An investigation into the problem of writing about matter in Nikolai Gogol's work and, indirectly, into the entire Neoplatonic tradition in Russian literature, this book is not intended to be an exha
Narrated by the count's last-surviving relative, Sally Ormsby Thompson Robinson, a fictional portrait of Benjamin Thompson, Count Rumford, describes the eclectic and distinguished career of the eighte
The Presentable Art of Reading Absence takes as impulse the act of meditation, in which the energetic relationship between a meditative body and its universe is not only the envisioning of absence by
A man, a writer, lives alone in a rather squalid Paris apartment. He is trying to write a novel, but he has nothing to say. He tries multiple beginnings, interspersed with one digression (but from wh
This bitterly funny memoir reads like an expose of the power structures in America's higher-education system: who's got it, how they're abusing it, what everyone else is willing to do to get it, and t
First published in France in 1985, The Bathroom was Jean-Philippe Toussaint's debut novel, and it heralded a new generation of innovative French literature. In this playful and perplexing book, we mee
This year Rikki Ducornet is being presented with a lifetime achievement award by the American Academy of Arts and Letters for her beloved work as a novelist and essayist, but perhaps most of all for h
"James Schuyler and I began writing A Nest of Ninnies purely by chance," writes John Ashbery in his new introduction to this classic of American comic fiction. "We were in a car being driven by the yo
A fictional imagining of the gentle but troubled zealot William Cowper - best known as a precursor to Romantics such as Wordsworth and Burns - Brian Lynch's The Winner of Sorrow brings to life the min
In this improbable love story, we meet a man who is obsessed with himself: how he does things and all the ways he might have done them, how he thinks, why he thinks the way that he thinks, how he mig
A landmark event: The last of Louis-Ferdinand Celine's novels to be translated into English, this account of an air raid on Paris during World War II throws readers into a world in which human aggres
Paradoxes of Peace continues the meditation of Nicholas Mosley's Time at War, at the end of which he wrote that humans find themselves at home in war because there they feel they know what they have
God is said to have given humans freedom. Yet in the story of Genesis, God is a punishing father figure. Why have humans portrayed him this way? Here, a contemporary writer named Adam imagines God be
The setting is a country called Inish (the Irish word for "island" and also for "tell"), which bears a striking resemblance to modern Eire. More pertinently, Inish resembles a state of mind—and since
Two men meet in an airport men's room sometime in the early 1990s in the Arabian Gulf. From this meeting, they proceed to get a bit drunk on bad liquor, discover a magical hidden room, get transported
God is said to have given humans freedom. Yet in the story of Genesis God is a punishing father-figure. Why have humans portrayed him like this? Here, a contemporary writer called Adam imagines God be
What happens when a writer throws herself into the service of one of the richest businessmen in the world? Will all the luxuries and corruption of the business world turn her into a complacent drone?
