Written in the irreverent style that made How to Talk About Books You Haven't Read a critical and commercial success, Pierre Bayard takes readers on a trip around the world, giving us essential guidance on how to talk about all those fantastic places we'v
A playfully brilliant re-creation of one of the most-loved detective stories of all time; the companion book no Holmes fan should be without.Eliminate the impossible, Holmes said, and whatever is left must be the solution. But as Pierre Bayard finds in th
Passion, courage, beauty, indomitable will, rare talent: these are the qualities of the sculptor Camille Claudel. And of the book by Anne Delbee, the book that caused a sensation in France, inspired a motion picture, and resurrected the artist for a publi
In The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), Emile Durkheim sets himself the task of discovering the enduring source of human social identity. He investigates what he considered to be the simplest form of documented religion - totemism among the Abor
Here is the ultimate American road book, one with a perspective unlike that of any other. In January 1947 Simone de Beauvoir landed at La Guardia airport and began a four-month journey that took her from one coast of the United States to the other, and ba
An NYRB Classics OriginalWe think of Honoré de Balzac as the author of long and fully upholstered novels, stitched together into the magnificent visionary document called The Human Comedy. Yet along with the full-length fiction within The Human Comedy st