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The Ballad of Dorothy Wordsworth Ordinarily presented as a self-effacing virgin or sacrificial saint, Dorothy Wordsworth was a talented writer and exceptional woman. She was William Wordsworth's inspiration, aide and most valued reader and traded in a conventional life to share in his world of words. This biography brings Dorothy to life in all her...
Corey Robin
Sep 03, 2021Francis Steegmuller's beautifully executed double portrait of Madame Bovary and her maker is a remarkable and unusual biographical study, a sensitive and detailed account of how an unpromising young man turns himself into one of the world's greatest novelists. Steegmuller starts with the young Flaubert, prone to mysterious fits, hypochondriacal, at...
Corey Robin
Jul 25, 2021What is fascism? Many authors have proposed definitions, but most fail to move beyond the abstract. The esteemed historian Robert O. Paxton answers this question for the first time by focusing on the concrete: what the fascists did, rather than what they said. From the first violent uniformed bands beating up “enemies of the state,” through Mussoli...
Corey Robin
May 13, 2021Black Nationalism in American Politics and Thought revisits the activism and arguments in support of separate black statehood from the mid-19th century to the present, detailing the ways black nationalism mirrors broader currents in U.S. politics and thought. This book challenges the idea that black nationalism is a timeless, unchanging, and anti-a...
Corey Robin
Mar 07, 2021
Black Struggle, Red Scare
Segregation and Anti-Communism in the South, 1948--1968
At the height of the cold war, southern segregationists exploited the reigning mood of anxiety by linking the civil rights movement to an international Communist conspiracy. Jeff Woods tells a gripping story of fervent crusaders for racial equality swept into the maelstrom of the South's siege mentality, of crafty political opportunists who played ...
Corey Robin
Jan 24, 2021A stunning new edition of Virginia Woolf's engulfing portrait of a day in one woman's life, featuring a new foreword by Jenny Offill, the New York Times bestselling author of Weather A Penguin Classics Deluxe EditionClarissa Dalloway, elegant and vivacious, is preparing for a party and remembering those she once loved. In another part of London, Se...
Corey Robin
Dec 19, 2020One of the most famous literary works of the 20th century, the novella "Death in Venice" embodies themes that preoccupied Thomas Mann (1875–1955) in much of his work; the duality of art and life, the presence of death and disintegration in the midst of existence, the connection between love and suffering, and the conflict between the artist and his...
Corey Robin
Dec 19, 2020A Major Literary Event: a brilliant new translation of Thomas Mann's first great novel, one of the two for which he was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929.Buddenbrooks, first published in Germany in 1900, when Mann was only twenty-five, has become a classic of modem literature -- the story of four generations of a wealthy bourgeois famil...
Corey Robin
Dec 19, 2020Also recommended by
Ernest HemingwayTo Move a Mountain is an inspirational account of how a group of Appalachian men and women, politicized by the disaster of local plant closings, became unlikely activists in the Tennessee statehouse and the protests in Seattle.Eve Weinbaum’s firsthand look at the devastation wrought by the closings of community-sustaining factories become moving st...
Corey Robin
Dec 16, 2020A major work of German historiography, this comprehensive account of Weber's political views and activities reveals that, paradoxically, Weber was at once an ardent liberal and a determined German nationalist and imperialist. Wolfgang J. Mommsen shows the important links between these seemingly conflicting positions and provides a critique of Weber...
Corey Robin
May 06, 2020The Price of Peace by Zachary D. Carter
The Romance of American Communism by Vivian Gornick
The Big Test by Nicholas Lemann
Race and the Making of American Political Science American Governance by Jessica Blatt
Freud by Philip Rieff
On Tyranny by Timothy Snyder