"In his posthumous memoirs, Braz Cubas, a wealthy nineteenth-century Brazilian, examines (from beyond the grave) his rather undistinguished life in 160 short chapters that both cover the basics of his existence and open out into philosophical explorations that sometimes follow meandering paths of thought to unexpected places, at times exuberant and hilarious, at other times cynical and utterly at odds with the world around him. In the tradition of...

"A selection of the best and most representative contemporary American short fiction from 1970 to 2020, including such authors as Ursula K. LeGuin, Toni Cade Bambara, Jhumpa Lahiri, Sandra Cisneros, and Ted Chiang, hand-selected by celebrated editor and anthologist John Freeman."--

Nobel laureate Halldór Laxness’s Under the Glacier is a one-of-a-kind masterpiece, a wryly provocative novel at once earthy and otherworldly. At its outset, the Bishop of Iceland dispatches a young emissary to investigate certain charges against the pastor at Snæfells Glacier, who, among other things, appears to have given up burying the dead.
But once he arrives, the emissary finds that this dereliction...

This collection of eleven essays originally appeared in France thirty years ago and created a literary whirlwind on the Left Bank. Cioran writes incisively about Western civilizations, the writer, the novel, mystics, apostles, and philosophers. The Temptation to Exist first introduced this brilliant European thinker twenty years ago to American readers, in a superb translation by Richard Howard. This literary mystique around Cioran continues to grow,...

"Collected here are the exquisite paintings, sets, costumes, photography, sculpture, poetry, and writing New York City Ballet has spawned from the great creative minds of our time." Contributors include: W.H. Auden, Richard Avedon, Marc Chagall, Martha Graham, Eric Carle, Joan Didion, Madeleine L'Engle, George Plimpton, Susan Sontag, Wendy Wasserstein, and many more.