In this study, leading scholar Rosette C. Lamont traces Eugene ionesco’s development as a writer and dramatist from his Surrealist beginnings through to his late “dream plays.” Her careful analysis of Ionesco’s entire oeuvre shows how the archetypal and the historical are intermingled in a synthesis that marks lonesco as a major figure in post-World War Il, post-Holocaust literature.Lamont’s rereading of lonesco’s work reveals the dramatist as profoundly marked by the events occurring in E...

Essays and reflections from one of the twentieth century's most original cultural critics, with an introduction by Hannah Arendt.Walter Benjamin was an icon of criticism, renowned for his insight on art, literature, and philosophy. This volume includes his views on Kafka, with whom he felt a close personal affinity; his studies on Baudelaire and Proust; and his essays on Leskov and Brecht's epic theater. Illuminations also includes his penetrating study "T...

New York Times Bestseller"Inspired. . . . Kundera's most brilliantly imagined novel. . . . A book that entrances, beguiles and charms us from first page to last." — Cleveland Plain DealerMilan Kundera's sixth novel springs from a casual gesture of a woman to her swimming instructor, a gesture that creates a character in the mind of a writer named Kundera. Like Flaubert's Emma or Tolstoy's Anna, Kundera's Agnès becomes an o...

Includes the essay "Notes on Camp," the inspiration for the 2019 exhibition Notes on Fashion: Camp at the Costume Institute of the Metropolitan Museum of ArtAgainst Interpretation was Susan Sontag's first collection of essays and is a modern classic. Originally published in 1966, it has never gone out of print and has influenced generations of readers all over the world. It includes the groundbreaking essays "Notes on Camp" and "Against Interpretation," as...

Edited by Philip Thody, translated by Ellen Conroy Kennedy."Here now, for the first time in a complete English translation, we have Camus' three little volumes of essays, plus a selection of his critical comments on literature and his own place in it. As might be expected, the main interest of these writings is that they illuminate new facets of his usual subject matter."--The New York Times Book Review"...a new single work for American readers that stands among th...

“Incites us to reflect on fiction and philosophy, knowledge and truth, and brilliantly illustrates the art of the essay.” — The New Republic"Every novelist's work contains an implicit vision of the history of the novel, an idea of what the novel is. I have tried to express the idea of the novel that is inherent in my own novels." — Milan KunderaKundera brilliantly examines the evolution, construction, and essence o...

Includes new early writings: "This vibrant collection fully displays Auster's wit and humanity . . . a fascinating glimpse into the mind of a celebrated author." — Publishers Weekly (starred review)Beginning with a short philosophical meditation written when he was twenty and concluding with nine political pieces that take on such issues as homelessness, 9/11, and the link between soccer and war, the forty-four pieces gathered in this volume offer a wide-ra...

In 1953, Samuel Beckett’s Waiting for Godot premiered at a tiny avant-garde theatre in Paris; within five years, it had been translated into more than twenty languages and seen by more than a million spectators. Its startling popularity marked the emergence of a new type of theatre whose proponents—Beckett, Ionesco, Genet, Pinter, and others—shattered dramatic conventions and paid scant attention to psychological realism, while highlighting their characters’ inability to understan...

The celebrated novelist and influential cultural critic's classic biography of one of history's most important writers, Marcel ProustIf there is anyone worthy of producing an intimate biography of the enigmatic genius behind Remembrance of Things Past, it is Edmund White, himself an award- winning writer for whom Marcel Proust has long been an obsession. White introduces us not only to the recluse endlessly rewriting his one massive work through the night,...

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 enchantment of great literature.From the banishment of the classical divinities during the Age of Reason to their emancipation by the Romantics and thei...

An “elegant translation” of Rilke’s writings on sculptor Auguste Rodin that “offers a fresh look at an unlikely mentorship” and two extraordinary artists (The New York Times Book Review).Sculptor Auguste Rodin was fortunate to have his secretary Rainer Maria Rilke, one of the most sensitive poets of our time. These two pieces discussing Rodin’s work and development as an artist are as revealing of Rilke as they are of his subject.Written in 1902 an...

"The fox knows many things, but the hedgehog knows one big thing." This ancient Greek aphorism, preserved in a fragment from the poet Archilochus, describes the central thesis of Isaiah Berlin's masterly essay on Leo Tolstoy and the philosophy of history, the subject of the epilogue to War and Peace. Although there have been many interpretations of the adage, Berlin uses it to mark a fundamental distinction between human beings who are fascinated by the infinite variety of things ...