How does a novel entice or enlist us? How does a song surprise or seduce us? Why do we bristle when a friend belittles a book we love, or fall into a funk when a favored TV series comes to an end? What characterizes the aesthetic experiences of feeli...

Laszlo F. Foldenyi is a writer who is learned in reference, taste, and judgment, and entertaining in style. Taking a place in the long tradition of public intellectual and cultural criticism, his work resonates with that of Montaigne, Rilke, and Mann...

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...

"Interpretation" is a term that encompasses both the most esoteric and the most fundamental activities of our lives, from analyzing medical images to the million ways we perceive other people's actions. Today, we also leave interpretation to the like...

When a young reader once asked Franz Fuhmann if he considered his work to be science fiction, he was quick to deny it: he wanted nothing to do with the genre. As he began writing the stories that make up this volume, however, he found himself coming...

"Cultural Graphology" could be the name of a new human science: this was Derrida's speculation when, in the late 1960s, he imagined a discipline that combined psychoanalysis, deconstruction, and a commitment to the topic of writing. He never undertoo...

Max Frisch (1911-1991) was a giant of twentieth-century German literature. When Frisch moved into a new apartment in Berlin's Sarrazinstrasse, he began keeping a journal, which he came to call the Berlin Journal. A few years later, he emphasized in a...

Originally published in Italian in 1965, "A Test of Powers" was immediately seen as one of the central texts of Italian intellectual life. By the time of the 1968 student revolts, it was clear that Franco Fortini had anticipated many of the themes an...

Franz Kafka was the poet of his own disorder. Throughout his life he struggled with a pervasive sense of shame and guilt that left traces in his daily existence – in his many letters, extensive diaries, and especially in his fiction. This stimulating...

Fiction created by and for the working class emerged worldwide in the early twentieth century as a response to rapid modernization, dramatic inequality, and imperial expansion. In Japan, literary youth, men and women, sought to turn their imagination...