Bangladesh in 1971 showed vividly, and terribly, the deadly effects of war. Piles of corpses, torture cells, ash and destruction everywhere in the wake of the Pakistani army's attacks on Bengali people. "Blue Venom" and "Forbidden Incense", two novel...

N. Katherine Hayles is known for breaking new ground at the intersection of the sciences and the humanities. In "Unthought", she once again bridges disciplines by revealing how we think without thinking – how we use cognitive processes that are inacc...

According to traditional accounts, the history of tragedy is itself tragic: following a miraculous birth in fifth-century Athens and a brilliant resurgence in the early modern period, tragic drama then falls into a marked decline. While disputing the...

John Hollander, poet and scholar, was a master whose work joined luminous learning and imaginative risk. This book, based on the unpublished Clark Lectures Hollander delivered in 1999 at Cambridge University, witnesses his power to shift the horizons...

Thames aficionado Robert Gibbings once wrote that "the quiet of an age-old river is like the slow turning of the pages of a well-loved book". "Writing the Thames" tells a much-loved river's story through the remarkable prose, poetry and illustration...

In this provocative study, Hazel Hutchison takes a fresh look at the roles of American writers in helping to shape national opinion and policy during the First World War. From the war's opening salvos in Europe, American writers recognized the impact...

How did Dante come to create his masterpiece, the Divine Comedy, a work unrivaled by any of his other writings? In this book, a preeminent Dante scholar analyzes the only real biography of the poet that we have-his body of works-to illuminate this qu...

What sets Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" apart from so many other famous works of fiction? What special combination of creativity and vision made possible the drafting of "Magna Carta"? When describing exceptional accomplishments like these – and the...

Man of letters, political critic, public intellectual, Irving Howe was one of America's most exemplary and embattled writers. Since his death in 1993 at age 72, Howe's work and his personal example of commitment to high principle, both literary and p...

In works of Western literature ranging from Homer's "Odyssey" to Albee's "Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?" The giving and taking of hospitality are sometimes pleasurable, but more often perilous. Heffernan traces this leitmotiv through the history of...