Literary History & Criticism

In this brilliant conclusion to his best-selling Mythos trilogy, legendary author and actor Stephen Fry retells the tale of the Trojan War....

An intellectual detective story, this history audiobook directs probing questions at orthodox history, presenting disturbing new evidence that historians have tried - but failed - to explain....

Poetic and powerful, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings is a modern American classic....

Father of the novelist Alexandre Dumas, Alex Dumas has become, through his son's books, the model for a captivating modern protagonist: The wronged man in search of justice....

In Pandora’s Jar, the broadcaster, writer, stand-up comedian, and passionate classicist turns the tables, putting the women of the Greek myths on an equal footing with the men. With wit, humor, and savvy, Haynes revolutionizes our understanding of epic poems, stories, and plays....

Paul Bäumer is just 19 years old when he and his classmates enlist....

For the last 20 years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us....

Often, there is much more going on in a novel or poem than is readily visible on the surface....

A deeply personal memoir about one woman’s journey to finding her voice and rewriting her story by the creator and host of the award-winning podcast Moms Don’t Have Time to Read Books....

For nearly four decades, David Sedaris has faithfully kept a diary in which he records his thoughts and observations on the odd and funny events he witnesses....

On the eve of his marriage to the beautiful Mercedes, having that very day been made captain of his ship, the young sailor Edmond Dantès is arrested on a charge of treason....

At the heart of this 1930 novel is the Bundren family's bizarre journey to Jefferson to bury Addie, their wife and mother....

A ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian-American consciousness and the struggle to be human....

William Shakespeare, the most celebrated poet in the English language, left behind nearly a million words of text, but his biography has long been a thicket of wild supposition....

Jia Tolentino is a peerless voice of her generation, tackling the conflicts, contradictions, and sea changes that define us and our time....

The history of European philosophy is usually constructed from the work of men. In Metaphysical Animals, a pioneering group biography, Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman offer a compelling alternative....

From breakout stand-up comedian Iliza Shlesinger comes a subversively funny collection of essays and observations on a confident woman's approach to friendship, singlehood, and relationships....

For over 40 years, Carlos Castaneda’s The Teachings of Don Juan has inspired audiences to expand their world view beyond traditional Western forms....

A collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched young cultural observers of her generation, Roxane Gay....

Volume 2 of the Nobel Prize-winner’s towering masterpiece: the story of Solzhenitsyn's entrance into the Soviet prison camps, where he would remain for nearly a decade. Features a new foreword by Anne Applebaum....

Following his two New York Times best sellers, Brain Droppings and Napalm & Silly Putty, comes George Carlin's third audiobook....

Notes of a Native Son inaugurated Baldwin as one of the leading interpreters of the dramatic social changes erupting in the United States in the 20th century, and many of his observations have proven almost prophetic....

Esteemed translator and best-selling author Stephen Mitchell energizes a heroic tale so old it predates Homer's Iliad by more than a millennium....

Hendrik Groen may be old, but he is far from dead and isn't planning to be buried any time soon....

Hidden within the rituals of the creation of the Oxford English Dictionary is a fascinating mystery...

Following the unprecedented and universal acclaim for The Lord of the Rings, the respected academic and world-renowned Tolkien scholar Professor Tom Shippey presents us with a fascinating and informed companion to the world of J.R.R. Tolkien, in particular focusing on The Hobbit, The Lord of the Rings and The Silmarillion. Written in a clear and accessible style, J. R. R. Tolkien: Author of the Century reveals why all of these books will be timeless.

In the 1950s, comics meant POW! BAM! superheroes, family-friendly gags, and Sunday funnies, but in the 1960s, inspired by these strips and the satire of MAD magazine, a new generation of creators set out to subvert the medium, and with it, American culture. Their “comix” presented tales of taboo sex, casual drug use, and a transgressive view of society. Dirty Pictures is the essential exploration of a truly American art form that re-contextualized the way people thought about war, race, sex, gender, and expression.

Everyone knows Frank Herbert’s Dune. One of the most popular science fiction novels ever written, it has become a worldwide phenomenon, winning awards, selling millions of copies around the world. Brian Herbert, Frank Herbert’s eldest son, tells the provocative story of his father’s extraordinary life in this honest and loving chronicle. He has also brought to light all the events in Herbert’s life that would find their way into speculative fiction’s greatest epic.

 In this masterwork, Phil Cousineau examines the connection of mythology to contemporary life and what that means for self-improvement. Drawing on his extensive work with Joseph Campbell (The Power of Myth), this is Cousineau's grand opus—revealing mythic insights for everyday life. 

Here is Virginia Woolf at her most entertaining and informative, relishing the portraits and insights she presents as she surveys a varied collection of individuals in English society and English literature. In The Common Reader Volume 2, (published in 1932), the essay lives on and even more so in this sensitive and engaging book by Georgina Sutton.

British writer William Hazlitt was the most brilliant essayist of his day. He is now considered one of the greatest critics and essayists in the history of the English language, placed in the company of Samuel Johnson and George Orwell. During his last illness, Hazlitt wrote this essay on a topic that most people will recognize. Hazlitt did not fear his own demise, and in this thoughtful essay, he explains why no one needs to give in to such a fear.

 This book recreates in written form seventeen of the most popular, frankly personal and engaging lectures on literature given by the award-winning teacher Richard Jacobs, who has been working with students for over forty years.

Over the course of a lifetime practising and teaching debate, Bo Seo has made a successful career out of arguing. In the past few years, however, he’s noticed how we’re not only arguing more but getting worse at it—a trend reflected in our increasingly polarised politics. Tracing his own journey from timid child to world champion, as well as those of illustrious participants in the sport from Socrates to Sally Rooney, Malcolm X to Nelson Mandela, Seo shows how the skills of debating are often the cornerstones of successful careers and happy lives. 

Doing English presents the ideas and debates that shape how we "do" English today, explaining arguments about the value of literature, the canon, Shakespeare, theory, politics, and the subject itself. 

Through the enduring eye of Sherlock Holmes, noted historian Jeremy Black traces how Holmes and his milieu evolved in Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's books and how Holmes continues to resonate today. Black explores the context of Doyle's ideas and stories and why they struck such a chord with readers in London, and ultimately the world. Drawing on a masterful knowledge both of Doyle's era and his writings, this entertaining and wide-ranging book uses the Holmes stories to bring Victorian England to vibrant life, a world where crimes large and small abound.

Agatha Christie is the bestselling novelist of all time, and nearly every story she ever wrote involves one—or, more commonly, several—dead bodies. Christie wouldn't have talked of "forensics" as it is understood today—most of her work predates the modern developments of forensics science—but in each tale she harnesses the power of human observation, ingenuity, and scientific developments of the era. A fascinating deep dive, The Science of Murder examines the use of fingerprints, firearms, handwriting, blood spatter analysis, toxicology, and more in Christie's works.

In Trickster Makes This World, Lewis Hyde brings to life the playful and disruptive side of human imagination as it is embodied in trickster mythology. He first visits the old stories—Hermes in Greece, Eshu in West Africa, Krishna in India, Coyote in North America, among others—and then holds them up against the lives and work of more recent creators: Picasso, Duchamp, Ginsberg, John Cage, and Frederick Douglass. Twelve years after its first publication, Trickster Makes This World has taken its place among the great works of modern cultural criticism.

In the first major history of crime fiction in 50 years, The Life of Crime: Detecting the History of Mysteries and Their Creators traces the evolution of the genre from the 18th century to the present, offering brand-new perspective on the world’s most popular form of fiction. 

In Extinction and the Human, Timothy Sweet ponders the realities of animal extinction and endangerment and the often divergent Native American and Euro-American narratives that surround them. He focuses especially on the force of human impact on megafauna—mammoths, whales, and the North American bison. Ultimately, he argues, it is the critical assessment of ideas of human exceptionalism that provides a necessary counterpoint both to apologies for human mastery over nature and deep ecology's attempts to erase the human.

The Owl and the Nightingale, one of the earliest literary works in Middle English, is a lively anonymous comic poem about two birds who embark on a war of words in a wood, with a nearby poet reporting their argument in rhyming couplets, line by line and blow by blow. In this engaging and energetic verse translation, Simon Armitage captures the verve and humor of this dramatic tale with all the cut and thrust of the original.