A prominent public intellectual tackles one of the most crucial political ideas of our moment.Since Hamas’s attack on Israel last October 7, the term “settler colonialism” has become central to public debate in the United States. A concept new to most Americans, but already established and influential in academic circles, settler colonialism is shaping the way many people think about the history of the United States, Israel and Palestine, and a host of political is...

Part of the Jewish Encounter seriesA dandy, a best-selling novelist, and a man of political and sexual intrigue, Benjamin Disraeli was one of the most captivating figures of the nineteenth century. His flirtation with proto-Zionism, his ideas about power and empire, and his fantasies about the Middle East remain prophetically relevant today. How a man who was born a Jew--and who remained in the eyes of his countrymen a member of a despised minority--managed to beco...

From the vast emigration of Jews out of Eastern Europe to the Holocaust to the creation of Israel, the twentieth century transformed Jewish life. The same was true of Jewish writing: the novels, plays, poems, and memoirs of Jewish writers provided intimate access to new worlds of experience.Kirsch surveys four themes that shaped the twentieth century in Jewish literature and culture: Europe, America, Israel, and the endeavor to reimagine Judaism as a modern faith. With discussions ...

A collection of bold, insightful, and controversial essays by “a poetry critic of the very first order” (New York Times).Over the last ten years, through essays in The New Republic, The New Yorker, and other magazines, Adam Kirsch—“one of the most promising young poet-critics in America” (Los Angeles Times)—has established himself among the most controversial and fearless critics writing today. Sure to cause heated debate, this c...

In these moving and meditative poems, Adam Kirsch shows how the experiences and recognitions of early life continue to shape us into adulthood. Richly evoking a 1980s childhood in Los Angeles, Kirsch uses Gen X landmarks—from Devo to Atari to the Challenger disaster—to tell a story of emotional and artistic coming of age, exploring universal questions of meaning, mortality, and how we become who we are.

What is the future of fiction in an age of globalization?In The Global Novel, acclaimed literary critic Adam Kirsch explores some of the 21st century’s best-known writers—including Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, and Elena Ferrante—and how they each have a way of imagining the world that sees different places and peoples as intimately connected.From climate change and sex trafficking to religious fundamentalism and genetic engineering, today’s no...

August Sander’s photographic portraits of ordinary people in Weimar Germany inspire this uncanny new collection of poems by one of America’s most celebrated writers and criticsThrough his portraits of ordinary people—soldiers, housewives, children, peasants, and city dwellers—August Sander, the German photographer whose work chronicled the extreme tensions and transitions of the twentieth century, captured a moment in history whose consequences he himself couldn’t ...

In Culture as Counterculture, leading literary critic and intellectual Adam Kirsch explores the question of how 21st-century religion, art, and science engage with the past, and are both re-enlivened and redefined by it. Since the early 20th-century, "high culture"-particularly classical music-has steadily been losing its authority, and not just because it was supplanted, as some argue, by mass-produced kitsch. For years after World War Two, it still represented that to which "pop...

Why do we still believe in UFOs, despite repeated efforts to dismiss them?For most of the twentieth century, reports of unidentified flying objects were treated as cultural error: cranks, hoaxes, late-night radio. Then, abruptly, the posture changed. The Pentagon released videos it could not explain. Navy pilots testified under oath about encounters that defied known technology. Intelligence agencies acknowledged that something unfamiliar appears to move through th...

In his second collection of poems, Adam Kirsch examines the world we live in now, a world in which the dangers of history have invaded the pleasures of private life. His connected poems use traditional forms to create a free, contemporary music amidst the omens of the post-September 11 world. Mr. Kirsch is at home with all the strange juxtapositions of our culture: he can celebrate "the paradisal sighs" of Jane Birkin and still hear the "angelic harmonies" of Handel's Messiah; he can obser...

A collection of essays from a “great poet-critic-intellectual” (Daily Beast).Adam Kirsch has been described as "elegant and astute…[a] critic of the very first order" (Michiko Kakutani, New York Times). In these brilliant, wide-ranging essays, published over the last eight years in the New Republic, The New Yorker, and elsewhere, Kirsch shows how literature can illuminate questions of meaning, ethics, and politics, and how those ...

From Silicon Valley boardrooms to rural communes to academic philosophy departments, a seemingly inconceivable idea is being seriously discussed: that the end of humanity’s reign on earth is imminent, and that we should welcome it. Anthropocene antihumanism has been inspired by revulsion at humanity’s destruction of the natural environment, and transhumanism, by contrast, glorifies some of the very things that antihumanism decries—scientific and technological progress, the supremacy of rea...