Knopf imprint: 1739 books

The first full-scale biography of one of the most elusive and enigmatic painters of our time -- the self-proclaimed Count Balthus Klossowski de Rola -- whose brilliantly rendered, markedly sexualized portraits, especially of young girls, are among the most memorable images in contemporary art. The...

The first biography of America's greatest twentieth-century sculptor, Alexander Calder: an authoritative and revelatory achievement, based on a wealth of letters and papers never before available, and written by one of our most renowned art critics. Alexander Calder is one of the most beloved...

In this posthumous collection of John Updike’s art writings, a companion volume to the acclaimed Just Looking (1989) and Still Looking (2005), readers are again treated to “remarkably elegant essays” (Newsday) in which “the psychological concerns of the novelist drive the eye from work to...

The story of Chick Austin is the story, in Virgil Thomson's words, of "a whole cultural movement in one man." Becoming director of Hartford's Wadsworth Atheneum at the age of twenty-six, Austin immediately set about to introduce modern art to America and to transform this conservative insurance...

From one of the most admired essayists and novelists at work today: a new collection of essays—his first since Tests of Time, winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. These twenty-five essays speak to the nature and value of writing and to the books that result from...

Kenneth Koch has been called “one of our greatest poets” by John Ashbery, and “a national treasure” in the 2000 National Book Award Finalist Citation. Now, for the first time, all of the poems in his ten collections–from Sun Out, poems of the 1950s, to Thank You, published in 1962,...

As a present to John Updike on his fiftieth birthday, and as a treat for his readers, his first book, a collection of light verse originally published twenty-five years ago, is brought back into print, with an author’s foreword and some small revisions.                 Many of these...

When Amy Clampitt’s first collection, The Kingfisher, was published, it was hailed as that rare first book that “signals a major poet in full bloom” (Los Angeles Times). Its author was sixty-three years old. Over the next eleven years, Clampitt produced four additional, major collections. Now,...

A remarkable late-in-life collection, elegiac and bracing, from master poet Jack Gilbert, whose Refusing Heaven captivated the poetry world and won the National Book Critics Circle Award as well as the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. In these characteristically bold and nuanced poems, Gilbert...

Alongside Wallace Stevens, James Merrill, and other pillars of twentieth-century poetry, Anthony Hecht joins the Borzoi Poetry series. Hecht, whose writing rings with the cadences of the King James Bible, and who, as an infantryman at the end of World War II, participated in the liberation...

Divided into two parts, this new book contains a collaboration with the artist Leonard Baskin called "Presumptions of Death, " reproducing 22 masterly wood engravings and all of Hecht's other poems written since his last book, The Transparent Man.

A captivating, spirited account of the intense relationship among four artists whose strong personalities, passionate feelings, and aesthetic ideals drew them together, pulled them apart, and profoundly influenced the very shape of twentieth-century art. New York, 1921: Alfred Stieglitz, the...

Nominated for the Man Booker International Prize For decades, Enric Marco was revered as a veteran of the Spanish Civil War, a crusader for justice, and a Holocaust survivor. But in May 2005, at the height of his renown, he was exposed as a fraud: Marco was never in a Nazi concentration camp....

Abdi Nor Iftin first fell in love with America from afar. As a child, he learned English by listening to American pop and watching action films starring Arnold Schwarzenegger. When U.S. marines landed in Mogadishu to take on the warlords, Abdi cheered the arrival of these Americans, who seemed as...