Men in the Off Hours

FROM ANNE CARSON, WINNER OF THE 2026 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE

NEW YORK TIMES NOTABLE BOOK • A landmark collection that heralds “a truly great poet of the twenty-first century” (Time Out New York) as she hones her inimitable style to perfection

In the poems and prose pieces of Men in the Off Hours, Anne Carson is, by turns, Sappho, Catullus, and Catherine Deneuve, deftly deploying her signature mixture of opposites—the classic and the modern, cinema and print, narrative and verse.

Reinventing figures as diverse as Oedipus, Emily Dickinson, and Audubon, Carson sets up startling juxtapositions: Lazarus among video paraphernalia, Virginia Woolf and Thucydides discussing war, Edward Hopper paintings illuminated by St. Augustine. And in a final essay, she meditates on the death of her mother. Reveling in unexpectedness and aware that “the fact of the matter for humans is imperfection,” Men in the Off Hours shows us a fiercely individual poet at her best.