Harvard University Press imprint: 1080 books

Pensive, mercurial, and often funny, the private Robert Frost remains less appreciated than the public poet. The Letters of Robert Frost, the first major edition of the correspondence of this complex and subtle verbal artist, includes hundreds of unpublished letters whose literary interest is on a par with Dickinson, Lowell, and Beckett.

Martin R. Delany’s Blake (c. 1860) tells the story of Henry Blake’s escape from a southern plantation and his travels in the U.S., Canada, Africa, and Cuba on a mission to unite blacks of the Atlantic region in the struggle for freedom. Jerome McGann’s edition offers the first correct printing of the work and an authoritative introduction.

Drawing on his rich experience within psychiatry, Leston Havens takes the reader on an extraordinary journey through the vast and changing landscape of psychotherapy and psychiatry today. Closely examining the dynamics of the doctor–patient exchange, he seeks to locate and describe the elusive therapeutic environment within which psychological healing most effectively takes place.

Here is the first reliable edition of Keats's complete poems designed expressly for general readers and students. Jack Stillinger provides helpful explanatory notes to the poems which give dates of composition, identify quotations and allusions, gloss names and words not included in the ordinary desk...

A nation of 1.25 billion, India is the world's most diverse democracy. Drawing on his extensive fieldwork and experience of Indian politics, Sumantra Bose tells the story of democracy's evolution in India since the 1950s and describes the challenges it faces today: from poverty and inequality to Maoist revolutionaries and Kashmir secessionists.

The Triumph of the Snake Goddess, a prose translation by the scholar and poet Kaiser Haq, is the first comprehensive retelling of this epic in modern English. Haq’s Prologue explores the oral, poetic, and manuscript traditions, and Wendy Doniger’s Introduction examines the significance of snake worship in classical Sanskrit texts.

Idealization is a basic feature of human thought. We proceed “as if” our representations were true, while knowing they are not. Kwame Anthony Appiah defends the centrality of the imagination in science, morality, and everyday life and shows that our best chance for accessing reality is to open our minds to a plurality of idealized depictions.

What sort of thing is a lyric poem? An intense expression of subjective experience? The fictive speech of a specifiable persona? Examining ancient and modern poems from Sappho to Ashbery, Jonathan Culler reveals the limitations of these two models—the Romantic and the modern—and challenges the assumption that poems exist to be interpreted.

Reading, David Mikics says, should not be drudgery, and not mere information-gathering or escape either, but a way to live life at a higher pitch. Slow Reading in a Hurried Age is a practical guide for anyone who yearns for a more meaningful, satisfying reading experience, as well as sharper reading skills and improved concentration.

This book makes the bold claim that intellectual sophistication was born worldwide during the middle centuries of the first millennium bce. From Axial Age thinkers we inherited a sense of the world as a place not just to experience but to investigate, envision, and alter. A variety of utopian visions emerged and led to both reform and repression.

A searching meditation on our all-too-human capacity for inhumanity, Evil Men confronts atrocity head-on—how it looks and feels, what motivates it, how it can be stopped. James Dawes’s unflinchingly honest account, drawing on firsthand interviews, is not just about the things Japanese war criminals did, but about what it means to befriend them.

Lu Xun (1881–1936) is widely considered the greatest writer of twentieth-century China. Although primarily known for his two slim volumes of short fiction, he was a prolific, inventive essayist. These 62 essays—20 translated for the first time—showcase his versatility as a master of prose forms and his brilliance as a cultural critic.

Born in Europe’s shadow, haunted by the Holocaust, and inspired by the Enlightenment, Israel has changed. Where is this diverse and self-absorbed country heading today? How do its citizens see themselves, globally and historically? Israel Has Moved is a profound and sometimes unsettling account of a country that is no longer where we might think.

Gathering all of Claude Lévi-Strauss’s writings on Japan, this sustained meditation follows his dictum that to understand one’s own culture, one must see it from another’s point of view. For Lévi-Strauss, Japan occupied a unique place among world cultures. This English translation presents one of France’s most public figures at his most personal.