Non-fiction

'What conditions are necessary for the creation of works of art?' Security, confidence, independence, a degree of prosperity - a room of one's own....

Ranging from the silent fate of Shakespeare's gifted imaginary sister to Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë and the effects of poverty and sexual constr...

translated by Richard Howard* A Short History of Decay (1949) is E.M. Cioran's nihilistic and witty collection of aphoristic essays concerning the ...

Ranging from the personal to the analytical, covering subjects such as art, politics, storytelling and creativity, A Way of Being Free confirms Okr...

Against Everything is a thought-provoking study and essential guide to the vicissitudes of everyday life under twenty-first-century capitalism. Mar...

Against Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and made her name as one of the most incisive thinkers of our time. Sontag was...

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

Vivian Gornick’s writing has always explored the hard truths of existence: the nature of human loneliness, and the struggle to love, work, and conn...

The question Are We Human? is both urgent and ancient. Beatriz Colomina and Mark Wigley offer a multilayered exploration of the intimate relationsh...

The chant of 'Azadi!' - Urdu for 'Freedom!' - is the slogan of the freedom struggle in Kashmir against what Kashmiris see as the Indian Occupation....

Bluets winds its way through depression, divinity, alcohol, and desire, visiting along the way with famous blue figures, including Joni Mitchell, B...

'A problem of space first of all, then a problem of order' One of the most singular and extravagant imaginations of the twentieth century, the nove...

Why is it important to imbibe a thinking culture? What can contemporary Malays contribute by way of an active intellectual and social life towards ...

An immigrant with a parrot in Stockholm, a photo of a girl in Lviv, a sculpture of Alexander the Great in Skopje, a memorial ceremony for the 50th ...

Beginning with the election of Donald Trump ("The Loneliest Man in the World") and expanding back and forth into American history, surveillance, vi...

Split into five sections--Reading, Being, Seeing, Feeling, and Remembering--Changing My Mind finds Zadie Smith casting an acute eye over material b...

Arthur Miller was not only one of America's most important twentieth-century playwrights, but he was also one of its most influential literary, cul...

Italo Calvino in Collection of Sand claimed that 'the brain begins in the eye'. The essays collected here display his fascination with the visual u...

'Language is a body, a living creature ... and this creature's home is the inarticulate as well as the articulate'. John Berger's work has revoluti...

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

After the publication of Outline, Transit and Kudos - in which Rachel Cusk redrew the boundaries of fiction - this writer of uncommon brilliance re...

Written with bracing wit and intelligence, Rachel Maddow's Drift argues that we've drifted away from America's original ideals and become a nation ...

This collection of intimate, illustrated essays by some of America's most well-regarded literary writers explores how comfort food can help us cope...

“The role of the critic,” Daniel Mendelsohn writes, “is to mediate intelligently and stylishly between a work and its audience; to educate and edif...

From My Little Pony to the Sex Pistols: An engaging exploration of why we love what we love Katy Perry. Wes Anderson. Coldplay. Star Wars. Hamilton...

With the same dazzling mix of emotion and idea that characterizes his novels he illuminates the art and artists who remain important to him and who...

These essays, reviews and articles illuminate the life and work of one of the most individual writers of this century - a man who created a unique ...

An unusual book of quirky essays, some deeply personal. Xu Xi writes from within, of Hong Kong’s vanishing culture and sensibility as it transforms...

No subject is too fringe or too mainstream for the unstoppable Zadie Smith. From social media to the environment, from Jay-Z to Karl Ove Knausgaard...

'My adult life can be divided into two distinct parts,' Eula Biss writes, 'the time before I owned a washing machine and the time after.' Having ju...

A unique and captivating collection of Hemingway's writings on war, including extracts from his unparalleled war novels, some classic short stories...

The bestselling author of Find Me and Call Me by Your Name returns to the essay form with this collection of thoughts on time, the creative mind, a...

Since its first publication in 1992, David Rattray's How I Became One of the Invisible has functioned as a kind of secret history and guidebook to ...

'Where are we to begin? How are we to bring order into this multitudinous chaos and so get the deepest and widest pleasure from what we read?' Publ...

It feels like the world is falling apart. So how do we keep hold of our optimism? How do we nurture the parts of ourselves that hope, trust and bel...

As a novelist, Alexander Chee has been described as “masterful” by Roxane Gay, “incendiary” by the New York Times, and "brilliant" by the Washingto...

Mary-Kay Wilmers has been a giant of the English literary world for decades. She was integral in the founding of LRB in 1979 during the year-long l...

The idea of connection permeates I Will Take the Answer, Ander Monson's fourth book of utterly original and intelligent essays. How is our present ...

Sontag wrote Illness as Metaphor in 1978, while suffering from breast cancer herself. In her study she reveals that the metaphors and myths surroun...

In an Antique Land is a subversive history in the guise of a traveller's tale. When the author stumbles across a slave narrative in the margins of ...

In these marvelously wide-ranging essays, Margaret Atwood explores her lifelong relationship to science fiction, as a reader and as a writer. At a ...

Food can embody our personal history as well as wider cultural histories. But what are the stories we tell ourselves about the kitchen, and how do ...

For Adam Phillips - as for Freud and many of his followers - poetry and poets have always held an essential place, as both precursors and unofficia...

Translated by Ann GoldsteinIllustrated by Andrea Ucini Elena Ferrante is the best-selling author of My Brilliant Friend, now an HBO original series...

Deeply personal and powerfully moving, a short and timely series of reflective essays by one of the most clear-sighted and essential writers of our...

Let Me Tell You brings together the brilliantly eerie short stories Jackson is best known for with frank and inspiring lectures on writing; comic e...

From one of our most iconic and influential writers: a timeless collection of mostly early pieces that reveal what would become Joan Didion's subje...

As well as being a master of the macabre, Shirley Jackson was also a pitch-perfect chronicler of everyday family life. In Life Among the Savages, h...