Literary Essays

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...

With Virginia Woolf as a guide, the stories of eight radical 20th century women--wanderers, rebels, explorers, mentors--who made a life for themselves in spite of everything. Everything that changed in the 20th century changed more dramatically for women. Her Own Voice tells the stories of eight...

""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...

When Paul Auster was asked to join NPR's Weekend All Things Considered program to tell stories, he turned the proposition on its head: he would let the stories come to him. He invited listeners to submit brief, true-life anecdotes about events that touched their lives. And so the National Story...

A superb collection of fifteen stories by an American master, E. L. Doctorow—the author of Ragtime, The March, The Book of Daniel, and Billy Bathgate He has been called “a national treasure” by George Saunders. Doctorow’s great topic, said Don DeLillo, is “the reach of American...

NATIONAL BESTSELLER NEW YORK TIMES EDITORS' CHOICE NAMED A BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR BY VOGUE, ELLE, AND ELECTRIC LITERATURE WINNER OF THE LAMBDA LITERARY DUGGINS PRIZE "Hypnotic...a haunting romance about desire, obsession, and ambition that is sure to get your heart rate up." —Time Magazine "R.O...

Jack Kerouac’s archive is vast. Throughout his life he was constantly writing, and he meticulously saved and catalogued his material. The result is that beyond the work published in his lifetime there has been a rich stream of posthumous writing that is far from tapped. This collection of previously unpublished writing culled from the Kerouac archive, and as a companion to Paul Maher Jr.'s Becoming Kerouac, spans Kerouac’s adult life, from a journal written at age seventeen to autobiographical reflections a few years before his death.

Lakshmi is the goddess of all that is good wealth (dhana), beauty (saundarya) and happiness (sukha). As Vishnu s consort and in her incarnations as Sita and Rukmini, she represents the ideal of femininity in Hinduism. She is also Shri, the goddess of fertility and grain, and Mahalakshmi, the...

“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...

A collection of short stories from The Big Garage on Clear Shot chronicles the offbeat lives of the colorful inhabitants of The End of the Road, a small town in Alaska...

In this collection of heartfelt and involving vignettes, Anne Rivers Siddons, the beloved best-selling author of Downtown, Hill Towns, and Colony, offers a stirring and insightful look at our everyday world and how one woman has chosen to live in it. Moving from memories of her gentle...

A lively inquiry into a literary genius, the translators who immortalized him, and what it means to cultivate a rich inner life in turbulent times "What happens to a writer's work when it is translated–specifically, what happens if his name is Franz Kafka?" In Kafkaesque, Maïa Hruska traces...

From Conan Doyle and Rudyard Kipling to Satyajit Ray and R. K. Narayan, this text is a collection of spine-chilling tales of the supernatural from India...

With this latest work of fiction, a collaboration with New York Times writer, John Tierney, Christopher Buckley promises to be every bit as hilarious and witty as in his previous audiobook, Thank You For Smoking. In God Is My Broker, Buckley aims his sharp humor at the self-help gurus; and the...

In this part-memoir, part-manifesto, an acclaimed poet interprets Black radical literary traditions to reimagine freedom through refusal. “An incisive and rigorous assessment of how people arrive within a moment and what they can make out of it—or how they can take it apart.”—Hanif...

ONE OF PEOPLE'S MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK OF 2026 A stunning, fierce collection from a master of the short story and one of the most important writers of our time Read alone, each story in Lauren Groff’s electric collection is an individual triumph, bold, agile, and packed with power. Read...

An intense, atmospheric novel about the devastating power of friendship, set against the backdrop of two cataclysmic events. After Marissa loses her mother at six, the most intimate relationship of her life begins. Her marine biologist father, determined to channel his grief into completing his...

If you eat while lying down, you will turn into a snake. If you don’t polish off all the rice on your plate you will marry a man full of pimples and pockmarks.Looking After the Ashes is a semi-biographical fiction of Kopi Soh’s childhood stories. Growing up in a large extended Taoist...

How does Shakespeare remain Shakespeare when every word is changed? In this playful, meditative exploration of translating the world’s most beloved playwright, Daniel Hahn guides us through the magic of bringing the Bard to a global audience. Shakespeare may have breathed the air of...

“Ahmad’s compassion, her deep care for the psychological and emotional nuances of her characters, never wavers.” – The New York Times Book Review In a searing collection by the award-winning author of The Return of Faraz Ali, characters seek to make their futures their own in a Pakistan...