Here are nineteen stories that explore her signature themes: wounded adolescence, loneliness in marriage, and the tragicomedy of life in the South. Here too are "The Member of the Wedding" and "The Ballad of the Sad Cafe," novellas that Tennessee Williams judged to be "assuredly among the masterpieces of our language." (A Mariner Reissue)

    Dick the greatest science fiction mind on any planet. Since his untimely death in 1982, interest in his works has continued to mount, and his reputation has been further enhanced by a growing body of critical attention. Dick won the prestigious Hugo Award for best novel of 1963 for "The Man in the High Castle, " and in the last year of his life, the film Blade Runner was made from his novel Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?This volume includes all of the writer's earliest short and medium-length fiction (including some previously unpublished stories) covering the years 1952-1955. These fascinating stories include "Beyond Lies the Wub, " "The Short Happy Life of the Brown Oxford, " "The Variable Man, " and twenty-two others.

    A one-time detective and a master of deft understatement, Hammett virtually invented the hard-boiled crime novel. In The Maltese Falcon, Sam Spade, a private eye with his own solitary code of ethics, tangles with a beautiful and treacherous woman whose loyalties shift at the drop of a dime. The Thin Man introduces Hammett's wittiest creations, Nick and Nora Charles, who solve homicides in between wisecracks and martinis. And in Red Harvest, Hammett's anonymous tough-guy detective, the Continental Op, takes on the entire town of Poisonville in a deadly war against corruption."Dashiell Hammett is a master of the detective novel, yes, but also one hell of a writer."—Boston Globe”Hammett was spare, hard-boiled, but he did over and over what only the best writers can ever do. He wrote scenes that seemed never to have been written before.”—Raymond Chandler”Hammett’s prose was clean and entirely unique. His characters were as sharply and economically defined as any in American fiction.”—The New York Times”As a novelist of realistic intrigue, Hammett was unsurpassed in his own or any time.”—Ross Macdonald”Dashiell Hammett’s dialogues can be compared only with the best in Hemingway.”—André Gide”Hammett is one of the best contemporary American writers.”—Gertrude Stein

    Drawing on unprecedented access to the family and its private papers, Pulitzer Prize-winning and bestselling historian Doris Kearns Goodwin takes readers from John Francis "Honey Fitz" Fitzgerald's baptism in 1863 through his reign as mayor of Boston, to the inauguration of his grandson as president ninety-eight years later. Each character emerges unforgettably: the young, shrewdly political Rose Fitzgerald; her powerful, manipulative husband, Joseph P. Kennedy; and the "Golden Trio" of Kennedy children -- Joe Jr., Kathleen, and Jack -- whose promise was eclipsed by the family's legacy of tragedy. Through the prism of two self-made families, Goodwin reveals the ambitions and the hopes that form the fabric of the American nation.

    Tracing the lives, loves, and aspirations of two couples who move between Vermont and Wisconsin, it is a work of quiet majesty, deep compassion, and powerful insight into the alchemy of friendship and marriage.

    With their brutally frank self-exposure and emotional immediacy, Plath's poems, from "Lady Lazarus" to "Daddy," have had an enduring influence on contemporary poetry.

    Barthelme spotlights the idiosyncratic, haughty, sometimes downright ludicrous behavior of human beings, but it is style rather than content which takes precedence.

    In these twenty-seven stories, written and published while America was in the grip of McCarthyism, Philip K. Dick speaks up for ordinary people and against militarism, paranoia and xenophobia - and always in his marvellously varied, quirky and entertainingly idiosyncratic style.Comprising:The Cookie Lady;Beyond the Door;Second Variety;Jon's World;The Cosmic Poachers;Progeny;Some Kinds of Life;Martians Come in Clouds;The Commuter;The World She Wanted;A Surface Raid;Project: Earth;The Trouble with Bubbles;Breakfast at Twilight;A Present for Pat;The Hood Maker;Of Withered Apples;Human Is;Adjustment Team;The Impossible Planet;Imposter;James P. Crow;Planet for Transients;Small Town;Souvenir;Survey Team;Prominent Author.

    Wit and repartee permeate his work — from the short, light pieces to his great novel Adventures of Huckleberry Finn and even later, in dark meditations on the human condition where his humor takes on a cynical, satirical twist.This remarkably inexpensive volume gathers together hundreds of Twain's most memorable quips and comments on life, love, history, culture, travel, and a diversity of other topics that occupied his thoughts over 50 years of writing and lecturing.An invaluable, ready reference for writers, speakers, and others in search of amusing and insightful quotes, this entertaining and thought-provoking compilation is also an ideal introduction to Twain's inimitable style and thought.

    

    Then one day I started writing . . .' Truman Capote began writing at the age of eight, and never looked back. A Capote Reader contains much of the author's published work: his brilliant and prolific oeuvre of fiction, travel sketches, portraits, reportage and essays. It includes all twelve of his celebrated short stories, together with The Grass Harp and Breakfast at Tiffany's. There are vivid sketches of places from Tangiers to Brooklyn, and fascinating insights into the lives of his contemporaries, from Jane Bowles and Cecil Beaton to Marilyn Monroe and Tennessee Williams. Generous space is devoted to reportage including 'The Muses Are Heard', on his trip to Communist Europe in the 1950s with the cast of Porgy and Bess. In all, A Capote Reader demonstrates the chameleon talents of one of America's most versatile and gifted writers.

    But then a voluptuous young widow badgers Rabo into telling his life story—and Vonnegut in turn tells us the plain, heart-hammering truth about man’s careless fancy to create or destroy what he loves.

    Rock Springs is a masterpiece of taut narration, cleanly chiseled prose, and empathy so generous that it feels like a kind of grace.

    It stole everything it hadn't bothered to buy -- land deeds, private homes, and ultimately, the souls of its men and women.In 1921, an army of 10,000 unemployed pro-union coal miners took up arms and threatened to overthrow the governments of two West Virginia counties. They were greeted by U.S. Army airplanes, bombs, and poison gas. This book recounts the real story of what happened--and where it all went wrong.Four people tell this powerful, deeply moving tale: Activist Mayor C. J. Marcum. Fierce, loveless union man Rondal Lloyd. Gutsy nurse Carrie Bishop, who loved Rondal. And lonely, Sicilian immigrant Rosa Angelelli, who lost four sons to the deadly mines. They all bear witness to nearly forgotten events of history, culminating in the final, tragic Battle of Blair Mountain--the first crucial battle of a war that has yet to be won.

    There have been numerous books about mother and daughter, but none has dealt with this closest of filial relations as directly or as ruthlessly. Gornick's groundbreaking book confronts what Edna O'Brien has called "the prinicpal crux of female despair": the unacknowledged Oedipal nature of the mother-daughter bond.Born and raised in the Bronx, the daughter of "urban peasants," Gornick grows up in a household dominated by her intelligent but uneducated mother's romantic depression over the early death of her husband. Next door lives Nettie, an attractive widow whose calculating sensuality appeals greatly to Vivian. These women with their opposing models of femininity continue, well into adulthood, to affect Gornick's struggle to find herself in love and in work.As Gornick walks with her aged mother through the streets of New York, arguing and remembering the past, each wins the reader's admiration: the caustic and clear-thinking daughter, for her courage and tenacity in really talking to her mother about the most basic issues of their lives, and the still powerful and intuitively-wise old woman, who again and again proves herself her daughter's mother.Unsparing, deeply courageous, Fierce Attachments is one of the most remarkable documents of family feeling that has been written, a classic that helped start the memoir boom and remains one of the most moving examples of the genre.

    Its eleven "exhibits" undermine black stereotypes old and new, and return to the facts of what being black means. " Mr. Wolfe is the kind of satirist who takes no prisoners. The shackles of the past have been defied by Mr. Wolfe's fearless humor, and it's a most liberating revolt!" - Frank Rich, The New York Times; "Brings forth a bold new voice that is bound to shake up blacks and whites with separate-but-equal impartiality. True satire." - Jack Kroll, Newsweek.

    THE WORLD AS I FOUND IT centers around Ludwig Wittgenstein, one of the most powerfully magnetic philosophers of our time--brilliant, tortured, mercurial, forging his own solitary path while leaving a permanent mark on all around him.

    It follows the interwoven destinies of families of Indians, lordly Dutch patrons, and yeomen.

    The insects are vying for world domination; the inventors of electricity stand in evil opposition. Bug , a young man, rebels against his own kind and joins forces with the insects. Wayne, a thug, allies himself with the malevolent forces of electricity and vows to assassinate the preying mantis who tends bar in Oregon. A brusque La Pasionara with the sprightly name of Millie leads an intrepid band of revolutionaries. You Bright and Risen Angels is the work of an extraordinary imagination. In this free-wheeling novel of epic proportions, William T. Vollmann has crafted a biting, hilarious satire of history, technology, politics, and misguided love.

    Set on the vast northern Great Plains, where the earth has only recently come beneath the plow, the stories and novels in this Library of America volume partake of an impressive physical space and a uniquely American ethnic. Panoramas of lonely prairie and open sky reflect the heroic aspirations and stoicism of her characters and the rebelliousness of their spirit.The Troll Garden (1905) was Cather’s first book of fiction. It contains seven stories, including the justly famous “Paul’s Case,” a study of a young man who escapes the world of the ordinary and briefly tastes the life of romance. Also included is “The Sculptor’s Funeral,” about a world-famous young artist who remains without honor in his native town.O Pioneers! (1913) is the story of a young Swedish-American girl, Alexandra Bergson, who is left to manage the homestead farm when her father dies. Although she must contend with the shiftlessness of two brothers and the brutal murder of a third, her instinctive identification with the forces of nature helps bring the land to abundant fruition, and she finds her own happiness in a kindred spirit—an engraver, gold prospector, and fellow dreamer.In her lyrical novel The Song of the Lark (1915), Cather’s love of music and theater and her faith in the spiritual influence of the Western landscape find expression in the ardent and talented Thea Kronborg. Moving from Colorado to Chicago to the primitive Southwest, Thea finds her destiny not in romance, but as a great Wagnerian soprano in the Metropolitan Opera. Her success, and that of all Cather’s heroines, derives from what the author calls “the naïve, generous country that gave on its joyous force.”A masterpiece at once austere and exuberant, historical and mythical, My Ántonia (1918) portrays a family of Bohemian emigrants on the Nebraska frontier. Despite the suicide of her father and the desertion of the father of her child, Ántonia Shimerda retains an unselfish nature that allows her to undergo years of drudgery and still affirm a courageous passion for life and motherhood—a dauntlessness intrinsically rooted in the awesome wonder of the prairie.One of Ours, winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1922, portrays the blighting effects of twentieth-century progress on a free spirit from the American frontier. Claude Wheeler, its hero, is an imaginative, restless young man who leaves his claustrophobic small town to become a soldier in France during World War I. The Old World shows him culture, art, generosity, and appreciation, and also the horror, waste, and tragedy of war.

    S. Merwin's first book since the publication five years ago of his Opening the Hand.Almost no other poet of our time has been able to voice in so subtle a fashion such a profound series of comments on the passing of history over the contemporary scene. To do this, he seems to have reinvented the poem -- so that the experience of reading Merwin is unlike the reading of any other poetry. In such famous books as The Lice, The Moving Target and (most recently) Opening the Hand, he has produced a body of work of great profundity and power made from the simplest and most beautiful poetic speech.The poems in this new book are concerned with intimacy and wholeness, and are made of the relations with people, with places, past and present, and with history and how the world endures it.Merwin can now rightfully be called a master, and this book shows in every way why this is the case.

    The first no-holds-barred, straight-on, uncensored look at Dallas politics ever to come from within the city itself, seeking to answer the question: Why was Dallas spared the agony of racial turmoil in the 60s--and what effect is that having now?

    Lynn Andrews, bestselling author of Star Woman and Jaguar Woman, continues her "chronicle of the spirit" with an extraordinary journey to th e wilderness of Central Australia, where she discovers the power of crystals.

    

    His work ranges from “What Are Those Monkeys Doing?” in which he links the paintings of Rousseau to the writings of Rimbaud and Flaubert, to “Imaginary Americas,” a survey of the different roles America has filled in the imagination of Europeans. Davenport, 1 of the foremost American critics and intellectuals of the 20th century, brings his piercing intellect, encyclopedic references, and careful eye for detail to each piece in Every Force Evolves a Form.   Whether writing on the philosophy behind modernism or a study of table manners, the paintings of Henri Rousseau or the design of Shaker handicrafts, Davenport always devotes his full attention and multi-angled analysis to the subject at hand. To read this thought-provoking collection is to see the inner-workings of Davenport’s brilliant mind, with its varied fascinations and unparalleled insights.

    Contents:The Jaguar Hunter (1985)The Night of White Bhairab (1984)Salvador (1984)How the Wind Spoke at Madaket (1985)Black Coral (1984)The End of Life as We Know It (1985)A Traveler's Tale (1984)Mengele (1985)The Man Who Painted the Dragon Griaule (1984)A Spanish Lesson (1985)

    Photographs.

    Arranged in seven parts and culminating in the superb "The Showings: Lady Julian of Norwich," Breathing the Water draws the readers deep into spiritual domains––not in order to leave the world behind, but to reanimate our sometimes dormant love for it.

    With a bias toward realism editors Raymond Carver and Tom Jenks have selected fiction that “tells a story”–and tells it with a masterful handling of language, situation, and insight.But what is so special about this volume is that it mirrors our age, our concerns, and our lives. Whether it’s the end of a marriage, as in Bobbie Ann Manson’s “Shiloh,” or the struggle with self-esteem and weight in Andre Dubus’s “The Fat Girl,” the 36 works included her probe issues that give us that “shock of recognition” that is the hallmark of great art—wonderful, absorbing fiction that will be read and reread for decades to come.

    But in fact, Patricia Nelson Limerick argues, the West has a history grounded in primary economic reality; in hardheaded questions of profit, loss, competition, and consolidation. In The Legacy of Conquest, she interprets the stories and the characters in a new way: the trappers, traders, Indians, farmers, oilmen, cowboys, and sheriffs of the Old West "meant business" in more ways than one, and their descendents mean business today."Written with extraordinary grace and understanding…[this book] returns the Western American past to the mainstream of national history. …Most important of all is her eloquent plea for Westerners, whether Anglo, Hispanic, Indian, Asian, or black, to see the West as a shared place, a splendid whole which each has helped create." -- Howard R. Lamar

    Testifying to Levertov's growing strength and technical mastery as a poet, Poems 1968-1972 also affirms the clarity of her vision in its resistance to the Vietnam War and its "opposition to the whole system of insane greed of which war is only the inevitable expression."The third retrospective volume of her poetry to be published to date by New Directions, Poems 1968-1972 carries forward the record of Denise Levertov's remarkable poetic development from Collected Earlier Poems 1940-1960 and Poems 1960-1967.

    Yet through an intricate overlay of scenes, voices, fact, and myth, this expanding fiction finds its way also across continents and into earlier and future times and indeed the Earth, to reveal connections between the most disparate lives and systems of feeling and power. At its breathing heart, it plots the fugue like and field like densities of late-twentieth-century life. McElroy rests a global vision on two people, apartment-house neighbors who never quite meet. Except, that is, in the population of others whose histories cross theirs believers and skeptics; lovers, friends, and hermits; children, parents, grandparents, avatars, and, apparently, angels. For Women and Men shows how the families through which we pass let one person's experience belong to that of many, so that we throw light on each other as if these kinships were refracted lives so real as to be reincarnate. A mirror of manners, the book is also a meditation on the languages rich, ludicrous, exact, and also American in which we try to grasp the world we're in. Along the kindred axes of separation and intimacy Women and Men extends the great line of twentieth-century innovative fiction.

    This remarkable collection of prose poems prove that startling new insights are possible when philosophical formulations are turned on their heads.

    Pele lives in Hawaiian hearts and minds as the personification of volcanic majesty and power. Having the power to create new land, she has a volcanic personality - an impetuous, lusty nature, jealous, unpredictable, capable of sudden fury and great violence. Yet she can also be gentle, loving and as serene as her forests of ferns and flowering trees.

    One of the cars he is hired to demolish is a snow-white Cadillac that was supposed to be a present for the Big Bopper, who died in the Iowa plane crash that killed Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens. Gastin has a change of heart and takes off in the car, heading for Texas where the Bopper is buried. Armed with a thousand hits of Benzedrine and chased by adversaries real and imagined, Gastin navigates a road trip that covers many miles and states of mind. Traveling in time from the Beat era to the dawn of the sixties, from the coffeehouses of North Beach to the open plains of America, Gastin picks up some extraordinary hitchhikers: the self-proclaimed "world's greatest salesman," the Reverend Double-Gone Johnson, and a battered housewife with a box of old 45s. As the miles and sleepless hours roll by, Gastin's trip becomes a blur of fantasy and reality fueled by a soundtrack of classic rock 'n' roll.

    .

    Linguistics. Originally appearing in 1977 and now in its 11th printing, THE NEW SENTENCE by Ron Silliman is a classic collection of essays by one of the sharpest minds in American contemporary poetic thought. It is a collection with rich insight into Silliman's own monumental poetical work and the writing of his peers, a book which both illuminates the concerns of the era in which it was written and radiates outward with a tremendous scope that continues to bear fruit for the contemporary reader. Ron Silliman is a terrific prose critic...positively bristles with intellectual and political energy of a very high order -Bruce Boone.

    Such a man was John Lathrop, a minister in the King's church, who, at the peril of his life, fought for religious freedom. This is the astounding biographical account of Lathrop's struggle and his ultimate exile to America. Winner of the National Freedom's Foundation Award

    s/t: An Encyclopedia of World Literature and the ArtsReference book on the symbols, movements, genres, characters & individuals found in Arts & Literature--as well as disciplines which are effected, or are alluded to, in these fields.

    Her husband Peter, 8 1/2 months nervous, is a blue-collar storyteller with a penchant for brevity. Sailing in the Chesapeake Bay, they tell each other tales to break the writer's block handed Peter by his Muse, to ease the weight of Katherine's pregnancy, to entertain, and to enlighten. Along with their stories, we learn of the Bay itself—past and present. The beloved Chesapeake, where young Peter once indulged his Huck Finn fantasy, is in danger of becoming what he dubs a moral cesspool; where nature is in a losing struggle with man; where the hallowed Deniston School for Girls is being pressured by the CIA to sell land to the Soviet embassy; and where the old Sagamore homestead might or might not be the newest espionage station on the shoreline.

    As the Seattle Times has said of Owning It All: "You may never again see the American west in quite the same way if you take the time to view it through the eyes of William Kittredge. [This is a] stunning book." Having grown up on his family's cattle ranch in eastern Oregon, Kittredge directly confronts the contradictions and myths that lie at the heart of the Western experience: male freedom and female domesticity, the wild and the tame, self-interest and love of the land.

    Out West is an account of three separate journeys: Lewis and Clark's epic adventure through uncharted wilderness; Duncan's retracing of the historic trail, now in various ways tamed, paved, and settled; and the journey of the American West in the years in between. Readers traveling with Duncan will encounter the people who inhabit today's West: farmers and ranchers, cowboys and mountain men, Native Americans, residents of dying small towns, city dwellers who have survived cycles of boom and bust. From the Gateway Arch in St. Louis to the Oregon coast, readers will be treated to a landscape as variously impressive as its people.

    In this Library of America volume are presented the first two novels and a little-known collection of biographical sketches by the man about whom H. L. Mencken said, “American writing, before and after his time, differed almost as much as biology before and after Darwin.”Dreiser grew up poor in a series of small Indiana towns, in a large German Catholic family dominated by his father’s religious fervor. At seventeen he moved to Chicago and eventually became a newspaper reporter there and in St. Louis, Pittsburgh, and New York. Reaction to his first book, Sister Carrie (1900), was not encouraging, and after suffering a nervous breakdown, he went on to a successful career editing magazines. In 1910 he resumed writing, and over the next fifteen years published fourteen volumes of fiction, drama, travel, autobiography, and essays.“Dreiser’s first great novel, Sister Carrie …came to housebound and airless America like a great free Western wind, and to our stuffy domesticity gave us the first fresh air since Mark Twain and Whitman,” Sinclair Lewis declared in his Nobel Prize acceptance speech in 1930. Carrie Meeber, an eighteen-year-old small-town girl drawn to bustling Chicago, becomes the passionless mistress of a good-humored traveling salesman and then of an infatuated saloon manager who leaves his family and elopes with her to New York. Dreiser’s brilliant, panoramic rendering of the two cities’ fashionable theaters and restaurants, luxurious hotels and houses of commerce, alongside their unemployment, labor violence, homelessness, degradation, and despair makes this the first urban novel on a grand scale.In a 1911 review, H. L. Mencken wrote, “Jennie Gerhardt is the best American novel I have ever read, with the lonesome but Himalayan exception of Huckleberry Finn.” Beautiful, vital, generous, but morally naïve and unconscious of social conventions, Jennie is a working-class woman who emerges superior to the succession of men who exploit her. There are no villains in this novel; in Dreiser’s view, everyone is victimized by the desires that the world excites but can never satisfy.Dreiser’s embracing compassion is felt in Twelve Men (1919), a collection of portraits of men he knew and admired. They range from “My Brother Paul” (Paul Dresser, vaudeville musical comedian and composer of “On the Banks of the Wabash” and “My Gal Sal”) to “Culhane, the Solid Man,” a sanatorium owner and former wrestler. Without sentiment but with honest emotion and respect for the bleak and unvarnished truth, Dreiser recalls these anomalous individuals and the twists of fate that shaped their lives.

    Cover design and drawings by George Schneeman.

    We have a postmodern architecture, a postmodern dance, perhaps even a postmodern philosophy and a postmodern condition. But do we have a postmodern fiction?In this trenchant and lively study Brian McHale undertakes to construct a version of postmodernist fiction which encompasses forms as wide-ranging as North American metafiction, Latin American magic realism, the French New New Novel, concrete prose and science fiction. Considering a variety of theoretical approaches including those of Ingarden, Eco, Doležel, Pavel, and Hrushovski, McHale shows that the common denominator is postmodernist fictin’s ability to thrust its own ontological status into the foreground and to raise questions about the world (or worlds) in which we live. Far from being, as unsympathetic critics have sometimes complained, about nothing but itself — or even about nothing at all — postmodernist fiction in McHale’s construction of it proves to be about (among other things) those handy literary perennials, Love and Death.

    

    Written in contemporary, easy-to-understand language translated with faitful accuracy, the New International Version is one of the most appreciated Bibles you can give.Concordia's edition offers: -- Outlines of New Testament books-- Comprehensive maps-- Summary of synoptic Gospels and more. Blue hardback.

    What happened next in the Little House series? William Anderson's research and writing helps fill in the gaps of the famous pioneer family story, which has been loved for generations.

    Lee, Stonewall Jackson, J. E. B. Stuart, and many lesser commanders. But while the tarnish on such statues has done nothing to color the reputation of those great leaders, there remains one Confederate commander whose tarnished image has nothing to do with bronze monuments. Nowhere in the South does a memorial stand to Lee's intimate friend and second-in-command James Longstreet.In Lee's Tarnished Lieutenant, William Garrett Piston examines the life of James Longstreet and explains how a man so revered during the course of the war could fall from grace so swiftly and completely. Unlike other generals in gray whose deeds are familiar to southerners and northerners alike, Longstreet has the image not of a hero but of an incompetent who lost the Battle of Gettysburg and, by extension, the war itself. Piston's reappraisal of the general's military record establishes Longstreet as an energetic corps commander with an unsurpassed ability to direct troops in combat, as a trustworthy subordinate willing to place the war effort above personal ambition. He made mistakes, but Piston shows that he did not commit the grave errors at Gettysburg and elsewhere of which he was so often accused after the war.In discussing Longstreet's postwar fate, Piston analyzes the literature and public events of the time to show how the southern people, in reaction to defeat, evolved an image of themselves which bore little resemblance to reality. As a product of the Georgia backwoods, Longstreet failed to meet the popular cavalier image embodied by Lee, Stuart, and other Confederate heroes. When he joined the Republican party during Reconstruction, Longstreet forfeited his wartime reputation and quickly became a convenient target for those anxious to explain how a "superior people" could have lost the war. His new role as the villain of the Lost Cause was solidified by his own postwar writings. Embittered by years of social ostracism resulting from his Republican affiliation, resentful of the orchestrated deification of Lee and Stonewall Jackson, Longstreet exaggerated his own accomplishments and displayed a vanity that further alienated an already offended southern populace.Beneath the layers of invective and vilification remains a general whose military record has been badly maligned. Lee's Tarnished Lieutenant explains how this reputation developed--how James Longstreet became, in the years after Appomattox, the scapegoat for the South's defeat, a Judas for the new religion of the Lost Cause.

    Though nothing is as simple as it might appear to be, we could describe this as a story about Allen, who is married to Maud but having an affair with Elizabeth, who lives with Maud. Or say it is a story about fraud in the art world, horse racing, and sexual intrigues. Or, as one critic did, compare it to a Jane Austen creation, or to an Aldous Huxley novel - and be right and wrong on both counts.

    

     Stories on conversion from extreme sinfulness to extreme holiness have always attracted humankind’s attention, and this was especially so among the monks of the ancient and medieval world.  In the literature of fourth-century Egypt, alongside the wise sayings of the desert fathers and the stories illustrating their way of life, there are also the accounts of the lives of the harlots, Pelagia, Maria, Thais, Mary of Egypt, and a number of lesser figures, all of which were copied, translated, and retold throughout the Middle Ages.   In this monograph, Benedicta Ward continues the work she began in The Sayings of the Desert Fathers and The Lives of the Desert Fathers, commenting on early monastic texts by discussing the theme of Christian repentance.  She begins with May Magdalene, the archetypal penitent, and goes on to examine the desert tradition, concluding each chapter with new translations of those lives which were most influential in the early Church and on countless generations afterwards.

    Tracing the themes of knowledge, love and physical vision ("the eyes have it") through both Shakespeare's plays and the poetry, Bottom: On Shakespeare is more than a compendious act of homage by one poet to another. In effect, it lays out Zukofsky's poetics and theory of knowledge on a grand scale, tracing his themes through the whole of Western culture, from the Classical Greeks through William Carlos Williams. The second volume of Bottom: On Shakespeare consists of Celia Thaew Zukofsky's spare operatic setting of Shakespeare's Pericles, Prince of Tyre, a play in which Zukofsky saw Shakespeare rewriting the classic plots and tropes of the Odyssey. The Wesleyan edition features a new foreword by Bob Perelman.

    A passionate work about the fragile and arid West that Stegner loves

    Contents:Water's EdgeThe Real Bad FriendMan With a HobbyWelcome, StrangerTerror Over HollywoodLuck Is No LadyCrime in RhymeThe CureSock FinishBroomstick RideDaybrokeBetsy Blake Will Live ForeverTerror in Cut-Throat CoveWord of HonorThat Old Black MagicThe Deadliest ArtThe Screaming PeopleThe Hungry EyeShow BizThe Gloating PlaceThe Man Who Knew WomenThe Big KickNight SchoolSabbaticalThe Funnel of God'Til Death Do Us PartThe Show Must Go OnA Matter of LifePin-Up GirlThe Baldheaded MirageThe Masterpiece

    We adopt a stance, a predictive strategy of interpretation that presupposes the rationality of the people - or other entities - we are hoping to understand and predict.The 10 essays included here represent the vanguard of Dennett's thought, push his theories into surprising new territory, and reveal fresh lines of inquiry into fundamental issues in psychology, artificial intelligence, and evolutionary theory as well as traditional issues in the philosophy of mind."Dennett's essays are vivid, witty and admirably provocative-"- P. N. Johnson-Laird, The London Review of Books"This is Dennett in action: reflecting, joking, clarifying, criticizing - and always stimulating... Anyone interested in the philosophy of mind will find both interest and excitement in these essays."- Margaret Boden, Sussex UniversityDaniel C. Dennett is Distinguished Arts and Sciences Professor at Tufts University and the author of Brainstorms and Elbow Room.

    He was so captivated that upon returning to the Tidewater Plantation in the Virginia Colony, he married Aurora because she held an uncanny resemblance to that raven-haired beauty. But it was in appearance, only. Now, abandoned by Aurora and left to raise a child on his own, Brandon faces a lonely future and needs a governess for his daughter.When Shannon arrives in Tidewater, she's immediately mistaken for the wayward Aurora and is not greeted with enthusiasm by anyone except Brandon's daughter. Brandon recognizes Shannon as the young girl who captivated him four years prior and though he tries to resist, cannot deny the attraction he feels.Then Brandon's missing wife's parents arrive to visit, forcing Shannon to play the role of Brandon's wife, which soon leads to mutual attraction. But, the love growing between them is soon tested when Aurora returns with her lover and a shocking secret.PUBLISHER'S NOTE: For fans of Jo Goodman we bring you one of her earliest books freshly edited, by Jo Goodman herself, for today's readers. Fans and readers of Mary Jo Putney, Kat Martin, Jo Beverly, Courtney Milan and Stephanie Laurens will not want to miss this tale of mistaken identity, intrigue and second-chance love.ALSO BY JO GOODMAN:Violet FireScarlet LiesSweet FireTHE MCCLELLANSCrystal PassionSeaswept AbandonTempting TormentTHE HAMILTON FAMILYMore Than You KnowMore Than You WishedTHE COMPASS CLUBLet Me Be The OneEverything I Ever WantedAll I Ever NeededBeyond A Wicked KissTHE DENNEHY SISTERSOnly My LoveMy Heart's DesireForever in My HeartAlways in My DreamsOnly in My ArmsTHE MARSHALL BROTHERSHer Defiant HeartHis Heart's RevengeTHE THORNE BROTHERS TRILOGYMy Steadfast HeartMy Reckless HeartWith All My HeartMEET JO GOODMAN:Jo Goodman is a licensed professional counselor working with children and families in West Virginia’s Northern Panhandle. Always a fan of the happily ever after, Jo turned to writing romances early in her career as a child care worker when she realized the only life script she could control was the one she wrote herself. She is inspired by the resiliency and courage of the children she meets and feels privileged to be trusted with their stories, the ones that they alone have the right to tell.Once upon a time, Jo believed she was going to be a marine biologist. She knows she is lucky that seasickness made her change course. She lives with her family in Colliers, West Virginia.

    Revised Final Draft. May 3, 1986 Producer: Rob Reiner..

    The story was collected in his anthology Welcome To The Monkey House. The story centers on a character named Harry Nash, who is an extremely shy & characterless small-town man. However, whenever he takes a part in the local, amateur theater production he becomes the character to an overwhelming extent. Soon Helene Shaw, a recent addition to the town, falls in love with Nash--or with his character in the play.

    This beautiful book introduces readers to their architecture, furniture, crafts, inventions, and simple way of life.

    

    Whether critiquing the politics of socialist realist art in “We Often Think of Lenin at the Clothespin Factory,” revisiting biblical tales in “Jonah,” or depicting an ancient Greek philosopher in “The Meadow,” Davenport demonstrates his talent for blending high-minded ideas with literary wit.   Davenport’s writing is at its most confident when the author weaves between time periods and ideas, such as when he revisits Descartes through the eyes of an ancient Greek skeptic in “Pyrrhon of Elis,” wherein a doubting philosopher declares, “I may not be, I think”; or in “The Bicycle Rider,” in which a doctoral student studying imagery of demons in the Gospels is visited by angelic spirits and attempts to save the life of a nihilistic prostitute. In these stories and the others collected in The Jules Verne Steam Balloon, Davenport’s signature approach to culture and humanity is on bold display.

    Customize your trip with simple planning tools • Top experiences & attractions • Practical advice for getting around • Easy-to-read color regional mapsExplore the Portland, Seattle, British Columbia and beyond • Discerning Fodor’s Choice picks for hotels, restaurants, sights, and more • “Word of Mouth” tips from fellow Fodor’s travelers • Illustrated features on whale-watching, wineries, and Pike's Market Place • Best open-air adventures, local breweries, and regional cuisineOpinions from destination experts • Fodor’s writers reveal their favorite local haunts • Revised annually to provide the latest information

    Fully revised tenth anniversary edition of this classic text.

    The text is a blend of documentary sources and terrain descriptions, combining official reports and observations of the commanding officers.

    Assembled from regimental histories as well as diaries, letters, and memoirs from men of both Union and Confederate armies, this is a stirring account of the final and decisive Shenandoah Valley campaign.

    The American enslavement of blacks and the Russian subjection of serfs flourished in different ways and varying degrees until they were legally abolished in the mid-nineteenth century. Historian Peter Kolchin compares and contrasts the two systems over time in this magisterial book, which clarifies the organization, structure, and dynamics of both social entities, highlighting their basic similarities while pointing out important differences discernible only in comparative perspective.These differences involved both the masters and the bondsmen. The independence and resident mentality of American slaveholders facilitated the emergence of a vigorous crusade to defend slavery from outside attack, whereas an absentee orientation and dependence on the central government rendered serfholders unable successfully to defend serfdom. Russian serfs, who generally lived on larger holdings than American slaves and faced less immediate interference in their everyday lives, found it easier to assert their communal autonomy but showed relatively little solidarity with peasants outside their own villages; American slaves, by contrast, were both more individualistic and more able to identify with all other blacks, both slave and free.Kolchin has discovered apparently universal features in master-bondsman relations, a central focus of his study, but he also shows their basic differences as he compares slave and serf life and chronicles patterns of resistance. If the masters had the upper hand, the slaves and serfs played major roles in shaping, and setting limits to, their own bondage.This truly unprecedented comparative work will fascinate historians, sociologists, and all social scientists, particularly those with an interest in comparative history and studies in slavery.

    She has borne the unthinkable and not gone mad, yet she is still held captive by memories of Sweet Home, the beautiful farm where so many hideous things happened. Meanwhile Sethe’s house has long been troubled by the angry, destructive ghost of her baby, who died nameless and whose tombstone is engraved with a single word: Beloved.Sethe works at beating back the past, but it makes itself heard and felt incessantly in her memory and in the lives of those around her. When a mysterious teenage girl arrives, calling herself Beloved, Sethe’s terrible secret explodes into the present.Combining the visionary power of legend with the unassailable truth of history, Morrison’s unforgettable novel is one of the great and enduring works of American literature.

    Robert Olmstead's stories transport readers into the raw, uncompromising landscape of rural New Hampshire, where simple survival is always complicated by desperate acts or murderous accidents: boys drowning a bagful of puppies, men buried alive under a mountain of corn silage, suicide on a foreclosed farm.

    Saturs:Baltais Klusums; Dzīvotgriba; Brūnis Vilks; Vienas dienas patvērums; Baltā cilvēka ceļš; Stāsts par Kišu; Negaidītais; Pa viltus sauļu taku; Baltais Ilknis; (stāsti)Mārtins Īdens; Dzelzs Papēdis(romāni)White Fang(1906), Martin Eden(1909), The Iron Heel(1908), The White Silence(1899), Keesh, Son of Keesh(1902),The Law of Life(1901)

    Walker plays with our foreknowledge of these ancient tales—her surpassingly rich description and fantastic, eccentric plottings create some of the most original stories of our time.

    In paperback for the first time, Anthony Seeger's Why Suyá Sing considers the reasons for the importance of music for the Suyá--and by extension for other groups-- through an examination of myth telling, speech making, and singing in the initiation ceremony.   Based on over twenty-four months of field research and years of musical exchange, Seeger analyzes the different verbal arts and then focuses on details of musical performance. He reveals how Suyá singing creates euphoria out of silence, a village community out of a collection of houses, a socialized adult out of a boy, and contributes to the formation of ideas about time, space, and social identity.   This new paperback edition features an indispensable CD offering examples of the myth telling, speeches, and singing discussed, as well as a new afterword that describes the continuing use of music by the Suyá in their recent conflicts with cattle ranchers and soybean farmers.

    Winner of the 1987 Brittingham Prize in Poetry.

    The story begins with Henry I, the mechanical wizard, tinkerer, and mad genius who drove the automobile into the heart of American life and conquered the world with it. But in the end he became an embittered crank who so possessively loved the company he built that when his son, Edsel, tried to change it to suit the times, Henry destroyed him. It was left to Edsel's son, Henry II, to avenge him and save the Ford Motor Company. From the details of Henry I's illicit affair, which produced an illegitimate son, to the life and loves of "Hank the Deuce" and his celebrated feud with Lee Iacocca, this is an engrossing account of a vital chapter in American history. The authors have added a new preface to this now classic work, showing how Henry II's line lost out to the line of his brother William Clay Ford in the quest to control the company in the twentieth century.

    Powerful and businesslike, the mother is determined to put the blind horse down; her daughter is determined to save him.

    Expanded and completely updated, this 2nd edition contains thousands of contemporary and traditional slang expressions, including the newest computer lingo and slang from the Internet. Entries Feature: Definitions Pronunciations Time and place origins Editorial notes Cross-references Examples that illustrate and validate usage Synonyms and variant forms Impact symbols

    Using recently-declassified American and British documents, Gaddis argues that the postwar international system has contained previously unsuspected elements of stability. This provocative reassessment of contemporary history--particularly as it relates to the current status of Soviet-American relations--will certainly generate discussion, controversy, and important new perspectives on both past and present aspects of the age in which we live.

    A supremely entertaining book that will expand the legion of Carroll's fans.

    So it was not till 1987 that it finally saw the light of day, published by Virago.Mariana Clare, born in the Deep South of the United States, is a romantic child and a great reader of fairy tales, which convince her of the existence of eternal love. Orphaned at a young age, she has lived with her grandmother until the old lady dies, at which point Mariana decides to move to New York. Amazed and bemused by city life, she falls in with a group of bohemian young people and is quite astonished by their sexual openness...

    With breathtaking freshness, he writes of mutability, of the passage of time, and of growth, decay, and death as they are reflected in both ourselves and the changing of the seasons. By turns playful, melancholy, and mysterious, the poems in "April Galleons" reaffirm the extraordinary powers that have made Ashbery such a significant figure in the American literary landscape.

    As Toni Morrison has said, "All of Forrest's novels explore the complex legacy of Afro-Americans. Like an insistent tide this history . . . swells and recalls America's past. . . . Brooding, hilarious, acerbic and profoundly valued life has no more astute observer than Leon Forrest." All of that is on display here in a novel that give readers a breathtaking view of the human experience, filled with humor and pathos.

    Illustrated with movie stills.

    She brilliantly analyzes Lacan's investigation of psychoanalysis not as dogma but as an ongoing self-critical process of discovery. By focusing on Lacan's singular way of making Freud's thought new again--and of thus enabling us to participate in the very moment of intellectual struggle and insight--Felman shows how this moment of illumination has become crucial to contemporary thinking and has redefined insight as such. This book is a groundbreaking statement not only on Lacan but on psychoanalysis in general.Felman argues that, contrary to popular opinion, Lacan's preoccupation is with psychoanalytic practice rather than with theory for its own sake. His true clinical originality consists not in the incidental innovations that separate his theory from other psychoanalytic schools, but in the insight he gives us into the structural foundations of what is common to the practice of all schools: the transference action and the psychoanalytic dialogue. In chapters on Poe's tale "The Purloined Letter"; Sophocles's Oedipus plays, a case report by Melanie Klein, and Freud's writings, Felman demonstrates Lacan's rediscovery of these texts as renewed and renewable intellectual adventures and as parables of the psychoanalytic encounter. The book explores these questions: How and why does psychoanalytic practice work? What accounts for clinical success? What did Freud learn from the literary Oedipus, and how does Freud text take us beyond Oedipus? How does psychoanalysis inform, and radically displace, our conception of what learning is and of what reading is?This book will be an intellectual event not only for clinicians and literary critics, but also for the broader audience of readers interested in contemporary thought.

    

    Especially useful for TOEFL test-takers and other students in America for whom English is a second language, this book explains and clarifies many of the similes and metaphors that newcomers to American English find mystifying. It is also useful to native-born Americans who are sometimes confused by regional colloquialisms encountered in reading or on TV. Idioms undergo constant change in every living language, some of them falling out of use, while new words and phrases become part of the standard vocabulary. This dictionary's new fourth edition takes account of the latest idiomatic changes and provides a solid background to informal American English.

    Using Jeffers' poetry and personal writings, as well as extensive interviews with Jeffers' family, Karman paints a stunning and meticulously crafted portrait. Illustrated with 26 rare photographs. Also included is an index and Jeffers bibliography.