Classic Essays

Few authors in America write with such sheer love of story, language, and imagination as T.C. Boyle, and nowhere is that passion more evident than in his inventive, wickedly funny, and widely praised short stories. In After the Plague, Boyle speaks of contemporary social issues in a range of...

The fourteen stories gathered here, which have appeared in The New Yorker, GQ, Harper's, McSweeney's, and Playboy, as well as in The O. Henry Prize Stories and Best American Stories volumes, display T. C. Boyle's imaginative muscle, emotional sensitivity and astonishing range. There are the...

The early fiction of one of the nation’s most celebrated writers, Truman Capote, as he takes his first bold steps into the canon of American literature Recently rediscovered in the archives of the New York Public Library, these short stories provide an unparalleled look at Truman Capote...

The buying and selling of citizenship has become a legitimate, thriving business in just a few years. Entrepreneurs are renouncing America and Europe in favor of tax havens in the Caribbean with the help of a cottage industry of lawyers, bankers, and consultants that specialize in expatriation...

“If Carpentier is ever to get a new reading in English, it should be now. . . . West’s translations . . . reintroduce English-language readers to this giant of Latin American fiction.” —Natasha Wimmer, The New York Review of Books The best-known book by Cuba’s most important...

When A.C. Bhaktivedanta Swami Srila Prabhupada entered the port of New York City on 17 September 1965, few Americans took notice–but he was not merely another immigrant. He was on a mission to introduce ancient teachings of Vedic India to mainstream America. Before Srila Prabhupada passed away...

This definitive and magnificent 10-volume unabridged translation is one of the rare English translations in full of the epic. Bibek Debroy makes the Mahabharata marvellously accessible to contemporary readers. Dispute over land and kingdom may lie at the heart of this story of war...

“Elegiac, funny, warm and wise, The Wisdom of Sheep will delight country folk and city dwellers alike.” —Katherine May A touching, wise and surprising chronicle of the rich inner lives of animals, drawn from Rosamund Young’s extraordinary lifetime as an organic farmer We talk a lot...

"Mani Ratnam’s Nayakan is among Time’s ‘100 Best Movies Ever’; and his Roja launched A.R. Rahman. For the first time ever, Mani Ratnam opens up here, to Baradwaj Rangan, in a series of freewheeling conversations— candid, witty, pensive, and sometimes combative—and looks back at these...

From the Nobel Prize winner and the acclaimed author of My Name is Red comes an engaging intellectual thriller and high romance set in Turkey about a young student whose life and identity is uprooted through the single act of reading a book. The protagonist of Orhan Pamuk's fiendishly...

A classic Faulkner novel which explores the lives of a family of characters in the South. An aging black who has long refused to adopt the black's traditionally servile attitude is wrongfully accused of murdering a white man...

Pulitzer Prize–winning literary critic Michiko Kakutani shares her enthusiasm for more than 100 books in a series of succinct, thought-provoking essays. “An ebullient celebration of books and reading.”—Publishers Weekly (starred review) “Books can connect people across time zones...

This volume brings together the best of Ruskin Bond’s prose and poetry. For over four decades, by way of innumerable novels, essays, short stories and poems, the author has mapped out and peopled a unique literary landscape. This anthology has selections from all of his major books and...

A powerful, award-winning novel that follows the lives of two women as democracy starts to crumble in Hong Kong. One summer morning, college roommates, Ah Lei and Panda, wake up with very different reactions to the night before. They have been chased and tear-gassed in the streets of their city...

A “brilliant and provocative” (The New Yorker) celebration of Melville’s masterpiece—from the bestselling author of In the Heart of the Sea, Valiant Ambition, and In the Hurricane's Eye One of the greatest American novels finds its perfect contemporary champion in Why Read Moby-Dick?...

Chanakya's Arthashastra is an unrivalled political treatise that has been used by scholars, academics and leaders across the world. In Chanakya and the Art of Getting Rich, Radhakrishnan Pillai brings out the inherent lessons from Arthashastra to present a strategic and practical way of...

Ruskin Bond’s simple characters, living amidst the lush forests of the Himalayan foothills, are remarkable for their quiet heroism, courage and grace, and age-old values of honesty and fidelity. Residents of nondescript villages and towns, they lead lives that are touched by natural beauty as...

In I Wonder as I Wander, Langston Hughes vividly recalls the most dramatic and intimate moments of his life in the turbulent 1930s. His wanderlust leads him to Cuba, Haiti, Russia, Soviet Central Asia, Japan, Spain (during its Civil War), through dictatorships, wars, revolutions. He meets and...

A powerful, timely, dazzling new collection of poems from Terrance Hayes, the National Book Award–winning author of Lighthead—to be published simultaneously with his latest work of literary criticism, Watch Your Language The three sections of Terrance Hayes’ seventh collection explore how...

From Senator Reverend Raphael G. Warnock, a sermon in the public square on the issues that plague us most Senator Reverend Raphael G. Warnock is a transformational voice in Congress and the pastor of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Ebenezer Baptist Church, and for the semiquincentennial of America...