Literary 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...

A beautifully unconventional debut novel about a girl, a boy, and a satellite—and a bittersweet meditation on loneliness, alienation, and what it means to be human. Longlisted for Canada Reads, shortlisted for the Kobo Emerging Writer Prize for Literary Fiction and for Speculative Fiction...

A cross-cultural tale of two women brought together by the intersections of television and industrial agriculture, fertility and motherhood, life and love—the breakout hit by the celebrated author of A Tale for the Time Being and The Book of Form and Emptiness Ruth Ozeki’s mesmerizing debut...

Channeling the subversive and sharp-eyed voice showcased in her popular column for The Cut, Amil Niazi stylishly interrogates the aspirations of young adulthood, early middle age, motherhood, and life after ambition. Building off her wildly popular viral essays “Losing My Ambition” and...

Despite their phenomenal decades-long success, the Harry Potter novels have attracted relatively little attention from literary critics and scholars. This book challenges that oversight, assembling and foregrounding some of the best literary critical work by scholars trying to move the needle on these novels to reflect their importance to twenty-first-century literary culture. In Open at the Close, contributors consciously address Harry Potter primarily as a literary phenomenon rather than a cultural one.

Vidyan Ravinthiran was born in the north of England to Sri Lankan Tamils, and moved to the United States five years ago. Considering identity in both its political and psychological senses, he leaps adventurously between memoir and criticism, understanding his life through poetry, and vice versa. This electric, compelling hybrid memoir discovers a new way of writing about the self and also literature.

It is the evolution of Kali, from her origins as a Tantric Goddess to her metamorphosis into a divinity in mainstream religions, that the author captures brilliantly in this book...

“Slender but weighty. . . . What is moving about this novel is its embrace of what has always driven Kundera, the delicate state of living between being and nothingness.”— Boston Globe From the internationally acclaimed, bestselling author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, an...

From the New York Times bestselling author of The History of White People and Old in Art School, a finalist for the NBCC Award, comes a comprehensive new collection of essays spanning art, politics, and the legacy of racism that shapes American history as we know it. Throughout her prolific...

From the New York Times bestselling author of Circle of Friends and The Glass Lake comes This Year It Will Be Different, a stunning new work that brings us the magic and spirit of Christmas in fifteen stories filled with Maeve Binchy's trademark wit, charm, and sheer storytelling genius. Instead...

This national bestseller is "a significant contribution to discussions of the art of fiction and a necessary challenge to received views about whose stories are told, how they are told and for whom they are intended" (Laila Lalami, The New York Times Book Review). The traditional writing...

Emily Nemens’s Clutch follows a group of five friends as they navigate the biggest challenges of their lives, asking: When you’re hanging on by your fingernails, how can you extend a hand to the ones you love? As undergrads, Gregg, Reba, Hillary, Bella, and Carson formed the kind of rare...

In the uproarious sequel to Life Among the Savages, the author of The Haunting of Hill House confronts the most vexing demons yet: her children In the long out-of-print sequel to Life Among the Savages, Jackson’s four children have grown from savages into full-fledged demons. After bursting...

FINALIST FOR THE 2022 NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FOR FICTION WINNER OF THE 2023 ASPEN WORDS LITERARY PRIZE, AND THE 2023 O. HENRY PRIZE NAMED ONE OF THE NEW YORKER'S BEST BOOKS OF 2022 "An endlessly inventive and moving collection from a thrilling and capacious young talent." —Jess Walter, author of...

In this outstanding collection, essayist Christopher Hitchens's works are shared–a must-have for Hitchens completists seeking a further understanding of his brilliant mind. Anthologized here for the first time, A Hitch in Time is a choice selection of Christopher Hitchens’s finest reviews...

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE NEW YORKER LONGLISTED FOR THE CENTER FOR FICTION FIRST NOVEL PRIZE AND THE VCU CABELL FIRST NOVELIST AWARD “If you read one debut novel in 2022, this should be it.” —Los Angeles Times In the bustling streets and cloistered homes of Lagos, a cast of...

""A truly excellent novel. . . . The morbidly fascinating little twists of human existence are all here: love, sex, life and death, beauty and horror—the works."" — Chicago Sun-Times In The Book of Jamaica, Russell Banks explores the complexities of political life in the Caribbean and its...

Now available for the first time in audio as a digital download, a selection of stories from Grace Paley. Whether writing about relationships, little girls, loving and bickering couples, angry suburbanites, frustrated job-seekers, or Jewish children performing a Christmas play, GRACE PALEY...

This is Virginia Woolf’s first collection of essays, published in 1925. In them, she attempts to see literature from the point of view of the ‘common reader’ - someone whom she, with Dr Johnson, distinguished from the critic and the scholar. She read, and wrote, as an outsider: a woman set to school in her father’s library, denied the educational privileges of her male siblings - and with no fixed view of what constitutes ‘English literature’. What she produced is an eccentric and unofficial literary and social history from the 14th to the 20th centuries.

The Tashkent-born Russian-American literary critic, editor, essayist, and journalist Vladislav Davidzon has been covering post-Soviet Ukraine for the past ten years, a tumultuous time for that country and the surrounding world. In late 2015, a year and a half after the 2014 Revolution swept away the Moscow-leaning kleptocratic President Viktor Yanukovich, Davidzon and his wife founded a literary journal, The Odessa Review. This eagerly anticipated debut tells the real story of what happened in Ukraine from the keen and resilient perspective of an observer at its center.