A comic novel about a Midwestern professor who tries to prop up his failing prospects for happiness by setting out on the Journey of a Lifetime.Louie Hake is forty-three and teaches architectural history at a third-rate college in Michigan. His second marriage is collapsing, and he's facing a potentially disastrous medical diagnosis. In an attempt to fend off what has become a soul-crushing existential crisis, he decides to treat himself to a tour of the world's mo...

The story of an elemental existence in rural Norway.

MacArthur Fellowship–winning poet Brad Leithauser returns with his first new collection in more than a decade, a collection that recalls the delicacy and intimacy of his early, award-winning volumes, and embraces the wisdom of age.As snappy as a dinner jacket’s red silk lining, as appealing as a piano interlude in jazz, Brad Leithauser’s robust felicity is a balm in grim times. It’s also the perfect vehicle for nostalgia, regret, and surprise, forces that animate h...

“[Sigrid Undset] should be the next Elena Ferrante.” —SlateThe turbulent historical masterpiece of Norway’s literary masterIn her great historical epic Kristin Lavransdatter, set in fourteenth-century Norway, Nobel laureate Sigrid Undset tells the life story of one passionate and headstrong woman. Painting a richly detailed backdrop, Undset immerses readers in the day-to-day life, social conventions, and political and reli...

**From the widely acclaimed poet, novelist, critic, and scholar, a lucid and edifying exploration of the building blocks of poetry and how they've been used over the centuries to assemble the most imperishable poems.“Anyone wanting to learn how to remodel, restore, or build a poem from the foundation up, will find this room-by-room guide on the architecture of poetry a warm companion.” —Tomás Q. Morín, author of Machete**We treasure our greatest poetry, Brad Leitha...

According to his obituary, Wesley Sultan died at the age of 63, leaving behind three children, a wife, an ex-wife, a brother, a sister, and a life-long business career. According to his obituary, Wesley Sultan led a quiet, respectable, and unremarkable life. Our narrator, however, is about to discover that nothing could be further from the truth.Using Sultan’s obituary as a road map to the unknown terrain of the man himself, our narrator discovers dead-ends, wrong ...

From one of our most universally admired poets: a generous selection from his five acclaimed books of poetry, and an outstanding group of new poems.From the outset, Brad Leithauser has displayed a venturesome taste for quirky patterns, innovative designs sprung loose from traditional forms. In The Oldest Word for Dawn, we encounter a sonnet in one-syllable lines (“Post-Coitum Tristesse”), a clanging rhyme-mad tribute to the music of Tin Pan Alley (“A Good ...

In this roomy, bawdy, exuberantly comic novel, Brad Leithauser takes us to an imaginary island-country, Freeland, during a crucial election year.Freeland occupies its own place in the North Atlantic, somewhere between Iceland and Greenland. A geological miracle, it is desolate ("What green is to Ireland, gray is to Freeland") -- and inspiring.The "friends" of the title are Hannibal, an expansive, lovable, unruly giant of a man who has been President of Free...

The best from Updike’s lifework in poetry: 129 witty and intimate poems that, when read together take on the quality of an autobiography in verse. • By a master of American letters and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series.“Updike’s gift for close observation, in these poems as elsewhere, is near to supernatural.” —The New York TimesFive decades of witty, intimate, and moving poems—written between 1953 and 2008—with the cumulat...

Brad Leithauser’s “most satisfying collection in years” (Library Journal), a bracing poetic journey that begins in a warm, peopled world and concludes in a cooler and more private place, embracing love of the human and natural world in all its states.

In this one-of-a-kind novel that bends borders, a happy marriage of poetry and fiction, the hero is Russel Darlington, a born naturalist and an unlikely romantic hero.We meet him in the year 1895—a seven-year-old boy first glimpsed chasing a frog through an Indiana swamp. And we follow this idealistic, appealing man for nearly forty years: into college and over the Rockies in pursuit of a new species of butterfly; through a clumsy courtship and into a struggling ma...

The Art Student's War is Brad Leithauser's finest novel to date, deeply moving in its portrayal of a young aspiring artist and her immigrant family during Detroit’s wartime heyday.The year is 1943. Bianca Paradiso is a pretty and ambitious eighteen-year-old studying to be an artist while her bustling, thriving hometown turns from mass-producing automobiles to rolling out fighter planes and tanks. For Bianca, national and personal conflicts begin to merge w...