Literary Studies

What is poetry? If music is sound organized in a particular way, poetry is a way of organizing language. It is language made special so that it wil...

For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Sw...

Five decades after her debut poetry collection, Firstborn, Louise Glück is a towering figure in American letters. Written with the same probing, an...

Language is humanity’s most spectacular open-source project, and the internet is making our language change faster and in more interesting ways tha...

Three years before he died, David Bowie made a list of the one hundred books that had transformed his life - a list that formed something akin to a...

In this spellbinding blend of memoir and insight, bestselling author Chuck Palahniuk shares stories and generous advice on what makes writing power...

In this personal portrait of Edward Said written by a close friend, Dominique Edde offers a fascinating and fresh presentation of his oeuvre from h...

In the introduction to her new collection of essays, Ex Libris: 100+ Books to Read and Reread, Michiko Kakutani writes: “In a world riven by politi...

The names of T. S. Eliot, William Golding, Ted Hughes, Sylvia Plath and Seamus Heaney are synonymous with the publishing house Faber & Faber, f...

Forgotten Women is a new series of books that uncover the lost herstories of influential women who have refused over hundreds of years to accept th...

In the first major biography of Baldwin in more than a decade, Bill V. Mullen celebrates the personal and political life of the great African-Ameri...

This first full-length biography of the Nobel Laureate to appear in a quarter century explores John Steinbeck's long apprenticeship as a writer str...

Hobbes's extreme political views have commanded so much attention that they have eclipsed his work on language and mind, and on reasoning, personho...

Of War and War's Alarms is a unique study of war and revolution and their impact on the writing lives of Irish poets and novelists from WW1 and the...

Since its publication nearly 70 years ago, George Orwell's 1984 has been regarded as one of the most influential novels of the modern age. Politici...

In Pirates and Publishers, Fei-Hsien Wang reveals the unknown social and cultural history of copyright in China from the 1890s through the 1950s, a...

The Chinese Revolution was a complex and protracted event staged by competing groups and individuals with different hopes and expectations. Its vet...

A decade ago, Maryanne Wolf’s Proust and the Squid revealed what we know about how the brain learns to read and how reading changes the way we thin...

This is a book about a poet, about a poem, about a city, and about a world at a point of change. More than a work of literary criticism or literary...

Since the nation-state sprang into being in 1965, Singapore literature in English has blossomed energetically, and yet there have been few books fo...

Translated by Lotfali KhonjiEdited by Valerie Miles The ruler of a totalitarian state seeks validation from a former schoolmate, now the nation's f...

Translated by Lara Vergnaud Reading is an act of resistance. Daraya is a town outside Damascus, the very spot where the Syrian Civil War began. Lon...

This is the story of our love affair with books, whether we arrange them on our shelves, inhale their smell, scrawl in their margins or just curl u...

What is humour? Why do we laugh? And why is the root of a good joke almost always error? Good jokes, bad jokes, clever jokes, dad jokes? The desire...

Tom Wolfe, whose legend began in journalism, takes us on an eye-opening journey that is sure to arouse widespread debate. The Kingdom of Speech is ...

The never-before-told story of one extremely rare copy of the Gutenberg Bible, and its impact on the lives of the fanatical few who were lucky enou...

In The Spider's Thread, Keith Holyoak looks at metaphor as a microcosm of the creative imagination. Holyoak, a psychologist and poet, draws on the ...

A lavishly illustrated exploration of the places that inspired and shaped the work of J.R.R. Tolkien, creator of Middle-earth. This new book from r...

Unfinished Business: Notes of a Chronic Re-reader is Vivian Gornick's celebration of passionate reading, of returning again and again to the books ...

If Vasily Grossman's 1961 masterpiece, Life and Fate, had been published during his lifetime, it would have reached the world together with Pastern...

Vincent van Gogh (1853-1890) was famously driven by his passion for God, for art - and for books. Vincent's life with books is examined here chapte...