A collection of essays on the joys of great literature from the New York Times–bestselling author and winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award. One of America's foremost novelists and critics, Cynthia Ozick has won praise and provoked debate for taking on challenging literary, historical, and moral issues. Her new collection of spirited essays focuses on the essential joys of great literature, with particular emphasis on the novel. With...

For the magazine's centenary celebration, an anthology of pieces from the early golden age of Vanity Fair. Editor Graydon Carter introduces these fabulous pieces written between 1913 and 1936, when the magazine published a murderers' row of the world's leading literary lights. It features great writers on great topics, including F. Scott Fitzgerald on what a magazine should be, Clarence Darrow on equality, D. H. Lawrence on women, e.e. cummings on...

With the publication of her first book, Against Interpretation, in 1966, Susan Sontag placed herself at the forefront of an era of cultural and political transformation. "What is important now," she wrote, "is to recover our senses ... In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art." She would remain a catalyzing presence, whether writing about camp sensibility, the films of Jean-Luc Godard and Alain Resnais, her experiences as a traveler to...