In 1977, twenty years after the publication of his landmark poem "Howl," and Jack Kerouac's seminal book On the Road, Allen Ginsberg decided it was time to teach a course on the literary history of the Beat Generation. Through the creation of this...

10th anniversary revised edition with new IntroductionJames Wood's How Fiction Works is a scintillating study of the magic of fiction―an analysis of its main elements and a celebration of its lasting power.Here one of the most prominent and stylish...

David Sedaris returns with his most deeply personal and darkly hilarious book.If you've ever laughed your way through David Sedaris's cheerfully misanthropic stories, you might think you know what you're getting with Calypso. You'd be wrong. When he buys...

Named a Best Book of 2018 by New York Magazine, the Washington Post, Publisher's Weekly, NPR, and Time, among many others, this essay collection from the author of The Queen of the Night explores how we form identities in life and in art.As a novelist,...

Drawn from the acclaimed New Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, the articles in this concise new reference book provide a complete survey of the poetic history and practice in every major national literature or cultural tradition in the world...

An irreverent critical lexicon of academic life and culture The university: The very name evokes knowledge, culture, and the magnificently universal ambition at the heart of this essential institution. Bastions of free inquiry and a free society,...

The message of Virgil's Aeneid once seemed straightforward enough: the epic poem returned to Aeneas and the mythical beginnings of Rome in order to celebrate the city's present world power and to praise its new master, Augustus Caesar. Things changed...

Gerald Janecek describes the experiments in visual, literature conducted from 1900 to 1930, the heyday of the Russian Avant Garde. Focusing on an aspect of Russian literary history that has previously been almost ignored, he shows how Russian writers of...

A beautiful illustrated edition of Thoreau's classic treatise on man and nature. "Our life is frittered away by detail. . . . Simplicity, simplicity, simplicity!" Henry David Thoreau built his small cabin on the shore of Walden Pond in 1845. For the...

In this magisterial study of the relationship between illness and art, the best-selling author of An Unquiet Mind, Kay Redfield Jamison, brings an entirely fresh understanding to the work and life of Robert Lowell (1917-1977), whose intense, complex, and...

"At last, a scrupulous and sustained--'earsighted'--study of that shadowy yet vital intersection of sound and sense without which literary reading remains a disembodied exercise. . . . Stewart immerses us brilliantly in the poststructural method of a...

The first major twenty-first century history of four hundred years of black writing, The Cambridge History of African American Literature presents a comprehensive overview of the literary traditions, oral and print, of African-descended peoples in the...

In essays on matters literary, social, cultural, and personal, Mary Gaitskill explores date rape and political adultery, the transcendentalism of the Talking Heads, the melancholy of Björk, and the playfulness of artist Laurel Nakadate. She celebrates...

The New Historicism Reader documents the New Historicists' multiplex achievement, spanning Renaissance and Reagan studies, American realism, English romanticism, gender studies, feminism, and communications and rhetoric.Harold Veeser's introduction...

This half-memoir, half-philosophical treatise is a meditation on the art of translation, and its potential for activism and humanist engagement. Mireille Gansel grew up in the traumatic aftermath of her family losing everything--including their native...

NATIONAL BESTSELLERA Kansas City Star Best Book of the Year"Brilliant, meditative, and full of surprises, wisdom, and wonder."―Ann Lamott, author of Imperfect Birds"I am leaving you all my journals, but you must promise me you won't look at them until...

A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice Winner of the American Library in Paris Book Award, 2017Les Misérables is among the most popular and enduring novels ever written. Like Inspector Javert’s dogged pursuit of Jean Valjean, its appeal has never...

First published in 1993. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Stephen Greenblatt—Pulitzer Prize– and National Book Award–winning author of The Swerve and Will in the World—investigates the life of one of humankind’s greatest stories. Bolder, even, than the ambitious books for which Stephen Greenblatt is already...