Tracing the solitude of the American self, the difference between idolatrous and companionate affection, and the dream of an "America of love," Eric Murphy Selinger shows how such concerns can shape a poet's most intimate decisions about genre and form. His lucid, elegant prose illuminates not only well-known love poets, including Emily Dickinson and William Carlos Williams, but also more unexpected figures, notably Wallace Stevens and Mina Loy. Like the poets he discusses, Selinger refuses to view love reductively. Rather, he takes the impulse to debunk love as part of his subject, whether it crops up in Puritan theology or contemporary literary theory. As he details Whitman's courtship of his readers, weighs the restorations of romance in H. D. and Ezra Pound, and demonstrates the bonds between poets as disparate as Robert Creeley and Robert Lowell, Selinger establishes love poetry as an essential American genre.

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • NATIONAL BOOK AWARD WINNER • NAMED ONE OF TIME’S TEN BEST NONFICTION BOOKS OF THE DECADE • PULITZER PRIZE FINALIST • NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST • ONE OF OPRAH’S “BOOKS THAT HELP ME THROUGH” • NOW AN HBO ORIGINAL SPECIAL EVENT Hailed by Toni Morrison as “required reading,” a bold and personal literary exploration of America’s racial history by “the most important essayist in a generation and a writer who changed the national political conversation about race” (Rolling Stone) NAMED ONE OF THE MOST INFLUENTIAL BOOKS OF THE DECADE BY CNN • NAMED ONE OF PASTE’S BEST MEMOIRS OF THE DECADE • NAMED ONE OF THE TEN BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY The New York Times Book Review • O: The Oprah Magazine • The Washington Post • People • Entertainment Weekly • Vogue • Los Angeles Times • San Francisco Chronicle • Chicago Tribune • New York • Newsday • Library Journal • Publishers Weekly In a profound work that pivots from the biggest questions about American history and ideals to the most intimate concerns of a father for his son, Ta-Nehisi Coates offers a powerful new framework for understanding our nation’s history and current crisis. Americans have built an empire on the idea of “race,” a falsehood that damages us all but falls most heavily on the bodies of black women and men—bodies exploited through slavery and segregation, and, today, threatened, locked up, and murdered out of all proportion. What is it like to inhabit a black body and find a way to live within it? And how can we all honestly reckon with this fraught history and free ourselves from its burden? Between the World and Me is Ta-Nehisi Coates’s attempt to answer these questions in a letter to his adolescent son. Coates shares with his son—and readers—the story of his awakening to the truth about his place in the world through a series of revelatory experiences, from Howard University to Civil War battlefields, from the South Side of Chicago to Paris, from his childhood home to the living rooms of mothers whose children’s lives were taken as American plunder. Beautifully woven from personal narrative, reimagined history, and fresh, emotionally charged reportage, Between the World and Me clearly illuminates the past, bracingly confronts our present, and offers a transcendent vision for a way forward.

Kahlil Gibran considered The Prophet his greatest achievement. He said: "I think I've never been without The Prophet since I first conceived it in Mount Lebanon. It seems to have been a part of me....I kept the manuscript four years before I delivered it over to my publisher, because I wanted to be sure, I wanted to be very sure, that every word of it was the very best I had to offer." The Chicago Post said of The Prophet: "Cadenced and vibrant with feeling, the words of Kahlil Gibran bring to one's ears the majestic rhythm of Ecclesiastes....If there is a man or woman who can read this book without a quiet acceptance of a great man's philosophy and a singing in the heart as of music born within, that man or woman is indeed dead to life and truth."