The great critic's masterwork makes a case for the necessity of the imaginative works in a society ever more worshipful of the liberal ideals of rationality and progress.

The Life of Henry Brulard is a vivid memoir that is also an extraordinary work of the imagination.

The world's first picaresque novel and an inspiration for many writers, including Cervantes.

Auden's inspired and incisive response to a thinker who had done much to shape his own beliefs is a fundamental reading of an author whose spirit remains as radical as ever more than 150 years after he wrote.

In Hugo von Hofmannsthal's celebrated autobiographical novella a young nobleman reveals to his patron Sir Francis Bacon his particularly modern crisis of spirit.

The Lore and Language of Schoolchildren is a pathbreaking work of scholarship that is also a splendid and enduring work of literature.

Love's Work is at once a memoir and a book of philosophy.

James McCourt's entrancing send-up of the world of opera has been a cult classic for more than a quarter-century. This comic tribute to the love of art is a triumph of art and love by a contemporary American master.

L. J. Davis's A Meaningful Life is a blistering black comedy about gentrification and its discontents, a gritty picture of the collapsing New York of the 1970s, a prophetic send-up of middle-class anxieties and ambitions.

Called "a rich, disquietingly good book" by The New York Times, the five interconnected stories in Memoirs of an Anti-Semite provide a panoramic yet intimate view of the deterioration of the European aristocracy in the years preceding World War II and the difficult decades that followed.