NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • In this virtuosic, career-spanning collection, Martin Amis, "one of the most gifted novelists of his generation” (TIME), takes on James Joyce and Elvis Presley, Nabokov and English football, Jane Austen and...

For the past four decades Frank Kermode, critic and writer, has steadily established himself as one of the most brilliant minds of his generation. Questioning the public's harsh perception of 'the artist', Kermode at the same time gently pokes fun at...

This acclaimed short study, originally published in 1983, and now thoroughly updated, elucidates the varied theoretical contributions of Roland Barthes (1915-80), the 'incomparable enlivener of the literary mind' whose lifelong fascination was with the...

Illuminating essays on philsophy, literature, soceity, and art by one of Ireland's greatest witsOscar Wilde—witty raconteur, flamboyant hedonist, and self-destructive lover—is most familiar as the author of brilliant comedies, including The Importance of...

Susan Sontag’s celebrated essays on cancer and AIDS now available in one volume.In 1978, Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor, a classic work described by Newsweek as “one of the most liberating books of its time.” A cancer patient herself when she was...

Have we become beauty-blind? For two decades or more in the humanities, various political arguments have been put forward against beauty: that it distracts us from more important issues; that it is the handmaiden of privilege; and that it masks political...

What is the role of the senses in the creation and reception of poetry? How does poetry carry on the long tradition of making experience and suffering understood by others? With Poetry and the Fate of the Senses, Susan Stewart traces the path of the...

Perfectly balanced between humor and erudition, Ex Libris establishes Anne Fadiman as one of our finest contemporary essayists.Anne Fadiman is--by her own admission--the sort of person who learned about sex from her father's copy of Fanny Hill, whose...

Introduction by Ralph Waldo EmersonCommentary by Van Wyck Brooks and E. B. White Naturalist, philosopher, champion of self-reliance and moral independence, Henry David Thoreau remains not only one of our most influential writers but also one of our most...

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award in CriticismThe first comprehensive selection in any language of the non-fiction--much of it appearing here in English for the first time--of “one of literature’s most fertile and original minds” (San...

Poet and critic are well met, as one of our best writers on poetry takes up one of the world’s great poets.Where other books on the Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney have dwelt chiefly on the biographical, geographical, and political aspects of his writing,...

The Pulitzer Prize-winning view of the continent, across the fortieth parallel and down through 4.6 billion yearsTwenty years ago, when John McPhee began his journeys back and forth across the United States, he planned to describe a cross section of...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER • From the Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Pilgrim at Tinker Creek and one of the most compelling writers of our time comes a "beautifully written and delightfully strange" (Daily News) narrative that renews our ability to discover...

The Poet Laureate's clear and entertaining account of how poetry works."Poetry is a vocal, which is to say a bodily, art," Robert Pinsky declares in The Sounds of Poetry. "The medium of poetry is the human body: the column of air inside the chest, shaped...

Perceptive, funny, and nostalgic, E. B. White's stroll around Manhattan remains the quintessential love letter to the city, written by one of America's foremost literary figures. The New York Times has named Here is New York one of the ten best books...

In 1917 young Edward Estlin Cummings went to France as a volunteer with a Red Cross ambulance unit on the western front. But his free-spirited, insubordinate ways soon got him tagged as a possible enemy of La Patrie, and he was summarily tossed into a...

Best known as the author of twenty-six novels, Iris Murdoch has also made significant contributions to the fields of ethics and aesthetics. Collected here for the first time in one volume are her most influential literary and philosophical essays...

This collection of twelve essays aims to demonstrate that while example has a rich genealogy in the rhetorical tradition, it also involves issues that are central to current theories of meaning and ethics in literature and philosophy. Whatever is...