In "Carnival and Cannibal", distinguished French philosopher Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007) reflects on many of his most significant ideas concerning the significance of language and the relationship between the technological and the social. In this,...

After laughing their way through his classic and beloved depictions of nineteenth-century American life, few readers would suspect that Mark Twain's last years were anything but happy and joyful. They would be wrong. Contrary to the myth perpetrated...

Available for the first time as an independent work, David Grene's legendary translation of "Oedipus the King" renders Sophocles' Greek into cogent, vivid, and poetic English for a new generation to savor. Over the years, Grene and Lattimore's "Compl...

What does a library say about the mind of its owner? How do books map the intellectual interests, curiosities, tastes, and personalities of their readers? What does the collecting of books have in common with the practice of architecture? "Unpacking...

Ever since children have learned to read, there has been children's literature. Children's Literature charts the makings of the Western literary imagination from "Aesop's fables to Mother Goose", from "Alice's Adventures in Wonderland" to "Peter Pan"...

"Prose Occasions" gathers over half a century's critical writing by the poet Thomas Kinsella. It makes available for the first time in a single volume key works including "The Divided Mind", his influential discussion of Anglo-Irish poetry, writings...

Pablo Picasso was one of the most prodigious and revolutionary artists in the history of Western painting. Gertrude Stein was an avant-garde American writer, art collector, eccentric and self-styled genius. Her Paris home was the leading salon for ar...

Tzvetan Todorov is one of Europe's leading intellectuals. Beyond his work in cultural and literary theory, philosophy and psychoanalysis, Todorov's influence is extraordinarily far-reaching specifically because of the clarity of his writing and his r...

Fyodor Dostoevsky completed his final novel, "The Brothers Karamazov", in 1880. A work of universal appeal and significance, his exploration of good and evil immediately gained an international readership and today "remains harrowingly alive in the f...

Not for sale in the Czech Republic and the Slovak Republic! Japanese novelist Ibuse Masuji (1898-1993) is best known for his 1966 novel "Kuroi Ame" (published in English as "Black Rain"), which detailed the tragic aftermath of the nuclear bombing o...