Classic Essays

From one of the world's most beloved and outspoken public intellectuals comes an illuminating book on the nature of criticism "Readers will be surprised, stimulated, instructed, impressed."―The New Yorker “What is a beginning? What must one do in order to begin? What is special about...

Mary Karr told the prize-winning tale of her hardscrabble Texas childhood with enough literary verve to spark a renaissance in memoir. The Liar's Club rode the top of The New York Times bestseller list for more than a year, and publications ranging from The New Yorker to People picked it as one...

The Great Republic is Sir Winston Churchill's personal vision of American history, from the arrival of the first European settlers to the dawn of the Cold War, edited by his grandson, the historian and journalist Winston S. Churchill. The book is a magnificent retelling of the American story...

At a time when speculative fiction seems less and less far-fetched, Margaret Atwood lends her distinctive voice and singular point of view to the genre in a series of essays that brilliantly illuminates the essential truths about the modern world. This is an exploration of her relationship with...

Daniel is a young Métis man searching for a way to exist in a world of lateral violence, intergenerational trauma and systemic racism. Facing obstacles of his own at every turn, he observes and learns from the lived realities of his family members, friends, teachers and lovers. He finds hope in...

A Penguin Classic First published in 1938, this volume of stories collected with the encouragement of his longtime editor Pascal Covici serves as a wonderful introduction to the work of Nobel Prize winner John Steinbeck. Set in the beautiful Salinas Valley of California, where simple people farm...

Dionne Brand’s hypnotic, urgent long poem is about the bones of fading cultures and ideas, about the living museums of spectacle where these bones are found. At the centre of Ossuaries is the narrative of Yasmine, a woman living an underground life, fleeing from past actions and regrets, in a...

WINNER OF THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD AND THE PRIX DU MEILLEUR LIVRE ÉTRANGER The Centaur is a modern retelling of the legend of Chiron, the noblest and wisest of the centaurs, who, painfully wounded yet unable to die, gave up his immortality on behalf of Prometheus. In the retelling, Olympus...

Pathemata, Or, The Story of My Mouth is an experiment in interiority written in the pandemic studio. Something of a companion piece to 2009’s Bluets, Pathemata merges a pain diary chronicling a decade of jaw pain with dreams and dailies, eventually blurring the lines between embodied...

NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE NATIONAL BESTSELLER NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY PEOPLE AND USA TODAY A NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK Nobody blows smoke like Nick Naylor. He’s a spokesman for the Academy of Tobacco Studies–in other words, a flack for cigarette companies...

Sparky Sweets, PhD, and Wisecrack proudly present this outrageously funny, ultra-sharp guide to literature based on the hit online series, Thug Notes. Inside, you'll find hilarious plot breakdowns and masterful analyses of sixteen of literature's most beloved classics, including: Things Fall...

Before email, when long distance telephone calls were difficult and expensive, people wrote letters, often several each day. Today, those letters provide an intimate and revealing look at the lives and loves of the people who wrote them. When the author is a brilliant writer who lived an...

Brilliant and original, A Thousand Years of Good Prayers introduces a remarkable new writer whose breathtaking stories are set in China and among Chinese Americans in the United States. In this rich, astonishing collection, Yiyun Li illuminates how mythology, politics, history, and culture...

The twenty-fifth-anniversary edition of the groundbreaking classic, with a new introduction First published in 1993, on the one-year anniversary of the Los Angeles riots, Race Matters became a national best seller that has gone on to sell more than half a million copies. This classic treatise on...

Following on the Giller Prize-nominated and Governor General's Literary Award-winning success of Ru, Kim Thúy's latest novel is a triumph of poetic beauty and a moving meditation on how love and food are inextricably entwined. Mãn has three mothers: the one who gives birth...

An unprecedented collection of the visionary Argentine writer’s meditations on the mystical realm Jorge Luis Borges immersed himself and his readers in metaphysical fantasies—playing reason against faith, belief against logic. His profound knowledge of eastern religions was an endless...

A bestselling historian takes readers on an intellectual and cultural adventure, offering a carefully curated guide to great, short nonfiction works by some of the world’s most influential writers—from Plato to Toni Morrison, Ernest Hemingway to bell hooks, and Marcus Aurelius to Joan Didion...

On the heels of the bestseller success of her novel The Wedding, Dorothy West, the last surviving member of the Harlem Renaissance, presents a collection of essays and stories that explore both the realism of everyday life, and the fantastical, extraordinary circumstances of...

Award-winning playwright, screenwriter, and director David Mamet shares his “smart, addictive, hilarious, and insightful” (Breitbart) tales from his four decades in Hollywood where he worked with some of the biggest names in movies. David Mamet went to Hollywood on top—a super successful...

Award-winning master critic Robert Gottlieb takes a singular and multifaceted look at the life of silver screen legend Greta Garbo, and the culture that worshiped her. “Wherever you look in the period between 1925 and 1941,” Robert Gottlieb writes in Garbo, “Greta Garbo is in people’s...