"When I say this book is a love story, I mean it is about things that cannot be gotten over – like this world, and some of the people in it". In 1819, the poet John Keats wrote six poems that would become known as the Great Odes. Some of them – "Ode...

Romanticism coincided with two major historical developments: the Industrial Revolution, and with it, a turning point in our relationship to the earth, its inhabitants, and its climate. Drawing on Marxism and philosophy of science, "The Calamity Form...

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...

The uncontested center of the black pulp fiction universe for more than four decades was the Los Angeles publisher Holloway House. From the late 1960s until it closed in 2008, Holloway House specialized in cheap paperbacks with page-turning narrative...

This book focuses on six brilliant women who are often seen as particularly tough-minded: Simone Weil, Hannah Arendt, Mary McCarthy, Susan Sontag, Diane Arbus, and Joan Didion. Aligned with no single tradition, they escape straightforward categories....

"Listening to the Loom" brings to light a previously unknown body of ideas and essays from renowned Indian Dalit scholar D. R. Nagaraj, representing his most important writings on literature, politics, and violence. Comprised of thirteen pieces – the...

"The Mahabharata" tells a story of such violence and tragedy that many people in India refuse to keep the full text in their homes, fearing that if they do, they will invite a disastrous fate upon their house. Covering everything from creation to des...

Selected from the pages of "Le Monde", the interviews conducted by Florence Noiville are unequaled in literary journalism. In "Literary Miniatures", Noiville captures the words and views of some of the best known writers of the twentieth century, eng...

"The Fabulous Feminist" brings together for the first time in one volume a vast range of renowned feminist thinker Suniti Namjoshi's writings, starting with her most famous collection, "Feminist Fables", and including excerpts from "Saint Suniti and...

At the end of the sixteenth century, scholars and intellectuals were seen as Faustian magicians, dangerous and sexy. By the nineteenth century, they were perceived as dusty and dried up, "dead from the waist down", as Browning so wickedly put it. In...