Böcker i The Charles Eliot Norton Lectures-serien

What is race and why does it matter? Why does the presence of Others make us so afraid? America's foremost novelist reflects on themes that preoccupy her work and dominate politics: race, fear, borders, mass movement of peoples, desire for belonging. Ta-Nehisi Coates provides a foreword to Toni Morrison's most personal work of nonfiction to date.

American painter Ben Shahn sets down his personal views of the relationship of the artist-painter, writer, composer-to his material, his craft, and his society. He talks of the creation of the work of art, the importance of the community, the problem of communication, and the critical theories governing the artist and his audience.

Leonard Bernstein's Norton Lectures on the future course of music drew cheers from his Harvard audiences and television viewers. In the re-creation of his talks, the author considers music ranging from Hindu ragas through Mozart and Ravel to Copland, Shoenberg, and Stravinsky.

Kermode examines enigmatic passages and episodes in the gospels. From his reading come ideas about what makes interpretation possible-and often impossible. He considers ways in which narratives acquire opacity, and he asks whether there are methods of distinguishing all possible meaning from a central meaning which gives the story its structure.

Berio shares with us some musical experiences that "invite us to revise or suspend our relation with the past and to rediscover it as part of a future trajectory." His scintillating meditation on music and the ways of experiencing it reflects the composer's profound understanding of the history and contemporary practice of his art.

A work on the shaping of our architectural environment.

Frye finds in romantic narratives of Western tradition an imaginative universe stretching from an idyllic world to a demonic one, and a pattern of cyclical descent into and ascent out of the demonic realm. Romance thus forms an integrated vision of the world, a "secular scripture" whose hero is man, paralleling sacred scripture whose hero is God.

Art, William Kentridge says, is its own form of knowledge. It does not simply supplement the real world, and cannot be purely understood in the rational terms of academic disciplines. The studio is where linear thinking is abandoned and the material processes of the eye, the hand, the charcoal and paper become themselves the guides of creativity.