Paul Goodman’s Growing Up Absurd was a runaway best seller when it was first published in 1960, and it became one of the defining texts of the New Left. Goodman was a writer and thinker who broke every mold and did it brilliantly—he was a novelist, poet, and a social theorist, among a host of other things—and the book’s surprise success established him as one of America’s most unusual and trenchant critics, combining vast learning, an astute mind, utopian sympathies, and a wonderf...

The “Young American” critics — Randolph Bourne, Van Wyck Brooks, Waldo Frank, and Lewis Mumford — are well known as central figures in the Greenwich Village “Little Renaissance” of the 1910s and in the postwar debates about American culture and politics. In Beloved Community, Casey Blake considers these intellectuals as a coherant group and assesses the connection between thier cultural criticisms and their attempts to forge a communitarian alternative to liberal and socialist poi...

At a time when American political and cultural leaders asserted that the nation stood at “the center of world awareness,” thinkers and artists sought to understand and secure principles that lay at the center of things. From the onset of the Cold War in 1948 through 1963, they asked: What defined the essential character of “American culture”? Could permanent moral standards guide human conduct amid the flux and horrors of history? In what ways did a stable self emerge through the life cycl...

From the author of The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Stigma is analyzes a person’s feelings about himself and his relationship to people whom society calls “normal.”Stigma is an illuminating excursion into the situation of persons who are unable to conform to standards that society calls normal. Disqualified from full social acceptance, they are stigmatized individuals. Physically deformed people, ex-mental patients, drug addicts...

NATIONAL BOOK AWARD FINALISTA New York Times Notable Book • An Amazon Top 100 Editors' Pick of the YearNamed a Best Book of the Year by O, The Oprah Magazine • Entertainment Weekly • NPR • Essence • Men’s Journal • Buzzfeed • Bustle • Time Out • Denver Post • Publishers Weekly • Kirkus Reviews • BookPage • Literary Hub • K...

“Call it *The Hunger Games of Thrones*. Erika Johansen’s debut novel is a genre mashup: medieval fantasy meets dystopian future. . . . The setting, combined with Johansen’s deft hand with character and plotting, really does work. . . . An addictive and enjoyable adventure. . . . The Tear is just as easy to get sucked into as Westeros or Hogwarts or Panem.” —USA Today**Magic, adventure, mystery, and romance combine in this epic debut in which a youn...

'We are free when, like artists, we produce without the goad of physical necessity' Karl MarxFor Marx, freedom entailed release from commercial labour. In this highly engaging account, Eagleton outlines the relationship between production, labour and ownership which lie at the core of Marx's thinking. Marx's utopia was a place in which labour is increasingly automated, emancipating the wealth of sensuous individual development so that 'savouring a peach [is an aspe...

The bestselling history of and investigation into human error by beloved New Yorker writer Kathryn Schulz"Both wise and clever, full of fun and surprise about a topic so central to our lives that we almost never even think about it." —Bill McKibben, author of Earth: Making a Life on a Tough New PlanetTo err is human. Yet most of us go through life assuming (and sometimes insisting) that we are right about nearly everything, from the origin...

Historian Arthur Herman traces the roots of declinism and shows how major thinkers, past and present, have contributed to its development as a coherent ideology of cultural pessimism.From Nazism to the Sixties counterculture, from Britain's Fabian socialists to America's multiculturalists, and from Dracula and Freud to Robert Bly and Madonna, this work examines the idea of decline in Western history and sets out to explain how the conviction of civilization's inevi...

In the spirit of the mega-selling On Bullshit, philosopher Aaron James presents a theory of the asshole that is both intellectually provocative and existentially necessary.What does it mean for someone to be an asshole? The answer is not obvious, despite the fact that we are often personally stuck dealing with people for whom there is no better name. Try as we might to avoid them, assholes are found everywhere—at work, at home, on the road, and in the publ...

If you were looking for a philosopher likely to appeal to Americans, Friedrich Nietzsche would be far from your first choice. After all, in his blazing career, Nietzsche took aim at nearly all the foundations of modern American life: Christian morality, the Enlightenment faith in reason, and the idea of human equality. Despite that, for more than a century Nietzsche has been a hugely popular—and surprisingly influential—figure in American thought and culture.In American Nietzsch...

A collection of essays that sets forth the moral principles of Objectivism, Ayn Rand's controversial, groundbreaking philosophy.Since their initial publication, Rand's fictional works—Anthem, The Fountainhead, and *Atlas Shrugged—*have had a major impact on the intellectual scene. The underlying theme of her famous novels is her philosophy, a new morality—the ethics of rational self-interest—that offers a robust challenge to altruist-collectivist ...