Non-fiction

Translated by Jamey Gambrell A moving collection of autobiographical essays from a Russian poet and refugee of the Bolshevik Revolution. Marina Tsv...

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

translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones A classic work of reportage about the Katyń Massacre during World War II by a soldier who narrowly escaped the at...

Curzio Malaparte was a disaffected supporter of Mussolini with a taste for danger and high living. Sent by an Italian paper during World War II to ...

Tegel prison, Berlin, in the fall of 1944. Helmuth James von Moltke is awaiting trial for his leading role in the Kreisau Circle, one of the most i...

Françoise Gilot's candid memoir remains the most revealing portrait of Picasso written, and gives fascinating insight into the intense and creative...

translated by Alex Andriesse Written over the course of four decades, François-René de Chateaubriand’s epic autobiography has drawn the admiration ...

The elusive narrator of this beautifully written, complex, and powerfully disconcerting novel is the scion of a decayed aristocratic family from th...

In 1884, the distinguished German jurist Daniel Paul Schreber suffered the first of a series of mental collapses that would afflict him for the res...

Maxime Rodinson, both a maverick Marxist and a distinguished professor at the Sorbonne, first published his biography of Muhammad in 1960. The book...

translated by Richard Lourie In My Century the great Polish poet Aleksander Wat provides a spellbinding account of life in Eastern Europe in the m...

In 1925 Harold Ross hired Katharine Sergeant Angell as a manuscript reader for The New Yorker. Within months she became the magazine’s first fictio...

Lillian Ross worked at The New Yorker for more than half a century, and might be described not only as an outstanding practitioner of modern long-f...

Starting in 1970, Jean Genet—petty thief, prostitute, modernist master—spent two years in the Palestinian refugee camps in Jordan. Always an outcas...

“People come to us for help. They come for health and strength.” With these simple words David Mendel begins Proper Doctoring, a book about what it...

Mezz Mezzrow was a boy from Chicago who learned to play the sax in reform school and pursued a life in music and a life of crime. He moved from Chi...

You could describe D.H. Lawrence as the great multi-instrumentalist among the great writers of the twentieth century. He was a brilliant, endlessly...

translated by Jean Stoner A bright star of the Italian Renaissance, Girolamo Cardano was an internationally-sought-after astrologer, physician, and...

translated by Peter Zombory-Moldovan The budding young Hungarian artist Béla Zombory-Moldován was on holiday when the First World War broke out in ...

Elizabeth Hardwick wrote during the golden age of the American literary essay. For Hardwick, the essay was an imaginative endeavor, a serious form,...

Published in 1967, as the early triumphs of the Civil Rights movement yielded to increasing frustration and violence, The Crisis of the Negro Intel...

Friedrich Reck might seem an unlikely rebel against Nazism. Not just a conservative but a rock-ribbed reactionary, he played the part of a landed g...

translated by Peter Bush Josep Pla's masterpiece, The Gray Notebook, is one of the most colorful and unusual works in modern literature. In 1918, w...

Simon Leys is a Renaissance man for the era of globalization. A distinguished scholar of classical Chinese art and literature and one of the first ...

A memoir about showbiz in the early 20th century that travels from the theaters of Vienna, Prague, and Berlin, to Hollywood during the golden age, ...

translated by John Sturrock The Life of Henry Brulard is the autobiography of one of France's greatest writers, Stendhal, author of The Red and th...

Call it "Zen and the Art of Farming" or a "Little Green Book," Masanobu Fukuoka's manifesto about farming, eating, and the limits of human knowledg...

Virginia Woolf called Max Beerbohm “the prince” of essayists, F. W. Dupee praised his “whim of iron” and “cleverness amounting to genius,” while Be...

From Galileo to today’s amateur astronomers, scientists have been rebels, writes Freeman Dyson. Like artists and poets, they are free spirits who r...

When The Sound of the One Hand came out in Japan in 1916 it caused a scandal. Zen was a secretive practice, its wisdom relayed from master to novic...

translated by Tess Lewis A new translation of philosopher Walter Benjamin's work as it pertains to his famous essay, "The Storyteller," this collec...

Out of print for nearly a century, The World I Live In is Helen Keller's most personal and intellectually adventurous work--one that transforms our...

Galen Strawson might be described as the Montaigne of modern philosophers, endlessly curious, enormously erudite, unafraid of strange, difficult, a...

Over the past decade and a half, Daniel Mendelsohn’s reviews for The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The New York Times Book Review h...

Jean-Paul Sartre was a man of staggering gifts, whose accomplishments as philosopher, novelist, playwright, biographer, and activist still command ...