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Liveright Publishing

A home for outstanding works of literature that define and redefine our culture. Eliot, E.E. Cummings, Hart Crane, Hilda Doolittle (H.D.)

Liveright Publishing Corporation grew out of the storied Boni & Liveright press, one of the most important publishers of the early twentieth century. Under the editorial guidance of Horace Liveright the firm captured the flowering literature of the 1920s and 1930s, publishing some of the most celebrated American writers of the period, including William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, Sherwood Anderson

, Gertrude Stein, Anita Loos, and Theodore Dreiser. Alongside these great authors were poets of equal prominence, such as Ezra Pound, T.S. and Robinson Jeffers, as well as founding members of the Harlem Renaissance and European intellectuals such as Sigmund Freud and Bertrand Russell. In choosing titles for publication, Horace Liveright sought out writers whose works, he hoped, would stand the test of time. As a result, a disproportionately high number of writers that the house signed up became foundational forces of modern literature and culture.

06/20/2025

Now in paperback: Eric Jay Dolin's LEFT FOR DEAD, the true story of five castaways abandoned on the Falkland Islands during the War of 1812—a tale of treachery, shipwreck, isolation, and the desperate struggle for survival.

Fraught with misunderstandings and mistrust, the incident left three British sailors and two Americans, including the captain of the sealer, Charles H. Barnard, abandoned in the barren, windswept, and inhospitable Falklands for a year and a half. With deft narrative skill and unequaled knowledge of the very pith of the seafaring life, Dolin describes in vivid and harrowing detail the increasingly desperate existence of the castaways during their eighteen-month ordeal—an all-too-common fate in the Great Age of Sail.

A tale of intriguing complexity, with surprising twists and turns throughout—involving greed, lying, bullying, a hostile takeover, stellar leadership, ingenuity, severe privation, endurance, banishment, the great value of a dog, the birth of a baby, a perilous thousand-mile open-ocean journey in a seventeen-foot boat, an improbable rescue mission, and legal battles over a dubious and disgraceful wartime prize—LEFT FOR DEAD shows individuals in wartime under great duress acting both nobly and atrociously, and offers a unique perspective on a pivotal era in American maritime history.

06/19/2025

“Love does not require taking an uncritical stance toward the object of one’s affections. In truth, it often requires the opposite. We can’t be of real service to the hopes we have for places—and people, ourselves included—without a clear-eyed assessment of their (and our) strengths and weaknesses.”
― Annette Gordon-Reed, ON JUNETEENTH

06/03/2025

"The Risky, Reality-Bending Thriller You Need This Summer.... [Daley-Ward] uses a full complement of textures to weave this book. The surreal drips into the moments of assumed sobriety, shifting the world around us as we read. To unfurl the story, she reaches for dark comedy, for drama, for poetry, for the absurd.... It’s not just the metaphysical play that stands out; Daley-Ward’s prose also shines from the start.... By harnessing both a poet’s heart and attention to language as well as a fresh ear for millennial humor and drama, Daley-Ward has penned a metaphysical experiment on grief, trauma, family and longing that holds all the excitement of a big summer read."
— Danez Smith, The New York Times

Yrsa Daley-Ward's THE CATCH - the inaugural novel in the Well-Read Black Girl series - is available *now* wherever books are sold!

06/02/2025

In stores *tomorrow!* — Yrsa Daley-Ward's THE CATCH has been named one of the Books to Read in June by the New York Times, one of the Best Books of Summer by the Washington Post, TIME, USA Today, and Forbes, and one of the Most Anticipated Books of 2025 by Publishers Weekly, Lit Hub, We Are Bookish, The Millions and Book Riot.

Twin sisters Clara and Dempsey have always struggled to relate, their familial bond severed after their mother vanished into the Thames. As infants they were adopted into different families, Clara sent to live with a successful, upper-class couple, and Dempsey with a sullen, unaffectionate city councilor. In adulthood, they are content to be all but estranged, until Clara sees a woman who looks exactly like their mother on the streets of London. The catch: this version of Serene, aged not a day, has enjoyed a childless life—the very life, it seems, she might have had if the girls had never been born.

Find THE CATCH wherever books are sold!

06/01/2025

In her riveting first foray into fiction, Yrsa Daley-Ward conjures a kaleidoscopic multiverse of daughterhood and mother-want, exploring the sacrifices that women must make for self-actualization. The result is a marvel of a debut novel that boldly asks, “How can it ever, ever be a crime to choose yourself?”

Discover THE CATCH — in stores this Tuesday.

05/31/2025

The inaugural novel in the Books series, THE CATCH is a darkly whimsical tale of women daring to live and create with impunity. Discover it in stores this Tuesday!

05/06/2025

Happy to J.M. Coetzee and Mariana Dimópulos, authors of SPEAKING IN TONGUES! In this provocative dialogue, a Nobel laureate novelist and a leading translator investigate the nature of language and the challenges of translation.

Language, historically speaking, has always been slippery. Two dictionaries provide two different maps of the universe: which one is true, or are both false? SPEAKING IN TONGUES―taking the form of a dialogue between Nobel laureate novelist J. M. Coetzee and eminent translator Mariana Dimópulos―examines some of the most pressing linguistic issues that plague writers and translators well into the twenty-first century.

The authors address questions that we must answer in order to understand contemporary society. They inquire if one can truly love an acquired language, and they question why certain languages, like Spanish, have gender differences built into them. They examine the threat of monolingualism and ask how we can counter, if at all, the global spread of the English language, which seems to maraud like a colonial power. They question whether it should be the duty of the translator to remove morally objectionable, misogynistic, or racist language. And in the conclusion, Coetzee even speculates whether it’s only mathematics that can tell the truth about everything.

Drawing from decades of experience in the craft of language, both Dimópulos and Coetzee face the reality, as did Walter Benjamin over a century ago in his seminal essay “The Task of the Translator,” that when it comes to self-expression, some things will always get lost in translation. SPEAKING IN TONGUES finally emerges as an engaging and accessible work of philosophy, shining a light on some of the most important linguistic and philological issues of our time.

04/30/2025

Coming November 4th, available now for preorder: 👐 “Wings: The Story of a Band on the Run” 👐 tells the astonishing, almost improbable, story of Paul McCartney and his newly formed band from 1971 through its dissolution barely a decade later.

Drawn from over 500,000 words of interviews with McCartney, key players, and family members, WINGS poignantly recounts, now with a half-century’s wisdom, the story of a man and musician navigating the aftermath of The Beatles’ breakup, soon joined by his wife—American photographer Linda McCartney—on keyboard and vocals; drummer Denny Seiwell; and guitarist Denny Laine, among many others. Organized around nine Wings albums, the narrative follows the adventurous band as they survive a robbery on the streets of Nigeria, appear unannounced at various university halls, tour in a sheared-off double-decker bus with their children, all while producing some of the most enduring music of the decade. With 150 black-and-white and color photographs, many previously unseen, this is a landmark work of soaring originality.

Learn more: https://wwnorton.com/books/Wings/

04/01/2025

A tenacious curator fights to save her beloved library and a new, groundbreaking archive in THE EPHEMERA COLLECTOR, 's epic Afrofuturist debut, in stores now!

The year is 2035, and Los Angeles County is awash in a tangelo haze of wildfire smoke. Xandria Anastasia Brown spends her days deep in the archives of the Huntington Library as the curator of African American Ephemera and associate curator of American Historical Manuscripts, supported by an array of AI personal assistants and health bots. Descended from a family of obsessive collectors who took part in the Great Migration, Xandria grew up immersed in African American ephemera and realia: boots worn by Negro Troopers during the Civil War, Black ATA tennis rackets, bandanas worn by the Crips....

Although Xandria’s work may preserve collective memory, she is losing a grasp on her own. Evren, her new health bot, won’t stop reminding her that her symptoms of long COVID are worsening; not to mention that severe asthma, chronic fatigue, grief, and worrying lapses in reality keep disrupting progress on a new Octavia E. Butler exhibition, cataloging the new Diwata Collection, and organizing the Huntington against a stealth corporate takeover. Then, one morning a colleague Xandria can’t place calls to wish her a happy birthday―and the library goes into an emergency lockdown.

Sequestered in the archive with only her adaptive technology and flickering intuition, Xandria fears that her life’s work is in danger―the Diwata Collection, a radical blueprint for humanity’s survival. Up against a faceless enemy and unsure of who her human or AI allies truly are, she must make a choice.

A lyrical and strikingly original saga, THE EPHEMERA COLLECTOR announces Stacy Nathaniel Jackson as a singular new voice in fiction.

03/26/2025

Congratulations to and on being named to the longlists of ’s 2025 Literary Awards! “Our awards are juried by panels of esteemed, award-winning authors, editors, translators, and critics,” writes PEN in their announcement. “These authors are committed to recognizing their contemporaries, from promising debut writers to those who have already had a continuous and lasting impact on the literary landscape.”

03/10/2025

“[] floats an idea: To truly understand Didion, one must look ‘through the lens of American mythmaking in Hollywood.’ … Wilkinson’s book got me curious enough about Didion and Dunne’s collaborations to visit or revisit all seven of their produced scripts. As I b***d up on the couple’s wildly eclectic scripted output—projects all over the map in tone, scale, quality, prestige, and ambition—I found my answer: about their status as screenwriters, Didion and Dunne cared a lot.” —Nell Beram,

Click the link in our bio to read more from Vogue’s review of WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES: JOAN DIDION AND THE AMERICAN DREAM MACHINE. This vivid study of Didion’s journey from New York to her arrival in Hollywood as a screenwriter at the twilight of the old studio system lands in stores tomorrow, wherever books are sold!

02/27/2025

Kicking off tonight, catch film critic on her tour across the country for “WE TELL OURSELVES STORIES: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine”!

Named one of the Most Anticipated Books of 2025 by the Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, W Magazine, and The Millions, this riveting cultural biography examines Joan Didion’s influence through the lens of American mythmaking. As a young girl, Didion was infatuated with John Wayne and his on-screen bravado, and was fascinated by her California pioneer ancestry and the infamous Donner Party. The mythos that preoccupied her early years continued to influence her work as a magazine writer and film critic in New York, offering glimmers of the many stories Didion told herself that would come to unravel over the course of her career. But out west, show business beckoned.

We Tell Ourselves Stories eloquently traces Didion’s journey from New York to her arrival in Hollywood as a screenwriter at the twilight of the old studio system. She spent much of her adult life deeply embroiled in the glitz and glamor of the Los Angeles elite, where she acutely observed—and denounced—how the nation’s fears and dreams were sensationalized on screen. Meanwhile, she paid the bills writing movie scripts like A Star Is Born, while her books propelled her to celestial heights of fame.

More than a portrait of a writer, We Tell Ourselves Stories shines a new light on a legacy whose impact will be felt for generations.

“Sharp, elegant and eye-opening . . . a crucial toolbox for understanding both Joan Didion and Hollywood.” —Emily Nussbaum

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