Search results for ""New York Review of Books""

Moving between colonial Algeria, the south of France, and New England, The Last Life is Claire Messud’s “masterly” (Wall Street Journal) sophomore novel of lies and ghosts, love and honor. When shots from a grandfather’s rifle shatter the LaBasse family’s quiet integrity, long-hidden shame emerges: a son abandoned by the family before he was even born, a mother whose identity is not what she has claimed, a father whose act of defiance brings Hotel Bellevue—the family business—to its knees. Unforgettably narrated by a fifteen-year-old girl with a ruthless regard for truth, The Last Life is a “phenomenally controlled tour de force” (Sarah Kerr, Vogue). “Messud textures her novel with all the sensory pleasures that bind us to life, and fills it with characters who helplessly respond to each other’s unspoken signals and nuances.”—The New Yorker “Original, intense, and gripping.”—Gabriele Annan, New York Review of Books

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This prize-winning account of the pre-Reformation church recreates lay people’s experience of religion, showing that late-medieval Catholicism was neither decadent nor decayed, but a strong and vigorous tradition. For this edition, Duffy has written a new introduction reflecting on recent developments in our understanding of the period. “A mighty and momentous book: a book to be read and re-read, pondered and revered; a subtle, profound book written with passion and eloquence, and with masterly control.”—J. J. Scarisbrick, The Tablet “Revisionist history at its most imaginative and exciting. . . . [An] astonishing and magnificent piece of work.”—Edward T. Oakes, Commonweal “A magnificent scholarly achievement, a compelling read, and not a page too long to defend a thesis which will provoke passionate debate.”—Patricia Morison, Financial Times “Deeply imaginative, movingly written, and splendidly illustrated.”—Maurice Keen, New York Review of Books Winner of the Longman-History Today Book of the Year Award

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"This learned and heavy volume should be placed on the shelves of every art historical library."—E. H. Gombrich, New York Review of Books"This is an engaged and passionate work by a writer with powerful convictions about art, images, aesthetics, the art establishment, and especially the discipline of art history. It is animated by an extraordinary erudition."—Arthur C. Danto, The Art Bulletin"Freedberg's ethnographic and historical range is simply stunning. . . . The Power of Images is an extraordinary critical achievement, exhilarating in its polemic against aesthetic orthodoxy, endlessly fascinating in its details. . . . This is a powerful, disturbing book."—T. J. Jackson Lears, Wilson Quarterly"Freedberg helps us to see that one cannot do justice to the images of art unless one recognizes in them the entire range of human responses, from the lowly impulses prevailing in popular imagery to their refinement in the great visions of the ages."—Rudolf Arnheim, Times Literary Supplement

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Los mejores ensayos sobre arte y literatura de una maestra del periodismoUno de los libros del 2013 para el Publisher Weekly y finalista del premio de la crítica de EEUULa obra de Janet Malcolm figura destacada en cualquier canon de la no ficción contemporánea, con piezas tan brillantes como la que da título a esta antología, con sus cuarenta y un intentos fallidos de comenzar un perfil del pintor David Salle, que acaban componiendo un retrato excepcional del artista. Malcolm está entre los autores más estimulantes intelectualmente, capaz de convertir epifanías de la percepción en estallidos de conocimiento como escribió David Lehman en The Boston Globe.Esta antología reúne piezas publicadas a lo largo de varias décadas, sobre todo en The New Yorker y The New York Review of Books, que recogen su interés por los artistas y su trabajo, pintores, fotógrafos, escritores y críticos. Explora la obsesión del grupo de Bloomsbury por la creación tanto plástica como literaria; las apas

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Magnífico. Recupera la emoción de descubrir la historia de una ciudad donde la Roma oriental y la Europa latina se unieron durante muchos siglos de maneras que desafían nuestras nítidas divisiones entre lo antiguo y lo medieval; entre romanos, griegos y bárbaros; entre Oriente y Occidente.PETER BROWN, autor deEl mundo de la Antigüedad tardía,en The New York Review of BooksUn viaje a la ciudad que fue el motor cultural del Imperio bizantino, la joya oculta del Adriático.En el año 402 d. C., después de que las tribus invasoras traspasaran las fronteras alpinas y amenazaran el Imperio romano de Occidente, el joven emperador Honorio trasladó la capital, hasta entonces en Milán, a una ciudad pequeña pero de fácil defensa en el estuario del Po. Desde entonces, y hasta el año 751 d. C., Rávena fue el centro cultural y político del norte italiano y la región adriática. Entre sus muros se instalaron eruditos, abogados, doctores, artes

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CHOSEN AS BOOK OF THE YEAR BY THE OBSERVER, NEW YORKER, NEW YORK TIMES BOOKS REVIEW, TIMES LITERARY SUPPLEMENT AND THE TIMES ‘Lucid and exhilarating … A great gift’ New York Review of Books ‘Tantalizes and compels ... A welcome reminder of how a novel can be defiantly and brilliantly novel’ Douglas Kennedy, New Statesman Jules Epstein has vanished: first slowly, then all at once. He begins divesting himself of all of his worldly possessions. Now he’s fallen off the face of the earth, and all the search parties can find is his empty monogrammed briefcase, abandoned in the Judean foothills. In her room at the Tel Aviv Hilton, an American novelist has also left home to undergo a transformation. But when a stranger recruits her for a project involving Kafka, she is drawn into a mystery that will take her on a metaphysical journey and change her in ways she could never have imagined.

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In this neighbourhood, only the dead go out for a walk'...A young party animal collapses in a Parisian disco and dies on the dance floor, only to watch his soul departing his body. Two embittered police detectives debate their favourite weapons. A violent man looks back on his childhood and seeks out the now-aged male porn actor his mother shot movies with.Here is the eagerly anticipated second volume of stories by Roberto Bolaño. Tender or etched in acid; hazily suggestive or chillingly definitive: The Return is a trove of strangely arresting short master works.TRANSLATED BY CHRIS ANDREWS''Dark, intimate and sneakily touching... There is gold to be found in this collection'' New York Review of BooksEach tale turns the reader into a voyeur, grasping at snapshots of troubled lives and ghosts' Observer A compelling encapsulation of Bolaño''s work... You won''t be bored' Los Angeles Times

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Arthur Danto is the Johnsonian Professor Emeritus of Philosophy at Columbia University and the most influential philosopher of art in the last half century. As an art critic for The Nation for 25 years and frequent contributor to other widely read outlets such as the New York Review of Books, Danto also has become one of the most respected public intellectuals of his generation. He is the author of some two dozen important books, along with hundreds of articles and reviews which have been the center of both controversy and discussion. In this volume Danto offers his intellectual autobiography and responds to essays by 27 of the keenest critics of his thought from the worlds of philosophy and the arts. The book includes 16 pages of color art reproductions. Danto is the author dozens of books on art, philosophy, the philosophy of art, and art criticism. He is a rare philosopher who is also a public intellectual.

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When a man's body is discovered near the picturesque town of Hay-on-Wye, his death appears to be 'unnatural' in every sense. Merrily Watkins is drafted in to investigate.'Rickman's writing style reflects his subject matter: spooky and indirect, elegantly crafted but always a sense of shadow behind you, that you've missed something you should have seen.' - New York Review Of Books'The wind was rising. A smokey cloud-mass shaped like a rabbit made a forward bound in slow motion and came apart over Hay Castle a mile away on the horizon . . .'Hay-on-Wye: the Welsh-border town that became world-famous for declaring independence and crowning its own king. But now black clouds are gathering, to meet rising shadows from the past. As the town fights for its future, a man drowns in a deep pool below a waterfall, a woman disappears, and diocesan exorcist Merrily Watkins - alone and vulnerable - uncovers a secret history of dark magic and ritual murder.

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WITH A NEW INTRODUCTION BY THE AUTHOR'If you buy one literary novel this year, make sure it's this' THE TIMES'The Romantics looks to Flaubert's Sentimental Education, to E.M. Forster, to Turgenev. But it is the product of a distinctive and sharp intelligence' HILARY MANTEL 'Grips the reader as artfully and as compellingly as the first page of A Passage to India' THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKSWINNER OF THE LOS ANGELES TIMES ART SEIDENBAUM AWARD FOR FIRST FICTION1989. In the holy city of Varanasi, 19-year-old Samar rents a room to avoid a small-town job and lose himself in reading about worlds outside of India. But when he is thrust into local a circle of privileged European and American expats, led by the charismatic Miss West, Samar will soon face his own silent desires and crumbling beliefs.'A work of art' Financial Times'A supernova' The Washington Post'A charming debut' The Independent

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Prospect Top 50 Thinker of 2021British Academy Book Prize FinalistPROSE Award Finalist“Provocative, elegantly written.”—Fara Dabhoiwala, New York Review of Books“Demonstrates how a broad rethinking of political issues becomes possible when Western ideals and practices are examined from the vantage point of Asia and Africa.”—Pankaj Mishra, New York Review of BooksIn case after case around the globe—from Israel to Sudan—the colonial state and the nation-state have been constructed through the politicization of a religious or ethnic majority at the expense of an equally manufactured minority. The model emerged in America, where genocide and internment on reservations created a permanent native minority. In Europe, this template would be used both by the Nazis and the Allies.Neither Settler nor Native offers a vision for arresting this process. Mahmood Mamdani points to inherent limitations in the legal solution attempted at Nuremberg. Political violence demands political solutions: not criminal justice but a rethinking of the political community to include victims and perpetrators, bystanders and beneficiaries. Making the radical argument that the nation-state was born of colonialism, he calls on us to delink the nation from the state so as to ensure equal political rights for all who live within its boundaries.“A deeply learned account of the origins of our modern world…Mamdani rejects the current focus on human rights as the means to bring justice to the victims of this colonial and postcolonial bloodshed. Instead, he calls for a new kind of political imagination…Joining the ranks of Hannah Arendt’s Imperialism, Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, and Edward Said’s Orientalism, this book is destined to become a classic text of postcolonial studies and political theory.”—Moustafa Bayoumi, author of How Does It Feel to Be a Problem?“A masterwork of historical comparison and razor-sharp political analysis, with grave lessons about the pitfalls of forgetting, moralizing, or criminalizing this violence. Mamdani also offers a hopeful rejoinder in a revived politics of decolonization.”—Karuna Mantena, Columbia University“A powerfully original argument, one that supplements political analysis with a map for our political future.”—Faisal Devji, University of Oxford

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“Powerful as well as highly engaging—a brilliant book.”—Amartya SenA Times Higher Education Book of the WeekIt may sound crazy to pay people whether or not they’re working or even looking for work. But the idea of providing an unconditional basic income to everyone, rich or poor, active or inactive, has long been advocated by such major thinkers as Thomas Paine, John Stuart Mill, and John Kenneth Galbraith. Now, with the traditional welfare state creaking under pressure, it has become one of the most widely debated social policy proposals in the world. Basic Income presents the most acute and fullest defense of this radical idea, and makes the case that it is our most realistic hope for addressing economic insecurity and social exclusion.“They have set forth, clearly and comprehensively, what is probably the best case to be made today for this form of economic and social policy.”—Benjamin M. Friedman, New York Review of Books“A rigorous analysis of the many arguments for and against a universal basic income, offering a road map for future researchers.”—Wall Street Journal“What Van Parijs and Vanderborght bring to this topic is a deep understanding, an enduring passion and a disarming optimism.”—Steven Pearlstein, Washington Post

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Placing Bruno—both advanced philosopher and magician burned at the stake—in the Hermetic tradition, Yates's acclaimed study gives an overview not only of Renaissance humanism but of its interplay—and conflict—with magic and occult practices. "Among those who have explored the intellectual world of the sixteenth century no one in England can rival Miss Yates. Wherever she looks, she illuminates. Now she has looked on Bruno. This brilliant book takes time to digest, but it is an intellectual adventure to read it. Historians of ideas, of religion, and of science will study it. Some of them, after reading it, will have to think again. . . . For Miss Yates has put Bruno, for the first time, in his tradition, and has shown what that tradition was."—Hugh Trevor-Roper, New Statesman"A decisive contribution to the understanding of Giordano Bruno, this book will probably remove a great number of misrepresentations that still plague the tormented figure of the Nolan prophet."—Giorgio de Santillana, American Historical Review"Yates's book is an important addition to our knowledge of Giordano Bruno. But it is even more important, I think, as a step toward understanding the unity of the sixteenth century."—J. Bronowski, New York Review of Books

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Ford is editing the UK edition of the Best American Poetry series and we can expect attention and support from them here Ford is a very active critic and both well-known and well-respected in both the UK and the US with regular reviews in the TLS and London Review of Books Ford's work has appeared in the US in The New York Review of Books, The Nation, The Paris Review, Bookforum, and The New Republic. Ford is well known here for having edited O'Hara's selected poems Ford's work has been reviewed enthusiastically in the New York Times in the past Ford's is constantly reinventing himself as a poet, giving the collection a versatility and variety that's exciting Ford says he writes to delight the reader (Vendler has said she reads him "with instant joy") and it's that kind of energy that drives his work and makes it so appealing Ford first came to poetry via the American greats—Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens, Williams, Eliot, Pound, Bishop, Ginsberg—and those influences are alive in his work today The book includes a section of new poems as well, for those US readers familiar with his work

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Our democracy is under assault from homegrown authoritarians, with most observers blaming Donald Trump and the Republican Party that submitted to him. Yet as Adam Jentleson shows, the problem not only goes back to the nineteenth century, but is less about the presidency than it is about our nation’s most venerated institution: the United States Senate. A revelatory history of minority rule in America as expressed through the Senate filibuster, Kill Switch shows that white conservatives have long relied on the filibuster—which is not featured in the Constitution, and which, as Jentleson demonstrates, the Framers would have opposed—to shut down attempts to create a multiracial democracy. Featuring a new epilogue on filibuster battles under the Biden administration, Kill Switch will remain an essential warning about the costs of empowering this nation’s right-wing minority. • “Jentleson understands the inner workings of the institution, down to the most granular details, showing precisely how arcane procedural rules can be leveraged to dramatic effect.” —Jennifer Szalai, New York Times • “Careful and thorough and exacting.” —Michael Tomasky, New York Review of Books • “[An] excellent, surprising new book.” —Benjamin Wallace-Wells, The New Yorker

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Winner of the 2005 Pulitzer PrizeThe explosive, New York Times bestselling first-hand account of America's secret history in AfghanistanPrize-winning journalist Steve Coll has spent years reporting from the Middle East, accessed previously classified government files and interviewed senior US officials and foreign spymasters. Here he gives the full inside story of the CIA's covert funding of an Islamic jihad against Soviet forces in Afghanistan, explores how this sowed the seeds of bn Laden's rise, traces how he built his global network and brings to life the dramatic battles within the US government over national security. Above all, he lays bare American intelligence's continual failure to grasp the rising threat of terrrorism in the years leading to 9/11 - and its devastating consequences.'Riveting ... the finest historical narrative so far on the origins of al Qaeda in the post-Soviet rubble of Afghanistan ... provides fresh details and helps explain the motivations behind many crucial decisions' The New York Times Book Review'A remarkable book ... the CIA itself would be hard put to beat his grasp of global events' New York Review of Books

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In The World Goes On, a narrator first speaks directly, then tells eleven unforgettable stories, and then bids farewell (“for here I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me”). As László Krasznahoraki himself explains: “Each text is about drawing our attention away from this world, speeding our body toward annihilation, and immersing ourselves in a current of thought or a narrative…” A Hungarian interpreter obsessed with waterfalls, at the edge of the abyss in his own mind, wanders the chaotic streets of Shanghai. A traveler, reeling from the sights and sounds of Varanasi, encounters a giant of a man on the banks of the Ganges ranting on the nature of a single drop of water. A child laborer in a Portuguese marble quarry wanders off from work one day into a surreal realm utterly alien from his daily toils. The World Goes On is another amazing masterpiece by the winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. “The excitement of his writing,” Adam Thirwell proclaimed in the New York Review of Books, “is that he has come up with this own original forms—there is nothing else like it in contemporary literature.”

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"Like Bolaño, Vásquez is a master stylist and a virtuoso of patient pacing and intricate structure" LEV GROSSMAN, Time Magazine"Juan Gabriel Vásquez . . . has succeeded García Márquez as the literary grandmaster of Colombia" ARIEL DORFMAN, New York Review of BooksA morally complex, searing set of stories by the award-winning author of The Sound of Things Falling and The Shape of the Ruins (shortlisted for the Booker International Prize 2019).A renowned photographer probes a traumatic incident in the life of a fellow guest at a countryside ranch. A chance meeting at a regimental reunion obliges a Korean War veteran to confront a shameful secret. And in the title story, an internet search for a book published in 1887 leads to the discovery of the life of a remarkable woman: Aurelia de Léon, who arrives in Colombia as a child orphan of the Great War, but as a free-spirited adult runs foul of her adoptive country's deep conservatism.The characters in Songs for the Flames are all men and women touched by violence - sometimes directly, sometimes tangentially - but the lives of all of them are irrevocably changed by the experience.Translated from the Spanish by Anne McLean

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It is commonly thought in secular society that the Bible is one of the greatest hindrances to doing justice. Isn't it full of regressive views? Didn't it condone slavery? Why look to the Bible for guidance on how to have a more just society? But Keller sees it another way. In GENEROUS JUSTICE, Keller explores a life of justice empowered by an experience of grace: a generous, gracious justice. Here is a book for believers who find the Bible a trustworthy guide, as well as those who suspect that Christianity is a regressive influence in the world.Keller's church, founded in the 80s with fewer than 100 congregants, is now exponentially larger. Over 5,000 people regularly attend Sunday services, and another 25,000 download Keller's sermons each week. A recent profile in New York magazine described his typical sermon as 'a mix of biblical scholarship, pop culture, and whatever might have caught his eye in The New York Review of Books or on Salon.com that week.' In short, Timothy Keller speaks a language that many thousands of people understand. In GENEROUS JUSTICE, he offers them a new understanding of modern justice and human rights.

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Praised for its scope and depth, "Asia in the Making of Europe" is the first comprehensive study of Asian influences on Western culture. For volumes I and II, the author has sifted through virtually every European reference to Asia published in the sixteenth-century; he surveys a vast array of writings describing Asian life and society, the images of Asia that emerge from those writings, and, in turn, the reflections of those images in European literature and art. This monumental achievement reveals profound and pervasive influences of Asian societies on developing Western culture; in doing so, it provides a perspective necessary for a balanced view of world history."Volume I: The Century of Discovery" brings together "everything that a European could know of India, Southeast Asia, China, and Japan, from printed books, missionary reports, traders' accounts and maps" ("The New York Review of Books"). "Volume II: A Century of Wonder" examines the influence of that vast new body of information about Asia on the arts, institutions, literatures, and ideas of sixteenth-century Europe.

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'A very good guide to the state we're in' Paul Krugman, New York Review of Books'A well-written, thought-provoking book by one of America's leading economic thinkers and progressive champions.' Huffington PostDo you recall a time when the income of a single schoolteacher or baker or salesman or mechanic was enough to buy a home, have two cars, and raise a family?Robert Reich does - in the 1950s his father sold clothes to factory workers and the family earnt enough to live comfortably. Today, this middle class is rapidly shrinking: American income inequality and wealth disparity is the greatest it's been in eighty years.As Reich, who served in three US administrations, shows, the threat to capitalism is no longer communism or fascism but a steady undermining of the trust modern societies need for growth and stability.With an exclusive chapter for Icon's edition, Saving Capitalism is passionate yet practical, sweeping yet exactingly argued, a revelatory indictment of the economic status quo and an empowering call to action.

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New York Times 'Best Art Books' 2020 'Essential' – Sunday Times 'Brilliantly enraged' - New York Review of Books 'A real game-changer'– Economist Walk into any Western museum today and you will see the curated spoils of Empire. They sit behind plate glass: dignified, tastefully lit. Accompanying pieces of card offer a name, date and place of origin. They do not mention that the objects are all stolen. Few artefacts embody this history of rapacious and extractive colonialism better than the Benin Bronzes - a collection of thousands of metal plaques and sculptures depicting the history of the Royal Court of the Obas of Benin City, Nigeria. Pillaged during a British naval attack in 1897, the loot was passed on to Queen Victoria, the British Museum and countless private collections. The Brutish Museums sits at the heart of a heated debate about cultural restitution, repatriation and the decolonisation of museums. Since its first publication, museums across the western world have begun to return their Bronzes to Nigeria, heralding a new era in the way we understand the collections of empire we once took for granted.

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Leonardo’s writings on painting—among the most remarkable from any era—were never edited by Leonardo himself into a single coherent book. In this anthology the authors have edited material not only from his so-called Treatise on Painting but also from his surviving manuscripts and from other primary sources, some of which were here translated for the first time. The resulting volume is an invaluable reference work for art historians as well as for anyone interested in the mind and methods of one of the world’s greatest creative geniuses.“Highly readable. . . . Also included are documentary sources and letters illuminating Leonardo’s career; the manuscript sources for all of Leonardo’s statements are fully cited in the notes. The volume is skillfully translated and is illustrated with appropriate examples of drawings and paintings by the artist.”—Choice“Certainly easier to read and . . . more convenient than previous compilations.”—Charles Hope, New York Review of Books“A chaotic assemblage of Leonardo da Vinci’s writings appeared in 1651 as Treatise on Painting. . . . [Kemp] successfully applies . . . order to the chaos.”—ArtNews

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Praised for its scope and depth, "Asia in the Making of Europe" is the first comprehensive study of Asian influences on Western culture. For volumes I and II, the author has sifted through virtually every European reference to Asia published in the sixteenth-century; he surveys a vast array of writings describing Asian life and society, the images of Asia that emerge from those writings, and, in turn, the reflections of those images in European literature and art. This monumental achievement reveals profound and pervasive influences of Asian societies on developing Western culture; in doing so, it provides a perspective necessary for a balanced view of world history."Volume I: The Century of Discovery" brings together "everything that a European could know of India, Southeast Asia, China, and Japan, from printed books, missionary reports, traders' accounts and maps" ("The New York Review of Books"). "Volume II: A Century of Wonder" examines the influence of that vast new body of information about Asia on the arts, institutions, literatures, and ideas of sixteenth-century Europe.

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Gregory Bateson was a philosopher, anthropologist, photographer, naturalist, and poet, as well as the husband and collaborator of Margaret Mead. With a new foreword by his daughter Mary Katherine Bateson, this classic anthology of his major work will continue to delight and inform generations of readers. "This collection amounts to a retrospective exhibition of a working life. . . . Bateson has come to this position during a career that carried him not only into anthropology, for which he was first trained, but into psychiatry, genetics, and communication theory. . . . He . . . examines the nature of the mind, seeing it not as a nebulous something, somehow lodged somewhere in the body of each man, but as a network of interactions relating the individual with his society and his species and with the universe at large."—D. W. Harding, New York Review of Books "[Bateson's] view of the world, of science, of culture, and of man is vast and challenging. His efforts at synthesis are tantalizingly and cryptically suggestive. . . .This is a book we should all read and ponder."—Roger Keesing, American Anthropologist

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'Brilliant. Searching and profound' E.H. Carr, Times Literary Supplement'When reading Isaiah Berlin we breathe an altogether different air' New York Review of Books'Beautifully written' W. H. Auden, New Yorker'Ingenious. Exactly what good critical writing should be' Max Beloff, GuardianThe fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing.For Isaiah Berlin, there is a fundamental distinction in mankind: those who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things - foxes - and those who relate everything to a central all-embracing system - hedgehogs. It can be applied to the greatest creative minds: Dante, Ibsen and Proust are hedgehogs, while Shakespeare, Aristotle and Joyce are foxes.Yet when Berlin reaches the case of Tolstoy, he finds a fox by nature, but a hedgehog by conviction; a duality which holds the key to understanding Tolstoy's work, illuminating a paradox of his philosophy of history and showing why he was frequently misunderstood by his contemporaries and critics.With a foreword by Michael IgnatieffA W&N Essential

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From a prize-winning Harvard legal scholar, "a damning portrait" (New York Review of Books) of the misdemeanor machine that unjustly brands millions of Americans as criminals Punishment Without Crime offers an urgent new perspective on inequality and injustice in America by examining the paradigmatic American offense: the lowly misdemeanor. Based on extensive original research, legal scholar Alexandra Natapoff reveals the inner workings of a massive petty offense system that produces over thirteen million criminal cases each year, over 80 percent of the national total. People arrested for minor crimes are swept through courts where defendants often lack lawyers, judges process cases in mere minutes, and nearly everyone pleads guilty. This misdemeanor machine starts punishing people long before they are convicted, it punishes the innocent, and it punishes conduct that never should have been a crime. As a result, vast numbers of Americans-most of them poor and disproportionately people of color-are stigmatized as criminals, impoverished through fines and fees, and stripped of driver's licenses, jobs, and housing. And as the nation learned from the police killings of Eric Garner, George Floyd, and too many others, misdemeanor enforcement can be lethal. Now updated with a new afterword, Punishment Without Crime shows how America's sprawling misdemeanor system makes our entire country less safe, less fair, and less equal.

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A Choice Outstanding Academic Title of the YearA Tablet Book of the YearMarking a departure in our understanding of Christian views of the afterlife from 250 to 650 CE, The Ransom of the Soul explores a revolutionary shift in thinking about the fate of the soul that occurred around the time of Rome’s fall. Peter Brown describes how this shift transformed the Church’s institutional relationship to money and set the stage for its domination of medieval society in the West.“[An] extraordinary new book…Prodigiously original—an astonishing performance for a historian who has already been so prolific and influential…Peter Brown’s subtle and incisive tracking of the role of money in Christian attitudes toward the afterlife not only breaks down traditional geographical and chronological boundaries across more than four centuries. It provides wholly new perspectives on Christianity itself, its evolution, and, above all, its discontinuities. It demonstrates why the Middle Ages, when they finally arrived, were so very different from late antiquity.”—G. W. Bowersock, New York Review of Books“Peter Brown’s explorations of the mindsets of late antiquity have been educating us for nearly half a century…Brown shows brilliantly in this book how the future life of Christians beyond the grave was influenced in particular by money.—A. N. Wilson, The Spectator

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A Washington Post Book of the YearWinner of the Merle Curti AwardWinner of the Jacques Barzun PrizeWinner of the Ralph Waldo Emerson Award“A masterful study of privacy.”—Sue Halpern, New York Review of Books“Masterful (and timely)…[A] marathon trek from Victorian propriety to social media exhibitionism…Utterly original.”—Washington PostEvery day, we make decisions about what to share and when, how much to expose and to whom. Securing the boundary between one’s private affairs and public identity has become an urgent task of modern life. How did privacy come to loom so large in public consciousness? Sarah Igo tracks the quest for privacy from the invention of the telegraph onward, revealing enduring debates over how Americans would—and should—be known. The Known Citizen is a penetrating historical investigation with powerful lessons for our own times, when corporations, government agencies, and data miners are tracking our every move.“A mighty effort to tell the story of modern America as a story of anxieties about privacy…Shows us that although we may feel that the threat to privacy today is unprecedented, every generation has felt that way since the introduction of the postcard.”—Louis Menand, New Yorker“Engaging and wide-ranging…Igo’s analysis of state surveillance from the New Deal through Watergate is remarkably thorough and insightful.”—The Nation

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Acclaimed poet and translator Sarah Ruden brilliantly brings Apuleius's comic tale to life “A rollicking ride well worth the fare, . . . marvelously, sidesplittingly ridiculous. . . . It’s a story, not a homily, and Sarah Ruden has re-bestowed it with artful aplomb.”—Tracy Lee Simmons, National Review “A cause for celebration. . . . We owe Sarah Ruden a great debt of thanks for [this] English translation that is no less inventive, varied, and surprising than the original.”—G. W. Bowersock, New York Review of Books With accuracy, wit, and intelligence, this remarkable new translation of The Golden Ass breathes new life into Apuleius's classic work. Sarah Ruden, a lyric poet as well as a highly respected translator, skillfully duplicates the verbal high jinks of Apuleius's ever-popular novel. It tells the story of Lucius, a curious and silly young man, who is turned into a donkey when he meddles with witchcraft. Doomed to wander from region to region and mistreated by a series of deplorable owners, Lucius at last is restored to human form with the help of the goddess Isis.The Golden Ass, the first Latin novel to survive in its entirety, is related to the Second Sophistic, a movement of learned and inventive literature. In a translation that is both the most faithful and the most entertaining to date, Ruden reveals to modern readers the vivid, farcical ingenuity of Apuleius's style.

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The third volume in Alan Walker's magisterial biography of Franz Liszt. "You can't help but keep turning the pages, wondering how it will all turn out: and Walker's accumulated readings of Liszt's music have to be taken seriously indeed."—D. Kern Holoman, New York Review of Books "A conscientious scholar passionate about his subject. Mr. Walker makes the man and his age come to life. These three volumes will be the definitive work to which all subsequent Liszt biographies will aspire."—Harold C. Schonberg, Wall Street Journal "What distinguishes Walker from Liszt's dozens of earlier biographers is that he is equally strong on the music and the life. A formidable musicologist with a lively polemical style, he discusses the composer's works with greater understanding and clarity than any previous biographer. And whereas many have recycled the same erroneous, often damaging information, Walker has relied on his own prodigious, globe-trotting research, a project spanning twenty-five years. The result is a textured portrait of Liszt and his times without rival."—Elliot Ravetz, Time "The prose is so lively that the reader is often swept along by the narrative. . . . This three-part work . . . is now the definitive work on Liszt in English and belongs in all music collections."—Library Journal

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Nau cannot remember a time when she was not one with the world around her: with the fast breeze, the green grass, the high clouds, and the endless blue sky above the Shingled Spit. But her greatest joy is to visit the sea, where whales gather every morning to gaily spout rainbows. Then, one day, she finds a man in the mist where a whale should be: Reu, who has taken human form out of his Great Love for her. Together these first humans become parents to two whales, and then to mankind. Even after Reu dies, Nau continues on, sharing her story of brotherhood between the two species. But as these origins grow more distant, the old woman’s tales are subsumed into myth—and her descendants turn increasingly bent on parading their dominance over the natural world. Buoyantly translated into English for the first time by Ilona Yazhbin Chavasse, this new entry in the Seedbank series is at once a vibrant retelling of the origin story of the Chukchi, a timely parable about the destructive power of human ego—and another unforgettable work of fiction from Yuri Rytkheu, “arguably the foremost writer to emerge from the minority peoples of Russia’s far north” (New York Review of Books).

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Winner of the Distinguished Contribution to Scholarship Award, American Sociological AssociationCo-Winner of the Ralph J. Bunche Award, American Political Science AssociationIn a work of prodigious scholarship and enormous breadth, which draws on the tribal, ancient, premodern, and modern worlds, Orlando Patterson discusses the internal dynamics of slavery in sixty-six societies over time. These include Greece and Rome, medieval Europe, China, Korea, the Islamic kingdoms, Africa, the Caribbean islands, and the American South.Praise for the previous edition:“Densely packed, closely argued, and highly controversial in its dissent from much of the scholarly conventional wisdom about the function and structure of slavery worldwide.”—Boston Globe“There can be no doubt that this rich and learned book will reinvigorate debates that have tended to become too empirical and specialized. Patterson has helped to set out the direction for the next decades of interdisciplinary scholarship.”—David Brion Davis, New York Review of Books“This is clearly a major and important work, one which will be widely discussed, cited, and used. I anticipate that it will be considered among the landmarks in the study of slavery, and will be read by historians, sociologists, and anthropologists—as well as many other scholars and students.”—Stanley Engerman

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The first volume in a pioneering account of Oliver Cromwell—providing a major new interpretation of one of the greatest figures in history“Hutton’s book is intelligent, well documented, and stylish.”—Keith Thomas, New York Review of Books Oliver Cromwell (1599–1658)—the only English commoner to become the overall head of state—is one of the great figures of history, but his character was very complex. He was at once courageous and devout, devious and self-serving. As a parliamentarian, he was devoted to his cause; as a soldier, he was ruthless. Cromwell’s speeches and writings surpass in quantity those of any other ruler of England before Victoria and, for those seeking to understand him, he has usually been taken at his word. In this remarkable new work, Ronald Hutton untangles the facts from the fiction. Cromwell, pursuing his devotion to God and cementing his Puritan support base, quickly transformed from obscure provincial to military victor. At the end of the first English Civil War, he was poised to take power. Hutton reveals a man who was both genuine in his faith and deliberate in his dishonesty—and uncovers the inner workings of the man who has puzzled biographers for centuries.

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'One of the great American prose stylists of our time.' New York Times'Auster really does possess the wand of the enchanter.' New York Review of BooksThe New York Trilogy is perhaps the most astonishing work by one of America's most consistently astonishing writers. The Trilogy is three cleverly interconnected novels that exploit the elements of standard detective fiction and achieve a new genre that is all the more gripping for its starkness. It is a riveting work of detective fiction worthy of Raymond Chandler, and at the same time a profound and unsettling existentialist enquiry in the tradition of Kafka or Borges. In each story the search for clues leads to remarkable coincidences in the universe as the simple act of trailing a man ultimately becomes a startling investigation of what it means to be human. The New York Trilogy is the modern novel at its finest: a truly bold and arresting work of fiction with something to transfix and astound every reader.'Marks a new departure for the American novel.' Observer'A shatteringly clever piece of work . . . Utterly gripping, written with an acid sharpness that leaves an indelible dent in the back of the mind.' Sunday Telegraph

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Shortlisted for The Man Booker International Prize 2018 A Hungarian interpreter obsessed with waterfalls, at the edge of the abyss in his own mind, wanders the chaotic streets of Shanghai. A traveller, reeling from the sights and sounds of Varanasi, encounters a giant of a man on the banks of the Ganges ranting on the nature of a single drop of water. A child labourer in a Portuguese marble quarry wanders off from work one day into a surreal realm utterly alien from his daily toils. In The World Goes On, a narrator first speaks directly, tells twenty-one unforgettable stories, then bids farewell ('for here I would leave this earth and these stars, because I would take nothing with me'). As László Krasznahorkai himself explains: 'Each text is about drawing our attention away from this world, speeding our body toward annihilation, and immersing ourselves in a current of thought or a narrative...' The World Goes On is another masterpiece by the winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. 'The excitement of his writing,' Adam Thirlwell proclaimed in the New York Review of Books, 'is that he has come up with his own original forms-there is nothing else like it in contemporary literature.'

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“Appiah is a writer and thinker of remarkable range… [He] has packed into this short book an impressive amount of original reflection… A rich and illuminating book.”—Thomas Nagel, New York Review of BooksIdealization is a fundamental feature of human thought. We build simplified models to make sense of the world, and life is a constant adjustment between the models we make and the realities we encounter. Our beliefs, desires, and sense of justice are bound up with these ideals, and we proceed “as if” our representations were true, while knowing they are not. In this elegant and original meditation, Kwame Anthony Appiah suggests that this instinct to idealize is not dangerous or distracting so much as it is necessary. As If explores how strategic untruth plays a critical role in far-flung areas of inquiry: decision theory, psychology, natural science, and political philosophy. A polymath who writes with mainstream clarity, Appiah defends the centrality of the imagination not just in the arts but in science, morality, and everyday life.“Appiah is the rare public intellectual who is also a first-rate analytic philosopher, and the characteristic virtues associated with each of these identities are very much in evidence throughout the book.”—Thomas Kelly, Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

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As a backyard naturalist and river enthusiast, Henry David Thoreau was keenly aware of the many ways in which humans had altered the waterways and meadows of his beloved Concord River Valley. A land surveyor by trade, he recognized that he was as complicit in these transformations as the bankers, builders, and elected officials who were his clients. The Boatman reveals the depth of his knowledge about the river as it elegantly chronicles his move from anger to lament to acceptance of how humans had changed a place he cherished even more than Walden Pond.“A scrupulous account of the environment Thoreau loved most… Thorson argues convincingly—sometimes beautifully—that Thoreau’s thinking and writing were integrally connected to paddling and sailing.”—Wall Street Journal“An in-depth account of Thoreau’s lifelong love of boats, his skill as a navigator, his intimate knowledge of the waterways around Concord, and his extensive survey of the Concord River.”—Robert Pogue Harrison, New York Review of Books“An impressive feat of empirical research…an important contribution to the scholarship on Thoreau as natural scientist.”—Los Angeles Review of Books“The Boatman presents a whole new Thoreau—the river rat. This is not just groundbreaking, but fun.”—David Gessner, author of All the Wild That Remains

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A Times Higher Education Book of the WeekOne of our foremost commentators on poetry examines the work of a broad range of nineteenth- and twentieth-century English, Irish, and American poets. The Ocean, the Bird, and the Scholar gathers two decades’ worth of Helen Vendler’s essays, book reviews, and occasional prose—including the 2004 Jefferson Lecture—in a single volume.“It’s one of [Vendler’s] finest books, an impressive summation of a long, distinguished career in which she revisits many of the poets she has venerated over a lifetime and written about previously. Reading it, one can feel her happiness in doing what she loves best. There is scarcely a page in the book where there isn’t a fresh insight about a poet or poetry.”—Charles Simic, New York Review of Books“Vendler has done perhaps more than any other living critic to shape—I might almost say ‘create’—our understanding of poetry in English.”—Joel Brouwer, New York Times Book Review“Poems are artifacts and [Vendler] shows us, often thrillingly, how those poems she considers the best specimens are made…A reader feels that she has thoroughly absorbed her subjects and conveys her understanding with candor, clarity, wit.”—John Greening, Times Literary Supplement

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Established as a homeland for India’s Muslims in 1947, Pakistan has had a tumultuous history. Beset by assassinations, coups, ethnic strife, and the breakaway of Bangladesh in 1971, the country has found itself too often contending with religious extremism and military authoritarianism. Now, in a probing biography of her native land amid the throes of global change, Ayesha Jalal provides an insider’s assessment of how this nuclear-armed Muslim nation evolved as it did and explains why its dilemmas weigh so heavily on prospects for peace in the region.“[An] important book…Ayesha Jalal has been one of the first and most reliable [Pakistani] political historians [on Pakistan]…The Struggle for Pakistan [is] her most accessible work to date…She is especially telling when she points to the lack of serious academic or political debate in Pakistan about the role of the military.”—Ahmed Rashid, New York Review of Books“[Jalal] shows that Pakistan never went off the rails; it was, moreover, never a democracy in any meaningful sense. For its entire history, a military caste and its supporters in the ruling class have formed an ‘establishment’ that defined their narrow interests as the nation’s.”—Isaac Chotiner, Wall Street Journal

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A wide-ranging illustrated history of transparency as told through the evolution of the glass window “With impressive detail and wide-ranging erudition, Jütte charts the history of a single material, glass, as a product of human ingenuity developed across centuries.”—James Gleick, New York Review of Books Transparency is a mantra of our day. It is key to the Western understanding of a liberal society. We expect transparency from, for instance, political institutions, corporations, and the media. But how did it become such a powerful—and global—idea? From ancient glass to Apple’s corporate headquarters, this book is the first to probe how Western people have experienced, conceptualized, and evaluated transparency. Daniel Jütte argues that the experience of transparency has been inextricably linked to one element of Western architecture: the glass window. Windows are meant to be unnoticed. Yet a historical perspective reveals the role that glass has played in shaping how we see and interpret the world. A seemingly “pure” material, glass has been endowed, throughout history, with political, social, and cultural meaning, in manifold and sometimes conflicting ways. At the same time, Jütte raises questions about the future of vitreous transparency—its costs in terms of visual privacy but also its ecological price tag in an age of accelerating climate change.

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Niall Ferguson's acclaimed bestseller on the highs and lows of Britain's empireOnce vast swathes of the globe were coloured imperial red and Britannia ruled not just the waves, but the prairies of America, the plains of Asia, the jungles of Africa and the deserts of Arabia. Just how did a small, rainy island in the North Atlantic achieve all this? And why did the empire on which the sun literally never set finally decline and fall? Niall Ferguson's acclaimed Empire brilliantly unfolds the imperial story in all its splendours and its miseries, showing how a gang of buccaneers and gold-diggers planted the seed of the biggest empire in all history - and set the world on the road to modernity.'The most brilliant British historian of his generation ... Ferguson examines the roles of "pirates, planters, missionaries, mandarins, bankers and bankrupts" in the creation of history's largest empire ... he writes with splendid panache ... and a seemingly effortless, debonair wit' Andrew Roberts 'Dazzling ... wonderfully readable' New York Review of Books'A remarkably readable précis of the whole British imperial story - triumphs, deceits, decencies, kindnesses, cruelties and all' Jan Morris 'Empire is a pleasure to read and brims with insights and intelligence' Sunday Times

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Widely regarded as D. H. Lawrence's greatest novel, Women in Love is both a lucid account of English society before the First World War, and a brilliant evocation of the inexorable power of human desire.Women in Love continues where The Rainbow left off, with the third generation of Brangwens: Ursula Brangwen, now a teacher at Beldover, a mining town in the Midlands, and her sister Gudrun, who has returned from art school in London. The focus of the novel is primarily on their relationships, Ursula's with Rupert Birkin, a school inspector, and Gudrun's with industrialist Gerald Crich, and later with a sculptor, Loerke. Quintessentially modernist, Women is Love is one of Lawrence's most extraordinary, innovative and unsettling works.In his introduction Amit Chaudhuri discusses Lawrence's style and imagery. This introduction also includes a chronology of Lawrence's life and work, further reading, notes and appendices containing the original foreword to Women in Love, a fragment of 'The Sisters', 'Prologue' and 'Wedding' chapters from an earlier draft, a map and discussion of the setting and people involved.With an introduction by Amit Chaudhuri. 'His genius was for instant perception and vivid, passionate expression'The Times'His masterpiece ... Lawrence compels us to admit that we live less finely than we should'New York Review of Books

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The First World War killed around eight million men and bled Europe dry. In this provocative book Niall Ferguson asks: was the sacrifice worth it? Was it all really an inevitable cataclysm and were the Germans a genuine threat? Was the war, as is often asserted, greeted with popular enthusiasm? Why did men keep on fighting when conditions were so wretched? Was there in fact a death wish abroad, driving soldiers to their own destruction? The war, he argues, was a disaster - but not for the reasons we think. Far worse than a tragedy, it was the greatest error of modern history.'The most challenging and provocative analysis of the First World War to date' Ian Kershaw 'Must take a permanent place at the top of the War's historiography. It is one of the very few books whose own scale matches that of the events it describes' Alan Clark, Daily Telegraph'Possibly the most important book to appear in years both on the origins of the First World War ... Ferguson can confidently claim to have inherited A. J. P. Taylor's mantle' Paul Kennedy, New York Review of Books'At one massive stroke, Niall Ferguson has transformed the intellectual landscape' Economist

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Leonid Tsypkin’s novel Summer in Baden-Baden was hailed as an undiscovered classic of 20th-century Russian literature. The Washington Post claimed it “a chronicle of fevered genius,” and The New York Review of Books described it as “gripping, mysterious and profoundly moving.” In her introduction,Susan Sontag said: “If you want from one book an experience of the depth and authority of Russian literature, read this book.” At long last, here are the remaining writings of Leonid Tsypkin: in the powerful novella Bridge Across the Neroch, the history of four generations of a Russian-Jewish family is seen through the lens of a doctor living in Moscow. In Norartakir, a husband and wife on vacation in Armenia bask in the view of Mt. Ararat and the ancient history of the land, until they are unceremoniously kicked out of their hotel and returned to Soviet reality. The remaining stories offer knowing windows into Soviet urban life. As the translator Jamey Gambrell says in her preface: "For Tsypkin's narrator, history is a tightrope to be walked every minute of every day, in both his internal and external world."

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Bradley's stunning volume offers a surprising and delightful glimpse behind the scenes of New York history, and invites readers into the world of Diedrich Knickerbocker, the antihero who surprised everyone by becoming the standard-bearer for the city's exceptional sense of self, or what we now call a New York "attitude." A 2010 AAUP Best of the Best title “A briskly engaging book.” —Christopher Benfey, New York Review of Books “This is cultural history at its best.” —Journal of American Culture “Elizabeth L. Bradley sorts, catalogues and deciphers the shifting Knickerbocker currents in a metropolis constantly reinventing itself. She does the sturdy Dutchman proud in a scholarly and polished rendition.” —Star-Ledger “Bradley creates an engaging account of the city through the fictional Knickerbocker, who was a steady presence ‘over two centuries of wrenching urban transformation, from the post-colonial to the postmodern.’ Bradley is a perceptive and lively writer and does a superb job of tracing the many strands of the Knickerbocker myth. She provided the historical context necessary to illustrate the ways the Knickerbocker brand was invoked and provides deft analysis of the cultural meanings it accrued.” —Bookforum

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The letters of Mary Wollstonecraft and William Godwin mirror the relationship of a remarkable literary couple. The correspondence collected here covers the period from July 13, 1796, to August 30, 1797, when "their friendship turned to romance, their romance to passion, their passion to consummation, their affair to a highly unconventional marriage during which they lived far enough apart to permit the continuing exchange of letters. Wardle, a superb editor, provides just enough annotation to allow the relationship to unfold by itself through the correspondence of these two doctrinaire rationalists, who both came late to love...[Godwin & Mary] is the easiest, certainly the most delightful introduction to the life and prose of Mary Wollstonecraft."--Ellen Moers, New York Review of Books :Taken together, these letters help us to trace out the personal and domestic relations of Mary and Godwin at first hand, and they also throw a good deal of light on the contrasting characters of the pair. Professor Wardle's annotations are most helpful; always brief and concise, but never superfluous."--English Studies Ralph M. Wardle is the author of Oliver Goldsmith (1957), Mary Wollstonecraft: A Critical Biography (1951) and Halzlitt (1971).

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This book collects, for the first time, Colm Toibin's critical essays on Henry James. Shortlisted for the Booker Prize for his novel about James's life, The Master, Toibin brilliantly analyzes James from a novelist's point of view. Known for his acuity and originality, Toibin is himself a master of fiction and critical works, which makes this collection of his writings on Henry James essential reading for literary critics. But he also writes for general readers. Until now, these writings have been scattered in introductions, essays in the Dublin Times, reviews in the New York Review of Books, and other disparate venues. With humor and verve, Toibin approaches Henry James's life and work in many and various ways. He reveals a novelist haunted by George Eliot and shows how thoroughly James was a New Yorker. He demonstrates how a new edition of Henry James's letters along with a biography of James's sister-in-law alter and enlarge our understanding of the master. His "Afterword" is a fictional meditation on the written and the unwritten. Toibin's remarkable insights provide scholars, students, and general readers a fresh encounter with James's well-known texts.

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