"Robert Pinsky, Winner of PEN/Voelcker Career-Achievement Award for Poetry" Robert Pinsky, who served as Poet Laureate of the United States, 1997-2000, is the author of many books, including: Jersey Rain, Americans' Favorite Poems, Poems to Read, The Sounds of Poetry, The Handbook of Heartbreak, The Inferno of Dante: A New Verse Translation, among others, and three works published by Princeton: An Explanation of America; The Situation of Poetry; and...

Will in the World interweaves a searching account of Elizabethan England with a vivid narrative of the playwright's life. We see Shakespeare learning his craft, starting a family, and forging a career for himself in the wildly competitive London theater world, while at the same time grappling with dangerous religious and political forces that took less-agile figures to the scaffold. The basic biographical facts of Shakespeare's life have been known...

"A revelatory history of the transformational decade after World War II when Germany raised itself out of the ashes of defeat, turned away from fascism, and reckoned with the corruption of its soul, and the horrors of the Holocaust"-- The years 1945 to 1955 were a raw, wild decade that found many Germans politically, economically, and morally bankrupt. Victorious Allied forces occupied the four zones that make up present-day Germany. More than half...

In 1882, Emily Dickinson's brother Austin began a passionate love affair with Mabel Todd, a young Amherst faculty wife, setting in motion a series of events that would forever change the lives of the Dickinson family. The feud that erupted as a result has continued for over a century. Lyndall Gordon, an award-winning biographer, tells the riveting story of the Dickinsons, and reveals Emily as a very different woman from the pale, lovelorn recluse...

Founded by Alexander the Great and built by self-styled Greek pharaohs, the city of Alexandria at its height dwarfed both Athens and Rome. It was the marvel of its age, legendary for its vast palaces, safe harbors, and magnificent lighthouse. But it was most famous for the astonishing intellectual efflorescence it fostered and the library it produced. If the European Renaissance was the "rebirth" of Western culture, then Alexandria, Egypt, was its...

"From the end of the Baroque era and the death of Bach to the rise of Hitler, Germany was transformed from a poor relation among Western nations into a dominant intellectual and cultural force. By 1933, Germans had won more Nobel Prizes than the British and Americans combined. Yet this remarkable genius was cut down in its prime by Adolf Hitler and his disastrous Third Reich--a brutal legacy that has overshadowed the nation's achievements ever since....

"As the United States marks the 150th anniversary of our defining national drama, 1861 presents a gripping and original account of how the Civil War began."--Dust flap.

International Bestseller: This “absolute gem of a book” offers a month-by-month account of the year before World War I—one of the most exciting times in the 20th century (The Observer).
“A sexy, comic and occasionally heartbreaking soap opera” for history buffs interested in 20th-century art, music, and literature (Washington Post).

It was the year Henry Ford first put a...

A Dominican-born academic tells the story of how the Great Books transformed his life--and why they have the power to speak to people of all backgrounds. What is the value of a liberal education? Traditionally characterized by a rigorous engagement with the classics of Western thought and literature, this approach to education is all but extinct in American universities, replaced by flexible distribution requirements and ever-narrower academic specialization....

"In an overloaded, superficial, technological world, in which almost everything and everybody are judged by their usefulness, where can we turn for escape, lasting pleasure, contemplation, or connection to others? While many forms of leisure meet these needs, Zena Hitz writes, few experiences are so fulfilling as the inner life, whether that of a bookworm, an amateur astronomer, a birdwatcher, or someone who takes a deep interest in one of countless...