How FBI surveillance influenced African American writingFew institutions seem more opposed than African American literature and J. Edgar Hoover's white-bread Federal Bureau of Investigation. But behind the scenes the FBI's hostility to black protest was...

A compelling intellectual and literary history of midcentury AmericaIn a midcentury American cultural episode forgotten today, intellectuals of all schools shared a belief that human nature was under threat. The immediate result was a glut of dense,...

With the same grace and lyrical precision that distinguish his vibrant short stories, James McPherson surveys the emotional upheaval of his last twenty-one years. From Baltimore, Maryland, to Cambridge, Massachusetts, to Iowa and Japan, Crabcakes...

One of America's most important writers takes on the arrest of Wayne Bertram Williams for the murder of twenty-eight black children in Atlanta to offer this searing indictment of the nation's racial stagnation. This edition of James Baldwin's classic...

This extensive collection of autobiographical writings by the author of The Turn of the Screw and The Portrait of a Lady offers a revelatory self-portrait and an inside glimpse into his famous family In 1911, deeply affected by the death of his brother...

In the beginning there was one language--one tongue that Adam used to compose the first poem, an elegy for Abel. "These days, no one bothers to ask about the tongue of Adam. It is a naive question, vaguely embarrassing and irksome, like questions posed...

WITH A TWO-PART INTERVIEW BETWEEN MARILYNNE ROBINSON AND PRESIDENT OBAMA THAT FIRST APPEARED IN THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKSThe incomparable Marilynne Robinson has delivered an impassioned critique of contemporary society—our addiction to technology, our...

In a meditation on the wisdom of the Vedas, Roberto Calasso brings ritual and sacrifice to bear on the modern worldIn this revelatory volume, Roberto Calasso, whom The Paris Review has called "a literary institution," explores the ancient texts known as...

An artistic discussion on the critical potential of African American expressive cultureIn a major reassessment of African American culture, Phillip Brian Harper intervenes in the ongoing debate about the “proper” depiction of black people. He advocates...

This is the first book to provide a sustained critical analysis of the literary-aesthetic dimension of French fascism--the peculiarly French form of what Walter Benjamin called the fascist "aestheticizing of politics." Focusing first on three important...

Considered an exemplar of "Art-for-Art's Sake" in Victorian art and literature, Walter Pater (1839-1894) was co-opted as a standard bearer for the cult of hedonism by Oscar Wilde, and this version of aestheticism has since been used to attack...

People have long imagined themselves as rooted creatures, bound to the earth—and nations—from which they came. In Rootedness, Christy Wampole looks toward philosophy, ecology, literature, history, and politics to demonstrate how the metaphor of the...

In this landmark work of journalism, Norman Mailer reports on the presidential conventions of 1968, the turbulent year from which today’s bitterly divided country arose. The Vietnam War was raging; Martin Luther King, Jr., and Robert F. Kennedy had just...

A haunting, magnificently written memoir by Ivan Doig about growing up in the American WestIvan Doig grew up in the rugged wilderness of western Montana among the sheepherders and denizens of small-town saloons and valley ranches. What he deciphers from...

A provacative collection of interviews with the guru of the Beat GenerationThe Job is William S. Burroughs at work, attacking our traditional values, condemning what he calls "the American nightmare," and expressing his often barbed views on Scientology,...

"Stern but compassionate, author Wendell Berry raises broader issues that environmentalists rarely focus on . . . In one sense Berry is the voice of a rural agrarian tradition that stretches from rural Kentucky back to the origins of human civilization...

An examination of the meaning of moral responsibility in literature and our everyday lives suggests that we live in a violated world that dismisses taboos. BOMC & History Alt. Reader's Subscription Main. First serial, The New York Times Book Review.

Cultural critic Fredric Jameson, renowned for his incisive studies of the passage of modernism to postmodernism, returns to the movement that dramatically broke with all tradition in search of progress for the first time since his acclaimed A Singular...

A New York Times Notable BookRereading her childhood diaries, Heidi Julavits hoped to find incontrovertible proof that she was always destined to be a writer. Instead, they “revealed me to possess the mind of a phobic tax auditor.” Thus was born a desire...