A timeless story of love, morality, and tragedy, Fernando de Rojas’s novel Celestina is second only to Don Quixote in its importance in Spanish-language literature.

One of our most influential theater figures takes a provocative look at how Shakespeare’s plays were influenced by misogyny, racism, elitism, and other social and sexual prejudices of his age, and how he managed to transcend them and write universal works of art.

In this thought-provoking book, John Felstiner explores the rich legacy of poems that take nature as their subject, and he demonstrates their force and beauty. In our own time of environmental crises, he contends, poetry has a unique capacity to restore our attention to our environment in its imperiled state.  And this, in turn, may just  make us better ste...

The publication of an astonishing debut more than fifty years ago brought poet Geoffrey Hill immediate attention and acclaim. Selected Poems represents a major publishing event, the publication of the first representative selection of Hill’s poetry, gathering work from early volumes to such recent books as The Orchards of Syon and Without Title.

This beautifully written biography of the internationally renowned Palestinian poet Taha offers a compelling portrait of the man as well as a nuanced, deeply human view of the tragedy of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict. Taha’s story, like his poetry, is at once profoundly local and utterly universal.

Inspired by the process of creating a library for his fifteenth-century home near the Loire, in France, Alberto Manguel, the acclaimed writer on books and reading, has taken up the subject of libraries. “Libraries,” he says, “have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I’ve been seduced by their labyrinthi...

Poetry doesn’t matter to most people, observes Jay Parini at the opening of this book. But, undeterred, he commences a deeply felt meditation on poetry, its language and meaning, and its power to open minds and transform lives. By the end of the book, Parini has recovered a truth often obscured by our clamorous culture: without poetry, we live only partially, n...

This deeply moving and original portrait of William Faulkner explores his three crucial relationships—with his black and white mothers, Caroline Barr and Maud Falkner, and with his wife, Estelle Oldham. These Southern women gave life to Faulkner’s imagination, profoundly shaping his emotional and psychological world.

This masterly biography uncovers Dickens the man through the profession in which he excelled. Michael Slater explores the personal and emotional life, the high-profile public activities, the relentless travel, the charitable works, the amateur theatricals and the astonishing productivity. But his core focus is Dickens’ career as a writer and professional author...

Through the keen eye of award-winning translator Rika Lesser, Göran Sonnevi’s revelatory long-form poem on the inner workings of human consciousness comes to life for the English reader.

The Maine Woods, Thoreau’s best-known book after Walden, is now available for the first time in a lavishly produced, fully-annotated gift-book edition that provides deep insights into the life and work of the great author and naturalist.

This extraordinary new translation of the Aeneid stands alone among modern Vergil translations for its accuracy and poetic appeal. Sarah Ruden, a lyric poet in her own right, is the first woman to translate Vergil’s great epic, and she renders the poem in the same number of lines as the original work—a very rare feat that maintains technical...

Chinese author Can Xue’s Five Spice Street stands out as one of the most astonishing novels written in any language over the last twenty years. The first of Xue’s full-length works to be translated into English, this compelling book explores a secret that takes on a life of its own as neighbors speculate, argue, indulge their fantasies, and reveal ...

The prodigiously gifted Isaac Rosenfeld, Saul Bellow’s closest friend and most brilliant rival, died abruptly at 38, leaving his early promise unfulfilled. This book is the first to explore the genius of this unjustly forgotten writer, his place in Jewish letters, and the cost of choosing a writer’s life.