Lionel Essrog has always respected Frank Minna, who helped him out when he was young, and when Frank is found dead, Lionel and his friends, the Minna Men, scour the streets of Brooklyn in search of the killer.

The most haunting memoir of the twentieth century—written in exile, published after death, essential for our time. Stefan Zweig was born into the golden age of European civilization, a world that believed in progress, treasured culture above nationalism, and thought peace permanent. From his privileged position in Vienna—cultural capital of the Hapsburg Empire—he witnessed the last great flowering of cosmopolitan humanism. He knew Rilke and Freud, Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss. He moved effortlessly between Paris, London, Berlin, and Rome. By the 1920s, he was one of the most translated authors in the world. Then, across three decades, he watched that entire civilization destroy itself. The World of Yesterday is Zweig's attempt to capture what was lost—the intellectual brilliance of pre-war Vienna, the madness of 1914's patriotic fever, the hyperinflation that destroyed Austria's middle class, the rise of Mussolini and Hitler, the nightmare of exile. Writing without access to his notes or library, relying purely on memory, Zweig creates something more valuable than conventional autobiography: a sustained meditation on civilization's fragility, written by a witness who understood exactly what was being destroyed and why it mattered. This is not simply historical testimony. It is warning and prophecy. Zweig describes how quickly democratic norms collapsed, how virulent antisemitism erupted in countries where Jews felt integrated, how cultural achievement proved defenseless against totalitarian barbarism. He chronicles the failure of intellectuals to resist, the transformation of neighbors into enemies, the speed with which cosmopolitan ideals gave way to tribal hatred. The memoir was completed in Brazil in February 1942, mailed to the publisher on February 21st. The next day, Zweig and his wife ended their lives. He could not survive the destruction of everything he valued. But he left us this book—eloquent, heartbroken, clear-eyed about both his generation's achievements and its catastrophic failures. For readers in our own uncertain era, The World of Yesterday speaks with uncomfortable urgency. The questions Zweig asks have become our questions. The dangers he witnessed have not disappeared. His testimony reminds us that civilization is never guaranteed—it must be defended, or it will be lost. A masterwork of witness and warning. The essential memoir of European catastrophe. Required reading for our age.

At once praised and condemned by his contemporaries and by critics ever since for his highly complex poetic vision, William Butler Yeats remains one of the most important and controversial twentieth-century poets. In what has become a classic work of literary criticism, award-winning critic Harold Bloom breaks new ground with his radical interpretation of Yeats' relationship to the English Romantic tradition. Yeats tells the continuous story of the lifelong influence of Shelley, Blake, and the Romantic tradition upon Yeats' work. Through his analysis of the full spectrum of Yeats' poems and plays, Bloom offers a profound reinterpretation of poetic influence in general.

A NEW YORK TIMES BEST BOOK OF THE YEAR • An essential new translation of the author’s complete, uncensored diaries—a revelation of the idiosyncrasies and rough edges of one of the twentieth century’s most influential writers. “An invaluable addition to Kafka’s oeuvre.”— The New York Times An essential new translation of Franz Kafka’s complete, uncensored diaries—a revelation of the idiosyncrasies and rough edges of one of the twentieth century’s most important, influential, and visionary writers Dating from 1909 to 1923, Franz Kafka’s Diaries contains a broad array of writing, including accounts of daily events, assorted reflections and observations, literary sketches, drafts of letters, records of dreams, and unrevised texts of stories. This volume makes available for the first time in English a comprehensive reconstruction of Kafka’s handwritten diary entries and provides substantial new content, restoring all the material omitted from previous publications—notably, names of people and undisguised details about them, a number of literary writings, and passages of a sexual nature, some of them with homoerotic overtones. By faithfully reproducing the diaries’ distinctive— and often surprisingly unpolished—writing as it appeared in Kafka’s notebooks, translator Ross Benjamin brings to light not only the author’s use of the diaries for literary invention and unsparing self-examination but also their value as a work of genius in and of themselves.

Blending memories and family myths, Mary McCarthy takes us back to the twenties, when she was orphaned in a world of relations as colourful, potent and mysterious as the Catholic religion. There were her grandmothers: one was a blood-curdling Catholic who combined piousness and pugnacity; the other was Jewish and wore a veil to hide the disastrous effects of a face-lift. There was wicked Uncle Myers who beat her for the good of her soul and Aunt Margaret who laced her orange juice with castor oil and taped her lips at night to prevent unhealthy 'mouth-breathing'. 'Many a time in the course of doing these memoirs,' Mary McCarthy says, 'I have wished that I were writing fiction.' But these were the people, along with the ladies of the Sacred Heart convent school, who helped to inspire her devastating sense of the sublime and ridiculous and her witty, novelist's imagination.

Joseph Brodsky (1940-1996) is unquestionably the greatest poet to emerge from postwar Russia and one of the great minds of the last century. After his expulsion from the Soviet Union in 1972, Brodsky transformed himself from a stunned and unprepared émigré into, as he himself termed it, "a Russian poet, an English essayist, and, of course, an American citizen." In interviews from 1972 to 1995, 'Joseph Brodsky: Conversations' covers the course of his exile. The last interview dates from just ten weeks before his death. In talks, he calibrates the process of his remarkable reinvention from a brilliant, brash, but decidedly provincial Leningrad poet to an international man of letters and an erudite Nobel Prize laureate. --

In a series of riveting interviews, America's senior statesman discusses the challenges of directing foreign policy during times of great global tension. As National Security Advisor to Richard Nixon, Henry Kissinger transformed America's approach to diplomacy with China, the USSR, Vietnam, and the Middle East, laying the foundations for geopolitics as we know them today. Nearly fifty years later, escalating tensions between the US, China, and Russia are threatening a swift return to the same diplomatic game of tug-of-war that Kissinger played so masterfully. Kissinger on Kissinger is a series of faithfully transcribed interviews conducted by the elder statesman's longtime associate, Winston Lord, which captures Kissinger's thoughts on the specific challenges that he faced during his tenure as NSA, his general advice on leadership and international relations, and stunning portraits of the larger-than-life world leaders of the era. The result is a frank and well-informed overview of US foreign policy in the first half of the 70s—essential reading for anyone hoping to understand tomorrow's global challenges.

THE STORY: Brooke Wyeth returns home to Palm Springs after a six-year absence to celebrate Christmas with her parents, her brother, and her aunt. Brooke announces that she is about to publish a memoir dredging up a pivotal and tragic event in the f

There is no summarizing or explaining the writings of Gertrude Stein. With the exception of her fledgling efforts like Three Lives or her funny, successful memoir, The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas , her fictions are without conventional plot, setting, or character. They are intellectual flowers, each sentence growing or receding from the one before it, repeating its main points with subtle, telling changes. In Lucy Church Amiably , first published in Paris in 1930 and long out of print, Stein describes the landscape and pastoral life of central France (while writing, she was staying near a small village named Lucy) in and through her character Lucy "Gradually remembering a lake. Gradually. Remembering. A lake. In gradually remembering a lake by the shore of the lake where they were sitting." Yet Stein is not opaque or purely she always provides solid details in unexpected places, specializing, as the critic Fred Dupee put it, in "the mingling of apparent conviction with transparent nonsense." She is a central figure in the modernist movement, but her relentless pleasure in her quirky, handmade idiom can repel the unwary reader. Although it is a delight to have this reprint, a brief introduction would have been useful for the uninitiated. Those interested in Stein should also turn to her Selected Writings , or, for a painless entrée to her work, begin with The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas . --Regina Marler

One of America's most versatile writers, author of bestselling biographies such as Steve Jobs and Benjamin Franklin , has assembled a gallery of portraits of (mostly) Americans that celebreate genius, talent, and versatility, and traces his own education as a writer and biographer. In this collection of essays, the brilliant, acclaimed biographer Walter Isaacson reflects on lessons to be learned from Benjamin Franklin, Albert Einstein, Bill Gates, Henry Kissinger, Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev, Hillary Clinton and Bill Clinton, and other interesting characters he has chronicled both as biographer and journalist. The people he writes about have an awesome intelligence, but that is not the secret to their success. They had qualities that were even more rare, such as imagination and true curiousity. Isaacson also reflects on how he became a writer, the lessons he learned from various people he met, and the challenges for journalism in the digital age. He also offers loving tributes to his hometown of New Orleans, which offers many of the ingredients for a creative culture, and to the Louisiana novelist Walker Percy, who was an early mentor. In an anecdotal and personal way, Isaacson describes the joys of writing and the way that tales about the lives of fascinating people can enlighten our own lives.

Christopher Hitchens assesses the life, the achievements, and the myth of the great political writer and participant George Orwell. In his emulative and contrarian style, Hitchens is both admiring and aggressive, sympathetic yet critical, taking true measure of his subject as hero and problem. Answering both the detractors and the false claimants, Hitchens tears down the facade of sainthood erected by the hagiographers and rebuts the critics point by point. He examines Orwell and his perspectives on fascism, empire, feminism, and Englishness, as well as his outlook on America, a country and culture towards which he exhibited much ambivalence.

Lara Vapnyar, author of the prizewinning story collection There Are Jews in My House, brings us a poignant and comic first novel about a delightfully sincere modern-day muse. We meet Tanya as a typical Russian girl, living with her bookish professor mother in a drab Soviet apartment. As a teenager, Tanya becomes obsessed with Dostoevsky and settles on her life’s she will be the companion to a great writer. Her memoirs tell of her immigration to New York after college, the stifling expectations of her Brighton Beach cousins, and the crucial moment in a bookshop on the Upper West Side, where Tanya attends a reading by Mark Schneider, a Significant New York Novelist. Tanya soon moves in with Mark, ready to dazzle in bed, to serve and inspire . . . if only he would spend a little more time writing and a little less time at the gym, the shrink, and the literary soirees where she feels hopelessly unglamorous and out of place. But as she gradually learns to read English—struggling to better understand Mark’s work and her true role as Muse—Tanya also learns more than she expected about the destiny she has imagined for herself. Animated by Vapnyar’s beguiling grace and vividness—with a narrative richness reflecting the great tradition of Russian realism to which she is a natural heir— Memoirs of a Muse is an altogether wonderful novel. It is a lively meditation on female capabilities and happiness, on the mysteries of artistic inspiration (and the absurdities of artistic life), and, perhaps most movingly, on the pain and wonder of the immigrant experience in New York City.

The legendary correspondence between the critic Walter Benjamin and the historian Gershom Scholem bears indispensable witness to the inner lives of two remarkable and enigmatic personalities. Benjamin, acknowledged today as on of the leading literary and social critics of his day, was known during his lifetime by only a small circle of friends and intellectual confreres. Scholem recognized the genius of his friend and mentor during their student days in Berlin, and the two began to correspond after Scholem’s emigration to Palestine. Their impassioned exchange draws the reader into the very heart of their complex relationship during the anguished years from 1932 until Benjamin’s death in 1940.

Discover the Heartbreaking Confession Franz Kafka Never Meant for the World to See Franz Kafka, the literary genius behind The Metamorphosis and The Trial, opens the door to his most personal struggle in Letter to His Father. This raw and emotional text, written in 1919 but never sent, is both a plea for understanding and a scathing account of the turbulent relationship between a son and his overbearing father. Letter to His Father is now presented in a fresh, modern translation designed to make Kafka’s poignant and powerful words accessible to contemporary readers. This updated version brings clarity and immediacy to Kafka’s timeless exploration of the complex and fraught relationship between a son and his overbearing father. In this searing letter, Kafka grapples with feelings of fear, guilt, and inadequacy, offering readers a unique window into the forces that shaped his identity and his work. With his signature introspection and masterful prose, he examines the weight of familial expectations, the wounds inflicted by power imbalances, and the desperate longing for reconciliation. Published posthumously in 1952, Letter to His Father is more than a personal document—it is a universal exploration of the human condition, relatable to anyone who has felt misunderstood or struggled to find their place in the shadow of someone else. This is Kafka at his most vulnerable, unguarded, and unforgettable. Whether you are a longtime admirer or discovering his work for the first time, Letter to His Father is a powerful testament to the man behind the masterpieces. Step into Kafka’s world and uncover the story behind the stories. Order your copy today!

Admirers and detractors of Vladimir Nabokov have viewed him as an ingenious contriver of literary games, teasing and even outsmarting his readers through his self-reflexive artifice and the many codes and puzzles he devises in his fiction. Nabokov himself spoke a number of times about reality as a term that always has to be put in scare quotes. Consequently, many critics and readers have thought of him as a writer uninterested in the world outside literature. Robert Alter shows how Nabokov was passionately concerned with the real world and its complexities, from love and loss to exile, freedom, and the impact of contemporary politics on our lives. In these essays, Alter spans the breadth of Nabokov's writings, from his memoir, lectures, and short stories to major novels such as Lolita. He demonstrates how the self-reflexivity of Nabokov's fiction becomes a vehicle for expressing very real concerns. What emerges is a portrait of a brilliant stylist who is at once serious and playful, who cared deeply about human relationships and the burden of loss, and who was acutely sensitive to the ways political ideologies can distort human values.

Aliens have conquered earth; while humankind survived they are living like mice. A complex social and religious order has evolved with women preserving knowledge and working as healers, and men serving as warriors and theives.

Michael Wolff knows Rupert Murdoch, Barry Diller, Jean-Marie Messier, Steve Ross and Ted Turner. He knows what they want, what fuels their appetites and what they can and can't see when they look in the mirror (or the financial pages). And he tells us all he knows in this report.