"Not only an education but a joy. This is a book for the ages." --Rivka Galchen A monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith. The essay...

In Modernism, Mass Culture and Professionalism Thomas Strychacz argues that modernist writers need to be understood both in their relationship to professional critics and in their relationship to an era and ethos of professionalism. In studying four...

A powerful new volume of missives about combat by Alexander Hamilton, General Sherman, Evelyn Waugh, Kurt Vonnegut, and more, from the author of the bestselling Letters of Note collectionsDefeated Cossacks taunt the pompous sultan of the Ottoman Empire...

How did the avant-garde imagine its interconnected world? And how does this legacy affect our understanding of the global today?The writers and artists of the French avant-garde aspired to reach a global audience that would be wholly transformed by their...

The beloved New York Times bestselling author reflects on home, family, friendships and writing in this deeply personal collection of essays."The elegance of Patchett’s prose is seductive and inviting: with Patchett as a guide, readers will really get to...

Originally published in 1959, Advertisements for Myself is an inventive collection of stories, essays, polemic, meditations, and interviews. It is Norman Mailer at his brilliant, provocative, outrageous best. Emerging at the height of “hip,”...

A smart and hilarious memoir of privilege and excess told by the son of a powerful, seductive member of the New York elite.Ben Sonnenberg grew up in the great house on Gramercy Park in New York City that his father, the inventor of modern public...

A collection of essays on translation, foreign languages, Proust, and one French city, from the master short-fiction writer and acclaimed translator Lydia Davis In Essays One, Lydia Davis, who has been called “a magician of self-consciousness” by...

Poetry: An Introduction is an accessible and clearly written introduction to the structural and methodological principles underpinning poetry and its study. It aims to equip the student, researcher, and general reader with a body of technical information...

NPR • Best Books of 2021 Proudly introducing the Well-Read Black Girl Library Series, On Girlhood is a lovingly curated anthology celebrating short fiction from such luminaries as Rita Dove, Alice Walker, Toni Morrison, and more. “When you look over your...

The sweeping story of cartoons, comic strips, and graphic novels and their hold on the American imagination.Comics have conquered America. From our multiplexes, where Marvel and DC movies reign supreme, to our television screens, where comics-based shows...

With clear, conversational prose, this is the first book dedicated entirely to Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o’s writings on translation.Through his many critically acclaimed novels, stories, essays, plays, and memoirs, Kenyan writer Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o has been at the...

The first comprehensive history of the Catholic Church’s notorious Index, with resonance for ongoing debates over banned books, censorship, and free speech.For more than four hundred years, the Catholic Church’s Index Librorum Prohibitorum struck terror...

A funny and fascinating exploration of our reliance upon swear words, insults, and the artfully placed expletive, damn it.We use salty or artful language to win arguments, slander, cheat, and bully, as well as to express feelings of joy or frustration by...

"As the humanities in higher education struggle with a jobs crisis and declining enrollments, the travails of "English" have been especially acute and long-standing. No scholar has analyzed the discipline's contradictions as authoritatively as John...

Sharp and thought-provoking, this memoir-meets-cultural criticism upends the romanticism of the Great Plains and the patriarchy at the core of its ideals.For many Americans, Kansas represents a vision of Midwestern life that is good and wholesome and...

Excerpts from the novels, plays, and poems of the French convict, prostitute, and literary artist join notes from his film, The Penal Colony, letters, essays, and a rare interview, all edited by a contemporary biographer.

Wendell Berry has never been afraid to speak up for the dispossessed. The Need to Be Whole continues the work he began in The Hidden Wound (1970) and The Unsettling of America (1977), demanding a careful exploration of this hard, shared truth: The wealth...

'Quite simply, and quite ridiculously, one of the funniest and most illuminating books I have ever read. I thought I was obsessive, but Keith Kahn-Harris is playing a very different sport. He really has discovered the whole world in an egg.' Simon...

"Black women writers and critics are acting on the old adage that one must speak for oneself if one wishes to be heard." --Claudia Tate, from the introduction Long out of print, Black Women Writers at Work is a vital contribution to Black literature in...