A literary gem – a portrait from life of Franz Kafka – now with an ardent preface by Francine Prose, avowed “fan of Janouch’s odd and beautiful book.” Gustav Janouch met Franz Kafka, the celebrated author of The Metamorphosis, as a seventeen-year-old...

“I don’t know why we do it. We must be crazy./Welcome, fellow poet.”―Richard Hugo Richard Hugo, whom Carolyn Kizer called “one of the most passionate, energetic and honest poets living,” was that rare phenomenon―a distinguished poet who was also an...

'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.

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...

A New York Review Books OriginalAn uncompromising contrarian, a passionate polemicist, a man of quick wit and wide learning, an anarchist, a pacifist, and a virtuoso of the slashing phrase, Dwight Macdonald was an indefatigable and indomitable critic of...

A moving and exquisite testament to one of the literary world’s most celebrated marriages: that of the greatest playwright of our age, Harold Pinter, and the beautiful and famous prize-winning biographer Antonia Fraser.“Bold, intimate.... A deliciously...

It is considerably easier to say that modern philosophy began with Descartes than it is to define the modernity and philosophy to which Descartes gave rise. In Lines of Thought, Claudia Brodsky Lacour describes the double origin of modern philosophy in...

1989, trade paperback, Dartmouth/University Press of New England, Hanover. 251 pages. Absolutely gorgeous title, printed on superior stock, with impressive b&w and color plates displaying the absolute best standards of American printing. Examples from...

In his stunning essay Coldness and Cruelty Gilles Deleuze provides a rigorous and informed philosophical examination of the work of late nineteenth-century German novelist Leopold von Sacher-Masoch. Deleuze’s essay, certainly the most profound study yet...

Common as Air offers a stirring defense of our cultural commons, that vast store of art and ideas we have inherited from the past and continue to enrich in the present. Suspicious of the current idea that all creative work is "intellectual property,"...

In 1902, a nineteen-year-old aspiring poet named Franz Kappus wrote to Rainer Maria Rilke, then twenty-six, seeking advice on his poetry. Kappus, a student at a military academy in Vienna similar to the one Rilke had attended, was about to embark on a...

'The men of culture are the true apostles of equality.' Matthew Arnold's famous series of essays, which were first published in book form under the title Culture and Anarchy in 1869, debate important questions about the nature of culture and society that...

*Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in Criticism**A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice**A New York Times Top 10 Nonfiction Book of the Year, as selected by Dwight Garner*Geoff Dyer has earned the devotion of passionate fans on both...

A WONDROUS NEW BOOK OF MCPHEE'S PROSE PIECES―IN MANY ASPECTS HIS MOST PERSONAL IN FOUR DECADESThe brief, brilliant essay "Silk Parachute," which first appeared in The New Yorker a decade ago, has become John McPhee's most anthologized piece of writing...

As early as the 1850s, gaslight tempted New Yorkers out into a burgeoning nightlife filled with shopping, dining, and dancing. Electricity later turned the city at night into an even more stunning spectacle of brilliantly lit streets and glittering...

As this concluding volume of his moving and revealing memoirs begins, Elie Wiesel is forty years old, a writer of international repute. Determined to speak out more actively for both Holocaust survivors and the disenfranchised everywhere, he sets himself...

Richard Wright grew up in the woods of Mississippi, with poverty, hunger, fear, and hatred. He lied, stole, and raged at those around him; at six he was a "drunkard," hanging about taverns. Surly, brutal, cold, suspicious, and self-pitying, he was...