Simon Leys is a Renaissance man for the era of globalization: a distinguished scholar of classical Chinese art and literature, he was one of the first Westerners to expose the horrors of Mao’s Cultural Revolution. Leys’s interests and expertise...
On Being Blue is a book about everything blue — sex and sleaze and sadness, among other things — and about everything else. It brings us the world in a word as only William H. Gass, among contemporary American writers, can do.
Gass writes:
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“All truth passes through 3 stages. First it’s ridiculed. Second, it’s violently opposed. Third, it’s accepted as being self-evident.”
— Arthur Schopenhauer
1. International Red Cross records refute “official” death toll....
A Choice Outstanding Academic Title for 2013
Synthesizing several decades of scholarship by historians East and West, Barbara Evans Clements traces the major developments in the history of women in Russia and their impact on the history of the...
A dazzling philosophical investigation of the challenge of living in the present, by a brilliant practitioner of the new essay.
In her third book, which continues to define the contours of the contemporary essay, Sarah Manguso confronts a...
The ascension of Vladimir Putin—a former lieutenant colonel of the KGB—to the presidency of Russia in 1999 should have been a signal that the country was headed away from democracy. Yet in the intervening years—as America and the world’s...
Things I Don't Want to Know is a brilliantly insightful longform essay by Deborah Levy.
'Things I Don't Want to Know' is a unique response to George Orwell from one of our most vital contemporary writers. Taking Orwell's famous list of motives...
Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also...
Brilliant, dazzling, never-before-collected nonfiction writings by "one of America's most daring and talented writers." (Los Angeles Times Book Review).
Both Flesh and Not gathers fifteen of Wallace's seminal essays, all published in book form...
In this exuberantly praised book — a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling aboard a...