Newly out in paperback, Jennifer Homans' groundbreaking history of ballet celebrates the beauty of the art form and the brilliance of its most accomplished practitioners. The author, dance critic for The New Republic and a former professional dancer, combines archival research with interviews that took her from Moscow to Manhattan. Gloriously illustrated with paintings and photography, this is a literary performance as rewarding for casual readers as it is for devoted balletomanes.

A trained dancer as well as a historian, Jennifer Homans offers an insider's perspective in her lavish survey of four centuries of ballet, from its days of aesthetic primacy to its current exile from culture's center stage.