Sei Shonagon’s Pillow Book—a key inspiration for Rivka Galchen’s new book — contains a list of “Things That Make One Nervous.” And wouldn’t the blessed event top almost anyone’s list?
Little Labors is a slanted, enchanted...
Included in Library Journal’s "25 Key Indie Fiction Titles, Fall 2014-Winter 2015".
Within the writer's life, words and things acquire power. For Borges it is the tiger and the color red, for Cortázar a pair of amorous lions, and for an early...
Nicholson Baker, who “writes like no one else in America” (Newsweek), here assembles his best short pieces from the last fifteen years.
The Way the World Works, Baker’s second nonfiction collection, ranges over the map of life to examine...
In A Jane Austen Education, Austen scholar William Deresiewicz turns to the author's novels to reveal the remarkable life lessons hidden within. With humor and candor, Deresiewicz employs his own experiences to demonstrate the enduring power of...
The major work of fiction in this collection, ‘A History of Books’, explores the relationship between reading and writing in twenty nine sections, each of which begins with the memory of a book that has left an image in the writer’s mind. The...
An author (a version of Vila-Matas himself) presents a short history of a secret society, the Shandies, who are obsessed with the concept of portable literature. The society is entirely imagined, but in this rollicking, intellectually playful book,...
“The Translator’s Invisibility: A History of Translation” provides a thorough and critical examination
of translation from the seventeenth century to the present day. It shows
how fluency prevailed over other translation strategies to shape...