Literary Essays

“Vivid . . . These stories, in which class divisions form impassable rifts and submission to the status quo comes at great psychic cost, have much to say about our contemporary reality." —The New York Times Book Review “What a gift to have these stories translated, finally, into English...

As any fan of Jo Walton's Among Others might guess, Walton is both an inveterate reader of SF and fantasy, and a chronic rereader of books. In 2008, then-new science fiction mega-site Tor.com asked Walton to blog regularly about her rereading—about all kinds of older fantasy and SF, ranging from acknowledged classics, to guilty pleasures, to forgotten oddities and gems. These posts have consistently been among the most popular features of Tor. Now this volume presents a selection of the best of them, ranging from short essays to long reassessments of some of the field's most ambitious series.

The Amputee’s Guide to Jules Verne is a listener's guide to every novel Jules Verne wrote; in that respect alone, there is no other book like it on the market. But it’s more than that. Nick DiMartino has included several essays evaluating Verne’s overall approach as a writer and the values embodied in his work. He has included as well a number of deeply personal essays about his struggles with the loneliness, pain, and lack of mobility that came with being an amputee.

This entertaining guide to some of the best short novels of all time, from a bestselling historian, is the “perfect gift for busy bibliophiles” (BookPage). Experience the joys of literature with this this “exciting guide to all that the world of fiction has to offer” (The New York Times...

CHOSEN AS ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: TIME, NPR, The New Yorker, Kirkus Reviews, Publishers Weekly As we witness monuments of white Western history fall, many are asking how is Shakespeare still relevant? Professor Farah Karim-Cooper has dedicated her career to the Bard, which is why she...

Longlisted for the National Book Award Winner of the Reading the West Book Award in Fiction Winner of the Writers' League of Texas Book Award in Fiction An extraordinary short story collection about community, home, betrayal, and forgiveness—from a writer whose “spellbinding, buoyant”*...

“Kate Zambreno has invented a new form. It is a kind of absolute present, real life captured in closeup.“ —Annie Ernaux, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature From “one of our most formally ambitious writers” (Esquire), a moving account of caretaking in a time of uncertainty and...

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.

Chickpeas to Cook is the story of the woman of the tribe, women from some of the smallest of communities, often no more than a few hundred families in Singapore. How do these women live, think, breathe? What does the Dawoodi Bohra woman answer, for instance, when she’s asked if her daughter...

Deeply humane, in turn wry and humorous, the stories in this collection haunt readers with their searing honesty.Lalitha, abused by her own mother, learns that bullies carry emotional traumas that scar everyone’s lives.Shiva Das confronts the truth of his own culpability when his adult special...

The fiction and reportage included in The Last Carousel, one of the final collections published during Nelson Algren’s lifetime, was written on ships and in ports of call around the world, and includes accounts of brothels in Vietnam and Mexico, stories of the boxing ring, and reminiscences of Algren’s beloved Chicago White Sox, among other subjects. In this collection, not just Algren’s intensity but his diversity are revealed and celebrated.

Sometimes, love is just an illusion. Sometimes, it becomes the sole purpose of your life. While stories on social media were trending, Raghu was lost in books. For him, even the idea of falling in love was limited to books-until he met Ruhi. As their love plays out against the backdrop of the...

An entertaining and informative guide to the most common 150 words even smart people use incorrectly, along with pithy forays into their fascinating etymologies and tangled histories of use and misuse. Even the most erudite among us use words like apocryphal, facetious, ironic, meteorite...

New Daughters of Africa has descriptive copy which is not yet available from the Publisher...

A.K. Ramanujan (1929-1993), one of India's finest poets, translators, folklorists, essayists and scholars of the twentieth century, is a stalwart in India's literary history. His translations of ancient Tamil and medieval Kannada poetry, as well as of UR Ananthamurthy's novel Samskara, are...

A deliciously compulsive first novel from New York Times Editor's Choice author of Lights On, Rats Out, Cree LeFavour's Private Means captures the very essence of summer in a sharply observed, moving meditation on marriage, money, and loss. It's Memorial Day weekend and Alice's beloved dog...

Lacing cultural criticism, Victorian literature, and storytelling together, "TOO MUCH spills over: with intellect, with sparkling prose, and with the brainy arguments of Vorona Cote, who posits that women are all, in some way or another, still susceptible to being called too much." (Esmé Weijun...

*SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2018 CROSSWORD JURY AWARD FOR NON FICTION* More than half of India is under the age of twenty-five and the country is set to have the youngest population in the world by 2021. But India's millennials are nothing like their counterparts in the West. In a world that's marked...

‘I am not sure that I am a man,’ said Yuvanashva. ‘I have created life outside me as men do. But I have also created life inside me, as women do. What does that make me? Will a body such as mine fetter or free me?’ Among the many hundreds of characters who inhabit the Mahabharata...

A brilliant biography of one of India’s greatest poets Mirza Mohammad Asadullah Khan Ghalib began writing poetry in Persian at the age of nine and the pre-eminent poet of the time, Mir, predicted a great future for the precocious genius when he was shown his verse. But success and material...