An education in a portmanteau: George Steiner at The New Yorker collects his best work from his more than 150 pieces for the magazine. Between 1967 and 1997, George Steiner wrote more than 130 pieces on a great range of topics for The New Yorker, making new books, difficult ideas, and unfamiliar subjects seem compelling not only to intellectuals but to “the common reader.” He possesses a famously dazzling mind: paganism, the Dutch Renaissance, children’s games, war-time Britain, Hitler’s bunker, and chivalry attract his interest as much as Levi-Strauss, Cellini, Bernhard, Chardin, Mandelstam, Kafka, Cardinal Newman, Verdi, Gogol, Borges, Brecht, Wittgenstein, Chomsky, and art historian/spy Anthony Blunt. Steiner makes an ideal guide from the Risorgimento in Italy to the literature of the Gulag, from the history of chess to the enduring importance of George Orwell. Again and again everything Steiner looks at in his New Yorker essays is made to bristle with some genuine prospect of turning out to be freshly thrilling or surprising.

"George Steiner at The New Yorker collects fifty-three of his fascinating and wide-ranging essays from the more than one hundred and thirty he has contributed to the magazine. Steiner possesses a famously dazzling mind: paganism, the Dutch Renaissance, children's games, wartime Britain, and chivalry attract his interest as much as Levi-Strauss, Bernhard, Kafka, Beckett, Wittgenstein, Chomsky, and art historian/spy Anthony Blunt. Steiner makes an ideal guide, from the Risorgimento in Italy to the literature of the Gulag, from the history of chess to the enduring importance of Borges. Again and again in his New Yorker essays everything Steiner looks at is made to bristle with possibility, with the genuine prospect of becoming fresh and thrilling." --Book Jacket.

"George Steiner at The New Yorker collects fifty-three of his fascinating and wide-ranging essays from the more than one hundred and thirty he has contributed to the magazine. Steiner possesses a famously dazzling mind: paganism, the Dutch Renaissance, children's games, wartime Britain, and chivalry attract his interest as much as Levi-Strauss, Bernhard, Kafka, Beckett, Wittgenstein, Chomsky, and art historian/spy Anthony Blunt. Steiner makes an ideal guide, from the Risorgimento in Italy to the literature of the Gulag, from the history of chess to the enduring importance of Borges. Again and again in his New Yorker essays everything Steiner looks at is made to bristle with possibility, with the genuine prospect of becoming fresh and thrilling." --Book Jacket.

One of the worlds foremost literary critics meditates upon seven books he long had in mind to write but never did. Massively erudite, the essays are also brave, unflinching, and wholly personal.

Imagine, thirty years after the end of World War II, Israeli Nazi-hunters, some of whom lost relatives in the gas chambers of Nazi Germany, find a silent old man deep in the Amazon jungle. He is Adolph Hitler. The narrative that follows is a profound and disturbing exploration of the nature of guilt, vengeance, language, and the power of evil—each undiminished over time. George Steiner's stunning novel, now with a new afterword, will continue to provoke our thinking about Nazi Germany's unforgettable past. "Two readings have convinced me that this is a fiction of extraordinary power and thoughtfulness. . . . [A] remarkable novel."—Bernard Bergonzi, Times Literary Supplement "In this tour de force Mr. Steiner makes his reader re-examine, to whatever conclusions each may choose, a history from which we would prefer to avert our eyes."—Edmund Fuller, Wall Street Journal "Portage largely avoids both the satisfactions of the traditional novel and the horrifying details of Holocaust literature. Instead, Steiner has taken as his model the political imaginings of an Orwell or Koestler. . . . He has produced a philosophic fantasy of remarkable intensity."—Otto Friedrich, Time

When it first appeared in 1975, After Babel created a sensation, quickly establishing itself as both a controversial and seminal study of literary theory. In the original edition, Steiner provided readers with the first systematic investigation since the eighteenth century of the phenomenology and processes of translation both inside and between languages. Taking issue with the principal emphasis of modern linguistics, he finds the root of the "Babel problem" in our deep instinct for privacy and territory, noting that every people has in its language a unique body of shared secrecy. With this provocative thesis he analyzes every aspect of translation from fundamental conditions of interpretation to the most intricate of linguistic constructions.For the long-awaited second edition, Steiner entirely revised the text, added new and expanded notes, and wrote a new preface setting the work in the present context of hermeneutics, poetics, and translation studies. This new edition brings the bibliography up to the present with substantially updated references, including much Russian and Eastern European material. Like the towering figures of Derrida, Lacan, and Foucault, Steiner's work is central to current literary thought. After Babel, Third Edition is essential reading for anyone hoping to understand the debates raging in the academy today.