Art & Literature

Walter Benjamin (1892-1940) is now generally recognized as one of the most influential thinkers of the last century. This Very Short Introduction explores his extraordinary life and thought. His complex system of criticism is difficult for many, but it is coherent in its combination of a Judaic...

Explorer, soldier, statesman, writer, key to the English Renaissance—Sir Walter Ralegh fashioned his life as a work of art. Exposing the tensions and contradictions of Renaissance England, Stephen Greenblatt presents Sir Walter Ralegh as a symbol of his age. The interplay between life and art...

It’s been said that the past is another country. Stefan Zweig’s memoir The World of Yesterday takes readers into several such countries. This book has been called the most famous work about the Hapsburg Empire of Austria-Hungary (which Zweig calls “the world of security”) in the last decades before its collapse in the First World War.

A revealing history that explores the artistry, craftmanship, and traditions behind the royal wardrobe. "A truly wonderful and fascinating book!"—Lady Anne Glenconner From tours and walkabouts to the dazzling spectacle of a wedding or Coronation, the clothes worn by royal women have always...

Bob Spitz, acclaimed author of The Beatles: The Biography, discusses the extensive research behind his definitive account of the world's most influential band. In this revealing interview, he explores the myths surrounding The Beatles' early years, the importance of Hamburg and the Cavern Club, the band's unique internal relationships, and the roles of Brian Epstein and George Martin.

'Gemma's mind is a thing of wonder. Reading her love for these crucial legacies is like falling under a spell' AFUA HIRSCH 'Will warm your heart and activate your moral compass. An absolute delight and a magnificent read' DAWN O’PORTER For centuries, travellers would stare up at the stars to...

As part of the major heritage interview program conducted in 2006 by the French National Audiovisual Institute (INA) in collaboration with the Foundation for the Memory of the Shoah, Roman Polanski recorded his account of his childhood in Poland during the war. It was while writing that he remembered asking his father, in 1973, to write his memoirs. He recently rediscovered this account, which he had never read before. It now forms the second part of this unique book, Letters to My Son by Ryszard Polanski.

With Virginia Woolf as a guide, the stories of eight radical 20th century women--wanderers, rebels, explorers, mentors--who made a life for themselves in spite of everything. Everything that changed in the 20th century changed more dramatically for women. Her Own Voice tells the stories of eight...

Good Villains is an odyssey into the minds of America's most polarizing figures—those who blur the line between icon and outcast. It begins with an unexpected encounter with Ye (formerly Kanye West) in late 2022, shortly after his billion-dollar empire collapsed and his presidential ambitions spiraled into chaos. What unfolds is a journey across the country, as author Shane Cashman gains unprecedented access to controversial cultural figures such as Alex Jones, Kari Lake, and Riff Raff—culminating in a harrowing profile of a woman at the center of a viral human trafficking controversy.

Skeptical artist Tokeli falls down a flight of stairs and rips open the "real world." Her recovery is marked by high strangeness. She lands in an all-white Egg. A calm presence appears and says it is staying for the rest of her life. A grocery store song warps. Strangers confess their secrets. Ordinary moments land with eerie precision. Then the dead start showing up... and extraterrestrials and Spirit Guides, and a chorus of voices that will not stop. By the third night, a thunderous rupture opens in the bedroom ceiling and something ancient steps through the portal.

Bloomsbury presents The Man Who Invented Fiction by William Egginton, read by Matt Fletcher-Macdonald. ‘In 1605 a crippled, greying, almost toothless veteran of Spain’s wars against the Ottoman Empire published a book. That book, Don Quixote, went on to sell more copies than any other book...

A critical biography of Harlem Renaissance writer Jean Toomer and his lifelong struggle to transcend race, by an award-winning author The poet and novelist Jean Toomer (1894–1967) was among the most influential figures of the Harlem Renaissance, inspiring generations of Black writers with his...

Leo Tolstoy is usually remembered as one man with one greatness, either the novelist who wrote the largest book in the world or the moralist who tried to live by the Sermon on the Mount and refused all comfort. Both portraits leave something out. They leave out the third Tolstoy, the one who walked behind a plough at sixty, who quarrelled with his wife about the price of boots, who wrote to a tsar and to a peasant in the same week, who at eighty-two left his own house at night and died on a railway platform without telling anyone where he was going.

Pore over the letters of Eve Babitz—queen of the witty, gossipy, and thoroughly engrossing missive. Eve Babitz was a pure product of Los Angeles. The goddaughter of the avant-garde composer Igor Stravinsky, she made the scene of just about every midcentury California scene there was: from the...

A biography of iconic radical historian Howard Zinn, examining his life and work as a progressive icon and thought leader through the story of the times that shaped him as well as the United States of America. From The Nation magazine columnist and New York Times bestselling author Dave Zirin...