critical theory, David Simpson argues that a nationalist myth underlies contemporary attacks on theory. Theory's...

"As bastions of culture, anchors of local retail districts, community gathering places, and the sources of new ideas, inspiration, and delight, bookstores have the capacity to save the world. Therefore, we need to protect them and the critical roles...

A new edition of C.L.R. James’s authorized biographyC.L.R. James was a man of prodigious and varied accomplishments. He was a protean twentieth-century Marxist intellectual, widely recognized as a pioneering scholar of slave revolt; a leading voice of...

Luminous essays on translation and self-translation by an award-winning writer and literary translatorTranslating Myself and Others is a collection of candid and disarmingly personal essays by Pulitzer Prize–winning author Jhumpa Lahiri, who reflects on...

An entertaining and illuminating collection of weird, wonderful, and downright baffling words from the origins of English—and what they reveal about the lives of the earliest English speakersOld English is the language you think you know until you...

"Czeslaw Milosz (1911-2004) was one of the great literary voices of the twentieth century, in no small part because he very much lived the events and ideologies of that century. Born into a Polish family in what was then the western fringe of the Russian...

The first book-length selection from the extraordinary unpublished diary of the late-Victorian writer “Michael Field”—the pen name of two female coauthors and romantic partnersMichael Field was known to late-Victorian readers as a superb poet and...

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in CriticismShortlisted for the Christian Gauss Award, Phi Beta Kappa SocietyA history of the chapter from its origins in antiquity to todayWhy do books have chapters? With this seemingly simple...

A copiously illustrated global history of magic books, from ancient papyri to pulp paperbacks "A beautiful production: a typographic and calligraphic treat as treasurable as a rare magical text itself. Almost every page is filled with wonder."--Suzi...

In Walt Whitman and the American Reader, Greenspan casts Whitman as the central actor on the stage of nineteenth-century American literary culture--a culture redefining its democratic identity. Against the context of the major changes revolutionizing the...