This collection gathers Salter’s thoughts on writing and profiles of important writers, observations of the changing American military life, evocations of Aspen winters, musings on mountain climbing and skiing, and tales of travels to Europe that first appeared in The New Yorker, Esquire, People,...

Much like her highly acclaimed One Writer's Beginnings, The Eye of the Story offers Eudora Welty's invaluable meditations on the art of writing. In addition to seven essays on craft, this collection brings together her penetrating and instructive commentaries on a wide variety of individual writers,...

Drawing on deep passion and personal experience, former US Poet Laureate Tracy K. Smith demystifies the art form that has too often been mischaracterized as “inaccessible,” “irrelevant,” or “intimidating.” She argues that poetry is rooted in fundamentally human qualities innate to our capacities to...

Thoroughly revised and expanded for a new generation of readers, this classic guide to enjoying literature to its fullest—a lively, enlightening, and entertaining introduction to the tools of literary analysis, covering a diverse range of writing and literary devices, including symbols, themes, and...

As writers of English from Australia to India to Sri Lanka command our attention, Salman Rushdie can state confidently that English fiction was moribund until the Empire wrote back, and few, even among the British, demur. A. S. Byatt does, and her case is persuasive. In a series of essays on the...

For the last twenty years, George Saunders has been teaching a class on the Russian short story to his MFA students at Syracuse University. In A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, he shares a version of that class with us, offering some of what he and his students have discovered together over the years....

No writer has surpassed the epic achievement of J.R.R. Tolkien, who spent decades refining his Middle-earth—a world that has felt so real to so many readers that it is almost impossible to imagine that any single person could have simply created it, seemingly out of thin air. In *The Tower and the...

We read to escape, to learn, to find love, to feel seen. We read to encounter new worlds, to discover new recipes, to find connection across difference, or simply to pass a rainy afternoon. No matter the reason, books have the power to keep us safe, to challenge us, and perhaps most importantly, to...