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The author of this book was born into a Jewish family in Poland in 1920, and he moved to Berlin as a boy. There he discovered his passion for literature and began a complex affair with German culture. In 1938, his family was deported back to Poland, where German occupation forced him into the Warsaw Ghetto. As a member of the Jewish resistance, a translator for the Jewish Council, and a man who personally experienced the ghetto's inhumane conditions, the author gained both a bird's-eye and ground-level view of Nazi barbarism. His account of this episode is among the most compelling and dramatic ever recorded. He escaped with his wife and spent two years hiding in the cellar of Polish peasants. After liberation, he joined and then fell out with the Communist Party and was temporarily imprisoned. He began writing and soon became Poland's foremost critical commentator on German literature. When he returned to Germany in 1958, his rise was meteoric. He claimed national celebrity and notoriety as the head of the literary section of the leading newspaper and host of his own television program. He frequently flabbergasted viewers with his bold pronouncements and flexed his power to make or break a writer's career. This, together with his keen critical instincts, makes his memoir an indispensable guide to contemporary German culture as well as an absorbing eyewitness history of some of the twentieth century's most important events.

The literary lineage of postapocalyptic fiction — stories set after civilization's destruction — is a long one, spanning the biblical tale of Noah and Hesiod's Works and Days to the works of Mary Shelley, Octavia Butler, Cormac McCarthy, and many others. Traveling from antiquity to the present, this book reveals how postapocalyptic fiction differs from other genres — pastoral poetry, science fiction, and the maroon narrative — that also explore human capabilities beyond the constraints of civilization. The book places postapocalyptic fiction into conversation with such theorists as Aristotle, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Claude Lévi-Strauss, and Carl Schmitt, illustrating how the genre functions as political theory in fictional form. It shows that rather than argue for a particular way of life, postapocalyptic literature reveals what it would be like to inhabit that life. It considers the genre's appeal in our own historical moment, contending that this fiction is the pastoral of our time. Whereas the pastoralist and the maroon could escape to real-world hills and fashion their own versions of freedom, on a fully owned and occupied Earth, only an apocalyptic event can create a space where such freedoms are feasible once again. The book looks at how fictional narratives set after the world's devastation represent new conditions and possibilities for life and humanity.

Examining literary and philosophical writing about ideal societies from Greek antiquity to the present, this book offers a striking new take on utopia's fundamental project. Noting that utopian imagining has often been propelled by an angry conviction that society is badly arranged, the book argues that utopia's essential aim has not been to secure happiness, order, or material goods, but rather to establish a condition of justice in which all have what they ought to have. The book also makes the case that hostility to utopias has frequently been associated with a fear that they will transform humanity beyond recognition, doing away with the very subjects who should receive justice in a transformed world. Further, the book shows how utopian writing speaks to contemporary debates about immigration, labor, and other global justice issues. Along the way, the book connects utopia to the Greek concept of nemesis, or indignation at a wrong ordering of things, and advances fresh readings of dozens of writers and thinkers — from Plato, Thomas More, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Edward Bellamy, Charlotte Perkins Gilman, and H. G. Wells to John Rawls, Robert Nozick, Fredric Jameson, Ursula Le Guin, Octavia Butler, and Chang-Rae Lee. The book offers a vital reconsideration of what it really means to imagine an ideal society.

This is the first book of its kind — an introduction to the history, development, and features of English-language prose poetry, an increasingly important and popular literary form that is still too little understood and appreciated. The book introduces prose poetry's key characteristics, charts its evolution from the nineteenth-century to the present, and discusses many historical and contemporary prose poems that both demonstrate their great diversity around the Anglophone world and show why they represent some of today's most inventive writing. A prose poem looks like prose but reads like poetry: it lacks the line breaks of other poetic forms but employs poetic techniques, such as internal rhyme, repetition, and compression. The book explains how this form opens new spaces for writers to create riveting works that reshape the resources of prose while redefining the poetic. Discussing prose poetry' s precursors, including William Wordsworth and Walt Whitman, and prose poets such as Charles Simic, Russell Edson, Lydia Davis, and Claudia Rankine, the book pays equal attention to male and female prose poets, documenting women's essential but frequently unacknowledged contributions to the genre. Revealing how prose poetry tests boundaries and challenges conventions to open up new imaginative vistas, this is an essential book for all readers, students, teachers, and writers of prose poetry.