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...

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...

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...

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...

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...

How you can enrich your life by becoming a more skillful and engaged reader of literatureWe are what we read, according to Robert DiYanni. Reading may delight us or move us; we may read for instruction or inspiration. But more than this, in reading we...

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...