A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice"[Calasso's] flow of associations leaves you feeling not out of your depth, but smarter and better read." --The New York Times Book ReviewThe eighth part of Roberto Calasso’s monumental series on the primal...

The definitive collection of literary essays by The New Yorker’s award-winning longtime book criticEver since the publication of his first essay collection, The Broken Estate, in 1999, James Wood has been widely regarded as a leading literary critic of...

From a "born storyteller" (Seattle Times), this playful and moving bestselling book of essays invites us into the miraculous and transcendent moments of everyday life. When Brian Doyle passed away at the age of sixty after a bout with brain cancer, he...

From the "astounding" (Entertainment Weekly), "spectacularly evocative" (The Atlantic), and "brilliant" (Los Angeles Times) author of the New York Times bestsellers The Recovering and The Empathy Exams comes a return to the essay form in this expansive...

A revolutionary memoir about domestic abuse by the award-winning author of Her Body and Other PartiesIn the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad, and a bold dissection of the mechanisms...

A New York Times Critic's Top Pick of the YearThis essential, enlightening, truly delightful collection shows one of our greatest writers parsing the political, artistic, and media landscape of the past three decades. These sixty-six essays and reviews,...

In Allegories of the Anthropocene Elizabeth M. DeLoughrey traces how indigenous and postcolonial peoples in the Caribbean and Pacific Islands grapple with the enormity of colonialism and anthropogenic climate change through art, poetry, and literature...

Finalist, National Book Award in NonfictionWinner, Massachusetts Book AwardA Book of the Year pick from Kirkus, BuzzFeed, and Literary Hub“The essays in this collection are restless, brilliant and short.…The brevity suits not just Walker’s style but his...

The canon of postwar American fiction has changed over the past few decades to include far more writers of color. It would appear that we are making progress―recovering marginalized voices and including those who were for far too long ignored. However,...

In Dickinson’s Nerves, Frost’s Woods, William Logan, the noted and often controversial critic of contemporary poetry, returns to some of the greatest poems in English literature. He reveals what we may not have seen before and what his critical eye can...

A coy tease, enchantress, adulteress, irresponsible mother, hard-hearted wife--such are the possible images of Penelope that Homer playfully presents to listeners and readers of the Odyssey, and that his narration ultimately contradicts or fails to...

This persuasive book describes the complex, often violent connections between body and voice in Ovid's Metamorphoses and narrative, lyric and dramatic works by Petrarch, Marston and Shakespeare. Lynn Enterline analyzes what happens when Renaissance...

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...

Featuring a new introduction, this updated edition of the New York Times bestselling classic by Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award–winning author and one of the most revered figures in American letters is “profound and priceless as guidance for...

Internationally recognized for its superior scholarship, Modern Fiction Studies was one of the first journals to publish articles on postcolonial studies. Since postcolonialism's inception, scholars have defined, clarified, and enriched its conceptions...

The Radical Twenties breaks with standard accounts of the period. Drawing on the work of DH Lawrence, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Townsend Warner, Ivor Gurney, Patrick Hamilton and others, John Lucas identifies the decade as a time of both political...

Claudia Brodsky marshals her equal expertise in literature and philosophy to redefine the terms and trajectory of the theory and interpretation of modern poetry. Taking her cue from Wordsworth's revolutionary understanding of “real language,” Brodsky...

“You will devour these beautifully written—and very important—tales of honesty, pain, and resilience” (Elizabeth Gilbert, New York Times bestselling author of Eat Pray Love and City of Girls) from fifteen brilliant writers who explore how what we don’t...

A selection of essays on writing and reading by the master short-fiction writer Lydia DavisLydia Davis is a writer whose originality, influence, and wit are beyond compare. Jonathan Franzen has called her “a magician of self-consciousness,” while Rick...

A captivating meditation on the power of the sentence by the author of Essayism, a 2018 New Yorker book of the year.In Suppose a Sentence, Brian Dillon, whom John Banville has called “a literary flâneur in the tradition of Baudelaire and Walter...