A fictionalized biography of the 18th-century German poet, Friedrich Leopold von Hardenberg, who wrote under the nom de plume, Novalis. The novel centers on his philosophy ("My conviction gains infinitely the moment another soul will believe in it") and on his romance with Sophie von Kuhn, 12, who became his muse, but who died of tuberculosis before they could marry.

"A poignant and hilarious oral history of a (fictitious) musical phenomenon. Celebrated music critic and cultural historian David Hajdu unravels the mystery of a one of-a-kind artist, a pianist with a rare neurological condition that enables her to make music that is nothing less than pure, unmediated emotional expression. Her name is Adrianne Geffel, praised as 'the Geyser of Grand Street' and the 'Queen of Bleak Chic'. Yet despite her renown, she...

A collection of short fiction explores the complexities of human relationships and emotions in stories about a housekeeper entering old-maidhood whose life is transformed by a practical joke and a lifelong philanderer who finds the tables turned. "A superb new collection from one of our best and best-loved writers. Nine stories draw us immediately into the special place known as Alice Munro territory--a place where an unexpected twist of events or...

"Realist fiction is one of the most enduring artforms history has ever witnessed. By describing the intricate inner life of its characters, or widening its focus to set their experience in context, it can evoke the reader’s sympathies as few other forms can. Yet it is also by and large a product of the middle classes: boldly individualist and fascinated by money, property, marriage, and inheritance. Can such realism survive in the postmodern age?...

Milan Kundera's new collection of essays is a passionate defense of art in an era that, he argues, no longer values art or beauty. Art is what we possess in the face of evil and the darker side of human nature. With the same mix of emotion and idea that characterizes his novels, Kundera revisits the artists who remain important to him and whose works help us better understand the world we live in and what it means to be human. An astute reader of...

"Mariana Enriquez has been critically lauded for her unconventional and sociopolitical stories of the macabre: populated by unruly teenagers, crooked witches, homeless ghosts, and hungry women, they walk the uneasy line between urban realism and horror. The stories in her next collection are as terrifying as they are socially conscious, and press into being the unspoken -- fetish, illness, the female body, the darkness of human history -- with unsettling...

"Phyllis Rose embarks on a grand literary experiment--to read her way through a random shelf of library books, LEQ-LES. Can you have an Extreme Adventure in a library? Phyllis Rose casts herself into the wilds of an Upper East Side lending library in an effort to do just that. Hoping to explore the "real ground of literature," she reads her way through a somewhat randomly chosen shelf of fiction, from LEQ to LES. The shelf has everything Rose could...

"E.B. White once said that "a book is a sneeze," and it's hard to disagree. Each classic literary work began as a germ of an idea, often conceived in the most unlikely circumstances and transposed despite critical indifference, personal tragedy, and plain old writer's block. But few sneezes are purely random occurrences. Arthur Golden knew he wanted to write about a geisha's family in Japan, he just didn't know how--until he met one. Stephen King...

The Legacy of Wallace Stegner (1909-1993) - as writer, teacher and conservationist - once moved Edward Abbey to declare him "the only living American worthy of the Nobel." Unequaled in the American literature of place, his Pulitzer Prize-winning fiction created an entirely new consciousness of the American West. As director of the Creative Writing Program at Stanford University, Stegner wielded a powerful influence on many of the most important writers...

Ever since the publication of his first essay collection, The Broken Estate, in 1999, James Wood has been widely regarded as a leading literary critic of the English-speaking world. His essays on canonical writers (Gustav Flaubert, Herman Melville), recent legends (Don DeLillo, Marilynne Robinson) and significant contemporaries (Zadie Smith, Elena Ferrante) have established a standard for informed and incisive appreciation, composed in a distinctive...