In her third collection of poems, Claudia Rankine creates a profoundly daring, ingeniously experimental examination of pregnancy, childbirth, and artistic expression. Liv, an expectant mother, and her husband, Erland, are at an impasse from her reluctance to bring new life into a bewildering world...
Since, 1990, Louise Glück has been exploring a form that is, according to poet Robert Hass, her invention. Vita Nova - like its immediate predecessors, a book-length sequence - combines the ecstatic utterance of The Wild Iris with the worldly dramas elaborated in Meadowlands. Vita Nova is a book...
Skeptical Music collects the essays on poetry that have made David Bromwich one of the most widely admired critics now writing. Both readers familiar with modern poetry and newcomers to poets like Marianne Moore and Hart Crane will relish this collection for its elegance and power of discernment....
This is a study of the “unofficial” side of African fiction — the largely undocumented writing, publishing, and reading of pamphlets and paperbacks — which exists outside the grid of mass production.
Stephanie Newell examines the popular fiction of Ghana produced since the 1930s, analyzing the...
Anne Fadiman is–by her own admission–the sort of person who learned about sex from her father’s copy of Fanny Hill, whose husband buys her 19 pounds of dusty books for her birthday, and who once found herself poring over her roommate’s 1974 Toyota Corolla manual because it...
Fascinating and mysterious, the idea of the harem long captured the imagination of the West. The Muslim practice of concealing the women of the household from the eyes of alien men tempted Europeans to extravagant projections of their own wishes and fears. This intriguing book examines the art that...
Straight West is a book of ninety exquisite and moving black and white photographs about the deep interior of the American West, a place whose people are defined by their relations to animals and the land. The country of Straight West is enormous, stretching from the Mexican border to Montana, but...
So it is for Pierce Moffett, would-be historian and author, who has moved from New York to the Faraway Hills, where he seems to discover―or rediscover―a path into magic, past and present. And so it is for Rosie Rasmussen, a single mother grappling with her mysterious uncle’s legacy and her...
A New York Times Notable Book of the Year
Twenty-five years ago, after Richard Nixon resigned the presidency, Gerald Ford promised a return to normalcy. “My fellow Americans, our long national nightmare is over,” President Ford declared.
But it was not. The Watergate scandal, and the remedies...
Dinner with Friends is a funny yet bittersweet examination of the married lives of two couples who have been extremely close for dozens of years. Although it seems to be treading on familiar ground, Dinner keeps changing its perspective to show how one couple’s breakup can have equally devastating...
This edition of Coleridge’s classic Romantic poem reprints the 1798 and 1817 texts along with critical essays, newly commissioned or revised for students, that read “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” from 5 contemporary critical perspectives: reader response, Marxist, psychoanalytic,...
In The Hours, Michael Cunningham, widely praised as one of the most gifted writers of his generation, draws inventively on the life and work of Virginia Woolf to tell the story of a group of contemporary characters struggling with the conflicting claims of love and inheritance, hope and despair....
Essayist, lecturer, and radical pamphleteer, William Hazlitt (1778-1830) was the greatest of English critics and a master of the art of prose. This book is a superb appreciation of the man and his works, at once a revaluation of the aesthetics of Romanticism and a sustained intellectual portrait....
Michael Warner, one of our most brilliant social critics, argues that gay marriage and other moves toward normalcy are bad not just for the gays but for everyone. In place of sexual status quo, Warner offers a vision of true sexual autonomy that will forever change the way we think about sex, shame...
“If art is to inspire us, we must not be too eager to understand. If we understand too readily, our understanding will, most likely, be meaningless. It will have no consequences. We must be patient with ourselves.” – Maria Irene Fornes
Edited by Marc Robinson, this casebook gathers new...
Small for his age, Wallace always wears a fireman’s hat so he won’t be lost in a crowd, but when his legs start growing out of proportion to his body, his mother is told by old Nanny Heppleweather that the hat must come off.
A landmark achievement as expansive, erudite, and passionate as its renowned author, this book is the culmination of a lifetime of reading, writing about, and teaching Shakespeare.
Preeminent literary critic-and ultimate authority on the western literary tradition, Harold Bloom leads us through a...
The most familiar assertion of Shakespeare scholarship is that he is our contemporary. Shakespeare After Theoryprovocatively argues that he is not, but what value he has for us must at least begin with a recognition of his distance from us.
In this study of the cultural pursuit of the end and what follows, Berger contends that every apocalyptic depiction leaves something behind, some mixture of paradise and wasteland. Combining literary, psychoanalytic, and historical methods, Berger mines these depictions for their weight and...
The sermon is the first and most enduring genre of American literature. At the center of the Puritan experience, it continued in succeeding centuries to play a vital role—as public ritual, occasion for passion and reflection, and, not least, popular entertainment. The fifty-eight sermons collected...
Queen Victoria was one of the most complex cultural productions of her age. In Royal Representations, Margaret Homans investigates the meanings Victoria held for her times, Victoria’s own contributions to Victorian writing and art, and the cultural mechanisms through which her influence was...
Although we know him as one of the greatest English poets, William Wordsworth might not have become a poet at all without the experience of personal and historical catastrophe in his youth. In Disowned by Memory, David Bromwich connects the accidents of Wordsworth’s life with the originality of his...
The highly acclaimed new play by the author of Sight Unseen and The Model Apartment.
Blue as the Lake maps out an African-American landscape unique in American literature. From Idlewild, the black resort on Lake Michigan where he vacationed as a child with his grandparents, to Oak Bluffs on Martha’s Vineyard, Robert Stepto traces a history of generations finding and making a...
Dido, Peter, Lulu, and others exercise their senses–seeing a walking stick, hearing the ice cream man, yelling, “Daddy!,” and dreaming in their sleep–in a vivid celebration of the many ways children see the world around them.
Mechanic Accents is a widely acclaimed study of American popular fiction and working-class culture. Combining Marxist literary theory with American labor history, Michael Denning explores what happened when, in the nineteenth century, working people began to read cheap novels and the “fiction...
John Rogers here addresses the literary and ideological consequences of the remarkable, if improbable, alliance between science and politics in seventeenth-century England. He looks at the cultural intersection between the English and Scientific Revolutions, concentrating on a body of work created...
A German Jewish girl whose life is destroyed by the atrocities of World War II … her uncle, who undermines the sureties of his own life in order to fight for Israeli statehood … the Jews of a 15th-century Italian ghetto . . Othello, newly arrived in Venice … a young Ethiopian...
In a fresh reading of Montaigne’s Essais, David Quint portrays the great Renaissance writer as both a literary man and a deeply engaged political thinker concerned with the ethical basis of society and civil discourse. From the first essay, Montaigne places the reader in a world of violent...
Slaves in the Family is the story of one man’s exploration of his family’s slave-owning past and his search for the descendants of the people his ancestors kept as slaves.
In 1698, Elias Ball traveled from his home in Devon, England to Charleston, South Carolina to take possession of his...
A New York Times Notable Book
Daring and fiercely original, The Women is at once a memoir, a psychological study, a sociopolitical manifesto, and an incisive adventure in literary criticism. It is conceived as a series of portraits analyzing the role that sexual and racial identity played in the...
While the term “liberalism” was not applied to political thought or political parties in England until the late eighteenth century, the author argues that its central ideas were formulated by seventeenth-century English writers in defiance of their society’s norms, and then transmitted to the...
When three-month-old Lia Lee Arrived at the county hospital emergency room in Merced, California, a chain of events was set in motion from which neither she nor her parents nor her doctors would ever recover. Lia’s parents, Foua and Nao Kao, were part of a large Hmong community in Merced,...
Rose is frightened by the strange noises emanating from the apartment upstairs, until she and her mother pay a visit to the noisy young boy who lives there.
In an astonishing book-length sequence, Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Louise Gluck interweaves the dissolution of a contemporary marriage with the story of The Odyssey. Here is Penelope stubbornly weaving, elevating the act of waiting into an act of will; here, too, is a worldly Circe, a divided...
This magisterial work links the literary and intellectual history of England, Scotland, Ireland, and Britain’s overseas colonies during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries to redraw our picture of the origins of cultural nationalism, the lineages of the novel, and the literary...
This edition features over three hundred letters, selected to best illustrate the complexity and textures of Hart Crane’s turbulent life –– from family pressures, to his creative ambition, to his homosexuality.
Harold Bloom’s The Anxiety of Influence has cast its own long shadow of influence since it was first published in 1973. Through an insightful study of Romantic poets, Bloom puts forth his central vision of the relations between tradition and the individual artist. Although Bloom was never the...
The English Literatures of America redefines colonial American literatures, sweeping from Newfoundland and Nova Scotia to the West Indies and Guiana. The book begins with the first colonization of the Americas and stretches beyond the Revolution to the early national period. Many texts are...
The colorful handmade costumes of beads and feathers swirl frenetically, as the Mardi Gras Indians dance through the streets of New Orleans in remembrance of a widely disputed cultural heritage. Iroquois Indians visit London in the early part of the eighteenth century and give birth to the “...
Drawing from essays, letters, journals and memoirs, this collection includes writers ranging from Thomas Mann to Joseph Brodsky.
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Winner of the 1993 PEN/Martha Albrand Award for First Non-Fiction, Proofs and Theories is an illuminating collection of essays by Louise Glück, whose most recent book of poems, The Wild Iris, was awarded the Pulitzer Prize. Glück brings to her prose the same precision of language, the same...
“Heroically brave, formidably learned… The Western Canon is a passionate demonstration of why some writers have triumphantly escaped the oblivion in which time buries almost all human effort. It inspires hope… that what humanity has long cherished, posterity will also.” –The New York Times Book...
This book argues that literature can be defined―pragmatist and historicist arguments notwithstanding―and that in its definition its unique value can be discovered. The author identifies literature ontologically as a sign of the preconceptual, as the “ostensive moment” that discloses neither the...
Includes: Found a Peanut, The Loman Family Picnic, The Model Apartment, What’s Wrong with This Picture?, and Sight Unseen.. With a palpable affection for the traditions of the stage and a taste for surreal comedy, Margulies “manages to transform what might have been kitchen-sink drama into...
In the two hundred years from 1475 London was transformed from a medieval commune into a metropolis of half a million people, a capital city, and a leading European trading center. Lawrence Manley provides a comprehensive account of the changing image and influence of London through its literature...
Examining Fielding’s sustained, often ambivalent engagement with questions of gender, this text breaks with critical commonplaces that contrast Fielding’s robust masculinity with Richardson’s feminine sensibilities. Arguing that a preoccupation with the tenuousness of gendered...
Using a variety of historical sources, Richard H. Brodhead reconstructs the institutionalized literary worlds that coexisted in nineteenth-century America: the middle-class domestic culture of letters, the culture of mass-produced cheap reading, the militantly hierarchical high culture of post-...
Phillips examines the transitions of a Caribbean nation from colonialism to a dubious state of independence through the experiences of Bertram Francis, a young man who leaves St. Kitts at the age of thirteen to study law on a coveted scholarship in England. Twenty years later he returns, chastened...
From the acclaimed author of Cambridge comes an ambitious, formally inventive, and intensely moving evocation of the scattered offspring of Africa. It begins in a year of failing crops and desperate foolishness, which forces a father to sell his three children into slavery. Employing a brilliant...
