Originally published in 1766, the Laocoön has been called the first extended attempt in modern times to define the distinctive spheres of art and poetry.
Shelve Laocoon: An Essay on the Limits of Painting and Poetry
As a novelist, art critic, and cultural historian, John Berger is a writer of dazzling eloquence and arresting insight, whose work amounts to a subtle, powerful critique of the canons of our civilizat…
In this luminous novel — winner of Britain's prestigious Booker Prize — John Berger relates the story of "G.," a young man forging an energetic sexual career in Europe during the early years of the la…
"Those who read or listen to our stories see everything as through a lens. This lens is the secret of narration, and it is ground anew in every story, ground between the temporal and the timeless . . …
Although at first glance this slim volume appears to be a quick read, it should be lingered over and reread to uncover the full depth of its beauty and insight. Combining memoir with artistic and phil…
Shelve Still Life with Oysters and Lemon: On Objects and Intimacy
Garments Against Women is a book of mostly lyric prose about the conditions that make literature almost impossible. It holds a life story without a life, a lie spread across low-rent apartment complex…
A blind Greek peddler tells the story of the wedding between a fellow peddler and his bride in a remarkable series of vivid and telling vignettes. As the book cinematically moves from one character's …
“Essential reading.” — New Society. A classic of eighteenth-century thought, Friedrich Schiller’s treatise on the role of art in society ranks among German philosophy’s most profound works. In addition…
Charles Baudelaire (1821 - 67) was a leading poet and novelist in nineteenth who also devoted a considerable amount of his time to criticism. Indeed it was with a Salon review that he made his literar…
Shelve The Painter of Modern Life and Other Essays (Phaidon Arts and Letters)
Poet and post-punk heroine Eileen Myles has always operated in the art, writing, and queer performance scenes as a kind of observant flaneur. Like Baudelaire's gentleman stroller, Myles travels the ci…
Shelve The Importance of Being Iceland: Travel Essays in Art
"Real seriousness," Nicanor Parra, the antipoet of Chile, has said, rests in "the comic." And read in that light, this newest collection of his work is very serious indeed. It is an abundant offering …
Shelve Antipoems: How to Look Better and Feel Great
E.M. Forster's Aspects of the Novel is an innovative and effusive treatise on a literary form that, at the time of publication, had only recently begun to enjoy serious academic consideration. This Pe…
Benjamin’s famous 'Work of Art' essay sets out his boldest thoughts--on media and on culture in general--in their most realized form, while retaining an edge that gets under the skin of everyone who …
Shelve The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility, and Other Writings on Media
"This fine translation is a god-send. . . . Surely you want to read what Galileo wrote. If so buy this book. Van Helden's introduction is scholarly; no one knows more about Galileo's telescope; the tr…
Shelve Sidereus Nuncius, or The Sidereal Messenger
New to our On the Shoulders of Giants series, this groundbreaking work of astronomy proposed a heliocentric universe in which planets orbited the sun-daring to challenge the Ptolemaic ideal of the ear…
Described by Kenneth Clark as 'one of the most brilliant books of art criticism that I have ever read', Art and Illusion is a classic study of image-making. It seeks to answer a simple question: why i…
Shelve Art and Illusion: A Study in the Psychology of Pictorial Representation
'Murphy', Samuel Beckett's first published novel, was written in English and published in London in 1938; Beckett himself subsequently translated the book into French, and it was published in France i…
This volume brings together three of Nobel Prize winner Samuel Beckett’s major short stories and thirteen shorter pieces of fiction that he calls “texts for nothing.” Here, as in all his work, Beckett…
In these ten intertwined essays, one of our most provocative young novelists proves that she is just as stylish and outrageous an art critic. For when Jeanette Winterson looks at works as diverse as t…
Shelve Art Objects: Essays on Ecstasy and Effrontery
The latest title to join the acclaimed Greek Tragedy in New Translations series, Sophocles' Oedipus at Colonus tells the story of the last day in the life of Oedipus. It was written at the end of the …
Justine was the Marquis de Sade's first novella, written in 1787, whilst imprisoned for two weeks in the Bastille. Although published anonymously, de Sade was eventually indicted for blasphemy and obs…
Short story from the April, 2013 Paris Review. My classroom was on the first floor, next to the nuns’ lounge. I used their bathroom to puke in the mornings. One nun always dusted the toilet seat with t…
This exciting introductory text offers an accessible guide to the past, present and future of cultural history, as it has been practised not only in the English-speaking world but in Continental Europ…
In the middle of the Nevada desert stands a solitary poplar tree, covered in hundreds of pairs of shoes. Further along U.S. Route 50, a lonely prostitute falls in love with a collector of found photog…
Immanuel Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals ranks alongside Plato's Republic and Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics as one of an influential work in moral philosophy. Its aim is to search for …
This collection of works by Sir Philip Sidney includes Defence of Poesie, the most entertaining and penetrating critical essay of the period. Sidney's extraordinary originality, and the impetus given …
Shelve Defence of Poesie, Astrophil and Stella, and Other Writings
Stephen is an ideal child of aristocratic parents—a fencer, a horse rider and a keen scholar. Stephen grows to be a war hero, a bestselling writer and a loyal, protective lover. But Stephen is a woman…
Insel, the only novel by the surrealist master Mina Loy, is a book like no other--about an impossible friendship amid the glamorous artistic bohemia of 1930s Paris.
