A revealing look at the power of speaking out, Writing in an Age of Silence describes Paretski’s coming of age in a time of great possibility, during the civil rights movement, the peace movement, and the women’s movement. Bestselling crime-writer Sarah...

Novelist and critic Colm Tóibín provides “a fascinating exploration of writers and their families” (Entertainment Weekly) and “an excellent guide through the dark terrain of unconscious desires” (The Evening Standard) in this brilliant collection of...

Ann Patchett and the late Lucy Grealy met in college in 1981, and, after enrolling in the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, began a friendship that would be as defining to both of their lives as their work. In Grealy’s critically acclaimed memoir, Autobiography...

Elliott demonstrates how America's first men of letters--Timothy Dwight, Joel Barlow, Philip Frenan, Hugh Henry Brackenridge, and Charles Brockden Brown--sought to make individual genius in literature express the collective genius of the American people...

Rhetoric is often seen as a synonym for shallow, deceptive language, and therefore as something negative. But if we view rhetoric in more neutral terms, as the 'art of persuasion', it is clear that we are all forced to engage with it at some level, if...

By the author who inspired Wes Anderson’s film, The Grand Budapest HotelWritten as both a recollection of the past and a warning for future generations, The World of Yesterday recalls the golden age of literary Vienna—its seeming permanence, its promise,...

“Groundbreaking in its call to reconsider our approach to the slow rhythm of time in the very concrete realms of environmental health and social justice.” —Wold Literature TodayThe violence wrought by climate change, toxic drift, deforestation, oil...

One of the enduring traditions of Western literary history, pastoral is often mischaracterized as a catchall for literature about rural themes and nature in general. In What Is Pastoral?, distinguished literary historian Paul Alpers argues that pastoral...

The internationally acclaimed novelist Siri Hustvedt has also produced a growing body of nonfiction. She has published a book of essays on painting (Mysteries of the Rectangle) as well as an interdisciplinary investigation of a neurological disorder (The...

A New York Times Editor's Choice A Los Angeles Times Book Prizes Finalist "A jaunty, insightful new book . . . [that] draws from disparate corners of history and science to celebrate our compulsion to storify everything around us."--New York TimesHumans...

Édouard Glissant, long recognized in the French and francophone world as one of the greatest writers and thinkers of our times, is increasingly attracting attention from English-speaking readers. Born in Martinique in 1928, Glissant earned a doctorate...

A New York Times Book Review Editors' ChoiceA New York Times BestsellerA New York Magazine Best Book of the YearAn Economist Best Book of the Year Pulitzer Prize–Winning Author of Gilead Marilynne Robinson has built a sterling reputation as a writer of...

Whether in family life, social interactions, or business negotiations, half the people in the world speak more than one language every day. Yet many myths persist about bilingualism and bilinguals. In a lively and entertaining book, an international...

The articles with which David Lodge entertained and enlightened readers of the Independent on Sunday and The Washington Post are now revised, expanded and collected together in book form.The art of fiction is considered under a wide range of headings,...

Published in conjunction with the PEN American Center, Burn This Book is a powerful collection of essays that explore the meaning of censorship and the power of literature to inform the way we see the world, and ourselves. As Americans we often take...

"Everything and nothing is sacred in Rebecca Brown's essays. Tongue, word, thought, and intellect all conspire in a free language love of living history, divination, sex, solitude and amusement. She is America's only real rock 'n' roll schoolteacher...

New York Times bestselling author Hilary Mantel, two-time winner of the Man Booker Prize, is one of the world’s most accomplished and acclaimed fiction writers. Giving Up the Ghost, is her dazzling memoir of a career blighted by physical pain in which...

Perhaps the most vitriolic attack ever launched on the American way of living—from politicians to professors to businessmen to Mom to sexual mores to religion—Generation of Vipers ranks with the works of De Tocqueville and Emerson in defining the...

Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Nonfiction • Winner of the National Book Award • New York Times Bestseller Renowned scholar Stephen Greenblatt brings the past to vivid life in what is at once a supreme work of scholarship, a literary page-turner, and a...

"All first-rate criticism first defines what we are confronting," the late, great jazz critic Whitney Balliett once wrote. By that measure, the essays of Christopher Hitchens are in the first tier. For nearly four decades, Hitchens has been telling us,...