Donald Margulies uncovers the layers of a relationship between a photojournalist and foreign correspondent–once addicted to the adrenaline of documenting the atrocities of war, and now grounded in the couple’s Brooklyn loft. Photographer Sarah was seriously injured while covering the war in...
In Obama’s Wars, Bob Woodward provides the most intimate and sweeping portrait yet of the young president as commander in chief. Drawing on internal memos, classified documents, meeting notes and hundreds of hours of interviews with most of the key players, including the president, Woodward tells...
This beautiful collection from J. D. McClatchy holds up a mirror to the soul, considering heroic and human figures in poems that “balance mandarin wit with enormous learning, a fully twenty-first-century sensibility and a deft use of the demotic” (Bookpage).
http://www.amazon.com/Mercury-Dressing...
“Anguished, beautifully written… The Long Goodbye is an elegiac depiction of drama as old as life.” – The New York Times Book Review
From one of America’s foremost young literary voices, a transcendent portrait of the unbearable anguish of grief and the enduring power of familial...
Who knew big words and knew how to use them? Was he a charmer or an insufferable smart aleck—or maybe both? Mark Oppenheimer was just such a boy, his talent for language a curse as much as a blessing. Unlike math or music prodigies, he had no way to showcase his unique skill, except to speak like a...
This volume provides lively and authoritative introductions to twenty-nine of the most important British and Irish poets from Geoffrey Chaucer to Philip Larkin. The list includes, among others, Shakespeare, Donne, Milton, Wordsworth, Browning, Yeats and T. S. Eliot, and represents the tradition of...
“[An] engrossing survey of the history of childbirth.” ―Stephen Lowman, Washington Post
Making and having babies―what it takes to get pregnant, stay pregnant, and deliver―have mystified women and men throughout human history. The insatiably curious Randi Hutter Epstein journeys through history,...
The Cultural Front charts the extraordinary upsurge of cultural activity and theory in America that began during the Great Depression and embraced Disney animators and proletarian novelists alike, alongside Orson Welles, Duke Ellington, John Dos Passos, C. L. R James and Billie Holiday. Spawned by...
A landmark event in the world of music, Mozart’s seven major librettos have finally been translated in verse with a sparkling poetic quality that matches the magnificence of the originals. Beginning this epic endeavor with his translation of The Magic Flute, first introduced at the...
Starred Review. Alexander is now widely known as the poet who read her “Praise Song for the Day” at President Obama’s inauguration, but as this first retrospective volume attests, that poem was preceded by a substantial and varied body of work composed over the past 20 years. Alexander...
These electric poems are set in a Nabokovian landscape of memory in which real places, people, and things—the exploration of the Hudson River, Edwardian London, sunflowers, Chekhov, Harlem, decks of cards, the death of Solzhenitsyn, morpho butterflies—collide with the speaker’s own protean tale of...
How do minds cause events in the world? How does wanting to write a letter cause a person’s hands to move across the page, or believing something to be true cause a person to make a promise? In Actions and Objects, Jonathan Kramnick examines the literature and philosophy of action during the...
How can intense religious beliefs coexist with pluralism in America today? Examining the role of the religious imagination in contemporary religious practice and in some of the best-known works of American literature from the past fifty years, Postmodern Belief shows how belief for its own sake...
In this series of interlocking essays, which had their start as lectures inspired by the presidency of Barack Obama, Robert Burns Stepto sets canonical works of African American literature in conversation with Obama’s Dreams from My Father. The elegant readings that result shed surprising...
Introducing Alfonso Perplexon, hero of the epic fantasy tale Dormia!
Alfonso Perplexon is an unusual sleeper. He climbs trees, raises falcons, even shoots deadly accurate arrows, all in his sleep. No one can figure out why.
Then one evening a man arrives at Alfonso’s door, claiming to be Alfonso’s...
Jonathan Swift was the most influential political commentator of his time, in both England and Ireland. His writings are a major source for historians of the eighteenth century, as well as including some of the greatest works of satire in verse and prose. This volume presents wide-ranging new...
In the early years of the 1940s, as the nation’s young men ship off to combat, a city springs up, seemingly overnight in the fields of Oklahoma: the Van Damme airplane factory, a gargantuan complex dedicated to the construction of the necessary machinery of warfare. Laborers—mostly women—...
“What does it mean to say that we live in a secular age?” This apparently simple question opens into the massive, provocative, and complex A Secular Age, where Charles Taylor positions secularism as a defining feature of the modern world, not the mere absence of religion, and casts light on the...
The modernist period witnessed attempts to explain religious experience in non-religious terms. Such novelists as Henry James, Marcel Proust, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf and Franz Kafka found methods to describe through fiction the sorts of experiences that had traditionally been the domain...
The Elizabethan history play was one of the most prevalent dramatic genres of the 1590s, and so was a major contribution to Elizabethan historical culture. The genre has been well served by critical studies that emphasize politics and ideology; however, there has been less interest in the way...
The Familiar Enemy re-examines the linguistic, literary, and cultural identities of England and France within the context of the Hundred Years War. During this war, two profoundly intertwined peoples developed complex strategies for expressing their aggressively intimate relationship. This special...
Milton’s Words approaches John Milton in both an old and a new way, focusing on his genius with words: keywords - the keys to a text or a theory; words of sexual avoidance and distress; words of abuse; words of privilege because ‘Scripture’; big learned words; and cunning little words, easily...
This long-awaited Norton Critical Edition of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight includes Marie Borroff’s celebrated, newly revised verse translation with supporting materials not to be found in any other single volume.
The text is accompanied by a detailed introduction, an essay on the metrical form,...
This volume brings together Lee Patterson’s essays published in various venues over the past twenty-seven years. As he observes in his preface, ‘The one persistent recognition that emerged from writing these otherwise quite disparate essays is that whatever the text…and whoever the...
The Crimean War (1854-1856) was the first to be fought in the era of modern communications, and it had a profound influence on British literary culture, bringing about significant shifts in perceptions of heroism and national identity. Stefanie Markovits explores how mid-Victorian writers and...
A Village Life, Louise Glück’s eleventh collection of poems, begins in the topography of a village, a Mediterranean world of no definite moment or place:
All the roads in the village unite at the fountain.
Avenue of Liberty, Avenue of the Acacia Trees—
The fountain rises at the center of the...
The new field of theatre studies changed rapidly in the post-World War II, post-Sputnik expansion of higher education, driven by the expressive urgencies of the baby boom and the ferment of the revolutionary 1960s. Internationally focused, communicatively multilingual, and culturally provocative,...
How did a nation so famously associated with freedom become internationally identified with imprisonment? After the scandals of Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay, and in the midst of a dramatically escalating prison population, the question is particularly urgent. In this timely, provocative study,...
Keith—born in the 1960s to immigrant West Indian parents, raised primarily by his white stepmother—is in his forties, a social worker heading a Race Equality unit in London whose life has come undone: separated from his wife of twenty years (her family “let her go” for marrying a black man); kept...
Maggie Verver, a young American heiress, and her widowed father Adam, a billionaire collector of objects d’art, lead a life of wealth and refinement in London. They are both getting married: Maggie to Prince Amerigo, an impoverished Italian aristocrat, and Adam to the beautiful but penniless...
A Best Book of the YearSeed Magazine • Granta Magazine • The Plain-Dealer
In this fascinating and utterly engaging book, Carl Zimmer traces E. coli’s pivotal role in the history of biology, from the discovery of DNA to the latest advances in biotechnology. He reveals the many surprising and...
Becoming a Woman of Letters examines the various ways women writers negotiated the market realities of authorship, including the myths and models that women constructed to elevate their place in the profession. Some, like Harriet Martineau, adopted the practices of her male counterparts and...
In this new study, Marc Robinson explores more than two hundred years of plays, styles, and stagings of American theater. Mapping the changing cultural landscape from the late eighteenth century to the start of the twenty-first, he explores how theater has—and has not—changed and offers close...
Harlem’s nightclubs in the 1920s and ’30s were a crucible for testing society’s racial and sexual limits. Normally tacit divisions were there made spectacularly public in the vibrant, but often fraught, relationship between performer and audience. The cabaret scene, Shane Vogel contends, also...
“A deft literate narrative folded into a vaudevillian romp.”—Los Angeles Times
Donald Margulies aims to invigorate the imagination of theatergoers with a story about the nature of storytelling. Based on a Victorian hoaxer’s tale of being a castaway in the South Pacific—complete with buried treasure...
When Charlie Shade and Alice Bussard find each other, neither is prepared for the powerful, aching feeling of love that unites them. After falling for the cheerful and empathetic young man, Alice asks God: “Please, leave us alone. Leave us just like this.” But as their relationship evolves, and...
This Norton Critical Edition is the only one-volume edition that presents the full range of Swift’s writing, including not only the major literary prose works—Gulliver’s Travels, A Modest Proposal, and A Tale of the Tub—but also substantial poetic and political writings. The texts are...
The dramatic, untold story of how women battled blatant inequities in America’s legal system.
As late as 1967, men outnumbered women twenty to one in American law schools. With the loss of deferments from Vietnam, law schools admitted women to avoid plummeting enrollments. As women entered,...
Praise Song for the Day was commissioned for the inauguration of President Barack Obama. These inspiring words by award-winning poet Elizabeth Alexander celebrate all that has made America what it is today and challenge us—as individuals, as communities, as a nation—to continue working toward the...
While poetry has been the genre most closely associated with the Romantic period, the novel of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries has attracted many more readers and students in recent years. Its canon has been widened to include less well known authors alongside Jane Austen, Walter...
Professor Lee, an Asian-born mathematician nearing retirement age, would seem the last person likely to attract the attention of FBI agents. Yet after a popular young colleague becomes the latest victim of a serial bomber, Lee’s detached response and maladroit behavior lead the FBI, the national...
In the Anteroom of Divinity focuses on the persistence of Pseudo-Dionysian angelology in England’s early modern period. Beginning with a discussion of John Colet’s commentary on Dionysisus’ twin hierarchies, Feisal G. Mohamed explores the significance of the Dionysian tradition to the...
What we call American literature is quite often a shorthand, a simplified name for an extended tangle of relations.” This is the argument of Through Other Continents, Wai Chee Dimock’s sustained effort to read American literature as a subset of world literature.
Inspired by an unorthodox...
Charles II’s first and most important parliament sat for eighteen years without a general election, earning itself the sobriquet “Long.” In 1661 this parliament began in eager compliance with the new king. Gradually disillusioned by Charles’s maneuvers, however, its members came to demand more...
What is honor? Has its meaning changed since ancient times? Is it an outmoded notion? Does it still have the power to direct our behavior? In this provocative book Alexander Welsh considers the history and meaning of honor and dismisses the idea that we live in a post-honor culture. He notes...
Poetry. “When Alexander and Stefanon scrutinize the variegated surfaces of Romare Bearden’s art, the intensity of their gazes gives way to speech. In the blues of ‘Reclining Nude,’ Stefanon’s speaker discovers ‘I could hear / her holding / her breath.’ Alexander finds images that...
Jonathan Brody Kramnick’s book examines the formation of the English canon over the first two-thirds of the eighteenth century. Kramnick details how the idea of literary tradition emerged out of a prolonged engagement with the institutions of cultural modernity, from the public sphere and...
In this wide-ranging collection of stories, Derek Green takes readers on a tour of the world as America’s military-industrial complex reels into a new century. Written with grace, masterful precision and brutal honesty, New World Order shows us characters stripped of the familiar and forced to face...
In this original book, distinguished literary scholar and critic Paul H. Fry sharply revises accepted views of Wordsworth’s motives and messages as a poet. Where others have oriented Wordsworth toward ideas of transcendence, nature worship, or—more recently—political repression, Fry redirects...
In At Large and At Small, Anne Fadiman returns to one of her favorite genres, the familiar essay–a beloved and hallowed literary tradition recognized for both its intellectual breadth and its miniaturist focus on everyday experiences. With the combination of humor and erudition that has...
