“The most revealing and subjectively penetrating assessment of Baldwin’s life yet published.” —The New York Times Book Review. “The first Baldwin biography in which one can recognize the human features of this brilliant, troubled, principled, supremely...

"This slim book--seven essays, punctuated by enigmatic, haunting paintings by Ana Teresa Fernandez--hums with power and wit."--Boston Globe "The antidote to mansplaining."--The Stranger "Feminist, frequently funny, unflinchingly honest and often scathing...

“On Immunity is a book I’ve recommended too many times to count―a searching, empathetic, ultimately unassailable argument, not just for vaccination but for thoroughly acknowledging our interdependence, and for all that becomes necessary and possible once...

100 Essays I Don't Have Time to Write is an incisive, idiosyncratic collection on life and theater from major American playwright Sarah Ruhl. This is a book in which chimpanzees, Chekhov, and child care are equally at home. A vibrant, provocative...

A National Review Top Ten Best Nonfiction Books of the Century One of Orwell s very best books and perhaps the best book that exists on the Spanish Civil War. The New Yorker In 1936, originally intending merely to report on the Spanish Civil War as a...

“Wonderful… Calvino’s prose is sparkling as ever, and he approaches ideas with wit and an open mind, always ready to challenge a stale point of view. This anthology will delight Calvino fans old and new.” —Publishers WeeklyA rich collection of essays...

Italo Calvino's brilliant reflection on what makes great literature, from the classics to more contemporary works, punctuated with personal details about Calvino's own writing processes. At the time of his death, Italo Calvino was at work on six...

Born in New York into a world of wealth and privilege, and writing with unique insight into the lives of the rich and fashionable, Edith Wharton was a best-seller in her time, and is now, again, one of the most widely read American authors. This book...

One of the largely untold stories of Orientalism is the degree to which the Middle East has been associated with "deviant" male homosexuality by scores of Western travelers, historians, writers, and artists for well over four hundred years. And this...

Crime fiction has been one of the most popular genres since the 19th century, but has roots in works as varied as Sophocles, Herodotus, and Shakespeare. In this Very Short Introduction Richard Bradford explores the history of the genre, by considering...

The widespread use of electronic communication at the dawn of the twenty-first century has created a global context for our interactions, transforming the ways we relate to the world and to one another. This critical introduction reads the fiction of the...

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • The highly acclaimed, provocative essay on feminism and sexual politics—from the award-winning author of Americanah "A call to action, for all people in the world, to undo the gender hierarchy." —MediumIn this personal,...

The Description for this book, The Auden Generation: Literature and Politics in England in the 1930s, will be forthcoming.

A Palestinian-Israeli poet declares a new state whose language, "Homelandic," is a combination of Arabic and Hebrew. A Jewish-Israeli author imagines a "language plague" that infects young Hebrew speakers with old world accents, and sends the narrator in...

From the author of Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, the New York Times Bestseller and Best Book of the Year at NPR, the Boston Globe, Newsweek, and many moreA collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched...

First published in 1976, Raymond Williams' highly acclaimed Keywords: A Vocabulary of Culture and Society is a collection of lively essays on words that are critical to understanding the modern world. In these essays, Williams, a renowned cultural...

A New Yorker writer revisits the seminal book of her youth--Middlemarch--and fashions a singular, involving story of how a passionate attachment to a great work of literature can shape our lives and help us to read our own histories. Rebecca Mead was a...

Much remains uncertain about the life of Edgar Allan Poe, the mysterious author of one of the best-known American poems, 'The Raven', the Gothic romance The Fall of the House of Usher, and the first detective fiction, The Murders in the Rue Morgue. This...

As the crisis of capitalism unfolds, the need for alternatives is felt ever more intensely. The struggle between radical movements and the forces of reaction will be merciless. A crucial battlefield, where the outcome of the crisis will in part...

A new, compelling collection of essays by Sven Birkerts, "one of America's most distinguished, eloquent servants of the poetry and fiction that matter" (Susan Sontag)Reading, the mind's traffic in signs and signifiers, is the most dynamic, changeful, and...