In her essay collection, Upstream, Mary Oliver describes the antidote to confusion she found in literature – first reading and then writing – as a kind of standing with otherness in the world.
Offering a fresh perspective and a hope for connection amidst the closed doors of social distancing, Georg Simmel is emerging as a thinker for our contemporary cultural moment.
A fresh perspective on the imbalance between animals and humans, Haruki Murakami’s short story The Elephant Vanishes explores the troubling paradoxes hiding in a relationship built on exploitation instead of reciprocity.
Marilyn McEntyre collects her meditations on classic and contemporary poetry in When Poets Pray and offers the reader a deep reverence for language and God.
Born in 1908 in Paris, France, the French philosopher, Simone de Beauvoir, developed as a writer, intellectual, and activist with radical existential courage.
In Gravity and Grace, Simone Weil offers supernatural insight on attention and suffering and how to live in contradiction.
Cultural criticism from Immanuel Kant to Walter Benjamin to Martin Scorsese stems from a high view of art and a low view of human cognition.
Genius and Ink: Virginia Woolf on How to Read is a newly packaged collection of some of the most beautiful prose Virginia Woolf has written on the creative, radical, and rebellious act of reading.
In his 1951 short story, The Rocket Man, Ray Bradbury explores the seduction of the open sky that inspires Elton John’s iconic song by the same name.
Meaning is lost in translation between the original Japanese and the English translation of Haruki Murakami’s Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World.
In approaching rhetoric, Kenneth Burke teases out a theory of reading that incorporates rhythm and promotes a harmony of our experiences.
Kenneth Burke considers every influence of a rhetorical act and develops a theory of identification that offers readers a new way to think about rhetoric.
Ralph Ellison and Kenneth Burke were friends for more than 50 years and Bryan Crable chronicles the complex history of their friendship.
Reading as meditation is the creative practice of attending to the text to evoke the image of thought that penetrates the reader.
In Idea of the Holy, philosopher and theologian, Rudolf Otto shows the numinous, the fearful and fascinating mystery of the holy, evokes deep worship.