Melville House imprint: 317 books

Arendt was one of the most important thinkers of her time, famous for her idea of "the banality of evil" which continues to provoke debate. This collection provides new and startling insight into Arendt's thoughts about Watergate and the nature of American politics, about totalitarianism...

This unauthorized companion to George Orwell’s Animal Farm is a controversial parable about September 11th by one of fiction’s most inventive and provocative writers Written in 14 days shortly after the September 11th attacks, Snowball’s Chance is an outrageous and unauthorized companion...

In Trouble in Paradise, Slavoj Žižek, one of our most famous, most combative philosophers, explains how we can find a way out of the crisis of capitalism.   There is obviously trouble in the global capitalist paradise. But why do we find it so difficult to imagine a way out of the crisis we're...

In intimate and eloquent interviews, including the last he gave before his suicide, the writer hailed by A.O. Scott of The New York Times as “the best mind of his generation” considers the state of modern America, entertainment and discipline, adulthood, literature, and his own inimitable writing...

The beguiling, never-before-translated dream diary of Georges Perec In La Boutique Obscure Perec once again revolutionized literary form, creating the world’s first “nocturnal autobiography.” From 1968 until 1972—the period when he wrote his most well-known works—the beloved French...

“I’ll croak before I write ads or sell bonds—or do anything except write.” James Agee’s father died when he was just six years old, a loss immortalized in his Pulitzer Prize–winning novel, A Death in the Family. Three years later, Agee’s mother moved the mourning family from Knoxville,...

"A witty and readable (and fetchingly illustrated and glossed) excursion through the history of handwriting." —The Wall Street Journal **Let a self-confessed "penmanship nut" take you on a tour of the strange and beautiful world of handwriting. ** Since her Catholic...

A masterpiece of satire and a key work of the Russian "fantastic" movement. One of the most celebrated tales in Russian literature. Collegiate Assessor Kovalyov awakens to discover that his nose is missing, leaving a smooth, flat patch of skin in its place. He finds and confronts...

About This Book Her mourth was almost pressed against his, and her words were like quick, hurried kisses: "You must absolutely go through with the duel tomorrow." This rediscovered gem by a major, yet neglected, writer — here presented in a dazzling new translation — is...

Twenty years ago, Ayatollah Khomeini called for the assassination of Salman Rushdie—and writers around the world instinctively rallied to Rushdie’s defense. Today, according to writer Paul Berman, “Rushdie has metastasized into an entire social class”—an ever-growing group of sharp-tongued...

"There's no such thing as chance...only injustice." From the winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature for “writing that upholds the fragile experience of the individual against the barbaric arbitrariness of history..." The acclaimed Hungarian Holocaust survivor Imre...

"I was on my way to look for a life of my own." A brilliant, brutally honest autobiographical novel, long out of print, from one of the great artistic polymaths of the 20th century. This is a Sebaldian account of the narrator's attempt to break free of a repressive upper-middle-class...

In the spirit of Dr. Strangelove and The Atomic Café, a blackly sardonic people’s history of atomic blunders and near-misses revealing the hushed-up and forgotten episodes in which the great powers gambled with catastrophe Rudolph Herzog, the acclaimed author of Dead Funny, presents a devastating...

“He has an evening suit, but never an occasion to wear it, so he puts it on when he paints his pictures.” Insel, the only novel by the surrealist master Mina Loy, is a book like no other—about an impossible friendship amid the glamorous artistic bohemia of 1930s Paris. German painter...