The French Revolution brings to mind violent mobs, the guillotine, and Madame Defarge, but it was also a publishing revolution: more than 1,200 novels were published between 1789 and 1804, when Napoleon declared the Revolution at an end. In this book...

"Five Spice Street" is a novel about a street in an unnamed city whose inhabitants speculate on the life of a mysterious Madam X. The novel interweaves their endless suppositions into a work that is at once political parable and surreal fantasia. Som...

Lope de Vega "single-handedly created the Spanish national theatre", writes Roberto Gonzalez Echevarria in the introduction to this new translation of "Fuenteovejuna". Often compared to Shakespeare, Moliere, and Racine, Lope is widely considered the...

Deported to a concentration camp from 1941 until the end of the war, Norman Manea again left his native Romania in 1986 to escape the Ceausescu regime. He now lives in New York. In this selection of essays on the subject of exile, he explores the lan...

As a young, deaf Jewish woman living in a small town in Michigan in 1942, Sandra Horowitz felt deeply frustrated by her limited prospects. Even though she had just graduated from junior college, she knew that she had two strikes against her in fulfil...

In today's academe, the fields of science and literature are considered unconnected, one relying on raw data and fact, the other focusing on fiction. During the period between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment, however, the two fields were not so...

Sir Frank Kermode, the British scholar, instructor, and author, was an inspired critic".Forms of Attention" is based on a series of three lectures he gave on canon formation, or how we choose what art to value. The essay on Botticelli traces the arti...

Between Parker's 1961 debut and his return in the late 1990s, the world of crime changed considerably. Now fake IDs and credit cards had to be purchased from specialists; increasingly sophisticated policing made escape and evasion tougher; and, worst...

Between Parker's 1961 debut and his return in the late 1990s, the world of crime changed considerably. Now fake IDs and credit cards had to be purchased from specialists; increasingly sophisticated policing made escape and evasion tougher; and, worst...

The novel contains imagined lives that achieve a kind of meaning and intensity our own lives do not. Out of the novelist's moral imagination-the breadth and depth of his awareness of human motivations, tensions, and complexities-emerge fictional pers...