Committed is a raw and masterful memoir that navigates the complexities of becoming a woman and going mad—and the intersection of both. Suzanne Scanlon's journey begins in the 90s as a student at Barnard College, where the loss of her mother sends her adrift in a sea of grief and inexpressible pain. This turmoil leads to a suicide attempt that results in her admission to the New York State Psychiatric Institute.

Spanning nearly three years and a myriad of experimental treatments, Suzanne eventually leaves the institute on unsteady footing. The following decades mark her path to recovery and a profound understanding of her suffering as part of a broader narrative—a lineage of women whose intricate and often silenced stories of self-realization are dismissed as mere “crazy chick” and “madwoman” clichés.

Through her personal odyssey, Suzanne discovers a resonating thrill in the works of influential women writers such as Charlotte Perkins Gilman, Virginia Woolf, Sylvia Plath, Janet Frame, Audre Lorde, and Shulamith Firestone. Committed is both a tale of personal discovery and a call to reclaim the archetype of the madwoman, celebrating it as a source of insight and a means to transcendence.

All Things Are Too Small is brilliant cultural critic Becca Rothfeld's soul cry for derangement: imbalance, obsession, gluttony, ravishment, ugliness, and unbound truth in aesthetics, whether we're talking about literature, criticism, or design. In a healthy culture, Rothfeld argues, economic security allows for wild aesthetic experimentation and excess; alas, in the contemporary Anglophone West, we've got it flipped.

The gap between rich and poor, privileged and oppressed, yawns hideously wide, while we stagnate in a cultural equality that imposes restraint. This collection of essays ranges from topics such as Sally Rooney, sadomasochism, and women who wait, making a glorious call to throw off restraint and balance in culture in favor of excess, abandon, and disproportion.

Like Love: Essays and Conversations is a momentous, raucous collection of essays drawn from twenty years of Maggie Nelson's brilliant work. These profiles, reviews, remembrances, tributes, and critical essays, as well as several conversations with friends and idols, bring to life Nelson's passion for dialogue and dissent.

The range of subjects is wide—from Prince to Carolee Schneemann to Matthew Barney to Lhasa de Sela to Kara Walker—but certain themes recur: intergenerational exchange; love and friendship; feminist and queer issues, especially as they shift over time; subversion, transgression, and perversity; the roles of the critic and of language in relation to visual and performance arts; forces that feed or impede certain bodies and creators; and the fruits and follies of a life spent devoted to making.

Arranged chronologically, Like Love shows the writing, thinking, feeling, reading, looking, and conversing that occupied Nelson while writing iconic books such as Bluets and The Argonauts. As such, it is a portrait of a time, an anarchic party rich with wild guests, a window into Nelson's own development, and a testament to the profound sustenance offered by art and artists.

Traces Of Enayat is a brilliant work of creative nonfiction from one of the preeminent poets of the Arab-speaking world, exploring the mysterious life and erasure of Egyptian literature's tragic heroine. Cairo, 1963: four years before her lone novel is finally published, the writer Enayat al-Zayyat takes her own life at age 27. In the following decades, it's as if Enayat never existed.

Years later, celebrated Egyptian poet Iman Mersal discovers Enayat's long-forgotten Love and Silence in a Cairo book stall, leading her on a journey of reflection and rediscovery. Through interviews with family members and friends, Mersal retraces Enayat's life and afterlife, tracking down the places where Enayat spent her days. From the glamour of golden-age Egyptian cinema to the Cairo of Mersal's own past, a remarkable portrait emerges of two women striving to live on their own terms.

Traces Of Enayat embraces the reciprocal relationship between a text and its reader, between past and present, between author and subject, crafting a luminous biographical detective story.

Marilynne Robinson, one of our greatest novelists and thinkers, presents a radiant, thrilling interpretation of the book of Genesis.

For generations, the book of Genesis has been treated by scholars as a collection of documents, by various hands, expressing different factional interests, with borrowings from other ancient literatures that mark the text as derivative. In other words, academic interpretation of Genesis has centered on the question of its basic coherency, just as fundamentalist interpretation has centered on the question of the appropriateness of reading it as literally true.

Both of these approaches preclude an appreciation of its greatness as literature, its rich articulation and exploration of themes that resonate through the whole of Scripture. Reading Genesis, which includes the original text, is a powerful consideration of the profound meanings and promise of God's enduring covenant with humanity. This magisterial book radiates gratitude for the constancy and benevolence of God's abiding faith in Creation.

No Judgement: Essays is a forthcoming collection by Lauren Oyler, known for her sharp wit and insightful commentary. While the descriptive copy is not yet available from the Publisher, readers can expect a series of compelling essays that delve into the art of being critical.

Oyler's work often explores the intersection of culture, social media, and literature, offering a unique perspective on contemporary issues. This collection promises to be an essential read for anyone interested in the power of critique in our modern world.

Joan Acocella, one of our finest cultural critics, has the rare ability to examine literature and unearth the lives contained within it—its authors, its subjects, and the communities from which it sprung. In her hands, arts criticism becomes a celebration and an investigation, and her essays pulse with unadulterated enthusiasm.

As Kathryn Harrison wrote in The New York Times, "Hers is a vision that allows art its mystery but not its pretensions, to which she is acutely sensitive. What better instincts could a critic have?" The Bloodied Nightgown and Other Essays gathers twenty-four essays from the past decade and a half of Acocella's career, as well as an introduction that frames her simple preoccupations, "life and art."

In agile, inspired prose, the New Yorker staff writer moves from J. R. R. Tolkien's translation of Beowulf to the life of Richard Pryor, from surveying profanity to untangling in the book of Job. Her appetite (and reading list) knows no bounds. This collection is a joy and a revelation, a library in itself, and Acocella our dream companion among its shelves.

Wifedom: Mrs. Orwell's Invisible Life by Anna Funder is a story that delves into the marriage behind some of the most renowned literary works of the 20th century and is a thought-provoking exploration of what it means to be a wife and a writer in today's world.

Anna Funder was at a crossroads in her life in the summer of 2017, overwhelmed by family obligations and household responsibilities that were distancing her from her writing. In search of help, she turned to the works of George Orwell, whose humor and keen insights into the dynamics of power deeply resonated with her. Upon re-reading his works and biographies, Funder discovered the overlooked figure of Orwell's wife, Eileen O'Shaughnessy, a writer whose intellectual prowess profoundly influenced Orwell's work and whose pragmatism was vital to his survival.

Funder's journey through the Orwells' marriage, from the Spanish Civil War to the Second World War in London, is not just a historical recount but also a personal quest to understand the sacrifices and contributions of a writer's spouse. Wifedom is an intimate portrayal of one of the most significant literary partnerships of the twentieth century and resonates with the present as much as it sheds light on the past. This genre-bending biography is a tribute to the unacknowledged efforts of women everywhere.

Monsters: A Fan's Dilemma is a passionate, provocative, and blisteringly smart interrogation of how we experience art in the age of #MeToo. Author Claire Dederer poses the critical question: What do we do with the art of monstrous men? Can we still love the work of Roman Polanski and Michael Jackson, Hemingway and Picasso? Should we love it? Does genius deserve special dispensation?

Dederer explores the concept of monstrousness in men and women artists alike, prompting readers to examine their own responses and behavior. With a focus on the tumultuous relationship between art, the artist's biography, and the audience, this book delves deep into one of our most pressing cultural conversations. It is a work that is morally wise, deeply considered, and sharply written, urging both the fan and the reader to engage with these complex issues.

A dazzlingly inventive, deeply moving, intellectually bracing exploration of pain and beauty, private memory and public monument, art and complexity in contemporary Black life.

Christina Sharpe begins by writing about her mother and grandmother in Ordinary Notes. This singular achievement explores profound questions about loss, and the shapes of Black life that emerge in the wake. A series of 248 brief and urgent notes gather meaning as we read them, skillfully weaving artifacts from the past—public ones alongside others that are poignantly personal—with present-day realities and possible futures, intricately constructing an immersive portrait of everyday Black existence.

Themes and tones echo throughout the pages, sometimes about life, art, language, beauty, memory; sometimes about history, photography, and literature—but always attending, with exquisite care, to the ordinary-extraordinary dimensions of Black life.

At the heart of Ordinary Notes is the indelible presence of the author's mother, Ida Wright Sharpe. Sharpe writes, "I learned to see in my mother's house," and "My mother gifted me a love of beauty, a love of words." Using these gifts and other ways of seeing, she steadily summons a chorus of voices and experiences to become present on the page. She articulates and follows an aesthetic of "beauty as a method," collects entries from a community of thinkers towards a "Dictionary of Untranslatable Blackness," and rigorously examines sites of memory and memorial. And in the process, she forges a new literary form, as multivalent as the ways of Black being it traces.

Celebrate the pleasure of reading and the thrill of discovering new titles in an extraordinary book that's as compulsively readable, entertaining, surprising, and enlightening as the 1,000-plus titles it recommends. Covering fiction, poetry, science and science fiction, memoir, travel writing, biography, children's books, history, and more, 1,000 Books to Read Before You Die ranges across cultures and through time to offer an eclectic collection of works that each deserve to come with the recommendation, You have to read this.

But it's not a proscriptive list of the "great works"—rather, it's a celebration of the glorious mosaic that is our literary heritage. Flip it open to any page and be transfixed by a fresh take on a very favorite book. Or come across a title you always meant to read and never got around to. Or, like browsing in the best kind of bookshop, stumble on a completely unknown author and work, and feel that tingle of discovery. There are classics, of course, and unexpected treasures, too.

Lists to help pick and choose, like Offbeat Escapes, or A Long Climb, but What a View. And its alphabetical arrangement by author assures that surprises await on almost every turn of the page, with Cormac McCarthy and The Road next to Robert McCloskey and Make Way for Ducklings, Alice Walker next to Izaac Walton.

There are nuts and bolts, too—best editions to read, other books by the author, "if you like this, you'll like that" recommendations, and an interesting endnote of adaptations where appropriate. Add it all up, and in fact there are more than six thousand titles by nearly four thousand authors mentioned—a life-changing list for a lifetime of reading.

What is TKI? TKI is not like anything ever created before (that is the kind of line business managers make you write, I apologise), it is 3 books in 1 which is quite surprising given that it is a novella.

Layer 1
Layer one is a thriller that has none stop action from start to finish.
Who is the man in the yellow polo shirt? Is he an anarchist, a jihadist or a fascist bent on a new world order? What was he doing at the scene of two separate terrorist attacks and why has he reappeared five years later during the deadliest bombings London has seen since the blitz?
Agent Heller, the only member of her Majesty's Secret Service that believes the man in the yellow polo shirt is behind it all, must find out the deadly truth, but what is the truth in the world of espionage and where does reality end and madness begin?

Layer 2
Layer two is a philosophical meta-fiction discussing the ramifications of actions and thoughts.
What if everything that happened in the world of a novel was real? What if authors were evil monsters torturing innocent characters with their evil schemes? And what does that make the reader?

Layer 3
Layer three is a literary criticism discussing the state of modern commercial fiction, its inflexible state of being, the trite cliches, the sloppy editing, the scores of grammar and spelling mistakes and its obsession with sales over quality.
If novel writing has basically become an algorithm to be followed, why would the world need writers anymore? If the world simply wants the same thing in slightly varying degrees, what is the point of creativity?

The text of Eliot's 1922 masterpiece is accompanied by thorough explanatory annotations as well as by Eliot's own knotty notes, some of which require annotation themselves.

In this exuberantly praised book — a collection of seven pieces on subjects ranging from television to tennis, from the Illinois State Fair to the films of David Lynch, from postmodern literary theory to the supposed fun of traveling aboard a Caribbean luxury cruiseliner — David Foster Wallace brings to nonfiction the same curiosity, hilarity, and exhilarating verbal facility that has delighted readers of his fiction, including the bestselling Infinite Jest.

Fyodor Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, a Monarch Notes edition, provides a comprehensive guide to understanding one of literature's great novels. This study guide includes detailed analyses of characters, themes, and the narrative structure, along with a deep dive into Dostoyevsky's literary techniques. Whether you're a student preparing for exams or a literature enthusiast eager to gain a deeper understanding of Dostoyevsky's work, this guide is an invaluable resource.