Essays on literature, pop culture, and more from the cult novelist and critic Tom McCarthyFifteen brilliant essays written over as many years provide a map of the sensibility and critical intelligence of Tom McCarthy, one of the most original and...

National Best SellerOn a post-college visit to Florence, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Jhumpa Lahiri fell in love with the Italian language. Twenty years later, seeking total immersion, she and her family relocated to Rome, where she began to read and...

Offering a new framework for the cultural study of globalization, Modernity at Large shows how the imagination works as a social force in today's world, providing new resources for identity and energies for creating alternatives to the nation-state,...

Finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism#1 Book of the Year from Brain PickingsNamed a best book of the year by NPR, Newsweek, Slate, Pop Sugar, Marie Claire, Elle, Publishers Weekly, and Lit HubA dazzling work of biography,...

A window onto the lives of the Romantic poets through the re-creation of one legendary night in 1817.The author of the highly acclaimed Posthumous Keats, praised as “full of…those fleeting moments we call genius” (Washington Post), now provides a window...

A deeply personal reflection from the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Namesake that explores the art of the book jacket from the perspectives of both reader and writer. How do you clothe a book? Probing the complex relationships between text and...

A radically new way of thinking about form and context in literature, politics, and beyondForms offers a powerful new answer to one of the most pressing problems facing literary, critical, and cultural studies today—how to connect form to political,...

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...

More than two decades of letters from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century—the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial—to the people in his life, from his years as a student in Prague in the early 1900s to his final months in the...

More than two decades of letters from one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century—the author of The Metamorphosis and The Trial—to the people in his life, from his years as a student in Prague in the early 1900s to his final months in the...

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...

Is the Bible one book or a collection of writings? If it is a book, does it stand as a coherent piece of literature? Building on the recently renewed interest in biblical narrative associated with Erich Auerbach, Northrop Frye, and Robert Alter, Gabriel...

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...

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...