E. M. Forster's guide sparkles with wit and insight for contemporary writers and readers. With lively language and excerpts from well-known classics, Forster (author of A Passage to India, Howards End, and A Room With a View) takes on the seven elements...

This book unites the disciplines of literature and history in an attempt to set the writings of Andrew Marvell in their seventeenth-century context of revolutionary upheaval and counter-revolution. Marvell is seen as a representative figure, illustrating...

From “one of America’s most significant young poets” (Lyn Hejinian), an exceptional book of nonfiction and fables that provides a walking tour of the creative mind.In Wonderful Investigations, Dan Beachy-Quick broaches “a hazy line, a faulty boundary”...

"This is criticism at its best." ―Carolyn Kellogg, Los Angeles TimesWriting in the tradition of Susan Sontag and Elaine Scarry, Maggie Nelson has emerged as one of our foremost cultural critics with this landmark work about representations of cruelty and...

"A beautiful, intelligent book that renders pain both ordinary and extraordinary into art."—Susanna Sonnenberg, San Francisco Chronicle In 2007, during the months before Nick Flynn’s daughter’s birth, his growing outrage and obsession with torture,...

A decade ago in the Times Literary Supplement, Roderick Conway Morris claimed that “almost everything that was going to happen in book publishing―from pocket books, instant books and pirated books, to the concept of author’s copyright, company mergers,...

New York holds a special place in America's national mythology as both the gateway to the USA and as a diverse, vibrant cultural center distinct from the rest of the nation. From the international atmosphere of the Dutch colony New Amsterdam, through the...

“One of the most significant literary personalities in the world.”—Italo Calvino   Georges Perec, author of the highly acclaimed Life: A User’s Manual, was only forty-six when he died in 1982. Despite a tragic childhood, during which his mother was...

She felt rather inclined just for a moment to stand still after all that chatter, and pick out one particular thing; the thing that mattered . . .—Virginia Woolf, To The LighthouseAn illuminating exploration of how seven of the greatest English novels of...

"Unlike Freud, I do not claim that religion is just an illusion and a source of neurosis. The time has come to recognize, without being afraid of 'frightening' either the faithful or the agnostics, that the history of Christianity prepared the world for...

A manual to show practicing physicians and medical students how to make use of short stories to help their patients adapt to their illnesses and participate in their treatment. For most people, the quickest route to wisdom, other than experience, is...

Current global tensions and the spread of terrorism have resurrected in the West a largely negative perception of Islamic society, an ill will fueled by centuries of conflict and prejudice. Shedding light on the history behind these hostile feelings,...

An unforgettable, illuminating story of how men live and how they survive, from the acclaimed New York Times bestselling author of Cutting for Stone When Abraham Verghese, a physician whose marriage is unraveling, relocates to El Paso, Texas, he hopes...

'Culture and Domination' challenges the claim of traditional hermeneutics that culture is a realm of meaning and value set apart from social relations of domination and power. In this forceful critical reassessment of hermeneutics, Marxism, and...

What is literary theory? Is there a relationship between literature and culture? In fact, what is literature, and does it matter? These are some of questions addressed by Jonathan Culler in this Very Short Introduction to literary theory. Often a...

Here, in this compelling assembly of writings, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Annie Dillard explores the world of natural facts and human meanings.

The description for this book, The Princeton Companion to Classical Japanese Literature, will be forthcoming.

Beginning with a historical account of why animal stories pose endemic critical challenges to literary and cultural theory, Animal Stories argues that key creative developments in narrative form became inseparable from shifts in animal politics and...

W. H. Auden's emigration from England to the United States in 1939 marked more than a turning point in his own life and work--it changed the course of American poetry itself. The Age of Auden takes, for the first time, the full measure of Auden's...