A memoir, biography, work of history, and literary criticism all in one, this moving book tells the story of three exiled writers—Erich Auerbach, François Fénelon, and W. G. Sebald—and their relationship with the classics, from Homer to Mimesis.In a...

Sometime in her twenties, Jennifer De Leon asked herself, "What would you do if you just gave yourself permission?" While her parents had fled Guatemala over three decades earlier when the country was in the grips of genocide and civil war, she hadn't...

A noted black woman journalist recounts her experiences as an outsider in the newsroom of The Washington Post in the late 1980s. National ad/promo. Tour.

Microdoses of the straight dope, stories so true they had to be wrapped in fiction for our own protection, from the best-selling author of But What if We're Wrong?A man flying first class discovers a puma in the lavatory. A new coach of a small-town...

A one-of-a-kind anthology of American essays on a wide range of subjects by a dazzling array of mid-century writers at the top of their form—from Normal Mailer to James Baldwin to Joan Didion—selected by acclaimed essayist Phillip LopateThe three decades...

A stunning collection of essays and memoir from twice Booker Prize winner and international bestseller Hilary Mantel, author of The Mirror and the Light In 1987, when Hilary Mantel was first published in the London Review of Books, she wrote to the...

Why we must learn to tell new stories about our relationship with the earth if we are to avoid climate catastropheReading literature in a time of climate emergency can sometimes feel a bit like fiddling while Rome burns. Yet, at this turning point for...

An authoritative and comprehensive intellectual biography of the author of the Divine ComedyFor all that has been written about the author of the Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (1265–1321) remains the best guide to his own life and work. Dante's writings...

"The great poems, plays, novels, stories teach us how to go on living. . . . Your own mistakes, accidents, failures at otherness beat you down. Rise up at dawn and read something that matters as soon as you can."So Harold Bloom, the most famous literary...

Growing up in Bulgaria, Julia Kristeva was warned by her father not to read Dostoyevsky. "Of course, and as usual," she recalls, "I disobeyed paternal orders and plunged into Dosto. Dazzled, overwhelmed, engulfed." Kristeva would go on to become one of...

America's most original and controversial literary critic writes trenchantly about forty-eight masterworks spanning the Western tradition—from Don Quixote to Wuthering Heights to Invisible Man—in his first book devoted exclusively to narrative fiction.In...

An accessible introduction to a concept often considered impossibly abstruse, demonstrating its power as a conceptual tool in the twenty-first century.This volume in the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series offers a clear and concise introduction to a...

The social practice of tact was an invention of the nineteenth century, a period when Britain was witnessing unprecedented urbanization, industrialization, and population growth. In an era when more and more people lived more closely than ever before...

André Bernard has researched the stories behind more than one hundred of the most famous titles in the English language to produce a fascinating volume rich in literary anecdote and publishing lore. The Great Gatsby was almost titled Trimalchio in West...

A Kirkus Reviews Best Book of 2020 In this “uncommonly wonderful collection of essays” (Rain Taxi), Molly McCully Brown explores living within and beyond the limits of a body―one shaped since birth by cere- bral palsy, a permanent and often painful...

Compelling essays from one of today's most esteemed cultural criticsSpanning many historical and literary contexts, Moral Imagination brings together a dozen recent essays by one of America's premier cultural critics. David Bromwich explores the...

Unrevised and unpublished proof for the first U.S. edition that was to appear in February 1982. The work became White's best-selling publication. Sidney Nolan attempted to have its publication stopped.