“An elegiac memoir and social jeremiad,” Cuz is “a literary and political event like Toni Morrison’s Playing in the Dark” (Henry Louis Gates Jr.).
First appearing in The New Yorker, Danielle Allen’s Cuz announced the arrival of one of our most gifted literary memoirists. In this “compassionate retelling of an abjectly tragic story” (New York Times), Danielle Allen—a prize-winning scholar—recounts her heroic efforts to rescue Michael Alexander Allen, her beloved baby cousin, who was arrested at fifteen for an attempted carjacking. Tried as an adult and sentenced to thirteen years, Michael served eleven. Three years later, he was dead. Why did this gifted young man, who dreamed of being a firefighter and a writer, end up murdered? Why did he languish in prison? And why at fifteen was he in an alley in South Central Los Angeles, holding a gun while trying to steal someone’s car? Hailed as a “literary miracle” (Washington Post), this fierce family memoir makes mass incarceration nothing less than a new American tragedy.
Danielle Allen is the James Bryant Conant University Professor at Harvard University and author of Cuz and Our Declaration, winner of the Parkman Prize. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
From the two-time Pulitzer Prize–winning author, God’s Crucible brings to life “a furiously complex age”
(New York Times Book Review).Resonating as profoundly today as when it was first published to widespread critical acclaim a decade ago, God’s Crucible is a ...
“J.G. Ballard is the undisputed laureate of suburban psychosis. . . . A brilliant novel.”—Literary
ReviewA violent novel filled with insidious twists, Kingdom Come follows the exploits of Richard Pearson, a rebellious, unemployed advertising executive, whose father is gunned down ...
This “watershed collection” (Wall Street Journal) now appears in an essential selected paperback edition, with
twenty-six of Machado’s finest stories.Widely acclaimed as “the greatest writer ever produced in Latin America” (Susan Sontag), as well as “another Kafka” (Allen ...
A lifetime of candid reflections from physicist Freeman Dyson, “an acute observer of personality and
human foibles” (New York Times Book Review). Written between 1940 and the late 1970s, the postwar recollections of renowned physicist Freeman Dyson have been celebrated ...
The most cosmically elegiac writer in literature . . . no one reading Ballard could
doubt the tidal gravity of his intellect. —Jonathan Lethem, New York Times Book ReviewViolent rebellion comes to London’s middle classes in this “fascinating” (San Francisco ...
Reissued in an edition newly offset from the authoritative Complete Poems 1904-1962, edited by George
James Firmage.E. E. Cummings, along with Pound, Eliot, and Williams, helped bring about the twentieth-century revolution in literary expression. He is recognized as the author ...
No philosopher speaks more immediately to the excesses of our twenty-first-century world and the limits
of human reason than Augustine.It would be almost impossible to exaggerate the influence of Augustine—the once-hedonistic pagan turned ascetic theologian and defender of the early ...
A lucid introduction to the philosophical complexities and the practical limits of the political thought
of Karl Marx.When Karl Marx was buried at Highgate Cemetery in North London in 1883, his longtime friend and collaborator, Friedrich Engels, remarked that he ...
