The novel contains imagined lives that achieve a kind of meaning and intensity our own lives do not. Out of the novelist's moral imagination-the breadth and depth of his awareness of human motivations, tensions, and complexities-emerge fictional pers...

"Arguing with Malarchy" is full of voices. Tender, sinister, sad or cantankerous, they compel us to attend to their realities, the glimpsed depths of their stories, the distances they have travelled. Carola Luther's poems are alert to the ways a life...

In this lively gambol through the history of quotations and quotation books, Gary Saul Morson traces our enduring fascination with the words of others. Ranging from the remote past to the present, he explores the formation, development, and significa...

"The Glacial Stairway" takes the reader on journeys in verse and prose, over a mountain pass in the Pyrenees, from King's Cross to the School of Oriental and African Studies; to the seasons of eighth-century China by way of a series of twentieth-cent...

In this wide-ranging and original account of Modernism, Michael Levenson draws on more than twenty years of research and a career-long fascination with the movement, its participants, and the period during which it thrived. Seeking a more subtle unde...

"Last Post", the fourth and final volume of Parade's End, is set on a single post-war summer's day. Valentine Wannop and Christopher Tietjens share a cottage in Sussex with Tietjens' brother and sister-in-law. Through their differing perspectives, Fo...

A parable rich in imagery and meaning, "The Surprising Adventures of Balthazar" provides readers of all ages with profound insights into the nature of authority, power, and freedom. The tale begins when a polar bear named Balthazar is captured by hun...

Writing in France in the nineteenth century, Jules Verne was fascinated by adventure and exploration. Collecting Five Weeks in a Balloon, Around the World in Eighty Days, A Journey to the Center of the Earth, From the Earth to the Moon, Round the Moo...

In 2006 Tim Liardet's brother died in mysterious circumstances. "The Storm House" is a book-length elegy that is both grief-fugue and exploration of family psychodrama. The two parts of the book form a powerful narrative of sorrow and anger, the even...

Like the creation myths they supersede, the revelations of science are seared into our collective imagination through storytelling. From Archimedes' bath to Newton's apple, vivid accounts of scientific discovery help us understand the principles behi...