Literary collections

Halls of Fame

by John D'Agata

“John D’Agata is an alchemist who changes trash into purest gold.” —Guy Davenport, Harper’s

John D’Agata journeys the endless corridors of America’s myriad halls of fame and faithfully reports on...

Cinnamon

by Samar Yazbek & Emily Danby

A fast-paced novel, coupling intense drama with insight, Cinnamon portrays the lives of Damascene women, rich and poor.

The Collected Drama of H. L. Mencken: Plays and Criticism

by S. T. Joshi

In The Collected Drama of H. L. Mencken: Plays and Criticism, S. T. Joshi has assembled for the first time Mencken’s dramatic works, comprising six one-act plays and the lengthy three-act play Heliogabalus....

Cotton Tenants: Three Families

by James Agee, John Summers & Walker Evans

A re-discovered masterpiece of reporting by a literary icon and a celebrated photographer

In 1941, James Agee and Walker Evans published Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, a 400-page prose symphony about three tenant...

remembered rapture

by bell hooks

Drawing on her experiences as a professor of English and the author of sixteen highly acclaimed books, critic bell hooks presents an insightful collection of essays on the process and politics of writing. Centrally,...

The Northern Front: A Wartime Diary

by Charles Glass

This is the Iraq war as it really started, amid lies, confusion and profound distrust between the United States and its Iraqi allies. Charles Glass, who first covered the Kurds in 1974 and was in Iraq for their...

Bird North and Other Stories

by Breton Dukes

The vignettes in these fresh, searing short stories, closely examine the complex male life. From a predatory act during a cross-country run in Fiordland to a doomed diving trip off Wellington's south coast,...

I Got His Blood on Me

by Lawrence Patchett

The short stories in this collection follow characters that are plucked away from their normal lives to face wildly abnormal situations. An old coachman must face the death of his passenger; a missionary loses...

Chewing the Page: The Mourning Goats Interviews

by Phil Jourdan

Interviews with edgy, funny, prolific novelists on the art of fiction.

Sentimentalism in Nineteenth-Century America: Literary and Cultural Practices

by Mary G. De Jong

Tracing the eighteenth-century origins of sentimentalism, the collection illustrates its proliferation in nineteenth-century America. Sentimental writings by both sexes played a major role in the formation of...

College of One

by Sheilah Graham

The moving story of how F. Scott Fitzgerald—washed up, alcoholic and ill—dedicated himself to devising a heartfelt course in literature for the woman he loved.

In 1937, on the night of her engagement to the...

The Difficulty of Being

by Jean Cocteau & Elizabeth Sprigge

Reflections on life and art from the legendary filmmaker-novelist-poet-genius.

By the time he published The Difficulty of Being in 1947, Jean Cocteau had produced some of the most respected films and literature...

An Appetite for Poetry

by Frank Kermode

Frank Kermode is one of the pre-eminent practitioners of the art of criticism in the English speaking world. It has been his distinction to make a virtue ? as all the best critics have done ? of the necessarily...

Dreaming by the Book

by Elaine Scarry

A pathbreaking work about the way literature teaches us to use our imagination.

We often attribute to our imaginative life powers that go beyond ordinary perception or sensation. In Dreaming by the Book, the...

Native American Fiction

by David Treuer

An entirely new approach to reading, understanding, and enjoying Native American fiction

This book has been written with the narrow conviction that if Native American literature is worth thinking about at all,...

White Pine and Blue Water

by Henry Beston

Here is a volume that is true Maine--as eloquent of "downeast" as a bough of fir balsam, as the thunder of a wave of a rocky shore, as the lonely splendor of the northern lights in the sky behind Katahdin. ...

Shakespearean Educations: Power, Citizenship, and Performance

by Coppélia Kahn, Heather S. Nathans & Mimi Godfrey

Shakespearean Educations expands the notion of 'education' beyond the classroom to literary clubs, private salons, public lectures, libraries, primers, and theatrical performance. This collection challenges...

Duppy Conqueror: New and Selected Poems

by Kwame Dawes & Matthew Shenoda

“The miracle of empathy,” Kwame Dawes once said in an interview, “is the ultimate aim of my writing.”

Imaginary Homelands: Essays and Criticism 1981-1991

by Salman Rushdie

In Imaginary Homelands, Salman Rushdie presents ten years' worth of concentrated thought on topics from the most cherished literary traditions and authors of India, Europe, and America to the politics of oppression,...

Myself with Others

by Carlos Fuentes

In Myself with Others, Fuentes has assembled essays reflecting three of the great elements of his work: autobiography, love of literature, and politics. They include his reflections on his beginning as a writer,...