Knopf imprint: 1739 books

A book which should appeal to both literary theorists and to readers of the novel, this study invites the reader to consider how the plot reflects the patterns of human destiny and seeks to impose a new meaning on life.

An enthralling, deeply moving memoir from one of our foremost American war correspondents. Janine di Giovanni has spent most of her career—more than twenty years—in war zones recording events on behalf of the voiceless. From Sarajevo to East Timor, from Sierra Leone to Afghanistan, Iraq,...

What do the Chinese mean by the word “democracy”? When they say that their political system is “democratic,” does this mean that they share our ideas about liberty, civil rights, and self government? With the recent improvement in relations between China and the West, such questions are no...

Philip Levine's new collection of poems (his first since The Simple Truth was awarded the Pulitzer Prize) is a book of journeys: the necessary ones that each of us takes from innocence to experience, from youth to age, from confusion to clarity, from sanity to madness and back again, from life to...

In Special Orders, the renowned poet Edward Hirsch brings us a new series of tightly crafted poems, work that demonstrates a thrilling expansion of his tone and subject matter. It is with a mixture of grief and joy that Hirsch examines what he calls “the minor triumphs, the major failures” of...

Kenneth Koch, who has already considerably "stretched our ideas of what it is possible to do in poetry" (David Lehman), here takes on the classic poetic device of apostrophe, or direct address. His use of it gives him yet another chance to say things never said before in prose or in verse...

A comprehensive instruction guide to the gentle, powerful, non-invasive healing technique being used increasingly both inside and outside the medical profession. Available to anyone searching to help others in pain.

At eighty-two, Florida Scott-Maxwell felt impelled to write about her strong reactions to being old, and to the time in which we live. Until almost the end this document was not intended for anyone to see, but the author finally decided that she wanted her thoughts and feelings to reach others. Mrs....

A superb new collection from “a great American poet . . . still at work on his almost-song of himself”(The New York Times Book Review). In both lively prose poems and more formal verse, Philip Levine brings us news from everywhere: from Detroit, where exhausted workers try to find a decent...

Nearly ninety years after its first publication, this celebratory edition of The Weary Blues reminds us of the stunning achievement of Langston Hughes, who was just twenty-four at its first appearance. Beginning with the opening “Proem” (prologue poem)—“I am a Negro: / Black as the night is...

In this elegant collection, D. Nurkse elegizes a lost father, a foreshortened childhood, and a young marriage. From the drenched lawns of suburbia to the streets of Brooklyn, he delivers up the small but crucial epiphanies that propel an American coming-of-age and chronicles the development of a tender...

Winner of the 2000 Paterson Poetry Prize About Marge Piercy's collection of her old and new poems that celebrate the Jewish experience, the poet Lyn Lifshin writes: "The Art of Blessing the Day is an exquisite book. The whole collection is strong, passionate, and poignant, but the mother and...

“There are so many profound and finely constructed poems in Singing Yet (like the Whitmanesque ‘America the Beautiful’ in which the poet pledges allegiance ‘this time to the vivification of our lost Body Politic,/ nerves and follicles and arteries/ ablaze in the suaveness of night’) that...

WITH MORE THAN 100 BLACK-AND-WHITE ILLUSTRATIONS THROUGHOUT   Who are “the Jews”? Scattered over much of the world throughout most of their three-thousand-year-old history, are they one people or many? How do they resemble and how do they differ from Jews in other places and times? What have...