An engaging reassessment of the celebrated essayist and his relevance to contemporary readersMore than two centuries after his birth, Ralph Waldo Emerson remains one of the presiding spirits in American culture. Yet his reputation as the starry-eyed...

A New York Times Editors' Choice Book Named a Most Anticipated Book of 2022 by Literary Hub and Goodreads A playful history of the humble index and its outsized effect on our reading lives. Most of us give little thought to the back of the book—it’s...

An exquisite, genre-defying new book from the Booker Prize–winning author of The Narrow Road to the Deep North, a reckoning with the author’s life and family, and the role of fiction in our times "A spectacular mixture of fierce energy and then control,...

Like Alexis de Tocqueville a century earlier, Jean Cocteau offers a powerful reminder to Americans of their own potential―and issues In 1949, Jean Cocteau spent twenty days in New York, and began composing on the plane ride home this essay filled with...

An account of criticism as an urgent response to what moves us.Criticism begins when we put down a book to tell someone about it. It is what we do when we face a work or event that bowls us over and makes us scramble for a response. As Michel Chaouli...

Finalist for the 2025 Wainwright Prize in Nature Writing"Extraordinary . . . Surprising at every turn and rewarding in ways you never expect."--Marlon James"An extraordinary, necessary book from a brilliant writer. A new song of the earth."--Robert...

The first translation of painter and writer Józef Czapski's inspiring lectures on Proust, first delivered in a prison camp in the Soviet Union during World War II.During the Second World War, as a prisoner of war in a Soviet camp, and with nothing but...

When Agatha Christie died in 1976, at age eighty-five, she had become the world's most popular author. At the end of 2004, following the death of Christie's daughter, Rosalind, a remarkable legacy was revealed: seventy-three handwritten volumes of...

Built on the grounds of a former cotton plantation, the Tuskegee Institute, founded by Booker T. Washington, offered agricultural and industrial education as a strategy for Black self-determination. There--and in many other communities in the U.S. South,...

Hesiod describes himself as a Boeotian shepherd who heard the Muses call upon him to sing about the gods. His exact dates are unknown, but he has often been considered a younger contemporary of Homer.The first volume of this revised Loeb Classical...