There is an ever-present intensity to James Berger’s Prior through which the reader plummets. Full of complex and particular insight, by turns darkly comic and comically dark, these poems are as unafraid of regret and anger as they are of quick surprise and happiness. Prior testifies to what it...
An Enlarged Heart, the exquisitely written prose debut from prize-winning poet Cynthia Zarin, is a poignantly understated exploration of the author’s experiences with love, work, and the surprise of time’s passage. In these intertwined episodes from her New York world and beyond, she charts the...
Taking as its starting point a moving recollection of growing up in Leeds during the 1970s, Colour Me English broadens into a reflective, entertaining and challenging collection of essays and other non-fiction writing which ranges from the literary to the cultural and autobiographical.
Elsewhere,...
It is the astonishment of Louise Glück’s poetry that it resists collection. With each successive book her drive to leave behind what came before has grown more fierce, the force of her gaze fixed on what has yet to be imagined. She invented a form to accommodate this need, the book-length sequence...
There are many Dan Savages: the author of the Savage Love advice column, syndicated around the country; the radio essayist beloved by This American Life fans; the author of a best-selling book about his gay marriage, and another about his son’s open adoption; the prankster who ruined Rick Santorum’...
Based on 18 months of reporting, Woodward’s 17th book The Price of Politics is an intimate, documented examination of how President Obama and the highest profile Republican and Democratic leaders in the United States Congress attempted to restore the American economy and improve the federal...
Milton and Questions of History considers the contribution of several classic studies of Milton written by Canadians in the twentieth century. It contemplates whether these might be termed a coherent ‘school’ of Milton studies in Canada and it explores how these concerns might intervene in current...
In a reporting tour de force that made national headlines and The New York Times bestseller list, award-winning journalist Steven Brill takes an uncompromising look at the adults who are fighting over America’s failure to educate its children—and points the way to reversing that failure.
In a...
Most of the people around us belong to our world not directly, as kin or comrades, but as strangers. How do we recognize them as members of our world? We are related to them as transient participants in common publics. Indeed, most of us would find it nearly impossible to imagine a social world...
How did Victorians, as creators and viewers of images, visualize the politics of franchise reform? This study of Victorian art and parliamentary politics, specifically in the 1840s and 1860s, answers that question by viewing the First and Second Reform Acts from the perspectives offered by...
Marc Robinson, Edited and with an Introduction
Playwright and actor David Greenspan has been a leading figure in Manhattan’s downtown performance scene for over twenty years. His numerous accolades include a Guggenheim fellowship and four Obie Awards for his acting and writing, and most recently a fifth Obie for Sustained Achievement....
Alison Bechdel’s Fun Home was a pop culture and literary phenomenon. Now, a second thrilling tale of filial sleuthery, this time about her mother: voracious reader, music lover, passionate amateur actor. Also a woman, unhappily married to a closeted gay man, whose artistic aspirations simmered...
What do a whatchful fly and a weight-bearing whale have in common?
A grateful saint – a saint whose life of work and devotion to God wouldn’t have been the same without the loyalty. the friendship of a lion or a blackbird, an eagle or a deer.
Other saints in these stories – two of...
Bringing his perennially popular course to the page, Yale University Professor Paul H. Fry offers in this welcome book a guided tour of the main trends in twentieth-century literary theory. At the core of the book’s discussion is a series of underlying questions: What is literature, how is it...
“To be or not to be.” “My kingdom for a horse.” “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day.” How is it that Shakespeare is so well remembered? In this richly illustrated book, David Scott Kastan and Kathryn James explore Yale University’s extraordinary collection of works by or relating to...
Social and political change is impossible in the absence of gifted male charismatic leadership—this is the fiction that shaped African American culture throughout the twentieth century. If we understand this, Erica R. Edwards tells us, we will better appreciate the dramatic variations within both...
Ever since he returned from Dormia, Alfonso Perplexon has enjoyed sleeping like a normal person. No dropping off to sleep in the middle of school. No waking up at the top of a tree. In fact, no sleepwalking at all. But on a class trip to France, his sleeping self takes over and he finds himself...
In Translations of Authority in Medieval English Literature, leading critic Alastair Minnis presents the fruits of a long-term engagement with the ways in which crucial ideological issues were deployed in vernacular texts. The concept of the vernacular is seen as possessing a value far...
London has provided the setting and inspiration for a host of literary works in English, from canonical masterpieces to the popular and ephemeral. Drawing upon a variety of methods and materials, the essays in this volume explore the London of Langland and the Peasants’ Rebellion, of Shakespeare...
Modernism arose in a period of accelerating globalization in the late nineteenth century. Modernist writers and artists, while often loyal to their country in times of war, aimed to rise above the national and ideological conflicts of the early twentieth century in service to a cosmopolitan ideal....
This book presents the five poems that make up the entire literary legacy of the anonymous late-medieval poet best known as the author of “Sir Gawain and the Green Knight.” The translations open a window on a world of knightly adventure and Christian devotion six centuries removed from our own....
Winner of the 2012 James Holly Hanford Award, sponsored by the Milton Society of America
Our post-secular present, argues Feisal Mohamed, has much to learn from our pre-secular past. Through a consideration of poet and polemicist John Milton, this book explores current post-secularity, an emerging...
This poetic and compelling masterpiece is a heartbreaking look at a marriage and the way we now live. Full of shocks and aftershocks, By Nightfall is a novel about the uses and meaning of beauty, and the place of love in our lives.
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...
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,...
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 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...
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,...
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...
