Product Description: A landmark biography that reveals the secret past of one of the most influential academics of the twentieth century. Over thirty years after his death in 1983, Paul de Man, a hugely charismatic intellectual who created with deconstruction an ideology so pervasive that it threatened to topple the very foundations of literature, remains a haunting and still largely unexamined figure...read more

Product Description: What is it the legacy that humankind has been living with since 1945? We were once convinced that time was the agent of change. But in the past decade or two, our experience of time has been transformed. Technology preserves and inundates us with the past, and we perceive our future as a set of converging and threatening inevitabilities: nuclear annihilation, global warming, overpopulation...read more

At the time of his death in 1998, Alfred Kazin was considered one of the most influential intellectuals of postwar America. What is less well known is that Kazin had been contributing almost daily to an extensive private journal, which arguably contains some of his best writing. These journals collectively tell the story of his journey from Brooklyn's Brownsville neighborhood to his position as a dominant figure in twentieth-century cultural life.To Kazin, the daily entry was a psychological and spiritual act. To read through these entries is to reexperience history as a series of daily discoveries by an alert, adventurous, if often mercurial intelligence. It is also to encounter an array of interesting and notable personalities. Sketches of friends, mistresses, family figures, and other intellectuals are woven in with commentary on Kazin's childhood, early religious interests, problems with parents, bouts of loneliness, dealings with publishers, and thoughts on the Holocaust. The journals also highlight his engagement with the political and cultural debates of the decades through which he lived. He wrestles with communism, cultural nationalism, liberalism, existentialism, Israel, modernism, and much more.Judiciously selected and edited by acclaimed Kazin biographer Richard Cook, this collection provides the public with access to these previously unavailable writings and, in doing so, offers a fascinating social, historical, literary, and cultural record.

Product Description: In college, Kevin Kopelson passed off a paper by his older brother Robert as his own. In graduate school, he plagiarized nearly an entire article from a respected scholar, and then later, having met her and been asked if he would send something for her to read, sent that essay he had plagiarized from her work...read more

Product Description: "How lucky I was, arriving in New York just as everything was about to go to hell.”That would be in the autumn of 1972, when a very young and green James Wolcott arrived from Maryland, full of literary dreams, equipped with a letter of introduction from Norman Mailer, and having no idea what was about to hit him...read more

Product Description: In Let's Take the Long Way Home, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Gail Caldwell offers a powerful and moving memoir about her coming-of-age in mid-life and her extraordinary friendship with Caroline Knapp, the author of Drinking: A Love Story...read more

Product Description: In Let's Take the Long Way Home, Pulitzer Prize–winning author Gail Caldwell offers a powerful and moving memoir about her coming-of-age in mid-life and her extraordinary friendship with Caroline Knapp, the author of Drinking: A Love Story...read more

Product Description: The Roswell Report: Case Closed is the second of two reports published by the United States Air Force to explain the events of the Roswell Incident that occurred in July of 1947. A follow-up to the report Fact Versus Fiction in the New Mexico Desert, Case Closed includes further analysis and discussion of the events...read more

A deeply personal literary memoir that explores what it means to live an authentic life in an increasingly detached and self-conscious world.Incited by the feeling that the essence of the modern world is buried beneath the distractions of hype and melodrama, cultural critic Richard Todd began a personal search for authenticity, that elusive quality we often seek but seldom find. In The Thing Itself, Todd attempts to discover for himself a new way of thinking by asking the simple question: What is true in ourselves and the world around us? With an exquisite eye for detail and an inquisitive spirit, Todd launches into an involving and elegantly crafted investigation of what makes an authentically lived life. As he focuses on an array of exchanges with people, objects, places, and ideas?from the banal to the emotionally poignant?Todd shows us that there?s a great distance between what we can touch, feel, and see, and what interactions mean in our lives. Mining a rich and multifaceted store of modern philosophy and personal experiences, he inches closer to seeing himself and the world through a clearer set of eyes. Engaging and readable, The Thing Itself offers unexpected insights into the very human search for meaning in our lives.

A cultural critic raised as an atheist reflects on the meaning of her Jewish heritage and her 'difficult friendship' with the writer Leonard Michaels, who continues to influence her life, even after his death.

Product Description: The Roswell Report: Case Closed is the second of two reports published by the United States Air Force to explain the events of the Roswell Incident that occurred in July of 1947. A follow-up to the report Fact Versus Fiction in the New Mexico Desert, Case Closed includes further analysis and discussion of the events...read more

The author shares her memoires of her father, the noted American literary critic, and depicts his memorable, if eccentric, personality