“[Terry Castle is] the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today.” —Susan Sontag From one of America’s most brilliant critics and cultural commentators, Terry Castle, comes The Professor and Other Writings: a collection of startling, gorgeously-written autobiographical essays and a new, long-form piece about the devastation and beauty of early love. James Wolcott, contributing writer to Vanity Fair, calls Terry Castle a “Jedi knight of literary exploration and lesbian scholarship,” and The Professor and Other Writings “a greatest-hits package of show-stopping monologues and offhand-genius riffs.” The Professor and Other Writings is a hilarious and heartbreaking exploration of gender, identity, and sexuality in the grand tradition of such feminist luminaries as Susan Sontag, Camille Paglia, and Joan Didion.

From Terry Castle, the brilliant cultural commentator whom Susan Sontag called "the most expressive, most enlightening literary critic at large today," comes a long-awaited collection of captivating personal essays. The title piece at the heart of the anthology—Castle's candid, wry, and rueful retelling of her romantic involvement with a female professor during graduate school—is a pitch-perfect recollection of the fiascoes of youth. Here, also, are classic Castle short works, including "Desperately Seeking Susan," a droll and bittersweet account of her friendship with Sontag; "My Heroin Christmas," a darkly humorous examination of addiction, her family and stepsiblings, and the late, great saxophonist Art Pepper; and the picaresque "Travels with My Mother," a rollicking tour through lesbianism, art, and the difficult yet transcendent paintings of Agnes Martin. The Professor is Terry Castle at her best: utterly distinctive, wise, frank, and fearless.

Roland Barthes, whose centenary falls in 2015, was a restless, protean thinker. A constant innovator, often as a daring smuggler of ideas from one discipline to another, he first gained an audience with his pithy, semiological essays on mass culture, then unsettled the literary critical establishment with heretical writings on the French classics, before going on to produce some of the most suggestive and stimulating cultural criticism of the late twentieth century ("Empire of Signs," "S/Z," "The Pleasure of the Text, Camera Lucida, Roland Barthes by Roland Barthes"). In 1976, the one-time structuralist outsider was elected to a chair at France s pre-eminent academic institution, the College de France, choosing to style himself its Professor of Literary Semiology, though this last somewhat hedonistic and more subjectivist phase of his intellectual adventure was cut short by his untimely death in 1980. The greater part of Barthes s published writings have been available to a French audience since the publication in 2002 of the expanded version of his "Oeuvres completes "[Complete Works], edited by Eric Marty. The present collection of essays, interviews, prefaces, book reviews and other occasional journalistic pieces, all drawn from that comprehensive source, attempts to give English-speaking readers access to the most significant previously untranslated material from the various stages of Barthes s career. It is divided (not entirely scientifically) into five themed volumes entitled: Theory, Politics, Literary Criticism, Signs and Images (Art, Cinema, Photography), and Interviews. Barthes was always concerned to frame his interventions in theoretical form. Even when turning away from the scientism of earlier years, his inclination was to "theorize" the challenge that emotions like pleasure and bliss represented for his former approach. From his early musings on grammar and his pioneering thoughts on the sociology of literature, through the high period of structuralism to the beginnings of a post-structuralist turn in his reflections on Derrida and the creative contribution of the "reader," the essays and interviews in this first volume, loosely grouped around the theme of theory, suggest a progression that is both straight line and spiral. "

During the occupation of West Germany after the Second World War, the American authorities commissioned polls to assess the values and opinions of ordinary Germans. They concluded that the fascist attitudes of the Nazi era had weakened to a large degree. The author and his colleagues, who returned in 1949 from the United States, were skeptical. In their view, public opinion is not simply an aggregate of individually held opinions, but is fundamentally a public concept, formed through interaction in conversations and with prevailing attitudes and ideas "in the air." In this book, they published their findings on their group discussion experiments that delved deeper into the process of opinion formation.

During his thirty-seven years at Smith College, Newton Arvin published groundbreaking studies of Hawthorne, Whitman, Melville, and Longfellow that stand today as models of scholarship and psychological acuity. He cultivated friendships with the likes of Edmund Wilson and Lillian Hellman and became mentor to Truman Capote. A social radical and closeted homosexual, the circumspect Arvin nevertheless survived McCarthyism. But in September 1960 his apartment was raided, and his cache of beefcake erotica was confiscated, plunging him into confusion and despair and provoking his panicked betrayal of several friends. An utterly absorbing chronicle, The Scarlet Professor deftly captures the essence of a conflicted man and offers a provocative and unsettling look at American moral fanaticism.

Fanny Fern was one of the most popular American writers of the mid-nineteenth century, the first woman newspaper columnist in the United States, and the most highly paid newspaper writer of her day. This volume gathers together for the first time almost one hundred selections of her best work as a journalist. Writing on such taboo subjects as prostitution, venereal disease, divorce, and birth control, Fern stripped the façade of convention from some of society's most sacred institutions, targeting cant and hypocrisy, pretentiousness and pomp.

First published in 1922, "The Waste Land" is T.S. Eliot's masterpiece, and is not only one of the key works of modernism but also one of the greatest poetic achievements of the twentieth century. A richly allusive pilgrimage of spiritual and psychological torment and redemption, Eliot's poem exerted a revolutionary influence on his contemporaries, summoning forth a rich new poetic language, breaking decisively with Romantic and Victorian poetic traditions. Kenneth Rexroth was not alone in calling Eliot "the representative poet of the time, for the same reason that Shakespeare and Pope were of theirs. He articulated the mind of an epoch in words that seemed its most natural expression." As influential as his verse, T.S. Eliot's criticism also exerted a transformative effect on twentieth-century letter, and this new edition of The Waste Land and Other Writings includes a selection of Eliot's most important essays. In her new Introduction, Mary Karr dispels some of the myths of the great poem's inaccessibility and sheds fresh light on the ways in which "The Waste Land" illuminates contemporary experience.