"A true poem," Walt Whitman proclaimed in 1852, "is the daily newspaper"--and American culture was never the same again. Like a blast of cold air in a stuffy drawing room, Whitman's campaign to give artistic representation to gritty reality shocked the...

Charles Ferrall and Dougal McNeill's book analyses the vast literary response to the 1926 General Strike . The Strike not only drew writers into political action but inspired literature that served to shape twentieth-century British views of class,...

Hailed by the New York Times as a book that “examines the role that argument has played throughout history and how it has shaped human existence”“An invigorating reflection on the nature and value of disagreement. . . . Sharp and taut. . . . A lesson in...

A revelatory meditation on class and consumer culture, from 2022 Nobel laureate Annie ErnauxA New Yorker Best of the Week Pick • A World Literature Today Notable Translation of 2023“Translated from the French with great intelligence and sensitivity by...

A deep history of storytelling as a civic agency, recalibrating literature’s political role for the twenty-first centuryWhy did short narrative forms like the novella, fable, and fairy tale suddenly emerge around 1800 as genres symptomatic of...

How four American cities shaped Poe's life and writingsEdgar Allan Poe (1809–1849) changed residences about once a year throughout his life. Driven by a desire for literary success and the pressures of supporting his family, Poe sought work in American...

Named one of the 100 best nonfiction books of all time by the Modern LibraryAnne Carson’s remarkable first book about the paradoxical nature of romantic loveSince it was first published, Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson’s lyrical meditation on love in...

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in CriticismA leading trans scholar and activist explores cultural representations of gender transition in the modern periodIn Pleasure and Efficacy, Grace Lavery investigates gender transition as it...

From Charles Dickens’ London to today’s megacities, a fascinating exploration of what urban walking tells us about modern life—for fans of Rebecca Solnit, Olivia Laing’s The Lonely City, and literary history. “A labyrinthine journey into the literature...

The classic Vietnam memoir, as relevant today as it was almost thirty years ago.In March of 1965, Marine Lieutenent Philip J. Caputo landed at Da Nang with the first ground combat unit deployed to Vietnam. Sixteen months later, having served on the line...

A memoir from the New York Times bestselling author of Warning of War and Marines of Autumn, James Brady's The Scariest Place in the World.Half a century after he fought there as a young lieutenant of Marines, James Brady returns to the brooding Korean...

One of the New Yorker's Best Books of 2022Bill McKibben―award-winning author, activist, educator―is fiercely curious.“I’m curious about what went so suddenly sour with American patriotism, American faith, and American prosperity.”Like so many of us,...

“One of our most interesting and bold writers . . . [offers] a characteristically wild effort that defies genre distinctions, flits from the profound to the mundane with fierce intelligence and searching restlessness, and at its best, delves deep into...

From the New York Times bestselling author of the My Struggle series comes a collection of ambitious, remarkably erudite essays on art, literature, culture, and philosophy.In the Land of the Cyclops is Karl Ove Knausgaard's first collection of essays to...

An instant New York Times bestseller!“Informative, endlessly entertaining.”—BuzzFeed“Generation X’s definitive chronicler of culture.”—GQFrom the author of But What If We’re Wrong comes an insightful, funny reckoning with a pivotal decadeIt was long ago,...

Theodore Sampson begins his compelling study by arguing that Wallace Stevens' (1859-1955) poetry defies interpretation, that his long poems, particularly, remain too open-ended for rational paraphrase. Most critics of Stevens, faced with his...

Now reintroduced with the addition of a Paris Review interview with the Argentine author, The Narrow Act was singled out by Borges as "the best, the most intelligent, and most carefully done" of the many books about