Although Francesco Petrarca (1304-1374) is best known today for cementing the sonnet's place in literary history, he was also a philosopher, historian, orator, and one of the foremost classical scholars of his age".Petrarch: A Critical Guide to the C...

There are few if any voices more distinct in contemporary French literature than that of Pascal Quignard, a prolific writer of rare erudition and elegance. Essayist, critic, translator, novelist and musician, Quignard attempts here an ambitious amalg...

Photographer Pedro Meyer is one of the pioneers of contemporary photography and was an early leader in its digital revolution. In "A Kind of Touching Beauty" his lens is focused on the American city, capturing its growth and transition through the 19...

"Literary criticism, as I attempt to practice it", writes Harold Bloom in "The Anatomy of Influence", "is in the first place literary, that is to say, personal and passionate". For more than half a century, Bloom has shared his profound knowledge of...

What is the place of individual genius in a global world of hyper-information – a world in which, as Walter Benjamin predicted more than seventy years ago, everyone is potentially an author? For poets in such a climate, "originality" begins to take a...

By turns funny and abstruse, "The Shimmering Beast" is the newest book by accomplished video artist Steve Reinke, which brings together his best pieces of prose. Hybrids of criticism, fiction, and personal essays, each chapter takes on another's work...

Epistemology is the study of how "knowledge" is formed. Standard epistemology isolates the "known" from the "knowers", thereby defining "knowledge" as objectively constant. Multiple epistemologies suggest that individuals learn in different ways shap...

In this richly illustrated book, David Scott Kastan and Kathryn James explore Yale University's extraordinary collection of works by or relating to William Shakespeare. They chart the winding course by which the playwright has been remembered, often...

Shortly after the debut of "Exorcism" in 1920, Eugene O'Neill suddenly canceled production and ordered all extant copies of the drama destroyed. For over ninety years, it was believed that the play was irrevocably lost, until it was recently discover...

In his eighty-seven years, Norman Maclean played many parts: fisherman, logger, firefighter, scholar, teacher. But it was a role he took up late in life, that of writer, that won him enduring fame and critical acclaim – as well as the devotion of rea...