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...

"No writer has better understood the mix of fear and possibility, peril and exuberance that's marked this new millennium." --Bill McKibben "An elegant reminder that activist victories are easily forgotten, and that they often come in extremely...

"In Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, Roy Scranton draws on his experiences in Iraq to confront the grim realities of climate change. The result is a fierce and provocative book."--Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth...

"All that can be done is for each one of us to invent our own ideal library of our classics." --from Why Read the Classics? Classics, according to Italo Calvino, are not only works of enduring cultural value, but also something much more personal:...

From the celebrated Ursula K. Le Guin, "a writer of enormous intelligence and wit, a master storyteller" (Boston Globe), the revised and updated edition of her classic guide to the essentials of a writer's craft. Completely revised and rewritten to...

The incomparable Rebecca Solnit, author of more than a dozen acclaimed, prizewinning books of nonfiction including Men Explain Things To Me, brings the same dazzling writing to the essays in The Encyclopedia of Trouble and Spaciousness; hailed by the Los...

In this remarkable blend of memoir and criticism, James Wood, the noted contributor to the New Yorker, has written a master class on the connections between fiction and life. He argues that of all the arts, fiction has a unique ability to describe the...

“All art and the love of art,” Victor Brombert writes at the beginning of the deeply personal Musings on Mortality, “allow us to negate our nothingness.” As a young man returning from World War II, Brombert came to understand this truth as he immersed...

The virulent anticommunist and author of The Group recounts her days in the New York, discussing the breakup of her first marriage, her move to Greenwich Village, the beginning of her literary career, and more.

An invaluable guide to the art and mind of Virginia Woolf, drawn from the personal record she kept over a period of twenty-seven years.Included are entries that refer to her own writing, and those that are relevant to the raw material of her work, and,...

"Profoundly searching, yet written with grace and lucidity. A distinguished historian and critic illuminates and answers one of the major problems of literary study in a work that will become and remain a classic."--W. Jackson Bate."Perkins writes...

In this searching and wide-ranging book, Timothy J. Reiss seeks to explain how the concept of literature that we accept today first took shape between the mid-sixteenth century and the early seventeenth, a time of cultural transformation. Drawing on...

"LaCapra offers an intriguing collection of essays to support both his enthusiasm for intellectual history . . . and his concern about the 'excesses' he finds in techniques and practices of the new social history. Admitting that the essays are polemical...

Now with more of Marina’s writing and a new foreword by #1 bestselling author R.F. Kuang. The instant New York Times bestseller and publishing phenomenon: Marina Keegan’s posthumous collection of award-winning essays and stories “sparkles with talent,...

To be a writer, Amitava Kumar says, is to be an observer. The twenty-six essays in Lunch with a Bigot are Kumar's observations of the world put into words. A mix of memoir, reportage, and criticism, the essays include encounters with writers Salman...