“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...

“Hear the dark liquor of her laughter rippling behind her sentences” in this magnetic memoir as it explores a journalist’s obsession with pop culture and the difficulty of navigating relationships as a Black woman through fanfiction, feminism, and...

The early 1890s through the late 1920s saw an explosion in serious long fiction by women in the United States. Considering a wide range of authors--African American, Asian American, white American, and Native American--this book looks at the work of...

In Theatrical Legitimation, Timothy Murray provides a post-structural analysis of three frameworks of 17th-century dramatic and literary criticism: authorship, patronage, and spectatorship. Discussing a wide range of primary materials from England and...

Here Thoreau's thoughts on freedom, which ring as true today as they did 150 years ago, have been gathered in a single volume.

A lively discussion of American and british poets, this book i both an appreciation of an and introduction to the important poetry of this century.

This book is an attempt to read the poems of Gaius Valerius Catullus in his own context; to look at the poet and his works against the cultural realities of the first century BC as recent advances in historical research allow us to understand them...

This perceptive study of a major cultural movement shows how Southern writers of 1930 t0 1955 tried to come to terms with Southern tradition, and discusses the resulting body of significant literature - fiction, poetry, memoirs, and historical writing.

A renowned critic, biographer, and Shakespeare scholar, Jonathan Bate provides in this Very Short Introduction a lively and engaging overview of the literature that Jorge Luis Borges called "the richest in the world." From the medieval "Hymn of Caedmon"...

2022 NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOKThe novelist, cultural critic, and indie icon serves up sometimes bitchy, always generous, erudite, and joyful assessments from the last thirty-five years of cutting edge film, art, and literature.“One of the most...