Series: The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures

From the Pulitzer Prize–winning author of The Sympathizer (now an HBO series) comes a moving and unflinchingly personal meditation on the literary forms of otherness and a bold call for expansive political solidarity. Born in war-ravaged Vietnam, Viet Nguyen arrived in the United States as a child refugee in 1975. The Nguyen family would soon move to San Jose, California,...

Erudite, wide-ranging, and slyly humorous. -The Atlantic One of the great novelists and public intellectuals of our time gives a master class on the philosophy of fiction. Umberto Eco was fond of pointing out that all writing is narrative. He published his famed debut novel The Name of the Rose when he was forty-eight years old, yet he believed that...

"An entertaining and shrewd little book … Ashbery is an accomplished raconteur." -Charles Simic, New York Review of Books The most influential American poet of his generation appraises the lesser-known writers who shaped his own confounding, infinitely inventive work. John Ashbery was the quintessential "difficult poet." When asked to explain his work, he typically responded by insisting that his poetry...

"The clearest, most forceful statement on art by an artist of our time that I have read." - Frank Getlein, New Republic An illustrated guide to artistic creation from one of the twentieth century's most provocative and expressive painters. Can art be taught? For the celebrated activist-painter Ben Shahn, the answer was a qualified yes. Any would-be artist can take...

Timeless lessons on the pleasures of listening, the dilemmas of composition, and the meaning of artistic freedom from a founder of musical modernism. In October 1939, Igor Stravinsky took the stage at Harvard not as a conductor but as a speaker. Invited to deliver the prestigious Norton Lectures, he had departed Europe just days after the outbreak of war, leaving...

"A wondrously limpid testament to the pleasures of reading." - Steven Poole, The Guardian Six incandescent lectures on literature from the patron saint of mirrors, metafiction, and infinite libraries. For more than thirty years, Jorge Luis Borges's Norton Lectures went unpublished. Recorded at Harvard in 1967 and 1968, the tapes gathered dust in a library vault until their discovery after...

A milestone in modern thought, Space, Time and Architecture has been reissued many times since its first publication in 1941 and translated into half a dozen languages. In this revised edition of Mr. Giedion's classic work, major sections have been added and there are 81 new illustrations. The chapters on leading contemporary architects have been greatly expanded. There is new...

Over the last three decades, the visual artist William Kentridge has garnered international acclaim for his work across media including drawing, film, sculpture, printmaking, and theatre. Rendered in stark contrasts of black and white, his images reflect his native South Africa and, like endlessly suggestive shadows, point to something more elemental as well. Based on the 2012 Charles Eliot Norton...

America's foremost novelist reflects on the themes that preoccupy her work and increasingly dominate national and world politics: race, fear, borders, the mass movement of peoples, the desire for belonging. What is race and why does it matter? What motivates the human tendency to construct Others? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid? Drawing on her Norton...

"Now and then," writes Lionel Trilling, "it is possible to observe the moral life in process of revising itself." In this new book, he is concerned with such a mutation: the process by which the arduous enterprise of sincerity, of being true to one's self, came to occupy a place of supreme importance in the moral life—and the further shift...