A biography of the Irish poet, dramatist, and essayist generally considered the most important poet in English of his time.

In the critically acclaimed memoir Girl Meets God, Lauren F. Winner chronicled her sojourn from Judaism to Christianity. Now, in Still: Notes on a Mid-Faith Crisis, Winner describes how experiences of loss and failure unexpectedly slam her into a wall of doubt and spiritual despair: “My belief has faltered, my sense of God’s closeness has grown strained, my efforts at living in accord with what I take to be the call of the gospel have come undone.” Witty, relatable, and fiercely honest, Winner lays bare her experience of what she calls the “middle” of the spiritual life. In elegant and spare prose, she explores why—in the midst of the overwhelming anxiety, loneliness, and boredom of her deepest questioning about where (or if) God is—the Christian story still explains who she is better than any other story she’s ever known. Still is an absorbing meditation combining literary grace with spiritual wisdom. It is sure to resonate with anyone looking to sustain a spiritual life in the midst of real life.

From one of contemporary literature’s bestselling, critically acclaimed, and beloved authors: a “luminous” novel (Jennifer Egan, The New York Times Book Review) about a fiercely compelling young widow navigating grief, fear, and longing, and finding her own voice—“heartrendingly transcendant” (The New York Times, Janet Maslin). Set in Wexford, Ireland, Colm Tóibín’s magnificent seventh novel introduces the formidable, memorable, and deeply moving Nora Webster. Widowed at forty, with four children and not enough money, Nora has lost the love of her life, Maurice, the man who rescued her from the stifling world to which she was born. And now she fears she may be sucked back into it. Wounded, selfish, strong-willed, clinging to secrecy in a tiny community where everyone knows your business, Nora is drowning in her own sorrow and blind to the suffering of her young sons, who have lost their father. Yet she has moments of stunning insight and empathy, and when she begins to sing again, after decades, she finds solace, engagement, a haven—herself. Nora Webster “may actually be a perfect work of fiction” (Los Angeles Times), by a “beautiful and daring” writer (The New York Times Book Review) at the zenith of his career, able to “sneak up on readers and capture their imaginations” (USA TODAY). “Miraculous...Tóibín portrays Nora with tremendous sympathy and understanding” (Ron Charles, The Washington Post).

Discusses life, time, beauty, experience, meaning, music, and art.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A “bracing” (Vox) guide for surviving and resisting America’s turn towards authoritarianism, from “a rising public intellectual unafraid to make bold connections between past and present” (The New York Times) “Timothy Snyder reasons with unparalleled clarity, throwing the past and future into sharp relief. He has written the rare kind of book that can be read in one sitting but will keep you coming back to help regain your bearings.”—Masha Gessen The Founding Fathers tried to protect us from the threat they knew, the tyranny that overcame ancient democracy. Today, our political order faces new threats, not unlike the totalitarianism of the twentieth century. We are no wiser than the Europeans who saw democracy yield to fascism, Nazism, or communism. Our one advantage is that we might learn from their experience. On Tyranny is a call to arms and a guide to resistance, with invaluable ideas for how we can preserve our freedoms in the uncertain years to come.

How long can I keep tricking you into thinking what I'm doing is poetry and not me begging you to let us live?

Anthropologist Michael Jackson predicates his intellectual autobiography, Worlds Within and Worlds Without, on the view that works and lives are intimately entangled. Through a skillful interweaving of personal and ethnographic descriptions, he focuses on the imaginative and practical ways human beings negotiate the space between worlds they call their own and worlds they regard as lying beyond their immediate purview. Whether the worlds that elude our empirical grasp are identified with divinities or the dead, ether or earth, history or myth, the Internet, or the nation state, we experience them ambivalently, as potential sources of wellbeing and as possible threats to our very existence. Closing ourselves off from the world is not an option, for our humanity depends on the ties that bind us to significant others, and others to us. As Jackson shows, the relationship between the familiar and the foreign is not only an existential issue that all human beings address in one way or another. It is a methodological issue for anthropologists concerned with the complementarity of individual and collective perspectivesethnos and anthropos, the intrapsychic and the intersubjective.

An edited collection on poetic creation in the Victorian period that studies nine major Victorian poets: Wordsworth, Tennyson, Robert and Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Clough, Christina Rossetti, Hopkins, Swinburne, and Yeats.

Among the foremost feminist critics to have emerged to international eminence over the last fifteen years, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak has relentlessly challenged the high ground of established theoretical discourse in literary and cultural studies. Although her rigorous reading of various authors has often rendered her work difficult terrain for those unfamiliar with poststructuralism, this collection makes significant strides in explicating Spivak's complicated theories of reading.