Literary Criticism bestsellers

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD WINNER • ONE OF TIME’S 100 MOST INFLUENTIAL PEOPLE • A ruthlessly honest, emotionally charged, and utterly original exploration of Asian American consciousness

“Brilliant . . . To read this book is to become more human.”—Claudia Rankine, author of Citizen

In... Read more »

A BRILLIANT SCHOLAR IMPARTS THE LESSONS BEQUEATHED BY THE BLACK COMMUNITY AND ITS REMARKABLE ARTISTS AND THINKERS. Farah Jasmine Griffin has taken to her heart the phrase “read until you understand,” a line her father, who died when she was nine, wrote in a note to her. She has made it central to this book about love of the majestic power of... Read more »

“In these soaring, open-hearted essays, Vanessa Zoltan writes with fierce brilliance about suffering, survival, and the kind of meaning in life that can withstand real scrutiny.”—John Green, bestselling author of The Fault in Our Stars and The Anthropocene Reviewed
 
 
A deeply felt celebration of a classic novel--and a reflection on the ways our... Read more »

Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award in Biography • “One of the most beautiful biographies I've ever read." —Glennon Doyle, author of #1 New York Times Bestseller, Untamed

The highly anticipated biography of Sylvia Plath that focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual achievements, while restoring... Read more »

NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “From The New Yorker’s beloved cultural critic comes a bold, unflinching collection of essays about self-deception, examining everything from scammer culture to reality television.”—Esquire
 
Book Club Pick for Now Read This, from PBS NewsHour and The New York Times • “A whip-smart, challenging book.”—Zadie Smith • “Jia... Read more »

The Brothers Karamazov is a passionate philosophical novel set in 19th century Russia, that enters deeply into the ethical debates of God, free will, and morality. It is a spiritual drama of moral struggles concerning faith, doubt, and reason, set against a modernizing Russia.Through the gripping events of their story, Dostoevsky portrays the... Read more »

An immensely persuasive work of literary criticism that opens a new chapter in the American dialogue on race—and promises to change the way we read American literature.

Morrison shows how much the themes of freedom and individualism, manhood and innocence, depended on the existence of a black population that was manifestly unfree--and that came... Read more »

A nostalgia-packed, star-studded anthology featuring contributors such as Kristen Arnett, Yumi Sakugawa, Myriam Gurba, and others exploring the lasting impact of Ann M. Martin’s beloved Baby-Sitters Club series

In 1986, the first-ever meeting of the Baby-Sitters Club was called to order in a messy bedroom strewn with RingDings, scrunchies, and a... Read more »

Bestselling author and renowned professor Mary Karr offers a master class in the essential elements of great memoir—delivered with her signature wit, insight, and candor.

Credited with sparking the current memoir explosion, Mary Karr’s The Liars’ Club spent more than a year at the top of the New York Times list. She followed with two other smash...

“Doctors don’t imitate Galen. Why should writers follow Aristotle? Jane Alison in her fresh, original book about narrative is our new Aristotle.” ―Edmund White, author of The Unpunished Vice: A Life of Reading

As Jane Alison writes in the introduction to her insightful and appealing book about the craft of writing: “For centuries there’s been one...

Originally published in 1854, Walden; or, Life in the Woods, is a vivid account of the time that Henry D. Thoreau lived alone in a secluded cabin at Walden Pond. It is one of the most influential and compelling books in American literature. This new paperback edition-introduced by noted American writer John Updike-celebrates the 150th... Read more »

A brilliant, invigorating account of the great writers on both sides of the Iron Curtain who played the dangerous games of espionage, dissidence and subversion that changed the course of the Cold War.

During the Cold War, literature was both sword and noose. Novels, essays and poems could win the hearts and minds of those caught between the...

From the author of Hunger: A Memoir of (My) Body, the New York Times Bestseller and Best Book of the Year at NPR, the Boston Globe, Newsweek, and many more

A collection of essays spanning politics, criticism, and feminism from one of the most-watched young cultural observers of her generation, Roxane Gay.

“Pink is my favorite color. I used to say...

What story would Eve have told about picking the apple? Why is Pandora blamed for opening the box? And what about the fate of Cassandra who was blessed with knowing the future but cursed so that no one believed her? What if women had been the storytellers?

Elizabeth Lesser believes that if women’s voices had been equally heard and respected...

In Burning the Books, Richard Ovenden describes the deliberate destruction of knowledge held in libraries and archives from ancient Alexandria to contemporary Sarajevo, from smashed Assyrian tablets in Iraq to the destroyed immigration documents of the UK Windrush generation. He examines both the motivations for these acts and the broader themes... Read more »

Mere Christianity, C. S. Lewis's eloquent and winsome defense of the Christian faith, originated as a series of BBC radio talks broadcast during the dark days of World War Two. Here is the story of the extraordinary life and afterlife of this influential and much-beloved book. George Marsden describes how Lewis gradually went from being an... Read more »

Explore the fascinating lives and loves of the greatest novelists, poets, and playwrights.

From William Shakespeare and Jane Austen to Gabriel García Márquez and Toni Morrison, Writers explores more than 100 biographies of the world’s greatest writers. Each featured novelist, playwright, or poet is introduced by a stunning portrait, followed by... Read more »

With color, irony, and sensitivity, Pulitzer Prize winner Annie Dillard illuminates the dedication, absurdity, and daring that is the writer's life. As it probes and exposes, examines and analyzes,The Writing Lifeoffers deeper insight into one of the most mysterious of professions.

A gregarious recluse, Dillard has passed many days, weeks, and...

A collection of essays, lectures, and observations on the art of writing fiction from Alice McDermott, winner of the National Book Award and unmatched "virtuoso of language and image" (Rebecca Steinitz, The Boston Globe)

What About the Baby? Some Thoughts on the Art of Fiction gathers the bestselling novelist Alice McDermott’s pithiest wisdom...

At last, a new audio edition of the book many have called James Baldwin's most influential work!Written during the 1940s and early 1950s, when Baldwin was only in his twenties, the essays collected in Notes of a Native Son capture a view of black life and black thought at the dawn of the civil rights movement and as the movement slowly gained... Read more »

Now in audiobook for the first time ever! Read by Simon Jones, the original “Arthur Dent,” and written by #1 New York Times bestselling author Neil Gaiman, Don’t Panic is the definitive chronicle of all things Hitchhiker!

First published in 1986 and updated several times since, Don’t Panic is in an in-depth exploration of Douglas Adams’s cultural...

This national bestseller is "a significant contribution to discussions of the art of fiction and a necessary challenge to received views about whose stories are told, how they are told and for whom they are intended" (Laila Lalami, The New York Times Book Review).

The traditional writing workshop was established with white male writers in mind;... Read more »

Humans live in landscapes of make-believe. We spin fantasies. We devour novels, films, and plays. Even sporting events and criminal trials unfold as narratives. Yet the world of story has long remained an undiscovered and unmapped country. It's easy to say that humans are "wired" for story, but why?

In this delightful and original book, Jonathan... Read more »

World-renowned folklorist Maria Tatar reveals an astonishing but long buried history of heroines, taking us from Cassandra and Scheherazade to Nancy Drew and Wonder Woman.

How do we explain our newfound cultural investment in empathy and social justice? For decades, Joseph Campbell had defined our cultural aspirations in The Hero with a... Read more »

The first novel-writing guide from the best-selling Save the Cat! story-structure series, which reveals the 15 essential plot points needed to make any novel a success.

Novelist Jessica Brody presents a comprehensive story-structure guide for novelists that applies the famed Save the Cat! screenwriting methodology to the world of novel writing.... Read more »

An assemblage of reflections on the nature of writing and the writer from one the greatest American writers of the twentieth century.

Throughout Hemingway’s career as a writer, he maintained that it was bad luck to talk about writing—that it takes off “whatever butterflies have on their wings and the arrangement of hawk’s feathers if you show it... Read more »

National Best Seller 

From the National Book Award–winning author of Just Kids: an unforgettable odyssey of a legendary artist, told through the prism of the cafés and haunts she has worked in around the world. It is a book Patti Smith has described as “a roadmap to my life.”

M Train begins in the tiny Greenwich Village café where Smith goes... Read more »

One of the most beloved authors in English literature, Jane Austen wrote myriad novels, stories and poems that illustrated her sophisticated sense of irony, humor and biting commentary on the society of Regency England. As the majority of her work was published anonymously, in the custom of female authors at the time, much of her notoriety came... Read more »

On bookshelves around the world, surrounded by ordinary books bound in paper and leather, rest other volumes of a distinctly strange and grisly sort: those bound in human skin. Would you know one if you held it in your hand? In Dark Archives, Megan Rosenbloom seeks out the historic and scientific truths behind anthropodermic bibliopegy?the... Read more »

Published in 2011, The 10X Rule approaches not only problems within the US economy present after the stock market dip of 2008, but it also discusses issues within the mentality of employees remaining in the workforce after the crash. The 10X Rule explains how everyone on this earth has the potential to do great things, regardless of their... Read more »

This “fascinating” (Malcolm Gladwell, New York Times bestselling author of Outliers) examination of literary inventions through the ages, from ancient Mesopotamia to Elena Ferrante, shows how writers have created technical breakthroughs—rivaling scientific inventions—and engineering enhancements to the human heart and mind.

Literature is a... Read more »

A luminescent treatise on writing, love, and loss, a witty response to George Orwell's influential essay "Why I Write"

Things I Don't Want to Know is the first in Deborah Levy's essential three-part "living autobiography" on writing and womanhood.

Taking George Orwell's famous essay, "Why I Write", as a jumping-off point, Deborah Levy offers her... Read more »

The world-renowned classic that has enthralled and delighted millions of readers with its timeless tales of gods and heroes.

Edith Hamilton's mythology succeeds like no other book in bringing to life for the modern reader the Greek, Roman and Norse myths that are the keystone of Western culture-the stories of gods and heroes that have inspired... Read more »

Discover the world's greatest myths and legends - from Greek mythology to Norse mythology - in this comprehensive guide.

What did Japanese mythology say about the beginning of the Universe? How did Oedipus become the classic tragic hero in Greek mythology? Who brought about the origin of death in Maori mythology? With vivid retellings of famous... Read more »

The Washington Post’s Pulitzer Prize–winning book critic uses the books of the Trump era to argue that our response to this presidency reflects the same failures of imagination that made it possible.

As a book critic for The Washington Post, Carlos Lozada has read some 150 volumes claiming to diagnose why Trump was elected and what his... Read more »

From the internationally acclaimed, best-selling author of Brother, I'm Dying, a collection of vividly imagined stories about community, family, and love. Rich with hard-won wisdom and humanity, set in locales from Miami and Port-au-Prince to a small unnamed country in the Caribbean and beyond, Everything Inside is at once wide in scope and... Read more »

The definitive, revelatory biography of Marvel Comics icon Stan Lee, a writer and entrepreneur who reshaped global pop culture—at a steep personal cost
 
“A biography that reads like a thriller or a whodunit . . . scrupulously honest, deeply damning, and sometimes even heartbreaking.”—Neil Gaiman

Stan Lee was one of the most famous and beloved... Read more »

Rilke's powerfully touching letters to an aspiring young poet, now available in a beautiful hardcover Penguin edition

At the start of the twentieth century, Rainer Maria Rilke wrote a series of letters to a young officer cadet, advising him on writing, love, sex, suffering, and the nature of advice itself. These profound and lyrical letters have...

In her entertaining and edifying New York Times bestseller, acclaimed author Francine Prose invites you to sit by her side and take a guided tour of the tools and the tricks of the masters and discover why their work has endured. Written with passion, humor, and wisdom, Reading Like a Writer will inspire readers to return to literature with a...

“[Warmth] is lyrical and erudite, engaging with science, activism, and philosophy . . . [Sherrell] captures the complicated correspondence between hope and doubt, faith and despair—the pendulum of emotional states that defines our attitude toward the future.” —The New Yorker

“Beautifully rendered and bracingly honest.” —Jenny Odell, author of... Read more »

This is the perfect study guide to the complete works of Shakespeare, covering everything from the romantic comedy of Romeo and Juliet to the tragedy Macbeth, alongside his Elizabethan history plays, sonnets, and other poems.

With detailed plot summaries and an in-depth analysis of the major characters and themes, this is a brilliant, innovative...

"A must-read for this era.”—Jake Tapper, CNN Anchor and Chief Washington Correspondent 

An insightful, urgent, and perennially relevant handbook that lays out in common sense language how the United States Constitution works, and how its protections are eroding before our eyes—essential reading for anyone who wants to understand and parse the...

Shakespeare: The Illustrated Edition is an exquisitely illustrated, updated edition of Bill Bryson’s bestselling biography of William Shakespeare that takes the reader on an enthralling tour through Elizabethan England and the eccentricities of Shakespearean scholarship. With more than 100 color and black-and-white illustrations throughout, and... Read more »

Exploring more than 100 of the world's most important literary works and the literary geniuses that created them, this book is the perfect introduction to the subject of literature and writing.

The Literature Book features some of the world's most celebrated books, plays, and poetry, including Latin American and African fiction, and best-selling...

In this brilliantly original book, Camille Paglia identifies some of the major patterns that have endured in western culture from ancient Egypt and Greece to the present. According to Paglia, one source of continuity is paganism, which, undefeated by Judeo-Christianity, continues to flourish in art, eroticism, astrology, and pop culture. Others,... Read more »