America’s most celebrated writer returns with a definitive edition of his essential statements on literature, his controversial novels, and the writing life, including including six pieces published here for the first time and many others newly revised. Throughout a unparalleled literary career that includes two National Book Awards (Goodbye, Columbus, 1959 and Sabbath’s Theater, 1995), the Pulitzer Prize in fiction (American Pastoral, 1997), the National Book Critics Circle Award (The Counterlife, 1986), and the National Humanities Medal (awarded by President Obama in 2011), among many other honors, Philip Roth has produced an extraordinary body of nonfiction writing on a wide range of topics: his own work and that of the writers he admires, the creative process, and the state of American culture. This work is collected for the first time in Why Write?, the tenth and final volume in the Library of America’s definitive Philip Roth edition. Here is Roth’s selection of the indispensable core of Reading Myself and Others, the entirety of the 2001 book Shop Talk, and “Explanations,” a collection of fourteen later pieces brought together here for the first time, six never before published. Among the essays gathered are “My Uchronia,” an account of the genesis of The Plot Against America, a novel grounded in the insight that “all the assurances are provisional, even here in a two-hundred-year-old democracy”; “Errata,” the unabridged version of the “Open Letter to Wikipedia” published on The New Yorker’s website in 2012 to counter the online encyclopedia’s egregious errors about his life and work; and “The Ruthless Intimacy of Fiction,” a speech delivered on the occasion of his eightieth birthday that celebrates the “refractory way of living” of Sabbath’s Theater’s Mickey Sabbath. Also included are two lengthy interviews given after Roth’s retirement, which take stock of a lifetime of work. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

At the heart of Gail Mazur's The Common is the refusal to simplify what is paradoxical in our world and a recognition of the tensions in our own divided nature. These unflinching poems create a place where wisdom and foolishness, fear and courage, rage and pity, love and diffidence, naturally co-exist. Desire, ambition, devotion, and devastating loss are all subjects for Mazur's clear-eyed poems, which resonate with the contradictions between the body's yearning and the mind's acknowledgment of the consequences of our choices. In a poetry driven by unrelenting questioning, Mazur tries, in Rilke's worlds, "to love the questions themselves."

Powers of Congress exhibits, in dazzling language and complex rhetorical structures, a passionate curiosity about all aspects of modern American life. Sven Birkerts, in The Boston Review, called Fulton a "prodigiously gifted poet," and Powers of Congress more than meets that claim. Back by popular demand, this is a reprint of an important collection that continues to exert a wide influence upon contemporary poetics. It will surely intoxicate all those who love the erotic involvement of language with thought. "She is an ambitious, powerful poet.... She is a thematic gambler of the best sort. Her poems are daring and broad."--Eavan Boland, Partisan Review "Powers of Congress is a rigorous, generous book, by one of the finest young poets in the country."--David Baker, Poetry "In Powers of Congress Alice Fulton shows she's learned a thing or two about levitation."--David Barber, Hungry Mind Review Marketing plans for Powers of Congress o Newsletter, brochure, catalog, and postcard mailings. o Advertisements in key literary and trade magazines. Powers of Congress was first published by David R. Godine in 1990. Alice Fulton's other books of poems include Felt, Sensual Math, Palladium, and Dance Script with Electric Ballerina. A collection of her essays, Feeling as a Foreign Language: The Good Strangeness of Poetry, was published by Graywolf Press in 1999. Alice Fulton's poems appear in five editions of The Best American Poetry series, as well as in The Best of the Best American Poetry. She is currently Professor of English at the University of Michigan in Ann Arbor, and lives in Ypsilanti, Michigan.