This beautiful collection brings together passages from the renowned stories, poems, dramas, and myths of South Asian literature, including the Mahabharata and the Ramaya?a. Drawing on the translations published by the Clay Sanskrit Library, the pass...

"Novel Houses" visits unforgettable dwellings in twenty legendary works of English and American fiction. Each chapter stars a famous novel in which a dwelling is pivotal to the plot, and reveals how personally significant that place was to the writer...

A pervasive assumption about the culture of the southern United States is that it is firmly rooted in an oral tradition, not a written one. Schweiger complicates our understanding of literacy and reading in the American South before emancipation by s...

Paul Celan (1920-1970) is one of the best-known German poets of the Holocaust; many of his poems, admired for their spare, precise diction, deal directly with its stark themes. Austrian writer Ingeborg Bachmann (1926-1973) is recognized as one of pos...

The ruler of a totalitarian state seeks validation from a former schoolmate, now the nation's foremost thinker, in order to access a cultural cache alien to his regime. A literary critic provides commentary on an unfinished poem that both foretells...

Science has given us several explanations for how humans evolved from walking on four limbs to two feet. None, however, is as riveting as what master storyteller Ngugi wa Thiong'o offers in "The Upright Revolution". Blending myth and folklore with an...

Rage and obstinacy are close relatives – and fundamental categories in the work of both Georg Baselitz and Alexander Kluge. In "World-Changing Rage", these two accomplished German creators explore links and fractures between two cultures through two...

In this enchanting book, Merav Mack and Benjamin Balint explore Jerusalem's libraries to tell the story of this city as a place where some of the world's most enduring ideas were put into words. The writers of Jerusalem, although renowned the world o...

A best-selling author and world-renowned bibliophile meditates on his vast personal library and champions the vital role of all libraries. In June 2015 Alberto Manguel prepared to leave his centuries-old village home in France's Loire Valley and ree...

Oedipus's major handicap in life is not knowing who he is – and both parricide and incest result from his ignorance of his identity. With two questions – "Who am I?" and "Who is my father?" – on his mind (and on his lips), the obsessed Oedipus arrive...