We think of the nineteenth century as an active age–the age of colonial expansion, revolutions, and railroads, of great exploration and the Great Exhibition. But in reading the works of Romantic and Victorian writers one notices a conflict, what Stefanie Markovits terms “a crisis of action.”...
In this groundbreaking book, Jake Halpern embarks on a quest to explore the facinating and often dark implications of America’s obsession with fame. Traveling across the country, he visits a Hollywood home for aspiring child actors and enrolls in a training program for would-be celebrity...
Between 1905 and 1939 a conspicuously tall white man with a shock of red hair, dressed in a silk shirt and white linen trousers, could be seen on the streets of Onitsha, in Eastern Nigeria. How was it possible for an unconventional, boy-loving Englishman to gain a social status among the local...
In this searing novel, Caryl Phillips reimagines the life of the first black entertainer in the U.S. to reach the highest levels of fame and fortune.After years of struggling for success on the stage, Bert Williams (1874—1922), the child of recent immigrants from the Bahamas, made the radical...
No American poet has so swiftly and decisively transformed the course of poetry as Hart Crane. In his haunted, brief life, Crane fashioned a distinctively modern idiom that fused the ornate rhetoric of the Elizabethans, the ecstatic enigmas of Rimbaud, and the prophetic utterances and cosmic...
Is a book the same book–or a reader the same reader–the second time around? The seventeen authors in this witty and poignant collection of essays all agree on the answer: Never.
The editor of Rereadings is Anne Fadiman, and readers of her bestselling book Ex Libris will find this volume...
Named one of the Best Books of 2005 by The New York Times, The Washington Post Book World, The Boston Globe, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review, The Los Angeles Times Book Review, The New York Times Book Review, USA Today, Time, and New York magazine.
The Assassins’ Gate:...
“Insurgents and terrorists retain the resources and capabilities to sustain and even increase current level of violence through the next year.” This was the secret Pentagon assessment sent to the White House in May 2006. The forecast of a more violent 2007 in Iraq contradicted the repeated...
West African Literatures provides students with fresh, in-depth perspectives on the key debates in the field. The aim of this book is not to provide an authoritative, encyclopedic account, but to consider a selection of the region’s literatures in relation to prevailing discussions about...
This incisive study takes on one of the grimmest secrets in America’s national life—the history of lynching and, more generally, the public punishment of African Americans. Jacqueline Goldsby shows that lynching cannot be explained away as a phenomenon peculiar to the South or as the perverse...
One of our most accomplished literary artists, John Crowley imagines the novel the haunted Romantic poet Lord Byron never penned …but very well might have. Saved from destruction, read, and annotated by Byron’s own abandoned daughter, Ada, the manuscript is rediscovered in our time...
Vigilant Memory focuses on the particular role of Emmanuel Levinas’s thought in reasserting the ethical parameters for poststructuralist criticism in the aftermath of the Holocaust. More than simply situating Levinas’s ethics within the larger context of his philosophy, R. Clifton...
Literature of the city and the city in literature are topics of major contemporary interest. This volume enhances our understanding of Chaucer’s iconic role as a London poet, defining the modern sense of London as a city in history, steeped in its medieval past. Building on recent work by...
In each section of Michael Cunningham’s bold new novel, his first since The Hours, we encounter the same group of characters: a young boy, an older man, and a young woman. “In the Machine” is a ghost story that takes place at the height of the industrial revolution, as human beings confront...
In this fascinating book, New Yorker business columnist James Surowiecki explores a deceptively simple idea: Large groups of people are smarter than an elite few, no matter how brilliant—better at solving problems, fostering innovation, coming to wise decisions, even predicting the future.
With...
An investigation of how the idea of a public as a central fiction of modern life informs our literature, politics, and culture.
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...
A striking look at the Jewish rite-and at American Jews in all their diversity
Since its emergence here a century ago, the bar or bat mitzvah has become a distinctively American rite of passage, so much so that, in certain suburbs today, gentile families throw parties for their thirteen-year-olds,...
A stunning work of narrative nonfiction that asks: what is natural?
Now as never before, exotic animals and plants are crossing the globe, borne on the swelling tide of human traffic to places where nature never intended them to be. Bird-eating snakes from Australia hitchhike to Hawaii in the...
The external lives of Clark, a high school guidance counselor, and Charlotte, a bookkeeper, are utterly ordinary, but their interior lives are as bold and complex as abstract paintings colored by imagined possibilities, childhood joys and, more darkly, by deeply buried fears. When Clark rescues a...
Courting the Abyss updates the philosophy of free expression for a world that is very different from the one in which it originated. The notion that a free society should allow Klansmen, neo-Nazis, sundry extremists, and pornographers to spread their doctrines as freely as everyone else has come...
“A terrific production … American playwright Donald Margulies’ self-reflective, dream reverie comedy drama Brooklyn Boy is tough, insightful, bittersweet, funny and ultimately wise.”—The Hollywood Reporter
“Those who know Margulies’ plays will find his familiar themes here: the inevitable...
The Other American Drama proposes an alternative to the received history of American drama, the Eugene O’Neil/Arthur Miller/August Wilson line of development so familiar to readers of standard drama surveys. Robinson’s book discusses Gertrude Stein, Maria Irene Fornes, Adrienne Kennedy and Richard...
Peninsula of Lies is nonfiction mystery, set in a haunting gothic locale and peopled by fascinating and eccentric characters. Its hero and heroine is Dawn Langley Simmons, a British writer who lived in Charleston, South Carolina, during the 1960s and became the center of one of the most unusual...
This Companion provides an authoritative introduction to the historical, social and stylistic complexities of modern Irish culture. Readers will be introduced to Irish culture in its widest sense and helped to find their way through the cultural and theoretical debates that inform our understanding...
The Ethics of Mourning dramatically shifts the critical discussion of the lyric elegy from psychological economy to ethical responsibility. Beginning from a reevaluation of famously inconsolable mourners such as Niobe and Hamlet, R. Clifton Spargo discerns the tendency of all grief to depend at...
Plan of Attack is the definitive account of how and why President George W. Bush, his war council, and allies launched a preemptive attack to topple Saddam Hussein and occupy Iraq. Bob Woodward’s latest landmark account of Washington decision making provides an original, authoritative...
In this powerful sequence of TV images and essay, Claudia Rankine explores the personal and political unrest of our volatile new century
I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes
me the saddest. The sadness is not really about
George W. or our American optimism; the
sadness lives in the...
In 1955, a new student arrives at a small college in the Tennessee mountains. Chuck is shy, speaks English haltingly, and on the subject of his earlier life in Korea will not speak at all. Then he meets Katherine, a solitary young woman haunted by an episode in her past. Without knowing why, these...
On the lam for an act of violence against the American government, 25-year-old Jenny Shimada agrees to care for three younger fugitives whom a shadowy figure from her former radical life has spirited out of California.
One of them, the kidnapped granddaughter of a wealthy newspaper magnate in San...
This anthology of hardtofind primary documents provides a solid overview of the foundations of American media studies. Focusing on mass communication and society and how this research fits into larger patterns of social thought, this valuable collection features key texts covering the media studies...
Funny, moving, and utterly unique, Braving Home introduces us to five unforgettable modern American pioneers. When Jake Halpern was a cub reporter, he became obsessed with stories about “some outlandish and often hellish place inhabited by a handful of stalwarts who refused to leave.” His fellow...
This collection of essays and speeches by Richard H. Brodhead addresses issues of importance to institutes of higher learning and to those who participate in them. As the popular Dean of Yale College from 1993 to 2004, Brodhead was involved in every aspect of undergraduate education - curriculum,...
By turns, an elegy, a celebration, and a social history, The Last Fine Time is a tour de force of lyrical style. Verlyn Klinkenborg chronicles the life of a family-owned restaurant in Buffalo, New York, from its days as a prewar Polish tavern to its reincarnation as George & Eddie’s, a...
The Story of My Life, a remarkable account of overcoming the debilitating challenges of being both deaf and blind, has become an international classic, making Helen Keller one of the most well-known, inspirational figures in history. Originally published in 1903, Keller’s fascinating memoir...
In Harold Bloom’s New York Times bestselling Shakespeare: The Invention of the Human, the world’s foremost literary critic theorized on the authorship of the historic play Hamlet. In this engaging new stand-alone work, he offers a full and warmly personal account of the play itself,...
Who smells? Surveying nearly eighty novels written in the 1860s to answer that impolite question,Common Scents provides a new reading of Victorian values, particularly as they assess the relative merits of men and women, spirit and matter. In depictions of comparative encounters, the commonplace...
Always Albert hopes for rain. On rainy days Mrs. Crabtree takes him with her for taxi rides. So much better than walks.
One day – brilliantly sunny, for a surprise – Albert hops a taxi alone. More than one taxi, actually.
You will never guess where he goes!
A comprehensive collection of Whitman’s most beloved works of poetry, prose, and short stories
When Walt Whitman self-published Leaves of Grass in 1855 it was a slim volume of twelve poems and he was a journalist and poet from Long Island, little-known but full of ambition and poetic fire. To...
Introducing us to America’s first gay ministers and first female priests, hippie Jews and folk-singing Catholics, Oppenheimer demonstrates that this was an era of extraordinary religious vitality. Drawing on a rich range of archival material as well as interviews with many of the protagonists...
The critics unanimously agree that brilliant, award-winning reporter and bestselling author Steven Brill has written a powerful and sweeping narrative of the country in the first year of the September 12 era. As “the pages flutter” – marvels one critic – “in a race to learn the rest of...
Literary critic, poet and philologist as well as medievalist, with a particular interest in the powers and effects of poetic language, Marie Borroff brings the full range of her expertise to bear on problems of central importance in the poetry of Chaucer and his nameless contemporary, the Gawain...
Bush at War reveals in stunning detail how an untested president with a sweeping vision for remaking the world and war cabinet members often at odds with each other responded to the September 11 terrorist attacks and prepared to confront Iraq. Woodward’s virtual wiretap into the White House...
A novel of tremendous scope and beauty, The Translator tells of the relationship between an exiled Russian poet and his American translator during the Cuban missile crisis, a time when a writer’s words – especially forbidden ones – could be powerful enough to change the course of...
Dorothy is a retired schoolteacher who has recently moved to a housing estate in a small village. Solomon is a night-watchman, an immigrant from an unnamed country in Africa. Each is desperate for love. And yet each harbors secrets that may make attaining it impossible.
With breathtaking assurance...
Why do we so often speak of books as living, flourishing, and dying? And what is at stake when we do so? This habit of treating books as people, or personifying texts, is rampant in postwar American culture. In this bracing study, Amy Hungerford argues that such personification has become pivotal...
The hugely admired author of “The Last Fine Time” preserves and makes new the sights, smells, sounds, and poetry of country living. Klinkenborg reveals the beauty of the American landscape, not from a scenic overlook, but through a screened-in porch or from the window of a pickup driving down an...
The Sweet Hell Inside is the four-generation saga of the fascinating Harleston family of South Carolina, the progeny of a Southern gentleman and his slave, who rise from the ashes of the Civil War, cast off their blemished roots, and create a cultural dynasty during the 1920s Jazz Age.
Charter...
“If readers are to come to Shakespeare and to Chekhov, to Henry James and to Jane Austen, then they are best prepared if they have read Lewis Carroll and Edward Lear, Robert Louis Stevenson and Rudyard Kipling,” writes Harold Bloom in his introduction to this enchanting and much-needed anthology of...
What is genius? It is the trait, says Harold Bloom, of standing both of and above an age, the ancient principle that recognizes and hallows the God within us, and the gift of breathing life into what is best in every living person. Now, in a monumental achievement of scholarship, America’s...
We are obsessed with ‘barbarians’. They are the ‘not us’, who don’t speak our language, or ‘any language’, whom we depise, fear, invade and kill; for whom we feel compassion, or admiration, and an intense sexual interest; whose innocence or vigour we aspire to, and who have an...
