Literary History & Criticism

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER Now a major motion picture starring ACADEMY AWARD winner Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, and Joe Alwyn, directed by Chloé Zhao. The acclaimed author of the Reese's Book Club pick The Marriage Portrait...

Albert Camus' The Stranger is one of the most widely read novels in the world, with millions of copies sold. It stands as perhaps the greatest existentialist tale ever conceived, and is certainly one of the most important and influential books ever produced. Now, for the first time, this revered...

Paul Bäumer is just 19 years old when he and his classmates enlist. They are Germany’s Iron Youth who enter the war with high ideals and leave it disillusioned or dead. As Paul struggles with the realities of the man he has become, and the inscrutable world to which he must return, he is led...

Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Her life story is told in the documentary film And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS’s American Masters. Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird...

An intellectual detective story, this history audiobook directs probing questions at orthodox history, presenting disturbing new evidence that historians have tried - but failed - to explain....

Audie Award Winner, Personal Development, 2013 Author Benjamin Hoff shows that the philosophy of Winnie-the-Pooh is amazingly consistent with the principles of Taoism and demonstrates how you can use these principles in your daily life. Is there such thing as a Western Taoist? Benjamin Hoff says...

“BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY.” —Time “It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century.” —David Remnick, The New Yorker The Nobel Prize winner’s towering masterpiece of world literature...

After making his debut in The Killing Floor, Jack Reacher has quickly become one of the most popular―and most enduring―fictional heroes to emerge in the past half century. Now, his creator tells the stories behind the stories. These are the origin tales of all of the Reacher novels written...

“BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY.” —Time Volume 1 of the gripping epic masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn's chilling report of his arrest and interrogation, which exposed to the world the vast bureaucracy of secret police that haunted Soviet society. Features a new foreword by Anne...

The poems of the Poetic Edda have waited a long time for a modern English translation that would do them justice. Here it is at last (Odin be praised!). These amazing texts from a 13th-century Icelandic manuscript are of huge historical, mythological, and literary importance....

Notes of a Native Son inaugurated Baldwin as one of the leading interpreters of the dramatic social changes erupting in the United States in the 20th century, and many of his observations have proven almost prophetic....

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Will in the World reveals the daring and subversive life of Christopher Marlowe―Shakespeare’s contemporary, inspiration, and rival. In brutally repressive sixteenth-century England, artists had been frightened into dull conventionality; foreigners were...

The incomparable Mary Beard is back, and she’s talking all things classics.

A leading scholar draws on fifty years of reading and studying J.R.R. Tolkien to explain how he created an entire world.

Number one New York Times best-selling author Diana Gabaldon has captivated millions of listeners with her critically acclaimed Outlander novels, the inspiration for the Starz original series....

Sir Ian McKellen, fresh from his performance as Gandalf in Lord of the Rings, is Prospero, and heads a strong cast in Shakespeare’s last great play....

For over 40 years, Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan has inspired audiences to expand their world view beyond traditional Western forms....

Los Angeles, 1948: Easy Rawlins is a black war veteran just fired from his job at a defense plant....

In Thomas Ligotti's first nonfiction outing, an examination of the meaning (or meaninglessness) of life through an insightful, unsparing argument that proves the greatest horrors are not the products of our imagination but instead are found in reality. "There is a signature motif discernible in...

This magnificent novel - which secured for its author the 1955 Nobel Prize in Literature - is now available to contemporary American audiences. Although it is set in the early 20th century, it recalls both Iceland's medieval epics and such classics as Sigrid Undset's Kristin Lavransdatter. And...

Legendary writing teacher and author of The Anatomy of Story John Truby provides a guide to understanding the major genres of the story world.

In a time when our relationship to the natural world is ruled by the violence and greed of unbridled consumerism, Wendell Berry speaks out in these prescient essays, drawn from his 50-year campaign on behalf of American lands and communities. The writings gathered in The World-Ending Fire are...

The Heroine’s Journey describes contemporary woman’s search for wholeness in a society where she has been defined according to masculine values....

Tananarive Due, author of The Living Blood won the American Book Award and is praised as Stephen King's equal by Publishers Weekly. In The Good House, Due sets a story of ancient powers and modern retribution in a small Pacific Northwest town. When a young woman returns to her grandmother's...

When Walt Whitman self-published "Leaves of Grass" in 1855, he rocked the literary world and forever changed the course of poetry....

Emma Woodhouse is the most dangerous kind of reader: one who is intelligent enough to construct a coherent story from insufficient evidence, and confident enough never to question it. Jane Austen's Emma (1816) is, on its surface, a novel of country house society, matchmaking, and romantic misunderstanding. Below that surface runs one of the most precise philosophical investigations in English literature: an anatomy of self-deception so exact that it anticipates by a century the problems that would preoccupy psychology and epistemology in the twentieth century. Emma does not lie. She ...

Jane Austen's last novel — and her most radical. The one in which the heroine already knows everything the other heroines spend the book learning. Jane Austen completed Persuasion in 1816, less than a year before her death. It was published posthumously in 1818, alongside Northanger Abbey, and has been overshadowed by the louder novels ever since. It is quieter than Pride and Prejudice, less comic than Emma, less dramatic than Sense and Sensibility. It is also, by many measures, the most perfectly made thing Austen wrote. Anne Elliot is twenty-seven years old when the novel begins — old...

Ursula K. Le Guin witnessed and contributed to many of the twentieth century’s rebellions and upheavals, including women’s liberation, the Civil Rights movement and US anti-war and environmental activism. Spanning fifty years of her life and work, Space Crone brings together Le Guin’s writings on feminism and gender for the first time, offering new insights into her imaginative, multispecies feminist consciousness: from its roots in deep ecology and philosophies of non-violence to her self-education about racism and her writing on motherhood and ageing.

Anne Carson's remarkable first book about the paradoxical nature of romantic love Since it was first published, Eros the Bittersweet, Anne Carson's lyrical meditation on love in ancient Greek literature and philosophy, has established itself as a favorite among an unusually broad audience...

Every obsessive, destructive, unforgettable love interest in dark romance traces its DNA to Heathcliff. This is the edition that finally makes the source text fully readable. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights (1847) invented the dark romance hero before the category had a name. Heathcliff is not redeemable. He does not want to be. He returns from wherever he went transformed into something barely human, and spends the rest of his life methodically destroying everyone connected to the woman he loved — including her daughter, her memory, and himself. Modern dark romance has spent two ...

The four novels that gave American literature its voice — and two essays that explain why one of them changed everything. Mark Twain invented American literature twice. The first time was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876 — a boy's world of summer, caves, and the Mississippi River, told with the warmth of a man who remembered childhood as a country you could never return to. The second time was Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884, where the same river becomes a moving argument about freedom, race, and the cost of conscience. Hemingway said all modern American literature comes from...

Following his essential writing guide, This Year You Write Your Novel, award- winning author Walter Mosley delivers an eloquent treatise on the craft of fiction writing—part writing guide, part study of the mechanics of the genre. In his essential writing guide, This Year You Write Your Novel...

The greatest American novel ever written about obsession, the sea, and the thing that cannot be caught. This annotated edition includes an original critical essay and a full biography of Herman Melville. Herman Melville published Moby Dick in 1851 to near-total indifference. The reviews were mixed, the sales were poor, and Melville — who had poured everything he knew about whaling, philosophy, the Bible, and the darkness of the human will into 600 pages — spent the rest of his life in obscurity. He died in 1891 almost completely forgotten. Thirty years later, scholars rediscovered the ...

Seven novels. One writer. The most perfect intelligence in English fiction. Edited with afterwords by Henry Bugalho — philosopher, writer, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Published by Erato Press. This volume brings together every novel Jane Austen completed — the full measure of a writer who saw more clearly into the human heart than anyone before or since, and who did it in drawing rooms, with teacups, while the world pretended nothing serious was happening: ✦ Sense and Sensibility (1811) — Two sisters, two ways of navigating a world that offers women nothing but the ...

Most readers have heard of Ulysses. Few have actually read it. This edition is for both. Published in Paris in 1922, Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom through a single day in Dublin — June 16, 1904 — and in doing so dismantles every assumption about what a novel can be and do. Stream of consciousness, interior monologue, parody, myth, obscenity, tenderness, comedy: Joyce deploys them all simultaneously, not as technique but as necessity. He was not being difficult. He was being honest about the way a mind actually works. Ulysses — One day. One city. One man buying a kidney for breakfast, ...

By his longtime friend and a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, the definitive biography of Larry McMurtry, the legendary author and screenwriter of Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show, and Brokeback Mountain, who transformed our vision of the West. Before Larry McMurtry became one of the...

The most important literary biography in the English language — written by a novelist about a novelist, by a friend about a friend, and published four months after Charlotte Brontë's death. When Elizabeth Gaskell sat down in 1855 to write the life of Charlotte Brontë, she faced a problem no biographer had faced before: her subject was both a woman and a genius, in an age that was uncertain whether those two things could coexist. The woman who had written Jane Eyre — who had scandalized reviewers, been accused of coarseness and immorality, been suspected of being a man — needed to be...

Why the ongoing fascination with the ancient world? This witty, approachable book asks why—for better or (sometimes) worse—antiquity continues to exert such a powerful hold on the contemporary imagination. Recalling a formative childhood encounter with a four-thousand-year-old piece of bread in a museum, Beard introduces the idea of thauma, or wonder, that kick-started a lifetime engaging with classics.

Czeslaw Milosz Explained: Exile, Moral Witness, Poetry of History, Totalitarianism, Faith and Doubt, Memory, Identity, and the Search for Meaning in a Fractured World is a powerful and deeply engaging exploration of one of the twentieth century’s most important literary and philosophical voices. This book brings Milosz's complex ideas to life, guiding readers through his experiences of war, exile, and intellectual resistance while revealing how his poetry and essays continue to speak to modern readers searching for truth and meaning. Spanning themes such as totalitarianism, moral ...

Hermann Hesse Explained: Spiritual Awakening, Individuation, Eastern Philosophy, Inner Conflict, Self-Discovery, and the Search for Meaning in a Fragmented World Step into the profound world of Hermann Hesse, one of the most influential literary voices of the twentieth century, whose work continues to inspire readers searching for meaning, identity, and inner peace. This book explores Hesse’s major ideas in a clear, engaging, and accessible way, revealing how his novels speak directly to modern struggles with purpose, authenticity, and self-understanding. From the spiritual journey of ...

Thomas Mann Explained: Modernism, Moral Conflict, The Magic Mountain, Death in Venice, German Identity, Intellectual Crisis, and the Human Struggle Between Spirit and Life Step into the profound and intellectually rich world of Thomas Mann, one of the most influential literary voices of the twentieth century. This book offers a deep exploration of Mann’s life, major works, and enduring ideas, revealing how his writing captures the tension between tradition and modernity, reason and passion, individuality and society. From the decline of bourgeois culture to the psychological complexities ...

Octavio Paz Explained: Identity, Solitude, Mexican Culture, Surrealism, Language, Time, Love, Politics, and the Search for Meaning in Modern Life is a powerful and accessible deep dive into one of the twentieth century’s most influential thinkers and Nobel Prize winning writers. Blending philosophy, cultural analysis, and poetic insight, this book explores how Paz confronted the biggest questions of human existence: Who are we? Why do we feel alone? And how can we find meaning in a fragmented modern world? Through clear and engaging chapters, you will explore Paz’s groundbreaking ideas ...

Seamus Heaney Explained: Poetry of Place, Irish Identity, Memory, Language, Violence, Nature, History, and the Search for Meaning in a Changing World Discover the life, work, and enduring legacy of one of the most celebrated poets of the twentieth century. Seamus Heaney Explained offers a deeply engaging exploration of Heaney’s major ideas, tracing how his poetry transforms the everyday world of land, labor, and memory into something profound and universal. From his rural upbringing in Northern Ireland to his global influence as a Nobel Prize winning writer, this book reveals how ...

Rabindranath Tagore Explained: Poetry, Spiritual Humanism, Bengali Renaissance, Education Reform, National Identity, and the Universal Vision of Freedom and Creativity offers a powerful and accessible exploration of one of the most influential thinkers of the modern era. Winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature and a central figure in global intellectual history, Tagore’s work spans poetry, philosophy, education, music, and social thought. This book presents a clear and engaging guide to his major ideas, revealing how his vision continues to shape conversations about culture, identity, ...

Best known as the leader of the Harlem Renaissance, the celebrated poet and writer Langston Hughes believed in the power of art as resistance. What can we learn from his works today? Randal M. Jelks delivers this revelatory portrait of the celebrated poet, essayist, playwright, and American...

The most influential book in the English language — presented here with the critical apparatus its original translators deliberately withheld. The King James Bible of 1611 is the foundation of English prose style, the sourcebook of Western literature, the text that shaped four centuries of law, politics, art, and moral imagination. It is also, as its own translators knew, a translation made from imperfect sources, containing passages of disputed authenticity, interpolations introduced centuries after the original texts were written, and theological choices encoded as translation decisions...

William Shakespeare is the most celebrated writer in the history of the English language. He is also one of the least understood. We know almost nothing reliable about his actual life. The biographical record is so thin that the man who wrote Hamlet and King Lear left behind almost no letters, no diaries, no personal documents of any kind — only legal records about property transactions, a will that doesn't mention his plays, and a handful of signatures. Everything else is inference, imagination, and myth. William Shakespeare cuts through four centuries of mythology to examine seven ...

WINNER OF THE ELIZABETH AGEE PRIZE IN AMERICAN LITERATURE The American Open Road offers a rich exploration of how the mythos of the open road has shaped, and been shaped by, American culture. Beginning with the post–World War II boom that solidified car culture as central to American life...

Be Bak in a Whale: Reading Miss MacIntosh, My Darling from the Inside Marguerite Young spent eighteen years writing Miss MacIntosh, My Darling. Coral Russell has spent years reading it. This book is the record of five readings and everything they built. Be Bak in a Whale is not a reading guide and not a philosophical treatise. Those exist: A Guide to Reading Miss MacIntosh, My Darling holds readers hand through all eighty-two chapters; AND: The Philosophy of Marguerite Young names and argues for the five-pillar system Young built. This book goes inside the construction. It takes each of the...

A mysterious woman appears nightly at the bedside of a prince and sings to him until he falls sick with love for her. A determined hero tracks his beloved through several incarnations, struggling to win her back. A young warrior seeks a woman who turns into a swan. These are the plots of...