The landmark book that situates Blake’s poetry within the intellectual movements of his day and unlocks his symbolism for modern readersSince it was first published, Northrop Frye’s Fearful Symmetry has established itself as the defining commentary on...

What Thoreau can teach us about working—why we do it, what it does to us, and how we can make it more meaningfulHenry at Work invites readers to rethink how we work today by exploring an aspect of Henry David Thoreau that has often been overlooked:...

This second hardcover omnibus edition of Didion's collected nonfiction contains her final four books: Blue Nights, South and West, Let Me Tell You What I Mean, and her bestselling and most famous work, The Year of Magical Thinking.In her essay “Why I...

The moving story of the life and work of novelist Virginia Woolf, revealed through her own letters to those closest to her.Virginia Woolf is considered by many to be one of the greatest British writers and one of the foremost modernists of the twentieth...

A new intellectual biography of Goethe, examining the paradox of his thoughtJohann Wolfgang von Goethe (1749–1832) was a poet, a novelist, a scientist and an essayist on a dizzying range of topics. In the nineteenth century, he was widely regarded as one...

An engaging reassessment of the celebrated essayist and his relevance to contemporary readersMore than two centuries after his birth, Ralph Waldo Emerson remains one of the presiding spirits in American culture. Yet his reputation as the starry-eyed...

A New York Times Editors' Choice Book Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by Literary Hub and Goodreads A playful history of the humble index and its outsized effect on our reading lives. Most of us give little thought to the back of the book—it’s...

An exquisite, genre-defying new book from the Booker Prize–winning author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a reckoning with the author’s life and family, and the role of fiction in our times "A spectacular mixture of fierce energy and then control,...

Like Alexis de Tocqueville a century earlier, Jean Cocteau offers a powerful reminder to Americans of their own potential―and issues In 1949, Jean Cocteau spent twenty days in New York, and began composing on the plane ride home this essay filled with...

An account of criticism as an urgent response to what moves us.Criticism begins when we put down a book to tell someone about it. It is what we do when we face a work or event that bowls us over and makes us scramble for a response. As Michel Chaouli...

Finalist for the 2025 Wainwright Prize in Nature Writing"Extraordinary . . . Surprising at every turn and rewarding in ways you never expect."--Marlon James"An extraordinary, necessary book from a brilliant writer. A new song of the earth."--Robert...

The first translation of painter and writer Józef Czapski's inspiring lectures on Proust, first delivered in a prison camp in the Soviet Union during World War II.During the Second World War, as a prisoner of war in a Soviet camp, and with nothing but...

"There's a bridge of beautiful American prose--lyrical, powerful, fearlessly candid--running straight from James Baldwin to Thomas, who is obviously Baldwin's worthy heir . . . An utterly immersive book."--Francisco Goldman, author of the Pulitzer Prize...

Agatha Christie’s Secret Notebooks is the fascinating exploration of the contents of Agatha Christie’s long hidden notebooks, including illustrations, analyses, and two previously unpublished Hercule Poirot short stories. Not only will Christie’s legions...

Built on the grounds of a former cotton plantation, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, offered agricultural and industrial education as a strategy for Black self-determination. There--and in many other communities in the U.S. South,...

Hesiod describes himself as a Boeotian shepherd who heard the Muses call upon him to sing about the gods. His exact dates are unknown, but he has often been considered a younger contemporary of Homer.The first volume of this revised Loeb Classical...

Violence and the Sacred is René Girard's landmark study of human evil. Here Girard explores violence as it is represented and occurs throughout history, literature and myth. Girard's forceful and thought-provoking analyses of Biblical narrative, Greek...