The Body: An Essay

Author	Horace Walpole
ISBN	0192834401

First published pseudonymously in 1764, The Castle of Otranto purported to be a translation of an Italian story of the time of the crusades. In it Walpole attempted, as he declared in the Preface to the Second Edition, "to blend the two kinds of romance: the ancient and the modern." Crammed with invention,...

Author	Chris Ware
ISBN	0375424334

After years of sporadic work on other books and projects and following the almost complete loss of his virility, it's here: a new graphic novel by Chris Ware.
 
Building Stories imagines the inhabitants of a three-story Chicago apartment building: a 30-something woman who has yet to find...

Author	Leslie Jamison
ISBN	1555976719

From personal loss to phantom diseases, The Empathy Exams is a bold and brilliant collection; winner of the Graywolf Press Nonfiction Prize.

Beginning with her experience as a medical actor who was paid to act out symptoms for medical students to diagnose, Leslie Jamison’s visceral and...

Author	Beth Ann Fennelly
ISBN	0393356485

The 52 micro-memoirs in genre-defying Heating Cooling offer bright glimpses into a richly lived life, combining the compression of poetry with the truth-telling of nonfiction into one heartfelt, celebratory book. Ranging from childhood recollections to quirky cultural observations, these...

Author	Ann Radcliffe
ISBN	0140437541

From the first moment Vincentio di Vivaldi, a young nobleman, sets eyes on the veiled figure of Ellena, he is captivated by her enigmatic beauty and grace. But his haughty and manipulative mother is against the match and enlists the help of her confessor to come between them. Schedoni, previously a leading...

Author	Anne Carson
ISBN	0811218708

Nox is an epitaph in the form of a book, a facsimile of a handmade book Anne Carson wrote and created after the death of her brother. The poem describes coming to terms with his loss through the lens of her translation of Poem 101 by Catullus “for his brother who died in the Troad.” Nox is a work of poetry,...

Author	Eula Biss
ISBN	1931236070

Poetry. "Eula Biss writes in spare brushstrokes that evoke an emotional universe, by turns funny, scary, dreamlike, haunting. These prose poems are shards of gleaming observation, fragments of intimacy and illusion. Here we find our families and ourselves, our words and our silences"-Martin Espada....

Author

Anne Carson

The award-winning poet Anne Carson reinvents a genre in Autobiography of Red, a stunning work that is both a novel and a poem, both an unconventional re-creation of an ancient Greek myth and a wholly original coming-of-age story set in the present.

Geryon, a young boy who is also a winged red...

Author	Maggie Nelson
ISBN	1933517409

Suppose I were to begin by saying that I had fallen in love with a color...

A lyrical, philosophical, and often explicit exploration of personal suffering and the limitations of vision and love, as refracted through the color blue. With Bluets, Maggie Nelson has entered the pantheon of brilliant...

Author	Diana Khoi Nguyen
ISBN	1632430525

Ghost Of is a mourning song, not an exorcism or un-haunting of that which haunts, but attuned attention, unidirectional reaching across time, space, and distance to reach loved ones, ancestors, and strangers. By working with, in, and around the photographs that her brother left behind (from which...

Author

Elisa Gabbert

Elisa Gabbert’s The Self Unstable combines elements of memoir, philosophy, and aphorism to explore and trouble our ideas of the self, memory, happiness, aesthetics, love, and sex. With a sense of humor and an ability to find glimmers of the absurd in the profound, she uses the lyric essay like a koan...

Author	C.A. Conrad
ISBN	1940696550

"From these rituals come notes; from those notes come poems; and from those poems comes not just a view into his process, but an entrance into another present." —Boston Globe

After his boyfriend Earth's murder, CAConrad was looking for a (Soma)tic poetry ritual to overcome his depression....

Author	Claudia Rankine
ISBN	1555974074

In this powerful sequence of TV images and essay, Claudia Rankine explores the personal and political unrest of our volatile new century.

I forget things too. It makes me sad. Or it makes me the saddest. The sadness is not really about George W. or our American optimism; the sadness lives in the...