Best of
American

1984

The Short Stories


Ernest Hemingway - 1984
    The Short Stories, introduced here with a revealing preface by the author, chronicles Hemingway's development as a writer, from his earliest attempts in the chapbook Three Stories and Ten Poems, published in Paris in 1923, to his more mature accomplishments in Winner Take Nothing. Originally published in 1938 along with The Fifth Column, this collection premiered "The Capital of the World" and "Old Man at the Bridge," which derive from Hemingway's experiences in Spain, as well as "The Short Happy Life of Francis Macomber" and "The Snows of Kilimanjaro," which figure among the finest of Hemingway's short fictions.

Jitterbug Perfume


Tom Robbins - 1984
    It is a saga, as well. A saga must have a hero, and the hero of this one is a janitor with a missing bottle. The bottle is blue, very, very old, and embossed with the image of a goat-horned god. If the liquid in the bottle is actually is the secret essence of the universe, as some folks seem to think, it had better be discovered soon because it is leaking and there is only a drop or two left.

Collected Poems, 1947-1980


Allen Ginsberg - 1984
    "Ginsberg is both tragic and dynamic, a lyrical genius, con-man extraordinaire and probably the single greatest influence on American poetical voice since Walt Whitman."--Bob Dylan

Seven Plays


Sam Shepard - 1984
    Brilliant, prolific, uniquely American, Pulitzer prizewinning playwright Sam Separd is a major voice in contemporary theatre. And here are seven of his very best. "One of the most original, prolific and gifted dramatists at work today."--"The New Yorker" "The greatest American playwright of his generation...the most inventive in language and revolutionary in craft, [he] is the writer whose work most accurately maps the interior and exterior landscapes of his society."--"New York Magazine" "If plays were put in time capsules, future generations would get a sharp-toothed profile of life in the U.S. in the past decade and a half from the works of Sam Shepard."--"Time " "Sam Shepard is the most exciting presence in the movie world and one of the most gifted writers ever to work on the American stage."--Marsha Norman, Pulitzer prizewinning author of "'Night, Mother. " "One of our best and most challenging playwrights...his plays are a form of exorcism: magical, sometimes surreal rituals that grapple with the demonic forces in the American landscape."--"Newsweek" "His plays are stunning in thier originality, defiant and inscrutable."--"Esquire" "Sam Shepard is phenomenal..the best practicing American playwright."--"The New Republic"

The Nightmare Factory


Thomas Ligotti - 1984
    This new edition brings together his collected short stories with 'Teatro Grottesco', a sequence of new stories not published before.Contents:The Frolic (1982)Les Fleurs (1981)Alice's Last Adventure (1985)Dream of a Mannikin (1982)The Chymist (1981)Drink to Me Only with Labyrinthine Eyes (1982)Eye of the Lynx (1983)The Christmas Eves of Aunt Elise (1996)The Lost Art of Twilight (1986)The Troubles of Dr. Thoss (1985)Masquerade of a Dead Sword (1986)Dr. Voke and Mr. Veech (1983)Dr. Locrian's Asylum (1987)The Sect of the Idiot (1988)The Greater Festival of Masks (1985)The Music of the Moon (1987)The Journal of J. P. Drapeau (1987)Vastarien (1987)The Last Feast of Harlequin (1990)The Spectacles in the Drawer (1987)Flowers of the Abyss (1991)Nethescurial (1991)The Dreaming in Nortown (1991)The Mystics of Muelenburg (1987)In the Shadow of Another World (1991)The Cocoons (1991)The Night School (1991)The Glamour (1991)The Library of Byzantium (1991)Miss Plarr (1991)The Shadow at the Bottom of the World (1990)The Medusa (1991)Conversations in a Dead Language (1989)The Prodigy of Dreams (1986)Mrs. Rinaldi's Angel (1991)The Tsalal (1994)Mad Night of Atonement (1989)The Strange Design of Master Rignolo (1989)The Voice in the Bones (1989)Teatro Grottesco (1996)Severini (1996)Gas Station Carnivals (1996)The Bungalow House (1995)The Clown Puppet (1996)The Red Tower (1996)

Fool for Love and Other Plays


Sam Shepard - 1984
    This brilliant American dramatist creates what The New Yorker dubbed "Shepard Country"--a landscape of the imagination, a unique theatrical experience that captures our culture and consciouness, our fears and fantasies.FOOL FOR LOVE * ANGEL CITY * GEOGRAPHY OF A HORSE DREAMER * ACTION * COWBOY MOUTH * MELODRAMA PLAY * SEDUCED * SUICIDE IN BbWith an Introduction by Ross Wetzsteon"Sam Shepard is phenomenal...the best practicing American playwright." --The New Republic "Sam Shepard is the most exciting presence in the movie world and one of the most gifted writers ever to work on the American stage." --Marsha Norman"The most ruthlessly experimental and uncompromising of today's young writers." --John Lahr"Sam Shepard fills the role of professional playwright as a good ballet dancer or acrobat fulfills his role in performance. That is, he always delivers, he executes feats of dexterity and technical difficulty that an untrained person could not, and makes them seem easy." --Michael Feingold, The Village Voice "One of the most original, prolific, and gifted dramatists at work today." --The New Yorker "Increasingly recognized as one of the more significant dramatists in the English-speaking world." --Charles R. Bachman, Modern Drama

Writings: Autobiography / Notes on the State of Virginia / Public and Private Papers / Addresses / Letters


Thomas Jefferson - 1984
    Thomas Jefferson, a brilliant political thinker, is perhaps best known for the Declaration of Independence, but he was a man of extraordinarily wide interests.He was exceptionally controversial in his own time, and many of his ideas remain the subject of national debate. In his arguments for a system of general education, for local rather than central authority, for caution in international affairs, for religious and intellectual freedom, and for economic and social justice, Jefferson defined the issues that still direct our national political life centuries after the nation's formation. This volume will give readers the opportunity to reassess one of our most influential presidents.Jefferson's First Inaugural Address is a resounding statement of faith in a democracy of enlightened people. His Notes on the State of Virginia (1785) is an invaluable record of the landscape, inhabitants, life, and daily customs of America in the Revolutionary and early national eras. His letters, more than two hundred and fifty of which are gathered here, are brilliant urbane missives to such men as Patrick Henry, Thomas Paine, Lafayette, John Adams and James Madison. His slim Autobiography (1821), written "for my own more ready reference, and for the information of my family," hardly hints at the influence and impact he had as Secretary of State under George Washington, Minister to France, opposition-party Vice President to John Adams, and, after leaving the presidency, founder of the University of Virginia.His public papers and addresses fully demonstrate both the breadth of his interests and the power of his expressive mind. Extensively read (his personal library of ten thousand volumes became the foundation of the Library of Congress) and widely traveled, Jefferson wrote with ease and spontaneity about science, archaeology, botany and gardening, religion, literature, architecture, education, the habits of his fellow citizens, and, of course, his beloved home, Monticello.Jefferson's prose has an energy, clarity, and charming off-handedness, consistent with his conviction that style in writing should impose no barrier between the most educated and the most common reader. For those who want a renewed sense of the opportunity for human freedom that the United States represented to its founders, this is an indispensable book.

War All the Time


Charles Bukowski - 1984
    Charles Bukowski shows that he is still as pure as ever but he has evolved into a slightly happier man that has found some fame and love. These poems show how he grapples with his past and future colliding.

The Complete Short Stories


Ambrose Bierce - 1984
    Brought together in this volume, these stories represent an unprecedented accomplishment in American literature. In their iconoclasm and needle-sharp irony, their formal and thematic ingenuity and element of surprise, they differ markedly from the fiction admired in Bierce's time. Readers familiar with the classic An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge will want to turn to Bierce's other Civil War stories. Also included here are his horror stories, among them The Death of Halpin Frayser and The Damned Thing, and such tall tales as Oil of Dog and A Cargo of Cat.

Son of the Morning Star: General Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn


Evan S. Connell - 1984
    On the ridge five companies of United States cavalry - 262 soldiers, comprising officers and troopers - fought desperately but hopelessly. When the guns fell silent, no soldier - including their commanding officer, Lt Col. George Armstrong Custer - had survived. Custer's Last Stand is among the most enduring events in American history - 130 years after the fact, books continue to be written and people continue to argue about even the most basic details surrounding the Little Bighorn. Evan S. Connell, whom Joyce Carol Oates has described as 'one of our most interesting and intelligent American writers', wrote what continues to be the most reliable - and compulsively readable - account of the subject. Connell makes good use of his research and novelist's eye for story and detail to re-create the heroism, foolishness and savagery of this crucial chapter in the history of the West.

The Tie That Binds


Kent Haruf - 1984
    Eighty-year-old Edith Goodnough lies in a hospital bed, IV taped to the back of her hand, police officer at her door. She is charged with murder. The clues: a sack of chicken feed slit with a knife, a milky-eyed dog tied outdoors one cold afternoon. The motives: the brutal business of farming and a family code of ethics as unforgiving as the winter prairie itself.In his critically acclaimed first novel, Kent Haruf delivers the sweeping tale of a woman of the American High Plains, as told by her neighbor, Sanders Roscoe. As Roscoe shares what he knows, Edith's tragedies unfold: a childhood of pre-dawn chores, a mother's death, a violence that leaves a father dependent on his children, forever enraged. Here is the story of a woman who sacrifices her happiness in the name of family--and then, in one gesture, reclaims her freedom. Breathtaking, determinedly truthful, The Tie That Binds is a powerfully eloquent tribute to the arduous demands of rural America, and of the tenacity of the human spirit.

Daughters of Copper Woman


Anne Cameron - 1984
    Now comes a new edition that includes many pieces cut from the original as well as fresh material added by the author. Here finally, after twenty-two years of gathering dust, is the complete version of the groundbreaking bestseller.In this, her best-loved work, Anne Cameron has created a timeless retelling of northwest coast Native myths that together create a sublime image of the social and spiritual power of woman. Cameron weaves together the lives of legendary and imaginary characters, creating a work of fiction with an intensity of style matched by the power of its subject.

Where Water Comes Together with Other Water: Poems


Raymond Carver - 1984
    Winner of Poetry Magazine’s Levinson Prize, an illuminating collection from the middle of his career, Raymond Carver’s poems “function as distilled, heightened versions of his stories, offering us fugitive glimpses of ordinary lives on the edge” (Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times).

VALIS & Later Novels: A Maze of Death / VALIS / The Divine Invasion / The Transmigration of Timothy Archer


Philip K. Dick - 1984
    Dick: Four Novels of the 1960s became the fastest selling title in The Library of America's history. The 2008 companion volume, Five Novels of the1960s & 70s, broke series records for advance sales. Now comes a third and final volume gathering the best novels of Dick's final years, when religious revelation, always important in his work, became a dominant and irresistible theme.In A Maze of Death (1970), a darkly speculative mystery that foreshadows Dick's final novels, colonists on the planet Delmak-O try to determine the nature of the God-or "Mentufacturer"-who plots their destiny. The late masterpiece VALIS (1981) is a novelistic reworking of "the events of 2-3-74," when Dick's life was transformed by what he believed was a mystical revelation. It is a harrowing self-portrait of a man torn between conflicting interpretations of what might be gnostic illumination or psychotic breakdown. The Divine Invasion (1981), a sequel to VALIS, is a powerful exploration of gnostic insight and its human consequences. The Transmigration of Timothy Archer (1982), Dick's last novel, is by turns theological thriller, roman à clef, and disenchanted portrait of late 1970s California life, based loosely on the controversial career of Bishop James Pike-a close friend and kindred spirit.LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.

Love Medicine


Louise Erdrich - 1984
    Black humor mingles with magic, injustice bleeds into betrayal, and through it all, bonds of love and family marry the elements into a tightly woven whole that pulses with the drama of life.Filled with humor, magic, injustice and betrayal, Erdrich blends family love and loyalty in a stunning work of dramatic fiction.

Stones for Ibarra


Harriet Doerr - 1984
    They have mortgaged, sold, borrowed, left friends and country, to settle in this remote spot; their plan is to live out their lives here, connected to the place and to each other. The two Americans, the only foreigners in Ibarra, live among people who both respect and misunderstand them. And gradually the villagers--at first enigmas to the Evertons--come to teach them much about life and the relentless tide of fate.There is an alternate cover edition of this book with the same ISBN here.

Winterkill


Craig Lesley - 1984
    Danny Kachiah is a Native American fighting not to become a casualty. His father, Red Shirt, is dead; his wife, Loxie, has left him, and his career as a rodeo cowboy is flagging. But when Loxie dies in a car wreck, leaving him with his son, Jack, whom he hardly knows, Danny uses the magnificent stories of Red Shirt to guide him toward true fatherhood. Together, Danny and Jack begin to make a life from the dreams of yesterday and the ruins of today's northwestern reservations.

What Shall We Do Without Us?: The Voice and Vision of Kenneth Patchen


Kenneth Patchen - 1984
    

The Embers and the Stars


Erazim V. Kohák - 1984
    Despite the author's criticisms of Thoreau, it is more like Walden than any other book I have read. . . . The book makes great strides toward bringing the best insights from medieval philosophy and from contemporary environmental ethics together. Anyone interested in both of these areas must read this book."—Daniel A. Dombrowski, The Thomist"Those who share Kohák's concern to understand nature as other than a mere resource or matter in motion will find his temporally oriented interpretation of nature instructive. It is here in particular that Kohák turns moments of experience to account philosophically, turning what we habitually overlook or avoid into an opportunity and basis for self-knowledge. This is an impassioned attempt to see the vital order of nature and the moral order of our humanity as one."—Ethics

Virgins


Caryl Rivers - 1984
    This book contains the rules and regimen, hijinks and longing of that time.

Buffalo Woman


Paul Goble - 1984
    His relatives send her away and she becomes a buffalo. Her husband follows and undergoes the Buffalo chief's tests to take on buffalo form thus strengthening the relationship between the people and the buffalo.

Not in Our Genes: Biology, Ideology and Human Nature


Richard C. Lewontin - 1984
    Three eminent scientists analyze the scientific, social, and political roots of biological determinism.

Prose and Poetry: Maggie: A Girl of the Streets / The Red Badge of Courage / Stories, Sketches, Journalism, The Black Riders / War Is Kind


Stephen Crane - 1984
    This comprehensive collection includes all his most accomplished and best-known works: five novels, short stories, journalism, war correspondence, and his two completed books of poetry.Here are the classic novels he published in a span of five years: The Red Badge of Courage (1895), about a young and confused Union soldier under fire for the first time; Maggie: A Girl of the Streets (1893), a vivid portrait of slum life and a young girl’s fall; George’s Mother (1896), about New York’s Bowery and its effect on a young workingman fresh from the country; The Third Violet (1897), the story of a bohemian artist’s country romance; and The Monster (1899), a novella about sacrifice and rescue, guilt and isolation.Among his short stories are such masterpieces as “The Open Boat,” “The Blue Hotel,” and “The Bride Comes to Yellow Sky.” His prose is at the same time dense and lean, suited to his description of the elusive forces that impinge upon his characters, and suited also to his desire not to circumscribe them with traditional moral and interpretive definition. Included here as well are the Whilomville stories of children and childhood in small-town America and the Sullivan County sketches of turn-of-the-twentieth-century rural life.As a journalist, Crane covered the Spanish-American War and the Greco-Turkish War, traveled through Mexico and the West, and reported on the seamier sides of New York City life; the best of his dispatches are gathered here. Also featured are both of Crane’s collections of epigrammatic free verse—The Black Riders (1895) and War is Kind (1899)—and selections from his uncollected poems. His poetry shows strong affinities to Emily Dickinson, while also anticipating the Imagist movement later in the twentieth century.This is the most substantial gathering of Crane’s work ever made available in one volume; it is an enduring testimony to his heroic achievement.

Collected Stories of John O'Hara


John O'Hara - 1984
    American LiteratureContains:The doctor's son -- It must have been spring -- Over the river and through the wood -- Price's always open -- Are we leaving tomorrow? -- Pal Joey -- The gentleman in the tan suit -- Good-bye, Herman -- Olive -- Do you like it here? -- Now we know -- Free -- Too young -- Bread alone -- Graven image -- Common sense should tell you -- Drawing room B -- The pretty daughters - The moccasins -- Imagine kissing Pete -- The girl from California -- In the silence -- Exactly eight thousand dollars exactly -- Winter dance -- The flatted saxophone -- The friends of Miss Julia -- How can I tell you? -- Ninety minutes away -- Our friend the sea -- Can I stay here? -- The hardware man -- The pig -- Zero -- Fatimas and kisses -- Natica Jackson -- We'll have fun.

A Companion to The Cantos of Ezra Pound


Carroll F. Terrell - 1984
    Available in a one-volume paperback edition for the first time, the Companion brings together in conveniently numbered glosses for each canto the most pertinent details from the vast body of work on the Cantos during the last thirty years. The Companion contains 10,421 separate glosses that include translations from eight languages, identification of all proper names and works, Pound's literary and historical allusions, and other exotica, with exegeses based upon Pound's sources. Also included is a supplementary bibliography of works on Pound, newly updated, and an alphabetized index to The Cantos.

U.S. Cruisers: An Illustrated Design History


Norman Friedman - 1984
    combatant types, as well as plans, profiles, and numerous detailed photographs.

Indian Country


Peter Matthiessen - 1984
    Matthiessen's urgent accounts and absorbing journalistic details make it impossible to ignore the message they so eloquently proclaim.

Shoeless Joe Jackson Comes to Iowa: Stories


W.P. Kinsella - 1984
    Ten stories deal with a farmer who loves baseball, a carpenter repairing a broken doll, a clever prostitute, and a wandering salesman

The Chosen Place, The Timeless People


Paule Marshall - 1984
    The advance team for an ambitious American research project arrives, and the tense ambivalent relationships that evolve -- between natives and foreigners, blacks and whites, haves and have-nots -- keenly dramatize the vicissitudes of power.

Selected Poems


Kenneth Rexroth - 1984
    The late Kenneth Rexroth ( 1905-1982) is surely one of the most readable of this century's great American poets. He is also one of the most sophisticated.

Attitudes Toward History


Kenneth Burke - 1984
    In this volume we find Burke’s first entry into what he calls his theory of Dramatism; and here also is an important section on the nature of ritual.

The Mighty Thor in The Ballad of Beta Ray Bill


Walter Simonson - 1984
    Thor 337-340

Prince of Peace


James Carroll - 1984
    Risking his vows to the priesthood and his status as a Korean War hero, Michael Maguire struggles with God and country in this thrilling novel of faith, truth, and honor, "so rich and vital it leaves you breathless" (Chicago Tribune).

Something Said


Gilbert Sorrentino - 1984
    Something Said collects in a single volume these definitive readings of such major twentieth-century innovators as William Carlos Williams, Edward Dahlberg, Hubert Selby, John Hawkes, Flann O'Brien, William Gaddis, Italo Calvino, John Hawkes, and Robert Creeley, along with critical writings on film, pop culture, and visual art. Featuring seventy-two pieces in all, this new expanded edition includes twenty-five pieces written since the publication of the first edition in 1984, and demonstrates Sorrentino's concern for the craft of writing and the development of an American aesthetic.

Nos âmes la nuit


Kent Haruf - 1984
    Her husband died years ago, as did his wife, and in such a small town they naturally have known of each other for decades; in fact, Addie was quite fond of Louis's wife. His daughter lives hours away in Colorado Springs, her son even farther away in Grand Junction, and Addie and Louis have long been living alone in houses now empty of family, the nights so terribly lonely, especially with no one to talk with. Their brave adventures - their pleasures and their difficulties - are hugely involving and truly resonant, making Our Souls at Night the perfect final installment to this beloved writer's enduring contribution to American literature.

Our Souls at Night


Kent Haruf - 1984
    Her husband died years ago, as did his wife, and in such a small town they naturally have known of each other for decades; in fact, Addie was quite fond of Louis's wife. His daughter lives hours away in Colorado Springs, her son even farther away in Grand Junction, and Addie and Louis have long been living alone in houses now empty of family, the nights so terribly lonely, especially with no one to talk with. Their brave adventures - their pleasures and their difficulties - are hugely involving and truly resonant, making Our Souls at Night the perfect final installment to this beloved writer's enduring contribution to American literature.

Your Time, My Time


Ann Walsh - 1984
    While she is in the peaceful graveyard of nearby Barkerville she finds a small gold ring that has very special powers. By twisting the ring on her finger, Elizabeth is transported to the nineteenth century during the heyday of the gold rush. Caught between her present life with family and friends and a love in the past, Elizabeth learns more than history.

41 Stories


O. Henry - 1984
    Henry evokes wordplay that is dazzling, inventive, wry, and humorous. This anthology includes forty-one stories that continue to captivate generation after generation of readers, including "The Gift of the Magi", "The Furnished Room", and those which demonstrate the technical genius and wide range of O. Henry's world.

The Bill James Baseball Abstract 1984


Bill James - 1984
    

Starboard Wine


Samuel R. Delany - 1984
    Rather, it uses the future as a means of talking about the present and its potentiality. By recognizing a text's specific "difference", we begin to see the quality of its particulars. Through riveting analyses of works by Joanna Russ, Robert Heinlein, Theodore Sturgeon, and Thomas M. Disch, Delany reveals critical strategies for reading that move beyond overwrought theorizing and formulaic thinking. Throughout, the author performs the kinds of careful inquiry and urgent speculation that he calls others to engage in.

Miami Blues


Charles Willeford - 1984
    With his guard down, he doesn’t think twice when he hears a knock on the door. The next day, he finds himself in the hospital, badly bruised and with his jaw wired shut. He thinks back over ten years of cases wondering who would want to beat him into unconsciousness, steal his gun and badge, and most importantly, make off with his prized dentures. But the pieces never quite add up to revenge, and the few clues he has keep connecting to a dimwitted hooker, and her ex-con boyfriend and the bizarre murder of a Hare Krishna pimp.Chronically depressed, constantly strapped for money, always willing to bend the rules a bit, Hoke Moseley is hardly what you think of as the perfect cop, but he is one of the the greatest detective creations of all time.

Mrs. Todd's Shortcut, from Skeleton Crew


Stephen King - 1984
    Ophelia Todd is always looking for a shorter distance between two points, so she just wrinkles the map a little--until she gets caught in one of the wrinkles.Description: 1 audiocassette (78 min.) : analog, Dolby processed.

Mises and Austrian Economics: A Personal View


Ron Paul - 1984
    17Ludwig von Mises, The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality (South Holland, ...

Young Hearts Crying


Richard Yates - 1984
    Every failure he suffers in his efforts to become established as a professional writer weighs against the uneasy knowledge that his wife, Lucy, has an untapped private fortune amounting to millions of dollars. Lucy, for her part, always elegant but often shy, is never quite certain what is expected of her. And as a couple, the Davenports are repeatedly dismayed at meeting other people whose lives appear brighter and better than their own. In this magnificent novel, at once bitterly sad and achingly funny, Richard Yates again shows himself to be the supreme, tenderly ironic chronicler of the 'American Dream' and its casualties. 'Yates is good at bad couples, sad, sour marriages, young hopes corroded by suburban life...These are bitterly perceptive books, depressing but difficult to put down' Grace Ingoldby, New Statesman'Yates intends to spare his readers nothing. He is a truthful and ruthless writer' Robert Nye, Guardian'A natural story-teller' Nina Bawden, Daily Telegraph

The Day We Bombed Utah


John G. Fuller - 1984
    George, Utah. Within a few days, more than 4,000 sheep were dead of a mysterious illness. Within a few years, a plague of cancer and birth defects had rippled through the area- a plague that may have caused the cancer-related deaths of John Wayne and over 100 other cast and crew members of The Conqueror, which was filmed only miles from the test site. And when the survivors claimed compensation, the government successfully denied all responsibility.This uncompromising expose' of "the greatest government cover-up of all time" brings to light a shocking thirty-year conspiracy of falsified reports, suborned witnesses, and "lost evidence"- a record of shame that, like the testing itself, continues to this day.

Apples and Pears and Other Stories


Guy Davenport - 1984
    

Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community


Charles Joyner - 1984
    Reconstructs daily life in a Lowcountry slave community.

How Far She Went


Mary Hood - 1984
    "The madder she got, the greener everything grew."

Literary Criticism, Vol 2: French Writers / Other European Writers / Prefaces to the New York Edition


Henry James - 1984
    It includes reviews of a great number of European writers, especially French writers, along with more general essays and the Prefaces Henry James wrote for the New York Edition of his works, published between 1907 and 1909.The collection attests to James’s nearly unparalleled creative energy and to the reach of his theoretical and interpretive curiosity. His unique authority as a commentator draws upon the European-American contrast that is a central circumstance of his own fiction. A member of intellectual circles on both continents, he became the foremost interpreter to American readers of the literary and cultural life of Europe.More than one hundred reviews and essays are gathered by author, so that readers can trace the development of James’s complex, meditative, and highly volatile attitudes toward a wide spectrum of literature. James reviews the formidable Honoré de Balzac (with his “huge, all compassing, all desiring, all devouring love of reality”), Gustave Flaubert (“a pearl-diver, breathless in the thick element while he groped for the priceless word”), and Ivan Turgenev, the Russian visitor in Paris, with whom James felt great personal affinity, even though Tugenev “lacked the immense charm of absorbed inventiveness.”James delivers his critical judgments with great elegance and point, especially when he discusses the performance of other critics like Hippolyte Taine and Augustin Sainte-Beuve, and, of course, he can be wonderfully acerbic. An early moralistic essay on Baudelaire finds Poe “vastly the greater charlatan of the two, and the greater genius.”James brings his critical zest, exhilaration, and independence of judgment to bear on writers as diverse as Alphonse Daudet, George Sand, Victor Hugo, Guy de Maupassant, Théophile Gautier, J. W. von Goethe, and Gabriele D’Annunzio.Readers will find, in the complete collection of the Prefaces, one of literature’s most revealing artistic autobiographies, a wholly absorbing account of how writing gets written, and a vision of the possibilities for fiction which critics and novelists of later times will find immensely instructive and liberating.

Like a Lamb to Slaughter


Lawrence Block - 1984
    In this ingenious collection, multiple award-winning mystery author Lawrence Block leads us into dark, unprotected fields, where human sheep gather in terror of predatory wolves. And we follow willingly-through a hayseed's bloody mid-life crisis, into the explosive heart of a vengeful CPA:s account-balancing...and onto the streets with p.i. Matthew Scudder, as he spends an inheritance from a baglady to hunt down the old woman's killer.

The Source: A Guidebook of American Genealogy


Arlene H. Eakle - 1984
    an excellent beginner's guidebook to researching your family history

Young Mutants


Isaac Asimov - 1984
    A collection of short stories by a variety of authors about children with one common characteristic--they are all mutants.

Literary Criticism, Vol. 1: Essays on Literature / American Writers / English Writers


Henry James - 1984
    This Library of America volume and its companion are a fitting testimony to his unprecedented achievement. They offer the only comprehensive collection of his critical writings ever assembled, more than one-third of which have never appeared in book form.This first volume focuses especially on his responses to American and English writers; the second volume contains his essays on European literature and the Prefaces to the New York Edition of his fiction.From 1864 until virtually the end of his life, James displayed an astonishing range and catholicity of critical interests, touching on nearly every facet of literature in America, England, and Europe. Here are his most important theoretical essays, including his witty and daring declarations of the novelist’s freedom in “The Art of Fiction,” “The Future of the Novel,” and “The Science of Criticism”—a gently ironic title from a writer who regarded criticism as a form of art.Appreciations of Ralph Waldo Emerson (“I knew he was great, greater than any of our friends”), pungent comments (which he later regretted) on Walt Whitman’s “Drum-Taps,” and assessments of Louisa May Alcott, Edgar Allan Poe, his friend and admirer William Dean Howells, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Francis Parkman, and scores of other American writers are joined, in revealing proximity, to commentaries on nearly every important English writer of fiction (and some poets, such as the Brownings) during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.These reviews of English writers include James’s stunning essay on Charles Dickens’s Our Mutual Friend, his provocative discussions of George Eliot, and his tough but appreciative estimates of Anthony Trollope, Matthew Arnold, Benjamin Disraeli, Elizabeth Gaskell, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, William Morris, Rupert Brooke, Ouida, Algernon Charles Swinburne, and Robert Louis Stevenson. Also included here is his great essay on Shakespeare’s The Tempest. All of these pieces are gathered under the author considered, so that James’s supple changes in attitude can be followed across the years.Of particular interest, both critically and biographically, are James’s commentaries on Nathaniel Hawthorne, including his still-controversial book-length study of 1879. His estimates of his predecessor’s work remain highly debatable, but are perhaps more interesting as evidence of his own feelings about being an American writer of a later and, as he assumed, more complex time.Finally, this volume includes two invaluable collections: his “American Letters” and “London Notes,” wherein, with unsurpassed tact and grandeur of mind, he introduces readers of his native and of his adopted country to each other.

Harmony of the World: Stories


Charles Baxter - 1984
    Whether he is writing about the players in a rickety bisexual love triangle or a woman visiting her husband in a nursing home, probing the psychic mainspring of a grimly obsessive weight lifter or sifting through the layers of resentment, need, and pity in a friendship that has gone on a few decades too long, Baxter enchants us with the elegant balance of his prose and the unexpectedness of his insights. Long admired and now once more available in paperback, Harmony of the World is a masterpiece of lucidity and compassion.

Black Women Writers (1950-1980): A Critical Evaluation


Mari Evans - 1984
    This unique volume provides each writers reflection on her work, an evaluation of that writer by two perceptive critics, and detailed biographical and bibliographical data.  Included are Maya Angelou, Toni Cade Bambara, Nikki Giovanni, Toni Morrison, Alice Walker, and ten other outstanding writers.

Fast Lanes


Jayne Anne Phillips - 1984
    Jayne Anne Phillips has always been a master of portraiture, both in her widely acclaimed novels and in her short fiction.  The stories in Fast Lanes demonstrated the breadth of her talent in a tour de force of voices, offering elegantly rendered views into the lives of characters torn between the liberation of detachment and the desire to connect.Three stories are collected in this edition for the first time: in "Alma," and adolescent daughter is made the confidante of her lonely mother; "Counting" traces the history of a dommed love affair; and "Callie" evokes memories of the haunting death of a child in 1920's West Virginia.  Along with the original seven stories from Fast Lanes--each told in extraordinary first person narratives that have been hailed by critics as virtuoso performances--these incandescent portraits offer windows into the lives of an entire generation of Americans, demonstrating again and again why Jayne Anne Phillips remains one of our most powerful writers.

The Polish Peasant in Europe and America: a classic work in immigration history


William I. Thomas - 1984
    The new introduction and epilogue make the book especially valuable in teaching United States history survey courses as well as immigration history and introductory sociology courses.

The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones


Amiri Baraka - 1984
    A driving force behind the Black Arts Movement, the prolific Baraka retells his experiences from his participation in avant-garde literature after World War II and his role in Black nationalism after the assassination of Malcolm X to his conversion to Islam and his commitments to an international socialist vision. When The Autobiography of LeRoi Jones was first published in 1984, the publisher made substantial cuts in the copy. Under the careful direction of the author, the book has been restored to its original form. This is the first complete and unexpurgated version of Baraka’s life and work.

Another man's poison: The life and writings of columnist George Frazier


Charles Fountain - 1984
    

Time to Go


Stephen Dixon - 1984
    Part short story collection, part novel, Time to Go moves from despair to hope, from the passing of things—time, relationships, businesses, chances—to the coming of marriage, stability, family, a new life. It is a book that can be in turn frightening and funny, touching and tough—and one that is, on occasion, all these things at once.