From the mad genius behind Chainsaw Man and Look Back comes a new story about coping with loss.Yuta’s moviemaking career started with a request from his mother to record her final moments. After her death, Yuta meets a mysterious girl named Eri, who takes his life in new directions. The two begin creating a movie together, but Eri is harboring an explosive secret.

"If it is art, it is not for all, and if it is for all, it is not art."In this sharp, uncompromising address, he defends the composer’s duty to the text: not to entertain, not to soothe, but to translate meaning with precision and depth. Music, he argues, must obey something higher than taste—something as exacting, and as rare, as truth itself.

“A young healthy child well nursed, is, at a year old, a most delicious nourishing and wholesome food, whether stewed, roasted, baked, or boiled; and I make no doubt that it will equally serve in a fricasee, or a ragoust.”Jonathan Swift’s 1729 pamphlet is at once a denunciation of the mistreatment of Ireland’s poor and a daringly inventive comic rhapsody. Still shocking in its defiance of good taste and unrivalled in its evisceration of political hypocrisy, this is one of the great...

“Although people like to talk about their travels, few of us like to listen to them. Such talk resembles academic writing and reports of dreams: forms of communication driven more by the needs of the producer than the consumer.”In The Case Against Travel the philosopher Agnes Callard launches a vigorous assault on the idea that there is something transformative or ennobling about recreational travel. Going well beyond commonplace complaints about the irksomeness of tourist...

Jun’ichirō Tanizaki’s luminous meditation on traditional Japanese aesthetics finds unexpected beauty in shadows, silence, and cold. In an age of glare and noise, he praises dim rooms, worn surfaces, and the hush of a winter toilet. With wit and sensual precision, Tanizaki shows how elegance emerges not from display but from concealment—what we soften, what we shadow, what we leave unsaid.

“I fully realize that my discussion of the mental climate of collecting will confirm many of you in your conviction that this passion is behind the times, in your distrust of the collector type. Nothing is further from my mind than to shake either your conviction or your distrust.”Walter Benjamin was one of the great cultural critics of the twentieth century. In Unpacking My Library he offers a strikingly personal meditation on his career as a book collector and on the str...

“I found it terrible, yet at the same time touching, for in all the years of the war I had not seen so perfect and pure an expression of bliss on any German face.”An ostensibly whimsical story about the adventures of a Berlin art dealer, Stefan Zweig’s The Invisible Collection is a powerful evocation of the condition of Germany between the wars. When Zweig’s anonymous narrator sets off to the provinces in search of a lucrative bargain, he finds himself caught up in the slo...

“More than any other technical design or social institution, the railway stands for modernity.”In this brilliant essay the historian Tony Judt describes the singular contribution made by railways to the development of our shared way of life. From the transformation of urban spaces to the reorganisation of our sense of time, it is impossible to imagine the world we live in without the social and economic changes wrought by rail travel: no other mode of transport can represent with s...

In this extraordinary 1959 interview, Carl Gustav Jung speaks with disarming lucidity about death, God, dreams, and the psyche’s hidden depths. Reflecting on his break with Freud, his childhood visions, and the moral crises of the modern world, Jung issues a stark warning: that humanity’s greatest threat lies within.

“We are going to Rome to scatter these words of liberty far and wide, words which for seven years have been forbidden like a crime. And with reason, for if they had been allowed, they would have shaken the Fascist tyranny to its foundations within a few hours.”In 1931 the Italian poet Lauro de Bosis flew over Rome in a small plane in order to scatter anti-Fascist pamphlets from the sky. He did not survive the journey, but in Story of My Death he left behind a remarkable te...

Never neglect to read the fine printAs a viscount’s daughter, Constance Grail is an ordinary girl whose only notable trait is sincerity, leaving her with no real options when someone steals her fianc  and falsely accuses her of petty theft at a ball. While Connie awaits her undeserved punishment, a ghost appears to offer a bargain. The spirit is none other than Scarlett Castiel, a noblewoman once praised for her beauty, lineage, and undeniable charisma-and executed some ten years earlier f...

“I invent the most hopeless sounding plots; very often they are based on something I’ve read in a newspaper. And people say, ‘Oh, this is all nonsense’—and then the Russians come along in Germany and shoot people with potassium cyanide pistols.”Between them, Ian Fleming and Georges Simenon created two of the best-known heroes of modern fiction. In this illuminating dialogue, the authors who gave us James Bond and Jules Maigret discuss (among other things) their approaches to the cr...