Literary Essays

A collection of the year’s best essays, selected by Pulitzer Prize–winning critic Wesley Morris and series editor Kim Dana Kupperman. “Imparting some piece of yourself—any part—is arduous and warrants some kind of commendation,” writes guest editor Wesley Morris in his introduction...

In a gauntlet-throwing essay at the start of this brilliant assemblage, Cynthia Ozick stakes the claim that, just as surely as critics require a steady supply of new fiction, novelists need great critics to build a vibrant community on the foundation of literary history. For decades Ozick herself has been one of our great critics, as these essays so clearly display. She offers models of critical analysis of writers from the mid-20th century to today, from Saul Bellow, Bernard Malamud, and Kafka to William Gass and Martin Amis, all assembled in provocatively named groups.

One of the greatest novels of the twentieth century — the modernist masterpiece that redefined what fiction could do. In 1927, Virginia Woolf published the novel she had been moving toward her entire career. To the Lighthouse takes the simplest of materials — a family's summer house on the Isle of Skye, a planned trip to a lighthouse, the passage of a decade — and from them builds one of the most profound meditations ever written on time, memory, grief, art, and the mystery of other minds. There is almost no plot. There is everything else. The novel. Mr. and Mrs. Ramsay, their eight ...

Every novel Louisa May Alcott wrote about growing up — all eight, in one edition. Plus two critical essays that read them the way they deserve to be read. Louisa May Alcott published Little Women in 1868 under pressure: from her publisher, from her readers, from a market that wanted girls to behave. She spent the rest of her career writing around that pressure — eight novels, dozens of stories, a body of work that kept asking the same question in different ways: what does it cost a woman to become herself in a world designed to prevent it? This edition collects all eight novels and ...

David Hume (1711-1776) remains a major figure in British philosophy, particularly for two or three works, including A Treatise on Human Nature and An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. But he was also a prolific essayist and historian. During his lifetime Essays Moral, Political and Literary went through a number of editions and collections, far outselling his philosophy. Now, the situation is reversed. But listening to the essays today it is difficult to see why. 

The novel in which Dickens perfected everything he knew — and in which everything Pip believes turns out to be wrong. This Erato Press critical edition reads Great Expectations as the coldest, the most precisely engineered, and the most morally unforgiving novel Dickens ever wrote. Published weekly in All the Year Round between 1860 and 1861, Great Expectations is the Bildungsroman inverted. The young hero acquires wealth, manners, education, and a gentleman's wardrobe — and every acquisition makes him worse. The benefactor he imagines is not who he thinks. The woman he loves was ...

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER From #1 New York Times bestselling author Rachel Campos-Duffy and the Fox News family comes a celebration of the people, the history, and the spirit that make America great, from sea to shining sea. For 250 years, the United States has stood for hope, freedom...

Every word Oscar Wilde published — the novel, the plays, the poems, the essays, the fairy tales, and the two masterpieces he wrote in disgrace — in a single authoritative edition. Oscar Wilde lived two lives simultaneously: the most celebrated wit in Victorian London, and a man whose inner life was at war with everything the society around him demanded. He understood, better than almost anyone before or since, that style is not decoration but argument — that how you say something is inseparable from what you are saying. He paid for that understanding with two years in Reading Gaol and...

"All first-rate criticism first defines what we are confronting," the late, great jazz critic Whitney Balliett once wrote. By that measure, the essays of Christopher Hitchens are in the first tier. For nearly four decades, Hitchens has been telling us, in pitch-perfect prose, what we confront...

Six novels. One life. The complete arc of the most beloved heroine in Canadian literature — from the red-haired girl who arrived uninvited at Green Gables to the woman who sent her sons to war. Lucy Maud Montgomery published Anne of Green Gables in 1908 after years of rejection. The manuscript had been turned down so many times she had put it away in a hat box. When it finally appeared, it sold out within months and made her famous overnight. She spent the rest of her life writing sequels she hadn't planned, living a life considerably less free than the one she had imagined for Anne. Anne...

In his long career, eminent psychotherapist and author Irvin Yalom has pressed his patients and readers to grapple with life's two greatest challenges: that we all must die, and that each of us is responsible for leading a life worth living. In Creatures of a Day, he and his patients confront...

Book VIII Metaphors We Live By: Belief, Ideology, & Conviction Beliefs rarely feel like choices. They feel like reality. By the time a belief becomes strong enough to defend, it has already become part of the structure through which everything else is interpreted. Evidence that confirms it passes through easily. Evidence that challenges it encounters a door that was never designed to open. Metaphors We Live By: Belief, Ideology, & Conviction is a collection of forty essays exploring how beliefs form, how they harden into identity, and what makes the most important ones so resistant to ...

A Goodreads Editors’ Pick | A Boston Globe Best Book of the Summer | A Time and LitHub Most Anticipated Book of the Year | A People Most Anticipated Summer Read A spellbinding story collection from Booker Prize finalist Ruth Ozeki, about the lives we almost lived, the people we can’t quite...

Emily Nemens’s Clutch follows a group of five friends as they navigate the biggest challenges of their lives, asking: When you’re hanging on by your fingernails, how can you extend a hand to the ones you love? As undergrads, Gregg, Reba, Hillary, Bella, and Carson formed the kind of rare...

Author Peter Ackroyd has won the Somerset Maugham Award, the Whitbread Novel of the Year, and the Guardian Fiction Prize, and was shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Based on Geoffrey Chaucer’s immortal work, this retelling of The Canterbury Tales follows a party of travelers as they tell stories amongst themselves about love and chivalry, saints and legends, travel and adventure. Through allegory, satire, and humor, the tales help pass the time during their journey.

A new rip-roaring essay collection from the smart, edgy, hilarious, unabashedly raunchy, and bestselling Samantha Irby. Irby is forty, and increasingly uncomfortable in her own skin despite what Inspirational Instagram Infographics have promised her. She has left her job as a receptionist at a...

In this autobiography, woven from personal pieces composed over the course of a celebrated writing life of more than 50 years, you'll meet William Buckley the boy, growing up in a family of 10 children; Buckley the daring young political enfant terrible, whose debut book, God and Man at Yale, was a shocking New York Times best seller; Buckley the editor of National Review, widely hailed as the founder of the modern conservative movement; and Buckley the husband and father.

This is Irving Stone's powerful and passionate biographical novel of Michelangelo. His time: the turbulent Renaissance, the years of poisoning princes, warring popes, the all-powerful Medici family, the fanatic monk Savonarola. His loves: the frail and lovely daughter of Lorenzo de Medici; the...

The founding texts of modern science fiction — in a landmark new English translation. Jules Verne did not merely write adventure stories. He invented a new grammar of the imagination — one grounded in the science of his age, yet reaching toward the unknown with the precision of a cartographer mapping seas no one had sailed. Extraordinary Voyages gathers four of his greatest novels in a complete new English translation by Henry Bugalho, accompanied by critical essays that reveal the philosophical ambition concealed beneath the spectacle of his adventures. Twenty Thousand Leagues Under ...

In this exuberantly praised book - a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling aboard a Caribbean luxury cruiseliner - David Foster Wallace...