Literary History & Criticism

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER Now a major motion picture starring ACADEMY AWARD winner Jessie Buckley, Paul Mescal, Emily Watson, and Joe Alwyn, directed by Chloé Zhao. The acclaimed author of the Reese's Book Club pick The Marriage Portrait...

After making his debut in The Killing Floor, Jack Reacher has quickly become one of the most popular―and most enduring―fictional heroes to emerge in the past half century. Now, his creator tells the stories behind the stories. These are the origin tales of all of the Reacher novels written...

“BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY.” —Time “It is impossible to name a book that had a greater effect on the political and moral consciousness of the late twentieth century.” —David Remnick, The New Yorker The Nobel Prize winner’s towering masterpiece of world literature...

Maya Angelou’s debut memoir is a modern American classic beloved worldwide. Her life story is told in the documentary film And Still I Rise, as seen on PBS’s American Masters. Here is a book as joyous and painful, as mysterious and memorable, as childhood itself. I Know Why the Caged Bird...

The Pulitzer Prize–winning author of Will in the World reveals the daring and subversive life of Christopher Marlowe―Shakespeare’s contemporary, inspiration, and rival. In brutally repressive sixteenth-century England, artists had been frightened into dull conventionality; foreigners were...

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

Author Benjamin Hoff shows that the philosophy of Winnie-the-Pooh is amazingly consistent with the principles of Taoism....

In this sharp and darkly funny new essay collection from the New York Times bestselling author, Cazzie David explores the irony and existential crises of leaving youth behind. This program is read by the author. With her thirtieth birthday fast approaching, Cazzie reflects on the delusions that...

In the rigid theocracy of Salem, Massachusetts, rumors that women are practicing witchcraft galvanize the town....

“BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF THE 20TH CENTURY.” —Time Volume 1 of the gripping epic masterpiece, Solzhenitsyn's chilling report of his arrest and interrogation, which exposed to the world the vast bureaucracy of secret police that haunted Soviet society. Features a new foreword by Anne...

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

An unmissable collection of eight unconventional and captivating short stories for young and adult learners. "I love Olly's work - and you will too!" - Barbara Oakley, PhD, Author of New York Times bestseller A Mind for Numbers Short Stories in Spanish for Beginners has been written especially...

Continuously available in print since 1968, this novel has become embedded in progressive anti-racist culture with wide circulation of the book and hotly debated film. A literary classic, The Spook Who Sat by the Door is a strong comment on entrenched racial inequities in the United States in...

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

From the New York Times bestselling, Booker Prize–winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo and Tenth of December comes a literary master class on what makes great stories work and what they can tell us about ourselves—and our world today. For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been...

The poems of the Poetic Edda have waited a long time for a modern English translation that would do them justice. Here it is at last (Odin be praised!). These amazing texts from a 13th-century Icelandic manuscript are of huge historical, mythological, and literary importance....

For more than 15 years, Robert McKee's students have been taking Hollywood's top honors. His “Story Seminar” is the world's ultimate seminar for screenwriters, filmmakers, and novelists. Now, Robert McKee's Story: Substance, Structure, Style, and the Principles of Screenwriting reveals the...

This program is read by actor and singer-songwriter Maya Hawke, star of Netflix's Stranger Things. "Narrating in a voice as clear and sustaining as a cool glass of water, Hawke’s unflashy approach allows the words to reveal their magic."—The Orange County Register "Didion’s timeless essays...

Dive into the timeless tales of gods and heroes in this bestselling A-to-Z encyclopedia detailing classic myths and legends—perfect for curious readers and academics alike. Edith Hamilton's mythology succeeds like no other book in bringing to life for the modern reader the Greek, Roman and...

Bjartur of Summerhouses, the book's protagonist, is an ordinary sheep farmer, but his flinty determination to achieve independence is genuinely heroic....

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....

Los Angeles, 1948: Easy Rawlins is a black war veteran just fired from his job at a defense plant....

The Willie Lynch Letter and the Making of a Slave is a study of slave making....

A fully illustrated guide to Deborah Harkness's #1 New York Times bestselling All Souls trilogy--"an irresistible . . . wonderfully imaginative grown-up fantasy" (People) A Discovery of Witches introduced Diana Bishop, Oxford scholar and reluctant witch, and vampire geneticist Matthew Clairmont...

Ever since the birth of his daughter, Nalla, Zsadist has been regressing further and further into the life he led before he met Bella, his beautiful shellan. He has been waking up in cold sweats due to nightmares from his past, hasn't made love to his wife, and won't hold his baby girl, for fear...

In this sharp and darkly funny new essay collection from the New York Times bestselling author, Cazzie David explores the irony and existential crises of leaving youth behind. This program is read by the author. With her thirtieth birthday fast approaching, Cazzie reflects on the delusions that...

Seven novels. One writer. The most perfect intelligence in English fiction. Edited with afterwords by Henry Bugalho — philosopher, writer, and Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts. Published by Erato Press. This volume brings together every novel Jane Austen completed — the full measure of a writer who saw more clearly into the human heart than anyone before or since, and who did it in drawing rooms, with teacups, while the world pretended nothing serious was happening: ✦ Sense and Sensibility (1811) — Two sisters, two ways of navigating a world that offers women nothing but the ...

The four novels that gave American literature its voice — and two essays that explain why one of them changed everything. Mark Twain invented American literature twice. The first time was The Adventures of Tom Sawyer in 1876 — a boy's world of summer, caves, and the Mississippi River, told with the warmth of a man who remembered childhood as a country you could never return to. The second time was Adventures of Huckleberry Finn in 1884, where the same river becomes a moving argument about freedom, race, and the cost of conscience. Hemingway said all modern American literature comes from...

The greatest American novel ever written about obsession, the sea, and the thing that cannot be caught. This annotated edition includes an original critical essay and a full biography of Herman Melville. Herman Melville published Moby Dick in 1851 to near-total indifference. The reviews were mixed, the sales were poor, and Melville — who had poured everything he knew about whaling, philosophy, the Bible, and the darkness of the human will into 600 pages — spent the rest of his life in obscurity. He died in 1891 almost completely forgotten. Thirty years later, scholars rediscovered the ...

Nobel Prize winner Han Kang’s first work of nonfiction published in English—an intimate, inspiring collection of writings on the connections between her life and art. What is love? It is the gold thread connecting between our hearts. In this light-filled and multifaceted book, Han Kang draws...

**Narrated by the Author!** A Most Anticipated Book of 2026 by Ms. Magazine A raw and lyrical exploration of the confining expectations of womanhood and, if we dare, what lies beyond those limitations—from a writer Roxane Gay calls “vibrant and thoughtful.” Gorgeous, badass, and...

The riveting story of three women reporters and the way they changed the world, work, and journalism. She hid on a Red Cross boat to reach Omaha Beach on D-Day. She walked the abandoned streets of Hong Kong to take food to her daughter’s father, a prisoner of war. She fought off the advances...

Most readers have heard of Ulysses. Few have actually read it. This edition is for both. Published in Paris in 1922, Ulysses follows Leopold Bloom through a single day in Dublin — June 16, 1904 — and in doing so dismantles every assumption about what a novel can be and do. Stream of consciousness, interior monologue, parody, myth, obscenity, tenderness, comedy: Joyce deploys them all simultaneously, not as technique but as necessity. He was not being difficult. He was being honest about the way a mind actually works. Ulysses — One day. One city. One man buying a kidney for breakfast, ...

As a result of childhood learning disabilities and educational neglect, Oliver James graduated from high school and became one of approximately 45 million functionally illiterate Americans. However, at age 32, with big dreams and few tools to actualize them, he dedicated himself to learning the...

¿Por qué las advertencias de hace décadas describen nuestro mundo actual con tanta exactitud? 1984 y Rebelión en la granja no son solo novelas; son profecías que definen nuestra comprensión de la política moderna. Esta colección presenta dos visiones complementarias sobre cómo se pierde la libertad: una a través del miedo y la vigilancia, y la otra a través de la mentira y la manipulación.

L'unico romanzo di Emily Brontë — edizione integrale, con una postfazione critica di Henry Bugalho Traduzione di Erato Press sotto la direzione editoriale di Henry Bugalho — filosofo, scrittore e Fellow della Royal Society of Arts. Ora un grande film con Margot Robbie e Jacob Elordi, diretto da Emerald Fennell — riscoprite il romanzo che ha ispirato tutto. Sulle brughiere selvagge dello Yorkshire, dove il vento ulula e l'erica si stende fino all'orizzonte, un trovatello di nome Heathcliff viene accolto nella famiglia Earnshaw. Ciò che segue è una delle storie più intense, ...

The dangerous belief that granting women reproductive freedom poses a threat to "traditional" values is a myth that has long prospered in American politics, playing an especially vicious role in the development of totalitarianism in the West. How did such damaging ideas arise? In Reproductive Wrongs, acclaimed translator and cultural historian Sarah Ruden exposes how ideologies that oppress women and families in the service of power took hold.

***** “Jade has written another wonderful Vampire Romantasy. I'm so excited for this series.” ***** “The tension and slow burn between Mia and Jude had me feeling it in my bones and frustrated in all the right ways.” ***** “…the connection between Mia and the vampire she shouldn’t want is written with real emotional weight. It’s fast, immersive, and sets up a world I’m already invested in continuing.” A luxury yacht. A violent storm. A forbidden island that should not exist. Mia Kennedy takes a one-month job on a billionaire’s yacht to escape her broken life, thanks to...

Inside a circle of trusted friends...one was a killer. Jerry Harris was a self-made California millionaire who, at age forty-four, had it all: booming businesses, yachts, a mansion, a beautiful wife, and a voice to rival Elvis. No one who knew this well-liked, generous man could make sense of...

Every tale of terror, every poem of unearthly beauty, every essay of dark philosophy — collected in one definitive volume. This is the complete and unabridged collection of Edgar Allan Poe's works: the gothic horror tales that invented a genre, the poems that still haunt the English language, the mystery stories that created the detective novel, and the critical essays that changed how we think about literature. Includes all tales of horror and suspense: "The Fall of the House of Usher," "The Masque of the Red Death," "The Black Cat," "The Pit and the Pendulum," "The Tell-Tale Heart," "...

Editorial Review “They Watched the Children” is a chilling investigative thriller inspired by the real 1994 Ariel School encounter in Zimbabwe, where dozens of children reported witnessing the same unexplained event. Through careful investigation, unsettling witness testimony, and disturbing physical evidence, the mystery grows into something far more calculated than a simple sighting. Ted Lazaris delivers another gripping entry in the Documented Terror series—where the most frightening stories are the ones that may have actually happened. THEY WATCHED THE CHILDREN A True Documented ...

By his longtime friend and a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist, the definitive biography of Larry McMurtry, the legendary author and screenwriter of Lonesome Dove, The Last Picture Show, and Brokeback Mountain, who transformed our vision of the West. Before Larry McMurtry became one of the...

Three novels. Three sisters. One revolution in English fiction. This edition contains: Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë — The governess who refused silence Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë — The love story that dismantled every rule of the novel Agnes Grey by Anne Brontë — The unflinching witness to what power does to the powerless Plus a 15,000-word critical afterword by Henry Bugalho — "The Brontë Sisters: Life, Literature, and Legacy" Before they were literary icons, Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë were three women writing at the same table in a parsonage on the edge of the ...

Honoré de Balzac Explained: The Human Comedy, Realism, French Society, Literary Ambition, and the Birth of the Modern Novel is a comprehensive and accessible guide to one of the most ambitious writers in literary history. In this in depth exploration, you will discover how Balzac built La Comédie Humaine into a vast interconnected portrait of nineteenth century France, capturing the rise of capitalism, the pressures of social mobility, and the psychological intensity of modern ambition. Whether you are new to Balzac or looking to deepen your understanding, this book provides clear insight...

Brought to you by Penguin. This rare self-portrait from pioneering publisher, writer and cultural activist Margaret Busby underscores her powerful legacy and celebrates some of the people and places that have shaped her exceptional life Margaret Busby has been at the heart of cultural life in...

What if the greatest obstacle to learning isn’t ignorance… but certainty? Throughout history, intelligent people have confidently defended ideas that later proved spectacularly wrong. Doctors once rejected handwashing. Scientists once declared flight impossible. Entire industries have collapsed because leaders were certain the world would never change. In The Certainty Trap, author Steven Doornbos explores the fascinating psychology behind why humans cling to beliefs—even when the evidence suggests they shouldn’t. Through compelling stories from science, history, business, and ...

In this part-memoir, part-manifesto, an acclaimed poet interprets Black radical literary traditions to reimagine freedom through refusal. “In these fierce yet tender pages, Camonghne Felix reveals how imagination can become a form of governance—an instrument for creating a world rooted in...

How to Write Psychological Thrillers: Structure, Tension, and the Architecture of the Mind Psychological thrillers are not built on jump scares or cheap twists. They are built on pressure. On containment. On secrets that breathe beneath the surface. On characters who believe they are in control—until the system they’ve stepped into closes around them. In How to Write Psychological Thrillers, you’ll learn how to construct stories that linger long after the final page. This is not a surface-level guide about adding darkness or shocking endings. Instead, this book teaches you how to: ...

What do Americans truly want in a novel? What would it look like if their preferences and aversions materialized in book form? In People's Choice Literature, Tom Comitta has taken up this challenge, writing two groundbreaking novels based on a nationwide poll about literary taste―one featuring...

Where the Dice Roll and the Pages Turn For too long, fantasy readers and tabletop gamers have lived in parallel worlds — attending different conventions, reading different magazines, and missing the spectacular magic that happens when these passions collide. Enchanted Realms Magazine was built for the ones who live in both worlds at once. This debut preview issue is your all-access pass to the full spectrum of fantasy storytelling. Whether you're a GM mining novels for your next campaign, a fantasy author whose best ideas come from a character sheet, or a reader who just wants to know ...