As a propagandist Claudian offers unique illumination of the intrigues inside and between the rival courts of Milan and Constantinople in the decisive years following the death of Theodosius the Great. As a poet, though a Greek by birth, he revived Latin...

"Many may remember the tale of Robert Johnson, the musician who sold his soul to the devil at the crossroads in exchange for being the best blues guitarist around. What many may not know is that after this tragic deal in Mississippi, Johnson ended up in...

Masters of the Air is the deeply personal story of the American bomber boys in World War II who brought the war to Hitler's doorstep. With the narrative power of fiction, Donald Miller takes readers on a harrowing ride through the fire-filled skies over...

Robert Fagles's translations of both the "Iliad" and "Odyssey" have sold hundreds of thousands of copies and become the standard translations of our era. Now, his stunning modern verse translation of Virgil's "Aeneid" is poised to do the same. This...

Preface by Richard Howard. Translated by Richard Miller. This is Barthes's scrupulous literary analysis of Balzac's short story "Sarrasine."

A vivid narration of the history of the tulip, from its origins on the barren, windswept steppes of central Asia to its place of honor in the lush imperial gardens of Constantinople, to its starring moment as the most coveted—and beautiful—commodity in...

Published in hardcover to outstanding acclaim on both sides of the Atlantic, and winner of the prestigious Commonwealth Writers Prize, Gould's Book of Fish is a marvelously imagined epic of nineteenth-century Australia -- a world of convicts and...

Reissued on the tenth anniversary of its publication, this classic work on our environmental crisis features a new introduction by the author, reviewing both the progress and ground lost in the fight to save the earth.This impassioned plea for radical...

Noam Chomsky is one of the most outspoken thinkers in the US and views the spread of a single global culture as resulting in a form of cultural imperialism from which only the Western world can truly benefit.

Homer's Odyssey is not the only version of the story. Mythic material was originally oral, and also local -- a myth would be told one way in one place and quite differently in another. I have drawn on material other than the Odyssey, especially for the...

In this book, in a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga lives an embittered old judge who wants to retire in peace when his orphaned granddaughter Sai arrives on his doorstep. The judge's chatty cook watches over her, but his...

Liberty and freedom: Americans agree that these values are fundamental to our nation, but what do they mean? How have their meanings changed through time? In this new volume of cultural history, David Hackett Fischer shows how these varying ideas form an...

In one of the most acclaimed novels in recent memory, Edward P. Jones, two-time National Book Award finalist, tells the story of Henry Townsend, a black farmer and former slave who falls under the tutelage of William Robbins, the most powerful man in...

The New Yorker staff writer Louis Menand's The Metaphysical Club is the winner of the Pulitzer Prize for History.A national bestseller and "hugely ambitious, unmistakably brilliant" (Janet Maslin, New York Times) book about the creation of modern...

Winner of the International Lannan Literary Award for NonfictionAnimal tracks, word magic, the speech of stones, the power of letters, and the taste of the wind all figure prominently in this intellectual tour de force that returns us to our senses and...

Negative Dialects is a phrase that flouts tradition. As early as Plato, dialectics meant to achieve something positive by means of negation; the thought figure of a 'negation of negation' later became the succinct term. This book seeks to free dialectics...

EDGAR AWARD NOMINEE • In this stunning debut novel, the first volume in Paul Auster’s acclaimed The New York Trilogy, an author determined to solve a mystery begins to descend into madness. “Remarkable . . . The book is a pleasure to read, full of...