Category
Literature of the United States of America (USA)
The definitive, career-spanning collection of writing from Anthony Bourdain, assembled for the first time in book form.
Anthony Bourdain represented many things to many people—and he had many sides. But no part of his identity was more important to him, and more long-lasting, than that of a...
James Baldwin turns a murder and its aftermath into an inquest in which even the most well-intentioned whites are implicated—and in which even a killer receives his share of compassion.
In a small Southern town, a white man murders a black man, then throws his body in the weeds. With this act of...
Above Ground 2026
Clint Smith’s vibrant and compelling new collection traverses the vast emotional terrain of fatherhood, and explores how becoming a parent has recalibrated his sense of the world. There are poems that interrogate the ways our lives are shaped by both personal lineages and historical institutions....
Berlin, 1932. As political unrest grips Germany and the Nazi Party rises to power, a group of artists, activists, and intellectuals gathers in an apartment, struggling to understand the forces transforming their country. Bound by friendship, ideals, and a shared sense of unease, they watch as fear,...
In this exquisite book, Alice Walker’s first new collection of poetry since 1991, are poems that reaffirm her as “one of the best American writers of today” (The Washington Post). The forces of nature and the strength of the human spirit inspire the poems in Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the...
Spanning the years 1920 to 1956, this priceless collection of articles and letters shows Hemingway's work as a reporter, from correspondent for the Toronto Star to contributor to Esquire, Colliers, and Look. As fledgling reporter, war correspondent, and seasoned journalist, Hemingway provides access...
Caroline, or Change 2004
A nation reeling from the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedy assassination. Caroline, a black maid, and Noah, the son of the Jewish family she works for, struggle to find an identity for their friendship after Noah's stepmother, unable to give Caroline a raise, tells Caroline that she...
Citizen 2014
Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the...
Counting Descent 2016
In the intricate tapestry of Counting Descent, Clint Smith expertly navigates the nuances of belonging and dissonance. Through his poetic lens, he guides us through the labyrinthine experience of being part of a community that fiercely and unapologetically celebrates the richness of black humanity....
James Baldwin was an American literary master, renowned for his fierce engagement with issues haunting our common history. In The Cross of Redemption we have Baldwin discoursing on, among other subjects, the possibility of an African-American president and what it might mean; the hypocrisy of...
Named one of the Los Angeles Times's Best Science Fiction Books in 2007, Dance Dance Revolution is a genre-bending tour de force told from the perspective of the Guide, a former dissident and tour guide of an imagined desert city.
A Distant Center 2018
Best-selling novelist Ha Jin’s poetry boldly confronts China’s fraught political history while paying tribute to its rich culture and landscape.
In the bold tradition of the “Misty Poets,” Ha Jin confronts China’s fraught political history while paying tribute to its rich culture and landscape. The...
In this widely celebrated debut collection of poems, Natasha Trethewey draws moving domestic portraits of families, past and present, caught in the act of earning a living and managing their households. Small moments taken from a labor-filled day--and rendered here in graceful and readable...
Claudia Rankine’s second poetry collection, The End of the Alphabet, is an inquiry into despair and recovery, selfhood and alienation. Centered on a heroine named Jane, these poems—obsessive, intrepid, erotic—speak in the aftermath of a life-altering tragedy, attempting to make peace with loss and...
Engine Empire 2012
Engine Empire is a trilogy of lyric and narrative poems that evoke an array of genres and voices, from Western ballads to sonnets about industrialized China to fragmented lyric poems set in the future. Through three distinct yet interconnected sequences, Cathy Park Hong explores the collective...
Although highly regarded as a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and drama, N. Scott Momaday considers himself primarily a poet. This first book of his poems to be published in over a decade, Again the Far Morning comprises a varied selection of new work along with the best from his four earlier books...
Homebody/Kabul 2005
A middle-aged English woman, fascinated by the history and culture of Afghanistan, becomes increasingly absorbed in a world she has never seen. After she unexpectedly disappears while traveling in Kabul, her husband and daughter journey to Afghanistan in search of answers, entering a country shaped...
Human Nature 2000
Olson's first book of new poetry in sixteen years. Human Nature is the poet and novelist Toby Olson's first book of new poetry since We Are the Fire (New Directions, 1984). The intervening years saw five of his novels published to strong critical acclaim. "But," says Olson, "one day I woke from...
Imaginary Friends 2003
Although Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy probably only met once in their lives, their names will be linked forever in the history of American literary feuds: they were legendary enemies, especially after McCarthy famously announced to the world that every word Hellman wrote was a lie, “including...
At age fifteen, Barbara Fant tragically lost her mother, and her world was suddenly upended. “I became an angry teenager. I was mad at the world,” she recalls. “I even stopped praying, but I began to write. Poetry became my way of communication, my way of processing ... it became my way to pray.”...
Monument 2019
Layering joy and urgent defiance―against physical and cultural erasure, against white supremacy whether intangible or graven in stone―Trethewey’s work gives pedestal and witness to unsung icons. Monument, Trethewey’s first retrospective, draws together verse that delineates the stories of working...
Characterized by “a radical simplicity and seriousness of purpose, along with a fearless interest in autobiography and its tragedies and redemptions” (Matthew Zapruder, New York Times Magazine), Marie Howe’s poetry transforms penetrating observations of everyday life into sacred, humane...
The New Testament 2014
In the world of Jericho Brown's second book, disease runs through the body, violence runs through the neighborhood, memories run through the mind, trauma runs through generations. Almost eerily quiet in even the bluntest of poems, Brown gives us the ache of a throat that has yet to say the hardest...
In his haunting and fearless debut, Ocean Vuong walks a tightrope of historic and personal violences, creating an interrogation of the American body as a borderless space of both failure and triumph. At once vulnerable and redemptive, dreamlike and visceral, compassionate and unforgiving, these...
O Albany! 1985
William Kennedy's celebrated cycle of novels has put Albany on the literary map. In O Albany! we visit the city's ethnic and social neighborhoods. We meet uncommon characters who tread on Kennedy's stage—Erastus Corning, America's longest-running mayor (forty-three years in office); the Prohibition...
Original Fire 2004
In this important collection, Erdrich has selected the best poems from her two previous books of poetry, Jacklight and Baptism of Desire, and added 19 new poems. In an entirely unique fashion, Original Fire unfolds the themes and introduces the characters of some of Erdrich’s most acclaimed fiction....
Appalachian Elegy 2012
Author, activist, feminist, teacher, and artist bell hooks is celebrated as one of the nation's leading intellectuals. Born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, hooks drew her unique pseudonym from the name of her grandmother, an intelligent and strong-willed African American woman who inspired her to stand...
A Raisin in the Sun 2027
First produced in 1959, A Raisin in the Sun was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and hailed as a watershed in American drama. Not only a pioneering work by an African American playwright—Lorraine Hansberry’s play was also a radically new representation of black life, resolutely...
One of the supreme fiction writers of the twentieth century, Nobel laureate Saul Bellow was also deeply insightful in his lesser-known roles as essayist, critic, and lecturer. Gathered together in this stunning compilation, Bellow’s vast range of nonfiction reveals the same wit, daring, and wisdom...
Running Away 2026
Vivid, honest, and boldly resilient, Ha Jin's latest poetry collection, Running Away, adopts a chorus of narrative voices to tell stories of desperate migration. These poems shift in language and geography, they move across borders and “echo the voices / of those who pant and groan / under heavy...
With echoes of Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, an extraordinary debut collection from a prize-winning poet that chronicles a Black woman’s journey through disability, the byzantine healthcare system, life-giving, taking, and sacrifice.
With breathtaking...
Assorted Prose 2012
John Updike’s first collection of nonfiction pieces, published in 1965 when the author was thirty-three, is a diverting and illuminating gambol through midcentury America and the writer’s youth. It opens with a choice selection of parodies, casuals, and “Talk of the Town” reports, the fruits of...
This Dry Spell 2025
After one night together in the desert, Grace uproots their life to chase after Brahm, a person who is slowly becoming a cactus. Not known for having a green thumb, Grace tends to Brahm and the seeds of their own doubt.
Can the desert be a place for love to grow, or are they both just waiting for...
Originally privately published in Paris, Three Stories and Ten Poems holds an interesting history. The three stories “Up in Michigan,” “Out of Season,” and “My Old Man” were first seen in this collection, but “Up in Michigan” was banned and not considered publishable in America until 1938 because of...
Time Is a Mother 2022
In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of personal and social loss, embodying the paradox of sitting in grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth...
The Tradition 2019
Jericho Brown's daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation?...
Two American Scenes 2013
Two American Scenes features two masters of the essay discussing "found material."
Excerpts:
It was given to me, in the nineteenth century,
to spend a lifetime on this earth. Along with a few of the sorrows
that are appointed unto men, I have had innumerable enjoyments;
and the world has been...
Unfinished Building 1993
Toby Olson considers poetry no less than good talk about important things. With imagery as accessible as the most ordinary of birds and the commonest weather, he performs an alchemy of language. Unfinished Building shows us it is the details that make up a life, that hold the clues to meaning.
The White Card 2019
Claudia Rankine’s first published play, The White Card, poses the essential question: Can American society progress if whiteness remains invisible?
Composed of two scenes, the play opens with a dinner party thrown by Virginia and Charles, an influential Manhattan couple, for the up-and-coming...
Axe in Blossom 2026
“My death is in the second drawer,” writes Franz Wright. “While you’re standing there, would you mind getting me one?”
It is a thrill to be back in these cadences, in his world of exquisite solitude, as he ponders becoming a ghost and returning to a childhood room where, he says, “I won’t have...
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A Raisin in the Sun January 12, 2027
First produced in 1959, A Raisin in the Sun was awarded the New York Drama Critics Circle Award and hailed as a watershed in American drama. Not only a pioneering work by an African American playwright—Lorraine Hansberry’s play was also a radically new representation of black life, resolutely...
Running Away October 27, 2026
Vivid, honest, and boldly resilient, Ha Jin's latest poetry collection, Running Away, adopts a chorus of narrative voices to tell stories of desperate migration. These poems shift in language and geography, they move across borders and “echo the voices / of those who pant and groan / under heavy...
Axe in Blossom July 7, 2026
“My death is in the second drawer,” writes Franz Wright. “While you’re standing there, would you mind getting me one?”
It is a thrill to be back in these cadences, in his world of exquisite solitude, as he ponders becoming a ghost and returning to a childhood room where, he says, “I won’t have...
Above Ground March 10, 2026
Clint Smith’s vibrant and compelling new collection traverses the vast emotional terrain of fatherhood, and explores how becoming a parent has recalibrated his sense of the world. There are poems that interrogate the ways our lives are shaped by both personal lineages and historical institutions....
This Dry Spell November 25, 2025
After one night together in the desert, Grace uproots their life to chase after Brahm, a person who is slowly becoming a cactus. Not known for having a green thumb, Grace tends to Brahm and the seeds of their own doubt.
Can the desert be a place for love to grow, or are they both just waiting for...
New and Selected Poems November 18, 2025
Characterized by “a radical simplicity and seriousness of purpose, along with a fearless interest in autobiography and its tragedies and redemptions” (Matthew Zapruder, New York Times Magazine), Marie Howe’s poetry transforms penetrating observations of everyday life into sacred, humane...
The Anthony Bourdain Reader October 28, 2025
The definitive, career-spanning collection of writing from Anthony Bourdain, assembled for the first time in book form.
Anthony Bourdain represented many things to many people—and he had many sides. But no part of his identity was more important to him, and more long-lasting, than that of a...
Joy in the Belly of a Riot September 2, 2025
At age fifteen, Barbara Fant tragically lost her mother, and her world was suddenly upended. “I became an angry teenager. I was mad at the world,” she recalls. “I even stopped praying, but I began to write. Poetry became my way of communication, my way of processing ... it became my way to pray.”...
The Span of a Small Forever April 2, 2024
With echoes of Audre Lorde’s The Cancer Journals and Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor, an extraordinary debut collection from a prize-winning poet that chronicles a Black woman’s journey through disability, the byzantine healthcare system, life-giving, taking, and sacrifice.
With breathtaking...
Time Is a Mother April 5, 2022
In this deeply intimate second poetry collection, Ocean Vuong searches for life among the aftershocks of personal and social loss, embodying the paradox of sitting in grief while being determined to survive beyond it. Shifting through memory, and in concert with the themes of his novel On Earth...
Monument November 5, 2019
Layering joy and urgent defiance―against physical and cultural erasure, against white supremacy whether intangible or graven in stone―Trethewey’s work gives pedestal and witness to unsung icons. Monument, Trethewey’s first retrospective, draws together verse that delineates the stories of working...
The Tradition April 2, 2019
Jericho Brown's daring new book The Tradition details the normalization of evil and its history at the intersection of the past and the personal. Brown's poetic concerns are both broad and intimate, and at their very core a distillation of the incredibly human: What is safety? Who is this nation?...
The White Card March 19, 2019
Claudia Rankine’s first published play, The White Card, poses the essential question: Can American society progress if whiteness remains invisible?
Composed of two scenes, the play opens with a dinner party thrown by Virginia and Charles, an influential Manhattan couple, for the up-and-coming...
Three Stories and Ten Poems January 8, 2019
Originally privately published in Paris, Three Stories and Ten Poems holds an interesting history. The three stories “Up in Michigan,” “Out of Season,” and “My Old Man” were first seen in this collection, but “Up in Michigan” was banned and not considered publishable in America until 1938 because of...
A Distant Center April 24, 2018
Best-selling novelist Ha Jin’s poetry boldly confronts China’s fraught political history while paying tribute to its rich culture and landscape.
In the bold tradition of the “Misty Poets,” Ha Jin confronts China’s fraught political history while paying tribute to its rich culture and landscape. The...
Counting Descent September 20, 2016
In the intricate tapestry of Counting Descent, Clint Smith expertly navigates the nuances of belonging and dissonance. Through his poetic lens, he guides us through the labyrinthine experience of being part of a community that fiercely and unapologetically celebrates the richness of black humanity....
Night Sky With Exit Wounds April 5, 2016
In his haunting and fearless debut, Ocean Vuong walks a tightrope of historic and personal violences, creating an interrogation of the American body as a borderless space of both failure and triumph. At once vulnerable and redemptive, dreamlike and visceral, compassionate and unforgiving, these...
There Is Simply Too Much to Think About March 22, 2016
One of the supreme fiction writers of the twentieth century, Nobel laureate Saul Bellow was also deeply insightful in his lesser-known roles as essayist, critic, and lecturer. Gathered together in this stunning compilation, Bellow’s vast range of nonfiction reveals the same wit, daring, and wisdom...
The End of the Alphabet July 14, 2015
Claudia Rankine’s second poetry collection, The End of the Alphabet, is an inquiry into despair and recovery, selfhood and alienation. Centered on a heroine named Jane, these poems—obsessive, intrepid, erotic—speak in the aftermath of a life-altering tragedy, attempting to make peace with loss and...
Citizen October 7, 2014
Claudia Rankine's bold new book recounts mounting racial aggressions in ongoing encounters in twenty-first-century daily life and in the media. Some of these encounters are slights, seeming slips of the tongue, and some are intentional offensives in the classroom, at the supermarket, at home, on the...
The New Testament September 16, 2014
In the world of Jericho Brown's second book, disease runs through the body, violence runs through the neighborhood, memories run through the mind, trauma runs through generations. Almost eerily quiet in even the bluntest of poems, Brown gives us the ache of a throat that has yet to say the hardest...
Again the Far Morning July 1, 2013
Although highly regarded as a writer of fiction, nonfiction, and drama, N. Scott Momaday considers himself primarily a poet. This first book of his poems to be published in over a decade, Again the Far Morning comprises a varied selection of new work along with the best from his four earlier books...
Two American Scenes March 26, 2013
Two American Scenes features two masters of the essay discussing "found material."
Excerpts:
It was given to me, in the nineteenth century,
to spend a lifetime on this earth. Along with a few of the sorrows
that are appointed unto men, I have had innumerable enjoyments;
and the world has been...
Appalachian Elegy September 28, 2012
Author, activist, feminist, teacher, and artist bell hooks is celebrated as one of the nation's leading intellectuals. Born in Hopkinsville, Kentucky, hooks drew her unique pseudonym from the name of her grandmother, an intelligent and strong-willed African American woman who inspired her to stand...
Assorted Prose September 18, 2012
John Updike’s first collection of nonfiction pieces, published in 1965 when the author was thirty-three, is a diverting and illuminating gambol through midcentury America and the writer’s youth. It opens with a choice selection of parodies, casuals, and “Talk of the Town” reports, the fruits of...
Engine Empire May 7, 2012
Engine Empire is a trilogy of lyric and narrative poems that evoke an array of genres and voices, from Western ballads to sonnets about industrialized China to fragmented lyric poems set in the future. Through three distinct yet interconnected sequences, Cathy Park Hong explores the collective...
The Cross of Redemption September 6, 2011
James Baldwin was an American literary master, renowned for his fierce engagement with issues haunting our common history. In The Cross of Redemption we have Baldwin discoursing on, among other subjects, the possibility of an African-American president and what it might mean; the hypocrisy of...
Dance Dance Revolution November 17, 2008
Named one of the Los Angeles Times's Best Science Fiction Books in 2007, Dance Dance Revolution is a genre-bending tour de force told from the perspective of the Guide, a former dissident and tour guide of an imagined desert city.
Homebody/Kabul February 3, 2005
A middle-aged English woman, fascinated by the history and culture of Afghanistan, becomes increasingly absorbed in a world she has never seen. After she unexpectedly disappears while traveling in Kabul, her husband and daughter journey to Afghanistan in search of answers, entering a country shaped...
Caroline, or Change September 1, 2004
A nation reeling from the burgeoning Civil Rights Movement and the Kennedy assassination. Caroline, a black maid, and Noah, the son of the Jewish family she works for, struggle to find an identity for their friendship after Noah's stepmother, unable to give Caroline a raise, tells Caroline that she...
Original Fire August 17, 2004
In this important collection, Erdrich has selected the best poems from her two previous books of poetry, Jacklight and Baptism of Desire, and added 19 new poems. In an entirely unique fashion, Original Fire unfolds the themes and introduces the characters of some of Erdrich’s most acclaimed fiction....
Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the Earth March 9, 2004
In this exquisite book, Alice Walker’s first new collection of poetry since 1991, are poems that reaffirm her as “one of the best American writers of today” (The Washington Post). The forces of nature and the strength of the human spirit inspire the poems in Absolute Trust in the Goodness of the...
Imaginary Friends March 18, 2003
Although Lillian Hellman and Mary McCarthy probably only met once in their lives, their names will be linked forever in the history of American literary feuds: they were legendary enemies, especially after McCarthy famously announced to the world that every word Hellman wrote was a lie, “including...
Human Nature April 17, 2000
Olson's first book of new poetry in sixteen years. Human Nature is the poet and novelist Toby Olson's first book of new poetry since We Are the Fire (New Directions, 1984). The intervening years saw five of his novels published to strong critical acclaim. "But," says Olson, "one day I woke from...
By-Line Ernest Hemingway May 12, 1998
Spanning the years 1920 to 1956, this priceless collection of articles and letters shows Hemingway's work as a reporter, from correspondent for the Toronto Star to contributor to Esquire, Colliers, and Look. As fledgling reporter, war correspondent, and seasoned journalist, Hemingway provides access...
Blues for Mister Charlie April 25, 1995
James Baldwin turns a murder and its aftermath into an inquest in which even the most well-intentioned whites are implicated—and in which even a killer receives his share of compassion.
In a small Southern town, a white man murders a black man, then throws his body in the weeds. With this act of...
A Bright Room Called Day May 1, 1994
Berlin, 1932. As political unrest grips Germany and the Nazi Party rises to power, a group of artists, activists, and intellectuals gathers in an apartment, struggling to understand the forces transforming their country. Bound by friendship, ideals, and a shared sense of unease, they watch as fear,...
Unfinished Building June 1, 1993
Toby Olson considers poetry no less than good talk about important things. With imagery as accessible as the most ordinary of birds and the commonest weather, he performs an alchemy of language. Unfinished Building shows us it is the details that make up a life, that hold the clues to meaning.
O Albany! September 3, 1985
William Kennedy's celebrated cycle of novels has put Albany on the literary map. In O Albany! we visit the city's ethnic and social neighborhoods. We meet uncommon characters who tread on Kennedy's stage—Erastus Corning, America's longest-running mayor (forty-three years in office); the Prohibition...