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...

"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...

Now available in paperback, an insightful exploration and moving meditation on identity, art, and belonging from one of the most celebrated writers of the last decade. What happens when we begin to consider stories at the margins, when we grant them...

A collection that brings together Spivak's wide-ranging writings on translation for the first time. Living Translation offers a powerful perspective on the work of distinguished thinker and writer Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, revealing how, throughout...

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award for NonfictionFinalist for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography“An exhilarating romp through Orwell’s life and times and also through the life and times of roses.” —Margaret Atwood“A...

Roberto Calasso, "a literary institution of one" (The Paris Review), tells the story of the eternal life of Utnapishtim, the savior of man, in the eleventh part of his great literary project.A long time ago, the gods grew tired of humans, who were making...

A stunning philosophical and literary account of canonical plague talesMany are the losses suffered and lives lost during the recent COVID-19 pandemic. Since 2020, writers around the globe have penned essays and books that make sense of this medical and...

A groundbreaking biography of Milton’s formative years that provides a new account of the poet’s political radicalizationJohn Milton (1608–1674) has a unique claim on literary and intellectual history as the author of both Paradise Lost, the greatest...

Albert Bates Lord here offers an unparalleled overview of the nature of oral-traditional epic songs and the practices of the singers who composed them. Shaped by the conviction that theory should be based on what singers actually do, and have done in...

Now includes a new essay, “Naked Childhood,” about Kushner’s family, their converted school bus, and the Summers of Love in Oregon and San Francisco!“The Hard Crowd is wild, wide-ranging, and unsparingly intelligent throughout.” —Taylor Antrim, VogueFrom...

Winner of the 2022 American Academy of Religion Award for Excellence (Constructive-Reflexive Studies). For decades, scholars have been calling into question the universality of disciplinary objects and categories. The coherence of defined autonomous...

Following Clifford Geertz and other cultural anthropologists, the New Historicist critics have evolved a method for describing culture in action. Their "thick descriptions" seize upon an event or anecdote--colonist John Rolfe's conversation with...

“A Horse at Night is like light from a candle in the evening: intimate, pleasurable, full of wonder. It asks us to consider fiction as life and life as fiction. Amina Cain is our generous, gentle guide through an exquisite library. A truly beautiful book...

When Walt Whitman published Leaves of Grass in 1855, he dreamed of inspiring a "race of singers" who would celebrate the working class and realize the promise of American democracy. By examining how singers such as Woody Guthrie, Bob Dylan, and Bru

"In this study of a significant period of modern British literature, Sebastian D. G. Knowles argues that Modernism did not expire in 1939, to return as Contemporary Literature in 1945. Rather than marking a hiatus in British literature, the Second World...

Richly illustrated with images from Art Spiegelman’s Maus (“the most affecting and successful narrative ever done about the Holocaust” —The Wall Street Journal), Maus Now includes work from twenty-one leading critics, authors, and academics—including...

How meaning works—from monkey calls to human language, from spoken language to sign language, from gestures to music—and how meaning is connected to truth.We communicate through language, connecting what we mean to the words we say. But humans convey...

This important new collection of interdisciplinary essays sets out to chart the cultural construction of "ethnicity" as embodied in American ethnic literature. Looking at a diverse set of texts, the contributors place the subject in broad historical and...

An examination of remedies for violent rage rediscovered in ancient Greek mythsMillennia ago, Greek myths exposed the dangers of violent rage and the need for empathy and self-restraint. Homer’s Iliad, Euripides’ Hecuba, and Sophocles’ Ajax show that...

A collection of brief, but intimate meditations on life and culture ranging from controversial matters to private moments The internationally acclaimed author Claudio Magris offers a collection of brief "snapshots" reflecting on life and...