Irrational Man
A Study in Existential Philosophy
Written by William Barrett

Format: Trade Paperback, 320 pages
Publisher: Anchor
On Sale: July 1, 1962
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-03138-7 (0-385-03138-6)

Widely recognized as the finest definition of existentialist Philosophy, this book introduced existentialism to America in 1958. Barrett discusses the views of 19th and 20th century existentialists Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre and interprets the impact of their thinking on literature, art, and philosophy. Read more >

Illuminations
Essays and Reflections
Written by Walter Benjamin

Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Schocken
On Sale: January 13, 1969
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-8052-0241-0 (0-8052-0241-2)

Illuminations includes Benjamin's views on Kafka, with whom he felt the closest personal affinity, his studies on Baudelaire and Proust (both of whom he translated), his essays on Leskov and on Brecht's Epic Theater. Also included are his penetrating study on "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,"... Read more >

Reflections
Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings
Written by Walter Benjamin

Format: Trade Paperback, 400 pages
Publisher: Schocken
On Sale: March 12, 1986
Price: $16.95
ISBN: 978-0-8052-0802-3 (0-8052-0802-X)

Walter Benjamin is recognized as one of the most acute analysts of literary and sociological phenomenon of the 19th and 20th centuries. A companion volume to Illuminations (also available in Schocken paperback), Reflections presents a new sampling of his wide-ranging work. In addition to literary criticism, it contains autobiographical narration and... Read more >

The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz

Written by Hector Berlioz

Format: Hardcover
Publisher: Everyman's Library
On Sale: March 19, 2002
Price: $25.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-41391-9 (0-375-41391-X)

The Memoirs of Hector Berlioz has long been considered to be among the best of musical autobiographies.

Like his massive compositions, Berlioz (1803-69) was colorful, eloquent, larger than life. His book is both an account of his important place in the rise of the Romantic movement and a personal testament. He tells... Read more >

Ayn Rand For Beginners

Written by Andrew Bernstein
Illustrated by Owen Brozman

Format: Trade Paperback, 112 pages
Publisher: For Beginners
On Sale: August 18, 2009
Price: $14.99
ISBN: 978-1-934389-37-9 (1-934389-37-4)

Ayn Rand, author of the best-selling novels, The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged, is beloved by millions of readers, and equally hated. Her novels and her revolutionary philosophy of Objectivism have acquired a world-wide following. They have also created a world-wide legion of frustrated readers who find it difficult to permeate her... Read more >

Pushkin
A Biography
Written by T.J. Binyon

Format: Trade Paperback, 784 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: November 9, 2004
Price: $20.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-7652-9 (1-4000-7652-8)

In the course of his short, dramatic life, Aleksandr Pushkin gave Russia not only its greatest poetry—including the novel-in-verse Eugene Onegin—but a new literary language. He also gave it a figure of enduring romantic allure–fiery, restless, extravagant, a prodigal gambler and inveterate seducer of women. Having forged a dazzling, controversial career... Read more >

Roberto Bolano: The Last Interview
And Other Conversations
Written by Roberto Bolano
Translated by Sybil Perez
Introduction by Marcela Valdes

Format: Trade Paperback, 128 pages
Publisher: Melville House
On Sale: December 6, 2011
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-1-61219-095-2 (1-61219-095-2)

With the release of Roberto Bolaño’s The Savage Detectives in 1998, journalist Monica Maristain discovered a writer “capable of befriending his readers.” After exchanging several letters with Bolaño, Maristain formed a friendship of her own, culminating in an extensive interview with the novelist about truth and consequences, an interview that turned... Read more >

Jorge Luis Borges: The Last Interview
and Other Conversations
Written by Jorge Luis Borges
Translated by Kit Maude

Format: Trade Paperback, 192 pages
Publisher: Melville House
On Sale: June 25, 2013
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-1-61219-204-8 (1-61219-204-1)

Days before his death, Borges gave an intimate interview to his friend, the Argentine journalist Gloria Lopez Lecube. That interview is translated for the first time here, giving English-language readers a new insight into his life, loves, and thoughts about his work and country at the end of his life.

Accompanying that... Read more >

Shakespeare A to Z
The Essential Reference to His Plays, His Poems, His Life and Times, and More
Written by Charles Boyce

Format: Trade Paperback, 752 pages
Publisher: Delta
On Sale: November 10, 1991
Price: $24.00
ISBN: 978-0-385-31361-2 (0-385-31361-6)

The only single-volume comprehensive reference to Shakespeare. With over 3,000 entries, the book covers every play and character, poems, actors, producers and directors, theatrical and literary terms, authors, scholars and publishers of Shakespeare's works and more. Read more >

The Redneck Way of Knowledge

Written by Blanche Mccrary Boyd

Format: Trade Paperback, 176 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 15, 1995
Price: $14.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-75767-2 (0-679-75767-8)

This intoxicating book combines autobiography, reporting, and the dressed-up lies we call fiction. An underground classic since its initial publication, it is the wildly funny personal testament of Blanche McCrary Boyd, sixties radical and born-again Southerner, a lesbian with an un-PC passion for skydiving and stock-car racing, a graduate of Eastern... Read more >

Listen to the Echoes
The Ray Bradbury Interviews
Written by Ray Bradbury and Sam Weller
Foreword by Black Francis

Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Stop Smiling Books
On Sale: June 29, 2010
Price: $18.95
ISBN: 978-1-935554-03-5 (1-935554-03-4)

A definitive collection of interviews with one of America's most famous writers, covering his life, faith, friends, politics, and visions of the future.

Ray Bradbury, the poetic and visionary author of such classics as Fahrenheit 451, The Martian Chronicles and The Illustrated Man, is one of the most influential writers of the... Read more >

Imagining Characters
Six Conversations About Women Writers: Jane Austen, Charlotte Bronte, George Eli ot, Willa Cather, Iris Murdoch, and Toni Morrison
Written by A.S. Byatt and Ignes Sodre

Format: Trade Paperback, 288 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: September 2, 1997
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-77753-3 (0-679-77753-9)

In this innovative and wide-ranging book, Byatt and the psychoanalyst Ignes Sodre bring their different sensibilities to bear on six novels they have read and loved: Jane Austen's Mansfield Park, Bronte's Villette, George Elliot's Daniel Deronda, Willa Cather's The Professor's House, Iris Murdoch's An Unofficial Rose, and Toni Morrison's Beloved. The... Read more >

K.

Written by Roberto Calasso
Translated by Geoffrey Brock

Format: Trade Paperback, 336 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: February 14, 2006
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-1-4000-7612-3 (1-4000-7612-9)

From the internationally acclaimed author of The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony and Ka: an utterly original, fascinating interpretation of the work of Franz Kafka that is simultaneously an unprecedented exploration into the mystery of Kafka himself.

What are Kafka’s stories about? Are they dreams? Allegories? Symbols? Things that happen every day?... Read more >

Literature and the Gods

Written by Roberto Calasso

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: June 4, 2002
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-72543-2 (0-375-72543-1)

Brilliant, inspired, and gloriously erudite, Literature and the Gods is the culmination of Roberto Calasso’s lifelong study of the gods in the human imagination. By uncovering the divine whisper that lies behind the best poetry and prose from across the centuries, Calasso gives us a renewed sense of the mystery and... Read more >

Charles Dickens and the Great Theatre of the World

Written by Simon Callow

Format: Trade Paperback, 384 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: August 7, 2012
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-345-80323-8 (0-345-80323-X)

Acclaimed actor and writer Simon Callow offers a fresh perspective on one of the greatest novelists in the English language, Charles Dickens, in this lively, colorful biography.

Dickens was one of the first true celebrity authors. Thousands of fans in Britain and America eagerly awaited each new installment of his stories and... Read more >

Hermit in Paris
Autobiographical Writings
Written by Italo Calvino

Format: Trade Paperback, 272 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: August 10, 2004
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-71426-9 (0-375-71426-X)

Never before published in English, these essayistic writings enlarge our understanding of one of the twentieth century's most beloved authors.

In evocations of Italo Calvino's tumultuous teenage years—his life during Mussolini's rule, at the time of the liberation, and during the Cold War—we learn the story of the author's generation as it... Read more >

Kafka's Other Trial
The Letters to Felice
Written by Elias Canetti

Format: Trade Paperback, 128 pages
Publisher: Schocken
On Sale: April 12, 1988
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-8052-0705-7 (0-8052-0705-8)

Read more >

Decreation

Written by Anne Carson

Format: Trade Paperback, 272 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: October 10, 2006
Price: $15.95
ISBN: 978-1-4000-7890-5 (1-4000-7890-3)

In her first collection in five years, Anne Carson contemplates “decreation”—an activity described by Simone Weil as “undoing the creature in us”—an undoing of self. But how can we undo self without moving through self, to the very inside of its definition? Where else can we start?

Anne Carson’s Decreation starts with... Read more >

Fires
Essays, Poems, Stories
Written by Raymond Carver

Format: Trade Paperback, 208 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: June 18, 1989
Price: $15.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-72239-7 (0-679-72239-4)

More than sixty stories, poems, and essays are included in this wide-ranging collection by the gifted and versatile Raymond Carver.

Essays include:
My Father's Life
On Writing
Fires
John Gardner: The Writer as Teacher

Poems include:
Drinking While Driving
Luck
Distress Sale
Bankruptcy
Alcohol
Looking For Work
You Don't Know What Love Is

Stories include:
Distance
The Lie
The Cabin
Harry's Death
The Pheasant
Where Is Everyone?
So Much Water So... Read more >

The Selected Letters of Willa Cather

Written by Willa Cather
Edited by Andrew Jewell and Janis Stout

Format: Hardcover, 752 pages
Publisher: Knopf
On Sale: April 16, 2013
Price: $37.50
ISBN: 978-0-307-95930-0 (0-307-95930-9)

This first publication of the letters of one of America’s most consistently admired writers is both an exciting and a significant literary event. Willa Cather, wanting to be judged on her work alone, clearly forbade the publication of her letters in her will. But now, more than sixty-five years after her... Read more >

Dear Donald, Dear Bennett
The Wartime Correspondence of Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer
Written by Bennett Cerf and Donald Klopfer
Introduction by Robert D. Loomis

Format: Hardcover, 224 pages
Publisher: Random House
On Sale: March 5, 2002
Price: $25.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-50768-7 (0-375-50768-X)

Donald Klopfer and Bennett Cerf had been partners in Random House for seventeen years, but Donald decided that he had to become a part of an even greater endeavor—the defeat of Nazi Germany. Not long after Pearl Harbor, Donald, who was then forty years old, took a leave from Random House... Read more >

America Noir
Underground Writers and Filmmakers of the Postwar Era
Written by David Cochran

Format: Trade Paperback, 280 pages
Publisher: Smithsonian Books
On Sale: June 22, 2010
Price: $24.95
ISBN: 978-1-58834-218-8 (1-58834-218-2)

In America Noir David Cochran details how ten writers and filmmakers challenged the social pieties prevalent during the Cold War, such as the superiority of the American democracy, the benevolence of free enterprise, and the sanctity of the suburban family. Rod Sterling’s The Twilight Zone featured victims of vast, faceless, bureaucratic... Read more >

Lewis Carroll
A Biography
Written by Morton N. Cohen

Format: Trade Paperback, 608 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: November 26, 1996
Price: $25.00
ISBN: 978-0-679-74562-4 (0-679-74562-9)

Under the pen name Lewis Carroll, Charles Lutwidge Dodgson became a legend for his children’s books, which broke the constraints of Victorian moralism. This exemplary biography conveys both the imagination and humanity of the creator of Alice in Wonderland.

Lewis Carroll has found his ideal biographer in Morton N. Cohen, who has... Read more >

When Memory Speaks
Exploring the Art of Autobiography
Written by Jill Ker Conway

Format: Trade Paperback, 224 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: February 22, 1999
Price: $13.95
ISBN: 978-0-679-76645-2 (0-679-76645-6)

Jill Ker Conway, one of our most admired  autobiographers-- author of The Road from Coorain and True North --looks astutely and with feeling into the modern memoir: the forms and styles it assumes, and the strikingly different ways in which men and women respectively tend to understand and present their lives.

In a... Read more >

Leave Me Alone, I'm Reading
Finding and Losing Myself in Books
Written by Maureen Corrigan

Format: Trade Paperback, 240 pages
Publisher: Vintage
On Sale: January 2, 2007
Price: $16.00
ISBN: 978-0-375-70903-6 (0-375-70903-7)

As book reviewer for NPR’s Fresh Air, Maureen Corrigan literally reads for a living. Now Corrigan has added a volume of her own to the shelf of classics, by reading her life of reading with all the attention to complexity, wit, and intelligence that any good book–or life–deserves.

In this delightful memoir... Read more >