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...

The wealth and breadth of literature produced by African Americans is staggering and dates to the earliest days of black presence in the United States. A. Robert Lee's "Designs of Blackness" takes on the critical and expansive task of mapping the tra...

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...

The Loeb Classical Library series "Fragmentary Republican Latin" continues with oratory, an important element of Roman life from the earliest times, essential to running public affairs and for advancing individual careers long before it acquired lite...