Explores the moral debates that shape U.S. culture."We are arguing both that moral confusion is valuable and that more negotiation of morality is desirable and possible. This approach does not require a new universal moral order.... To be a nation that...

A provocative exploration of the impact of the human sciences on literature, politics, and cultureThe post-Darwinian theory of atavism forecasted obstacles to human progress in the reappearance of throwback physical or cultural traits after several...

Winner, 2021 NACCS Book Award, given by the National Association for Chicano and Chicana StudiesExplores the how, why, and what of contemporary Chicanx culture, including punk rock, literary fiction, photography, mass graves, and digital and experimental...

Challenging the tidy links among authorial position, narrative perspective, and fictional content, Stephen Hong Sohn argues that Asian American authors have never been limited to writing about Asian American characters or contexts. Racial Asymmetries...

Jameson’s first full-length engagement with Walter Benjamin’s work. The Benjamin Files offers a comprehensive new reading of all of Benjamin's major works and a great number of his shorter book reviews, notes and letters. Its premise is that Benjamin was...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From one of our most iconic and influential writers, the award-winning author of The Year of Magical Thinking: a timeless collection that reveals what would become Joan Didion's subjects, including the press, politics,...

How to Read African American Literature offers a series of provocations to unsettle the predominant assumptions readers make when encountering post-Civil Rights black fiction. Foregrounding the large body of literature and criticism that grapples with...

Hemingway's Quarrel with Androgyny confronts the entrenched mystique surrounding the hard drinker, bullfighter, and creator of characters steeled by their own code. Spilka stresses Hemingway's lifelong dependence on and secret identification with women,...

Terry Tempest Williams presents a sharp-edged perspective on the ethics and politics of place, spiritual democracy, and the responsibilities of citizen engagement. By turns elegiac, inspiring, and passionate, The Open Space of Democracy offers a fresh...

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice: There's no right way to keep a diary, but if there's an entertaining way, David Sedaris seems to have mastered it. If it's navel-gazing you're after, you've come to the wrong place; ditto treacly...

Winner of the National Book Award, the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry, and numerous other awards, C. K. Williams is one of the most distinguished poets of his generation. Known for the variety of his subject matter and the expressive intensity of his verse,...

In 2005, J.C. Hallman came across a scientific paper about “Pleistocene Rewilding,” a peculiar idea from conservation biology that suggested repopulating bereft ecosystems with endangered “megafauna.” The plan sounded utterly utopian, but Hallman liked...

In the view of David Leverenz, such nineteenth-century American male writers as Emerson, Hawthorne, Melville, Thoreau, and Whitman were influenced more profoundly by the popular model of the entrepreneurial "man of force" than they were by their literary...

Between the Civil War and World War I, David Leverenz maintains, the corporate transformation of American work created widespread desire for upward mobility along with widening class divisions. In his view, several significant narrative constructs,...

A generously illustrated training manual for reading images, discussing work by Félix Nadar, Roland Barthes, Fazal Sheikh, Susan Meiselas, and others.Paper Graveyards is neither a work of traditional art history nor one of literary criticism. It is not...

At the barricades: Forty years on the cutting edge of history Wilfred G Burchett.

The cultural battle known as the Quarrel of the Ancients and Moderns served as a sly cover for more deeply opposed views about the value of literature and the arts. One of the most public controversies of early modern Europe, the Quarrel has most often...

Book by Jay, Gregory S.

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • From the Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December comes a literary master class on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about ourselves—and our world today.LONGLISTED FOR THE...