An alarming exposé of the new challenges to literary freedom in the age of social media—when anyone with an identity and an internet connection can be a censor.In That Book Is Dangerous!, Adam Szetela investigates how well-intentioned and often...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • The inspiration for the major motion picture Rebel in the Rye One of the most popular and mysterious figures in American literary history, the author of the classic Catcher in the Rye, J. D. Salinger eluded fans and journalists for...

"Mrs. Dalloway is a novel about almost everything. Virginia Woolf wrote in her diary: "I want to give life and death, sanity and insanity; I want to criticize the social system, and to show it at work, at its most intense." Edward Mendelson concedes that...

If you’re writing about your life in real time, are you inherently fucked? Over the years that Chloé Caldwell had been married and hoping to conceive a child, she’d read everything she could find on infertility. But no memoir or message board reflected...

My ignorance was on my side. I wasn’t afraid. I didn’t know what to be afraid of. I did one thing, I did another. I did what I now call crashing about. One day I started to write.This collection of Jamaica Kincaid’s nonfiction writing, including early...

Named a Recommended Read by The New YorkerA book of mischief and improvisation that answers fundamentalism with rage, music, and delight in this earth. A book of mischief and improvisation, The Salt of the Universe answers fundamentalism of all kinds...

The story of the international struggle to preserve Kafka’s literary legacy.Kafka’s Last Trial begins with Kafka’s last instruction to his closest friend, Max Brod: to destroy all his remaining papers upon his death. But when the moment arrived in 1924,...

Literature Among Discourses was first published in 1986. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions...

The life of the German-Jewish literary critic and philosopher Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) is a veritable allegory of the life of letters in the twentieth century. Benjamin’s intellectual odyssey culminated in his death by suicide on the Franco–Spanish...

The Origin of German Tragic Drama is Walter Benjamin’s most sustained and original work. It begins with a general theoretical introduction on the nature of the baroque art of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, concentrating on the peculiar...

A provocative, revelatory history of British Romanticism that examines the impact of the transatlantic slave economy on the lives and times of some of our most beloved poets—with urgent lessons for today"[P]owerful, revelatory. . . . [A]s a writer...

The years 1989–2008 were an era of neoliberal hegemony in US politics, economy, and culture. Post*45 scholar Adam Kelly argues that American novelists who began their careers during these years—specifically the post-baby boom generation of writers born...

Postwar French writers were at the vanguard of global literary innovation―from the experimental minimalism of the Nouveau Roman to the literary games of the OuLiPo―but less often appreciated is the extent to which they worked closely with US editors and...

"If you told Aiden Arata in 1995 that the internet would one day crown her the "meme queen of depression" and mega corporations would fly her to conferences to speak about commodifying one's emotions for views, she would have asked you what a meme was...

A meditation on time, violence, and chance by "one of America's most dazzling poets" (O, The Oprah Magazine)Fanny Howe's The Needle's Eye: Passing through Youth is a sequence of essays, short tales, and lyrics that are intertwined by an inner visual...

A "beginning," especially as embodied in much modern thought, is its own method, Edward Said argues in this classic treatise on the role of the intellectual and the goal of criticism. Distinguishing between "origin," which is divine, mythical, and...

That Sartre's study of Flaubert, The Family Idiot, is a towering achievement in intellectual history has never been disputed. Yet critics have argued about the precise nature of this novel, or biography, or "criticism-fiction" which is the summation of...