The noted Dutch poet and novelist Cees Nooteboom reflects upon the life of the mind through a reexamination of books, music, art, travel, and gardeningThough a tireless explorer of distant cultures, for more than forty years Cees Nooteboom has also been returning to Menorca, “the island of the wind.” It is in his house there, with a study full of books and a garden taken over by cacti and many insects, that the 533 days of writing take place. The result is not a di...

In the tradition of A History of Reading, this book is an account of Manguel’s astonishment at the variety, beauty and persistence of our efforts to shape the world and our lives, most notably through something almost as old as reading itself: libraries. The Library at Nightbegins with the design and construction of Alberto Manguel’s own library at his house in western France – a process that raises puzzling questions about his past and his reading habits,...

Although he is best known for his luminous reports from the farthest-flung corners of the earth, Bruce Chatwin possessed a literary sensibility that reached beyond the travel narrative to span a world of topics—from art and antiques to archaeology and architecture. This spirited collection of previously neglected or unpublished essays, articles, short stories, travel sketches, and criticism represents every aspect and period of Chatwin’s career as it reveals an abiding theme in his work: h...

A dazzling book about memory and extinction from the author of Atlas of Remote IslandsA Publishers Weekly Best Book of the YearA Financial Times Best Book of the YearWinner of the Warwick PrizeWinner of the Helen & Kurt Wolff Translator's PrizeLonglisted for the International Booker PrizeEach disparate object described in this book—a Caspar David Friedrich painting, a species of tiger, a villa in Rome, a...

Inspired by the process of creating a library for his fifteenth-century home near the Loire, in France, Alberto Manguel, the acclaimed writer on books and reading, has taken up the subject of libraries. “Libraries,” he says, “have always seemed to me pleasantly mad places, and for as long as I can remember I’ve been seduced by their labyrinthine logic.” In this personal, deliberately unsystematic, and wide-ranging book, he offers a captivating meditation on the meaning of libraries.

John Berger, one of the world's most celebrated storytellers and writers on art, tells a personal history of art from the prehistoric paintings of the Chauvet caves to 21st century conceptual artists. Berger presents entirely new ways of thinking about artists both canonized and obscure, from Rembrandt to Henry Moore, Jackson Pollock to Picasso. Throughout, Berger maintains the essential connection between politics, art and the wider study of culture. The result is an illuminating walk thr...

“I am completely an elitist, in the cultural but emphatically not the social sense. I prefer the good to the bad, the articulate to the mumbling, the aesthetically developed to the merely primitive, and full to partial consciousness. I love the spectacle of skill, whether it’s an expert gardener at work, or a good carpenter chopping dovetails . . . I don’t think stupid or ill-read people are as good to be with as wise and fully literate ones. I would rather watch a great tennis player ...

Winner of the PEN Translation Prize"Pondering revolutionary Cuba, the Berlin Wall, and the caves of Cappadocia, these essays explore themes of memory, war, movement, and home."—The New Yorker"A thoughtful, roving meditation on migration, language, and home."—Publishers WeeklyIn her prize-winning debut, Mexican essayist Mariana Oliver trains her gaze on migration in its many forms, moving between re...

A poetic history of the twentieth century from one of our most beloved, popular, and highly lauded poets—a stirring, strikingly original, intensely imagined recreation of the most potent voices and searing moments that have shaped our collective experience.XX is award-winning poet Campbell McGrath's astonishing sequence of one hundred poems—one per year—written in a vast range of forms, and in the voices of figures as varied as Picasso and Mao, Frida Kahlo and Elvis Presle...

Roads to Berlin maps the changing landscape of Germany, from the period before the fall of the Wall to the present. Written and updated over the course of several decades, an eyewitness account of the pivotal events of 1989 gives way to a perceptive appreciation of its difficult passage to reunification.Nooteboom's writings on politics, people, architecture and culture are as digressive as they are eloquent; his innate curiosity takes him through the landscapes of Heine and Goethe,...

An exploration of the many reasons to remain hopeful in the face of life's disappointments and challenges.In a world that isn’t short of darkness, there could be few more urgent priorities than to spend time rehearsing for ourselves why life – despite all its challenges – still has so much to offer us; why there are still so many reasons to be hopeful.Here is a collection of some of the most persuasive arguments for staying on the side of optimism, creativi...

Cosmopolitan, vivacious essays in the tradition of Brodsky’s Watermark and Benjamin’s The Arcades Project by a celebrated young Mexican author.Valeria Luiselli is an evening cyclist; a literary tourist in Venice, searching for Joseph Brodsky’s tomb; an excavator of her own artifacts, unpacking from a move. In essays that are as companionable as they are ambitious, she uses the city to exercise a roving, meandering intelligence, seeking out the que...