On vacation from school, Denis goes to stay at Crome, an English country house inhabitated by several of Huxley's most outlandish characters--from Mr. Barbecue-Smith, who writes 1,500 publishable words an hour by "getting in touch" with his "subconscious," to Henry Wimbush, who is obsessed with writing the definitive history of chrome. Denis's stay proves to be a disaster amid his weak attempts to attract the girl of his dreams and the ridicule he...

An elegy of exile and an epic immersion into the world of rural Italy during the Mussolini years, Francesco Rosi₂s sublime adaptation of the memoirs of the painter, physician, and political activist Carlo Levi brings a monument of twentieth-century autobiography to the screen with quiet grace and solemn beauty. Banished to a desolate southern town for his anti-Fascist views, the worldly Levi discovers an Italy he never knew existed.

Mary Catherine Bateson sees aging today as an "improvisational art form calling for imagination and willingness to learn," and in this ardent, affirming study, she relates the experiences of men and women-herself included-who, upon entering this second adulthood, have found new meaning and new ways to contribute, composing their lives in new patterns. Among the people Bateson engages in open-ended, in-depth conversations are a retired Maine boatyard...

"In this incisive series of intellectual portraits, Adam Shatz, one of the Anglophone world's foremost essayists, charts the role of the committed intellectual. Through the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, he shows how writers bind themselves to the project embodied in their work In a moving portrait of Edward Said, Shatz uncovers the profound role the cause of Palestinian liberation had on his life and writing. And via thinkers as diverse as Fouad Ajami,...

A riveting, fictional rendering of the life of Osip Mandelstam, perhaps the greatest Russian poet of the twentieth century -- and one of the few artists in Soviet Russia who daringly refused to pay creative homage to Joseph Stalin.

"In Only a Voice, George Scialabba examines the chasm between modernity's promise of progress and the sobering reality of our present day through studies of the most influential public intellectuals of our time. In Scialabba's hands, literary criticism becomes a powerful tool for expressing political passion and demonstrating the generative power of argument and an inquisitive mind. Drawing together a diverse group of thinkers, artists, activists,...