Literary Criticism bestsellers

A Swim in a Pond in the Rain

“This masterclass for writers is also a masterclass for readers, and you don't have to be a writer to enjoy it. Through his wise insights on storytelling, Saunders sent me away with an understanding of why I enjoy reading what I do, how stories work, and how to be a better storyteller (and human) in all rights.”

Emily, Tsunami Books

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 »

A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOK OF THE YEAR • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • The highly anticipated biography of Sylvia Plath that focuses on her remarkable literary and intellectual achievements, while restoring the woman behind the long-held myths about her life and art.

“One of the most beautiful biographies I've ever read." —Glennon Doyle, author of... Read more »

Longlisted for the PEN/Jacqueline Bograd Weld Award for Biography

“An exhilarating romp through Orwell’s life and times and also through the life and times of roses.” —Margaret Atwood
 
“A captivating account of Orwell as gardener, lover, parent, and endlessly curious thinker.” —Claire Messud, Harper's

“Nobody who reads it will ever think of... Read more »

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 »

The Toni Morrison Book Club

“Readers looking to further educate themselves on race should put this book at the top of their audio queue. Listening to this book had me feeling like I was sitting in on an intimate and powerful discussion on Toni Morrison's works and what we can all learn from them. Educational, informative, and powerful.”

Mary, Skylark Bookshop

The first-ever full reckoning with Marvel Comics’ interconnected, half-million-page story, a revelatory guide to the “epic of epics”—and to the past sixty years of American culture—from a beloved authority on the subject who read all 27,000+ Marvel superhero comics and lived to tell the tale

“Brilliant, eccentric, moving and wholly wonderful. .... Read more »

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 »

NAMED A BEST BOOK OF 2021 BY THE NEW YORKER AND PUBLISHERS WEEKLY

“[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... 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 »

For years, America's national parks have provided public breathing spaces in a world in which such spaces are steadily disappearing, which is why close to 300 million people visit the parks each year. Now, to honor the centennial of the National Park Service, Terry Tempest Williams, the author of the beloved memoir When Women Were Birds, returns... 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 »

The Communist Manifesto

The Communist Manifesto is a pamphlet written by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and is recognized as one of the most important and influential political documents in the world. It became one of the principal programmatic statements of the European socialist and communist parties in the 19th and early 20th centuries. It is...

These empowering essays from leading women writers examine the power of the gendered language that is used to diminish women -- and imagine a more liberated world.

Words matter. They wound, they inflate, they define, they demean. They have nuance and power. "Effortless," "Sassy," "Ambitious," "Aggressive": What subtle digs and sneaky implications... Read more »

Part survey of the field of Indigenous literary studies, part cultural history, and part literary polemic, Why Indigenous Literatures Matter asserts the vital significance of literary expression to the political, creative, and intellectual efforts of Indigenous peoples today. Selected as an Equity, Justice, and Inclusion Community Read by the...

The "Fresh Air" book critic investigates the enduring power of The Great Gatsby -- "The Great American Novel we all think we've read, but really haven't."

Conceived nearly a century ago by a man who died believing himself a failure, it's now a revered classic and a rite of passage in the reading lives of millions. But how well do we really know... Read more »

The author of the award-winning Matisse: A Life gives us the definitive biography of writer Anthony Powell--and takes us deep into the heart of twentieth-century London's literary life.

Insightful, lively, and enthralling, this biography is as much a brilliant tapestry of a seminal era in London’s literary life as it is a revelation of an iconic... 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 »

“Roxane Gay is so great at weaving the intimate and personal with what is most bewildering and upsetting at this moment in culture. She is always looking, always thinking, always passionate, always careful, always right there.”  — Sheila Heti, author of How Should a Person Be?

A New York Times Bestseller

Best Book of the Year: NPR • Boston Globe •...

A provocative, moving, kinky, and often absurdly funny memoir about Shakespeare, love, obsession, and spanking

When it came to understanding love, a teenage Jillian Keenan had nothing to guide her—until a production of The Tempest sent Shakespeare’s language flowing through her blood for the first time. In Sex with Shakespeare, she tells the...

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 »

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 »

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...

The Divine Comedy describes Dante's descent into Hell with Virgil as a guide; his ascent of Mount Purgatory and encounter with his dead love, Beatrice; and finally, his arrival in Heaven. Examining questions of faith, desire and enlightenment, the poem is a brilliantly nuanced and moving allegory of human redemption.

Dante Alighieri was born... Read more »

An innovative and elegant new biography of John Milton from an acclaimed Oxford professor

John Milton was once essential reading for visionaries and revolutionaries, from William Blake to Ben Franklin. Now, however, he has become a literary institution—intimidating rather than inspiring.

In Making Darkness Light, Oxford professor Joe Moshenska... Read more »

Un cuarto propio es un breve ensayo de Virginia Woolf sobre la condición femenina que se ha convertido en un icono de la literatura del siglo XX.

«No hay marca en la pared para medir la precisa estatura de las mujeres. No hay medidas que determinen las condiciones de una buena madre o el cariño de una hija, la fidelidad de una hermana o la...

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 »

“An elegant, meticulously researched, and eminently readable history of the books that define us as Americans. For history buffs and book-lovers alike, McHugh offers us a precious gift.”—Jake Halpern, Pulitzer Prize winner and New York Times bestselling author     

“With her usual eye for detail and knack for smart storytelling, Jess McHugh... Read more »

"An urgent and compelling account of great bravery and passion." ―Susan Orlean

Award-winning journalist Delphine Minoui recounts the true story of a band of young rebels, a besieged Syrian town, and an underground library built from the rubble of war

Reading is an act of resistance.

Daraya is a town outside Damascus, the very spot where the Syrian... Read more »

Year of the Monkey

“I’m convinced that Patti Smith is the reincarnation of some spiritual mystic. Someone like Joan of Arc or Hildegard von Bingen. At this point I am committed to only listening to her audiobooks because her words are even more powerful in her own dreamy cadence. I sound like a school girl mooning over her first loved celebrity but, I can’t say it’s that different for me. I’ve lived and read enough to know that Patti Smith will forever be a literary icon for me and if you disagree, I maintain that you either haven’t read her yet OR you are wrong (insert tongue sticking out emoji). Anyway. I always struggle to review Patti’s books because her dream-like writing style is hard for me to appropriately express. In Year of the Monkey, Patti struggles with two incredible losses of lifelong friends, she struggles with the odd world we all find ourselves living in now, she struggles with dreams. Her prose (as it always seems to, but more so in this book) jumps quickly and fluidly from heady esoteric musings to a fluorescent glimpse into reality. A fever dream of images, are they real or a part of her beautiful mind. Patti is obsessed with a beach covered in candy wrappers, why isn’t this in the news? An out of place conversation with strangers about Robert Bolano. A dreamy vision of discussing Ayers Rock with Sam Shepherd, and the stark reality of his declining health. If you are unfamiliar with Patti Smith and/or her books, I encourage you wholeheartedly to pick one of them up, get lost in her incredible mind and musings. If not for the sake of understanding this bumbling mess of a review, for yourself so that you too can be drunk on her words and lost for your own. ”

Chelsea, McLean & Eakin Booksellers

Award-winning children's author Mitali Perkins grew up steeped in stories—escaping into her books on the fire escape of a Flushing apartment building and, later, finding solace in them as she navigated between the cultures of her suburban California school and her Bengali heritage at home. Now Perkins invites us to explore the promise of seven... Read more »

“Funny, sharp explications of what these sometimes not-very-nice women were up to, and how they sometimes made idiots of . . . but read on!”—Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid's Tale

The national bestselling author of A Thousand Ships returns with a fascinating, eye-opening take on the remarkable women at the heart of classical stories Greek...

An exploration and manifesto investigating the power of reading--and our potential to become radically better readers in the world--by an acclaimed novelist.

How many times have we heard that reading builds empathy? That we can travel through books? How often have we were heard about the importance of diversifying our bookshelves? Or claimed that... Read more »

The must own audio book for parents with children, Hans Christian Andersen found magic in the landscape of childhood. His talking animals and living toys shine a sparkling light on the strange wisdom of innocence and the deceptive nature of adulthood. These stories have now been adapted into countless classic films (including The Little Mermaid,... 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 »

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 »

One of The Economist's 2011 Books of the Year 


THE TRUE BUT UNLIKELY STORIES OF LIVES DEVOTED―ABSURDLY! MELANCHOLICALLY! BEAUTIFULLY!―TO THE RUSSIAN CLASSICS

No one who read Elif Batuman's first article (in the journal n+1) will ever forget it. "Babel in California" told the true story of various human destinies intersecting at Stanford University... Read more »

“Dead Girls is everything I want in an essay collection: provocative lines of inquiry, macabre humor, blistering intelligence... I love this book. I want to take it into the middle of a crowded room and hold it up and scream until someone tackles me the ground; even then, I’d probably keep screaming.”
— Carmen Maria Machado, author of Her Body...

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...

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 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 »

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 »

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 »

What We Talk About When We Talk About Books

“ What We Talk About When We Talk About Books healed some real cracks in my relationship with reading, and reinforced my love and optimism for the written word. Book historian Leah Price guides you through all the myths, melodrama, and baggage modern culture is carrying around about books. Through a humorous and curiosity-filled tour of book history, she unpacks why so many of us feel so much pressure to read the right things in the right way, and why we've come to feel like doing so would whip our brains into shape and make us into zen, hyper-focused superhumans. Price's measured take on things made me feel like it's all going to be okay. Elisabeth Rodgers' cool, clear voice was the perfect narration.”

Tova, Busboys and Poets Books

*A New York Times Book Review Editors' Choice * One of The East Hampton Star's 10 Best Books of the Year*

From the New York Times bestselling author of The Most Dangerous Book, the true story behind the creation of another masterpiece of world literature, Fyodor Dostoevsky's Crime and Punishment.

The Sinner and the Saint is the deeply researched... Read more »

One of the New Yorker’s Favorite Books from 2011—from the renowned translator of Rilke, Tao Te Ching, and Gilgamesh, a vivid new translation of Western civilization’s foundational epic: the Iliad.

One of The New Yorker’s Favorite Books of 2 011

Tolstoy called the Iliad a miracle; Goethe said that it always thrust him into a state of astonishment.... Read more »

“The queer memoir you’ve been waiting for”—Carmen Maria Machado

Grace Lavery is a reformed druggie, an unreformed omnisexual chaos Muppet, and 100 percent, all-natural, synthetic female hormone monster. As soon as she solves her “penis problem,” she begins receiving anonymous letters, seemingly sent by a cult of sinister clowns, and sets out on a...

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 »

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...