Literary Essays

Rain in the Mountains brings together some of Ruskin Bond’s most beautiful works from his years spent in the foothills of the Himalayas in the town of Mussoorie. Through vivid images and lucid writing, Bond evokes the everyday sights and sounds, and captures the essence of mountain life. The...

“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...

"Poets live the lives all of us live," says Bill Moyers, "with one big difference. They have the power--the power of the word--to create a world of thoughts and emotions other can share. We only have to learn to listen." In a series of fascinating conversations with thirty-four American poets...

A sweeping and intellectually rigorous work of literary criticism that moves the field forward, from one of the preeminent public scholars “[Said’s] book is relaxed and discursive, original, immensely learned, fluently written.”―John Bayley, The New York Times Book Review Edward W. Said...

Former Majority Leader of the U.S. House of Representatives and leading organizer of the Tea Party movement, Dick Armey offers a Tea Party Manifesto: Give Us Liberty. Written with Matt Kibbee, President and CEO of FreedomWorks, Give Us Liberty defines the issues and agenda of the wildfire...

The journeys of Paul Theroux take place not only in exotic, unexpected places of the world but in the thoughts, reading, and emotions of the writer himself. A gathering of people, places, and ideas in fifty glittering pieces of gold...

A love story that feels both new and achingly true from one of Japan’s most acclaimed writers, capturing the intensity, uncertainties, and intimacy of falling for someone for the first time. Art student Isogai first models for one of his tutors, the much older Yuri, then begins a passionate...

I would like to be remembered as someone who made people smile.' One of the great icons of our time, Khushwant Singh, 95, is a man of contradictions. An agnostic who's well-versed in the holy scriptures; a vocal champion of free speech who supported the Emergency; a 'dirty old man' who...

“These essays, deftly blending the political and the personal, offer fresh, galvanizing, and passionate perspectives on literary translation.”—Jhumpa Lahiri A manifesto in 22 essays, Violent Phenomena breaks stale rules about who can and should translate, envisioning a future more...

The Millions “Most Anticipated” Books of 2023 Never-before-seen unpublished works by award-winning American literary icon Ntozake Shange, featuring essays, plays, and poems from the archives of the seminal Black feminist writer who stands alongside giants like Toni Morrison and Alice Walker...

15 Essays des gefeierten Autors von Die Korrekturen, Freiheit und Crossroads. Virtuos und pointiert setzt sich Jonathan Franzen mit dem Geist seiner Zeit auseinander und offenbart ganz persönliche Erfahrungen: In fünfzehn Essays ergründet er »die Schwierigkeit, in einer lärmenden und zerstreuenden Massenkultur Individualität und Vielschichtigkeit zu bewahren: die Frage, wie Alleinsein geht«. Gegen eine medial beschleunigte Welt und von Ideologien gefärbte Wahrnehmung setzt er die kreative Abgeschiedenheit, den genauen Blick, das Lesen.

A powerful, patriarchy-defying manifesto that will transform your relationship to saying “no”—from the award-winning writer, co-founder of Jezebel, and former New York Times "Work Friend" advice columnist When was the last time you said “no”? Not, I don’t think so, or maybe, or let...

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...

From the widely acclaimed poet, novelist, critic, and scholar, a lucid and edifying exploration of the building blocks of poetry and how they've been used over the centuries to assemble the most imperishable poems. “Anyone wanting to learn how to remodel, restore, or build a poem from the...

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...

The complete sonnets of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century—in English and SpanishThis landmark collection brings together for the first time in any language all of the sonnets of one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. More intimate and personally revealing than...

A dazzling journey into the hidden lives of synanthropes, the wild animals who've found ingenious ways to survive and thrive in human communities—from award-winning writer and epidemiologist Dan Werb Synanthropes have always been an immutable part of the tapestry of our lives. They are the...

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...

From the Nobel Prize-winning novelist and the acclaimed author of My Name is Red—an inspired, thoughtful, and deeply personal book of essays about reading and writing novels. In this fascinating set of essays, based on the talks he delivered at Harvard University as part of the distinguished...

Indiana champions shining examples of literary and artistic merit regardless of whether the individual artist or writer is famous; asserts a standard of care and tradition that has nothing to do with the ivory tower establishment; is unafraid to deliver the coup de grâce when someone needs to say the emperor has no clothes; speaks in the same breath—in the same discerning, insolent, eloquent way—about high art and pop culture. Few writers could get away with saying the things Gary Indiana does. And when the writing is this good, it's also political, plus it's a riot of fun.