Kojin Karatani, one of Japan's most influential thinkers, wrote the essays collected in History and Repetition during a period of radical historical change, triggered by the collapse of the Cold War order and the death of the Showa emperor in 1989. Through an original reading of Marx, Karatani developed a theory of history based on the repetitive cycle of crises attending the expansion and transformation of capital. His work led to a rigorous theoretical...

What will 21st century fiction look like? Acclaimed literary critic Adam Kirsch examines some of our most beloved writers, including Haruki Murakami, Elena Ferrante, Roberto Bolano, and Margaret Atwood, to better understand literature in the age of globalization. The global novel, he finds, is not so much a genre as a way of imagining the world, one that allows the novel to address both urgent contemporary concerns -- climate change, genetic engineering,...

"From the author of the best-selling and beloved The End of Your Life Book Club--a wonderfully engaging new book: both a celebration of reading in general and an impassioned recommendation of specific books that can help guide us through our daily lives. 'I've always believed that everything you need to know you can find in a book, ' writes Will Schwalbe in his introduction to this thought-provoking, heartfelt, and inspiring new book about books....

Two years after his wife's unexpected death, Yusuke Kafuku arrives in Hiroshima to direct a production of Uncle Vanya for a theater festival and, through relationships with an actor with whom he shares a tangled history and a chauffeur with whom he develops a surprising rapport, finds himself confronting emotional scars. This quietly mesmerizing tale of love, art, grief, and healing is ultimately a cathartic exploration of what it means to go on living...

"Return to the sumptuous, global feast of fantasy fiction with Ann and Jeff VanderMeer's selection of modern masterpieces. From the swinging sixties to the strange, strange seventies, the over-the-top eighties to the gnarly nineties--and beyond, into the twenty-first century--the VanderMeers have found the stories and the writers from around the world that reinvented and revitalized the fantasy genre after World War II. From Jorge Luis Borges to Ursula...

"Una noche, la señora Jane Tabby soñó que podía volar y escapar de la dura vida en la ciudad. Pero ya se sabe: los gatos no pueden volar. Cuando, poco después, nacieron sus hijos, entendió el significado de ese sueño. ¡Habían nacido con alas! Debían marcharse y buscar una vida mejor lejos del barrio. ¿Qué aventuras les esperan más allá de los confines de la ciudad? Sigue las aventuras de los maravillosos gatos alados creados por Ursula...

"From "one of his generation's most inventive and gifted writers" (The New York Times), intimate and sharply observed commentary on life, art, politics, and "the war on terror." Mohsin Hamid's brilliant, moving, and extraordinarily clever novels have not only made him an international bestseller, they have earned him a reputation as a "master critic of the modern global condition" (Foreign Policy). His stories are at once timeless and of-the-moment,...