"A Naked Singularity" tells the story of Casi, a child of Colombian immigrants who lives in Brooklyn and works in Manhattan as a public defender – one who, tellingly has never lost a trial. Never. In the book, we watch what happens when his sense of...

To the West, China may appear an unstoppable economic unity, a single high-performing whole, but for the inhabitants of this vast, complex and contradictory nation, it is the cities that hold the secret to such economic success. From the affluent, We...

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...

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...

Edgar Allan Poe (1809-1849) is the poet of the night world, of the inexplicable, the uncanny. His poems do not analyse, they do not explain: they exist with the intensity of hallucinations. In the breathtakingly seductive beauty of "To Helen" – "Like...

Neil Powell's seventh Carcanet collection explores the deep roots of identity: family histories we inherit, memories we carry, the casual decisions and wrong turnings that add up to make us who we are. At the heart of the book is a compelling narrat...

"The Elizabethan Club of Yale University and Its Library" was first published in 1986 to celebrate the 75th anniversary of the founding of the Elizabethan Club. This second, greatly enlarged edition is being published in celebration of the Club's cen...

With "The Lucretian Renaissance", Gerard Passannante offers a radical rethinking of a familiar narrative: the rise of materialism in early modern Europe. Passannante begins by taking up the ancient philosophical notion that the world is composed of t...

As words and stories are increasingly disseminated through digital means, the significance of the book as object – whether pristine collectible or battered relic – is growing as well. "Unpacking My Library: Writers and Their Books" spotlights the per...

"Petrarch deserves to be valued as a real man, a careful thinker, a good poet", writes Nicholas Kilmer introducing his enlarged selection of the great Italian poet who lived from 1304 to 1374. Free in form yet holding close to the central impulses of...