Best of
American

2008

The Essential Tales and Poems


Edgar Allan Poe - 2008
    Here are some of the remarkable features of "Barnes & Noble Classics" New introductions commissioned from today's top writers and scholars Biographies of the authors Chronologies of contemporary historical, biographical, and cultural events Footnotes and endnotes Selective discussions of imitations, parodies, poems, books, plays, paintings, operas, statuary, and films inspired by the work Comments by other famous authors Study questions to challenge the reader's viewpoints and expectations Bibliographies for further reading Indices & Glossaries, when appropriateAll editions are beautifully designed and are printed to superior specifications; some include illustrations of historical interest. "Barnes & Noble Classics "pulls together a constellation of influences--biographical, historical, and literary--to enrich each reader's understanding of these enduring works. Creator of the modern detective story, innovative architect of the horror genre, and a poet of extraordinary musicality, Edgar Allan Poe remains one of America's most popular and influential writers. His tales and poems brim with psychological depth, almost painful intensity, and unexpected--and surprisingly modern--flashes of dark humor and irony. This anthology offers an exceptionally generous selection of Poe's short stories. It includes his famed masterpieces, such as "The Murders in the Rue Morgue" and "The Purloined Letter," featuring Poe's great detective, Dupin; his insightful studies of madness "The Black Cat" and "The Tell-Tale Heart"; "The Gold-Bug," his delightful exercise in "code-breaking"; and important but lesser-known tales, such as "Bon-Bon," "The Assignation," and "King Pest." Also included are some of Poe's most beloved poems, haunting lyrics of love and loss, such as "Annabel Lee," nightmare phantasmagories such as "The Raven," and his grand experiment in translating sound into words, "The Bells."Benjamin F. Fisher, Professor of English, University of Mississippi, is a longtime enthusiast of the works of Poe. He has published books, articles, and notes about Poe, and in American, Victorian, and Gothic studies, and serves on editorial boards for several professional journals. He has also been acclaimed for outstanding teaching.

Can I Get a Witness?


ReShonda Tate Billingsley - 2008
    After all, she's seen everything in her notorious Houston courtroom, where she's presided over the breakup of countless unhappy and disillusioned couples. Even her own sister, Dionne, is dealing with a relationship drama of her own, a betrayal that's left Dionne hungry for revenge on the man she hoped to marry. But when career-driven Vanessa chooses to work late on the night of her fifth wedding anniversary, her husband, Thomas, decides he's had enough of her putting work before starting the family he so desperately wants -- and he tells her he wants out. In a last-ditch effort to save the marriage, their own judge orders Vanessa and Thomas to attend a spiritual retreat. She goes -- but not without a fight. And just when she thinks she's won, fate steps in and helps her see things in a whole new light. Now Vanessa and her sister face the toughest choices of their lives. Can Dionne untangle herself from a payback plan gone horribly wrong? Can Vanessa rebuild a bond that she had a big part in destroying? Will she learn from her own mistakes and her years of experience on the bench? Or will she need something else to keep a tide of bitterness from taking over her life?

August: Osage County


Tracy Letts - 2008
    When the patriarch of the Weston clan disappears one hot summer night, the family reunites at the Oklahoma homestead, where long-held secrets are unflinchingly and uproariously revealed. The three-act, three-and-a-half-hour mammoth of a play combines epic tragedy with black comedy, dramatizing three generations of unfulfilled dreams and leaving not one of its thirteen characters unscathed.

FreeDarko Presents: The Macrophenomenal Pro Basketball Almanac: Styles, Stats, and Stars in Today's Game


Bethlehem Shoals - 2008
    The NBA of the moment is a league of hugely charismatic celebrities, crackling aesthetic intrigue, sociopolitical undercurrents, and raw humanity: every Kobe Bryant pump-fake or LeBron James dunk holds within it a Shaq-size load of meaning. The Macro-Phenomenal NBA Almanac is a one-of-a-kind guide to this tumultuous and exciting league. In a series of brilliantly illustrated chapters—from Master Builders like Tim Duncan to Destiny’s Kids like Amare Stoudemire to Lost Souls like Lamar Odom—the almanac breaks down the styles of the NBA’s most colorful characters, showing what each one reveals through his play and conduct, both on the court and off. Filled with some of the smartest, funniest sportswriting known to fankind, this book will cast an entirely new light on one of our favorite games.

A People's History of American Empire


Paul M. Buhle - 2008
    More than a successful book, A People’s History triggered a revolution in the way history is told, displacing the official versions with their emphasis on great men in high places to chronicle events as they were lived, from the bottom up.Now Howard Zinn, historian Paul Buhle, and cartoonist Mike Konopacki have collaborated to retell, in vibrant comics form, a most immediate and relevant chapter of A People’s History: the centuries-long story of America’s actions in the world. Narrated by Zinn, this version opens with the events of 9/11 and then jumps back to explore the cycles of U.S. expansionism from Wounded Knee to Iraq, stopping along the way at World War I, Central America, Vietnam, and the Iranian revolution. The book also follows the story of Zinn, the son of poor Jewish immigrants, from his childhood in the Brooklyn slums to his role as one of America’s leading historians.Shifting from world-shattering events to one family’s small revolutions, A People’s History of American Empire presents the classic ground-level history of America in a dazzling new form.

Our Story Begins: New and Selected Stories


Tobias Wolff - 2008
    In the years since, he’s written a third collection, The Night in Question, as well as a pair of genre-defining memoirs (This Boy’s Life and In Pharaoh’s Army), the novella The Barracks Thief, and, most recently, a novel, Old School.Now he returns with fresh revelations—about biding one’s time, or experiencing first love, or burying one’s mother—that come to a variety of characters in circumstances at once everyday and extraordinary: a retired Marine enrolled in college while her son trains for Iraq, a lawyer taking a difficult deposition, an American in Rome indulging the Gypsy who’s picked his pocket. In these stories, as with his earlier, much-anthologized work, he once again proves himself, according to the Los Angeles Times, “a writer of the highest order: part storyteller, part philosopher, someone deeply engaged in asking hard questions that take a lifetime to resolve.”

Yahweh's Chosen


Terri L. Fivash - 2008
    . .Until the prophet demanded his presence at the feast of the new moon and secretly anointed him king of Israel.There was no one to confide in, no outlet for the burning questionshis secret was safe with no one. But the Habiru guessed and swore their allegiance to him. The final words of a dying warrior seared into his soul: Yahweh has given you much. Take only what comes from His hand. He will place you where you need to be so that you will be able to do the task given to you."He would cling to these words for strength time and again as Yahweh led him first into the court of the troubled king, then onto the battlefield to face the giant Goliathall the while binding his life and loyalty to the prince whose throne he must someday take.

A Naked Singularity


Sergio de la Pava - 2008
    So far he’s on the winning side. He’s never lost a case. But nothing lasts forever, and pride like his has a long way to fall.Funny, smart and always surprising, A Naked Singularity speaks a language all of its own and reads like nothing else ever written. Casi’s beautiful mind and planetary intelligence make him an inimitable and unforgettable narrator.In De La Pava’s hands, the labyrinthine miseries of the New York Justice System are as layered and diabolical as Dante’s nine circles of Hell. But the Devil doesn’t hog the best lines. There are plenty here to go around.

Share Your Universe: Wolverine


Fred Van Lente - 2008
    But unless they learn to work together, neither of them will come back from their first mission together alive!

Poems, Prose, and Letters


Elizabeth Bishop - 2008
    Today she is recognized as one of America's great poets of the 20th century. This unprecedented collection offers a full-scale presentation of a writer of startling originality, at once passionate and reticent, adventurous and perfectionist. It presents all the poetry that Bishop published in her lifetime, in such classic volumes as "North & South," "A Cold Spring," "Questions of Travel," and "Geography III." In addition it contains an extensive selection of un_published poems and drafts of poems (several not previously collected), as well as all her published poetic translations, ranging from a chorus from Aristophanes' The Birds to versions of Brazilian sambas. "Poems, Prose, and Letters" brings together as well most of her published prose writings, including stories; reminiscences; travel writing about the places (Nova Scotia, Florida, Brazil) that so profoundly marked her poetry; and literary essays and statements, including a number of pieces published here for the first time. The book is rounded out with a selection of Bishop's irresistibly engaging and self-revelatory letters. Of the 53 letters included here, written between 1933 and 1979, a considerable number are printed for the first time, and all are presented in their entirety. Their recipients include Robert Lowell, Marianne Moore, Randall Jarrell, Anne Stevenson, May Swenson, and Carlos Drummond de Andrade.

Shadow Country


Peter Matthiessen - 2008
    In this bold new rendering, Matthiessen has cut nearly a third of the overall text and collapsed the time frame while deepening the insights and motivations of his characters with brilliant rewriting throughout. In Shadow Country, he has marvelously distilled a monumental work, realizing his original vision. Inspired by a near-mythic event of the wild Florida frontier at the turn of the twentieth century, Shadow Country reimagines the legend of the inspired Everglades sugar planter and notorious outlaw E. J. Watson, who drives himself relentlessly toward his own violent end at the hands of neighbors who mostly admired him, in a killing that obsessed his favorite son.Shadow Country traverses strange landscapes and frontier hinterlands inhabited by Americans of every provenance and color, including the black and Indian inheritors of the archaic racism that, as Watson’s wife observed, "still casts its shadow over the nation."

Desperate Passage: The Donner Party's Perilous Journey West


Ethan Rarick - 2008
    After months of grueling travel, the 81 men, women and children would be trapped for a brutal winter with little food and only primitive shelter. The conclusion is known: by spring of the next year, the Donner Party was synonymous with the most harrowing extremes of human survival. But until now, the full story of what happened, what it tells us about human nature and about America's westward expansion, remained shrouded in myth.Drawing on fresh archaeological evidence, recent research on topics ranging from survival rates to snowfall totals, and heartbreaking letters and diaries made public by descendants a century-and-a-half after the tragedy, Ethan Rarick offers an intimate portrait of the Donner party and their unimaginable ordeal: a mother who must divide her family, a little girl who shines with courage, a devoted wife who refuses to abandon her husband, a man who risks his life merely to keep his word. But Rarick resists both the gruesomely sensationalist accounts of the Donner party as well as later attempts to turn the survivors into archetypal pioneer heroes. The Donner Party, Rarick writes, is a story of hard decisions that were neither heroic nor villainous. Often, the emigrants displayed a more realistic and typically human mixture of generosity and selfishness, an alloy born of necessity.A fast-paced, heart-wrenching, clear-eyed narrative history, A Desperate Hope casts new light on one of America's most horrific encounters between the dream of a better life and the harsh realities such dreams so often must confront.

The Complete Peanuts, 1967-1970


Charles M. Schulz - 2008
    Beautiful boxed set collects four years in two volumes of the complete collection of the popular strip.

The Freak Brothers Omnibus: Every Freak Brothers Story Rolled Into One Bumper Package


Gilbert Shelton - 2008
    Includes a share certificate offer for the upcoming animated movie. The definitive Freak Brothers book for years to come.

Montana Star


Deann Smallwood - 2008
    Aries read the ad Ben McCabe had placed in the paper and prayed the position hadn't been filled. She knew nothing about cooking, ranching, or being a wife for that matter. Aries had been trained by one of Philadelphia's best physicians, her father. Trained, but not board certified; trained but not allowed to practice. She longed to be a practicing physician, but no one wanted a woman doctor. Her father's death, which left her with nothing but gambling debts and a young brother to provide and care for, forced her to put aside her love of medicine. Answering this ad was the only way Aries could think of to provide for herself and her brother. She felt badly about deceiving Ben, but what she didn't know was that Ben had deceived her from the moment she'd read the ad and been sent the money to travel to Montana. There was no turning back. Aries knew that as she heard the clickety-clack of the train taking her closer to a man she knew nothing about and who wanted no part of a woman in his life -- and certainly not a wife.

Sylvia Plath: The Bell Jar and Poems (Writers and Their Works)


Rachel Haugrud Reiff - 2008
    A biography of writer Sylvia Plath that describes her era, her major works--the novel The bell jar and her poetry--her life, and the legacy of her writing.

American Earth: Environmental Writing Since Thoreau


Bill McKibben - 2008
    Classics of the environmental imagination—the essays of Henry David Thoreau, John Muir, and John Burroughs; Aldo Leopold’s A Sand County Almanac; Rachel Carson’s Silent Spring—are set against the inspiring story of an emerging activist movement, as revealed by newly uncovered reports of pioneering campaigns for conservation, passages from landmark legal opinions and legislation, and searing protest speeches. Here are some of America’s greatest and most impassioned writers, taking a turn toward nature and recognizing the fragility of our situation on earth and the urgency of the search for a sustainable way of life. Thought-provoking essays on overpopulation, consumerism, energy policy, and the nature of “nature” join ecologists’ memoirs and intimate sketches of the habitats of endangered species. The anthology includes a detailed chronology of the environmental movement and American environmental history, as well as an 80-page color portfolio of illustrations.

Fire to Fire


Mark Doty - 2008
    Doty's subjects—our mortal situation, the evanescent beauty of the world, desire's transformative power, and art's ability to give shape to human lives—echo and develop across twenty years of poems. His signature style encompasses both the plainspoken and the artfully wrought; here one of contemporary American poetry's most lauded, recognizable voices speaks to the crises and possibilities of our times.

Collected Works Of Edna St. Vincent Millay


Edna St. Vincent Millay - 2008
    This collection includes: Aria da Capo, A Few Figs from Thistles, Second April, Renascence and Other Poems

Family of Secrets: The Bush Dynasty, the Powerful Forces That Put it in the White House & What Their Influence Means for America


Russ Baker - 2008
    After eight disastrous years, George W. Bush leaves office as one of the most unpopular presidents in American history. Russ Baker asks the question that lingers even as this benighted administration winds down: Who really wanted this man at the helm of the country, and why did his backers promote him despite his obvious liabilities and limitations? This book goes deep behind the scenes to deliver an arresting new look at George W. Bush, his father George H. W. Bush, their family, and the network of figures in intelligence, the military, finance, and oil who enabled the family's rise to power.Baker's exhaustive investigation reveals a remarkable clan whose hermetic secrecy and code of absolute loyalty have concealed a far-reaching role in recent history that transcends the Bush presidencies. Baker offers new insights into lingering mysteries—from the death of John F. Kennedy to Richard Nixon's downfall in Watergate. Here, too, are insider accounts of the backroom strategizing, and outright deception, that resulted in George W. Bush's electoral success.Throughout, Baker helps us understand why we have not known these things before. Family of Secrets combines compelling narrative with eye-opening revelations. It offers the untold history of the machinations that have shaped American politics over much of the last century.

Keith Haring


Jeffrey Deitch - 2008
    This is the book Haring wanted to make, based on the outline of a monograph that was never completed due to his untimely death in 1989.

When Marina Abramović Dies: A Biography


James Westcott - 2008
    This intimate, critical biography chronicles Abramović's formative and until now undocumented years in Yugoslavia, and tells the story of her partnership with the German artist Ulay--one of the twentieth century's great examples of the fusion of artistic and private life.In one of many long-durational performances in the renewed solo career that followed, Abramović famously lived in a New York gallery for twelve days without eating or speaking, nourished only by prolonged eye contact with audience members. It was here, in 2002, that author James Westcott first encountered her, beginning an exceptionally close relation between biographer and subject. "When Marina Abramović Dies" draws on Westcott's personal observations of Abramović, his unprecedented access to her archive, and hundreds of hours of interviews he conducted with the artist and the people closest to her. The result is a unique and vivid portrait of the charismatic self-proclaimed "grandmother of performance art.""

Frederick Douglass: The Most Complete Collection of His Written Works & Speeches


Frederick Douglass - 2008
    AUTHOR'S BIRTHCHAPTER II. REMOVAL FROM GRANDMOTHER'SCHAPTER III. TROUBLES OF CHILDHOODCHAPTER IV. A GENERAL SURVEY OF THE SLAVE PLANTATIONCHAPTER V. A SLAVEHOLDER'S CHARACTERCHAPTER VI. A CHILD'S REASONINGCHAPTER VII. LUXURIES AT THE GREAT HOUSECHAPTER VIII. CHARACTERISTICS OF OVERSEERSCHAPTER IX. CHANGE OF LOCATIONCHAPTER X. LEARNING TO READCHAPTER XI. GROWING IN KNOWLEDGECHAPTER XII. RELIGIOUS NATURE AWAKENEDCHAPTER XIII. THE VICISSITUDES OF SLAVE LIFECHAPTER XIV. EXPERIENCE IN ST. MICHAELSCHAPTER XV. COVEY, THE NEGRO BREAKERCHAPTER XVI. ANOTHER PRESSURE OF THE TYRANT'S VISECHAPTER XVII. THE LAST FLOGGINGCHAPTER XVIII. NEW RELATIONS AND DUTIESCHAPTER XIX. THE RUNAWAY PLOTCHAPTER XX.CHAPTER XXI. ESCAPE FROM SLAVERYSECOND PARTCHAPTER I. ESCAPE FROM SLAVERYCHAPTER II. LIFE AS A FREEMANCHAPTER III. INTRODUCED TO THE ABOLITIONISTSCHAPTER IV. RECOLLECTIONS OF OLD FRIENDSCHAPTER V. ONE HUNDRED CONVENTIONSCHAPTER VI. IMPRESSIONS ABROADCHAPTER VII. TRIUMPHS AND TRIALSCHAPTER VIII. JOHN BROWN AND MRS. STOWECHAPTER IX. INCREASING DEMANDS OF THE SLAVE POWERCHAPTER X. THE BEGINNING OF THE ENDCHAPTER XI. SECESSION AND WAR"MEN OF COLOR, TO ARMS!”THE BLACK MAN AT THE WHITE HOUSECHAPTER XII. HOPE FOR THE NATIONCHAPTER XIII. VAST CHANGESCHAPTER XIV. LIVING AND LEARNINGCHAPTER XV. WEIGHED IN THE BALANCECHAPTER XVI. "TIME MAKES ALL THINGS EVEN"CHAPTER XVII. INCIDENTS AND EVENTSCHAPTER XVIII. "HONOR TO WHOM HONOR"CHAPTER XIX. RETROSPECTIONCONCLUSIONAPPENDIXWEST INDIA EMANCIPATIONTHIRD PARTCHAPTER I. LATER LIFECHAPTER II. A GRAND OCCASIONCHAPTER III. DOUBTS AS TO GARFIELD'S COURSECHAPTER IV. RECORDER OF DEEDSCHAPTER V. PRESIDENT CLEVELAND'S ADMINISTRATIONCHAPTER VI. THE SUPREME COURT DECISIONCHAPTER VII. DEFEAT OF JAMES G. BLAINECHAPTER VIII. EUROPEAN TOURCHAPTER IX. CONTINUATION OF EUROPEAN TOURCHAPTER X. THE CAMPAIGN OF 1888CHAPTER XI. ADMINISTRATION OF PRESIDENT HARRISONCHAPTER XII. MINISTER TO HAÏTICHAPTER XIII. CONTINUED NEGOTIATIONS FOR THE MÔLE ST. NICOLASCOLLECTED ARTICLES OF FREDERICK DOUGLASS, A SLAVEMY ESCAPE FROM SLAVERYRECONSTRUCTIONMY BONDAGE and MY FREEDOMCONTENTSEDITORS PREFACEINTRODUCTIONLIFE AS A SLAVE?I--CHILDHOODII--REMOVED FROM MY FIRST HOMEIII--PARENTAGEIV--A GENERAL SURVEY OF THE SLAVE PLANTATIONV--GRADUAL INITIATION INTO THE MYSTERIES OF SLAVERYVI--TREATMENT OF SLAVES ON LLOYDS PLANTATIONVII--LIFE IN THE GREAT HOUSEVIII--A CHAPTER OF HORRORSIX--PERSONAL TREATMENTX--LIFE IN BALTIMOREXI--"A CHANGE CAME O'ER THE SPIRIT OF MY DREAM"XII--RELIGIOUS NATURE AW

The Dove Keeper


Evelyn Deshane - 2008
    But when he meets Bernard, the old, aging, and well known fag artist, he is offered something he cannot turn down.

Growing Up Country: Memories of an Iowa Farm Girl


Carol Bodensteiner - 2008
    In charming and memorable vignettes, Carol Bodensteiner captures rural life in middle America, in the middle of the 20th Century. Bodensteiner grew up on a family-owned dairy farm in the 1950s, a time when a family could make a good living on 180 acres. In these pages you can step back and relish a time simple but not easy, a time innocent yet challenging. If you grew up in rural America, these stories will trigger your memories and your senses, releasing a wealth of stories of your own. If the rural Midwest is foreign territory to you, Carol's stories will invite you into a fascinating and disappearing world.

Magic. You Are It. Be It.


Gary M. Douglas - 2008
    You ARE It. Be It." Gary Douglas and Dr. Dain Heer share processes, tools and points of view that you can use to create consciousness and magic- and change your life in ways you may not even be able to imagine.Magic is about the fun of having the things you desire. In a larger way, magic is about consciousness - not the addendum TO your life, it's consciousness AS your life. You can function from consciousness every moment you're alive. When you do, your life becomes truly magical and there's nothing you can't generate.What are the infinite possibilities?What else is possible?"Magic is all around us, it's something we all generate. What would it take to think differently about the universe, the consciousness and oneness that we all are and the magic that is an intrinsic part of it?"--Gary M. Douglas"The real magic is the ability to have the joy that's possible, the joy that can be generated, the joy that life can be!"-- Dr. Dain Heer

Collected Poems 1956–1987


John Ashbery - 2008
    Long associated with the New York School that came to the fore in the 1950s, John Ashbery has charted a profoundly original course that has opened up pathways for subsequent generations of poets. At once hermetic and exuberantly curious, meditative and unnervingly funny, dreamlike and steeped in everyday realities, alive to every nuance of American speech, these are poems that constantly discover new worlds within language and its unexpected permutations.As the poet David Shapiro has written, “The poems of Ashbery may seem so open that they become, like Hamlet, that rare inexhaustible thing, the irreducible fact of great art.” This first volume of the collected Ashbery includes the texts of his first twelve books: Some Trees (1956), selected by W. H. Auden for the Yale Younger Poets; The Tennis Court Oath (1962); Rivers and Mountains (1966); The Double Dream of Spring (1970); Three Poems (1972), saluted by John Hollander as “a meditational masterpiece”; The Vermont Notebook (1975), presented with the original art by Joe Brainard; Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror (which won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award in 1976); Houseboat Days (1977); As We Know (1979); Shadow Train (1981); A Wave (1984); and April Galleons (1987). In addition it presents an unprecedented gathering of more than 60 previously uncollected poems written over a period of four decades.To read Ashbery’s work in sequence is to marvel at his refusal to rest on what has already been accomplished, his insistence on constantly renewed modes of expression. It is to become aware as well of the way his poetry chronicles life as really lived—“the way things have of enfolding / When your attention is distracted for a moment”—amid the surfaces of the quotidian (waking, dreamt, imagined, remembered) and the equally pervasive, equally elusive and deceptive surfaces of language. Through all his metamorphoses he has continued to work with incomparable freedom and humor: Ashbery (in the words of James Longenbach) “is constitutionally incapable of narrowing the possibilities for poetry.”

The Collected Stories


Deborah Eisenberg - 2008
    This one volume brings together Transactions in a Foreign Currency (1986), Under the 82nd Airborne (1992), All Around Atlantis (1997) and her most recent collection-Twilight of the Superheroes (2006).“One of America’s finest writers.”—San Francisco Chronicle    “Concentrated bursts of perfection.”—The Times (London)    “Shimmering stories that possess the power and charm to move us.” —The New York Times    “Exhilarating.”—Harper’s Magazine    “Outstanding.”—Christian Science Monitor    “Eisenberg simply writes like no one else.”—Elle    “Eisenberg’s stories possess all the steely beauty of a knife wrapped in velvet.”—The Boston Globe    “Dazzling.”—Time Out New York    “Magic.”—Newsweek    “Comic, elegant and pitch perfect.”—Vanity Fair    “One of the great fiction writers living in America today.”—The Dallas Morning News    “There aren’t many contemporary novels as shudderingly intimate and mordantly funny as Eisenberg’s best stories.”—The New York Times Book Review

Reborn: Journals and Notebooks, 1947-1963


Susan Sontag - 2008
    This, the first of three volumes of her journals and notebooks, presents a constantly and utterly surprising record of a great mind in incubation. It begins with journal entries and early attempts at fiction from her years as a university and graduate student, and ends in 1964, when she was becoming a participant in and observer of the artistic and intellectual life of New York City.Reborn is a kaleidoscopic self-portrait of one of America's greatest writers and intellectuals, teeming with Sontag's voracious curiosity and appetite for life. We watch the young Sontag's complex self-awareness, share in her encounters with the writers who informed her thinking, and engage with the profound challenge of writing itself—all filtered through the inimitable detail of everyday circumstance.

The Franklin Scandal: A Story of Powerbrokers, Child Abuse & Betrayal


Nick Bryant - 2008
    The scandal originally surfaced during an investigation into Omaha, Nebraska's failed Franklin Federal Credit Union and took the author beyond the Midwest and ultimately to Washington, DC. Implicating businessmen, senators, major media corporations, the CIA, and even the venerable Boys Town organization, this extensively researched report includes firsthand interviews with key witnesses and explores a controversy that has received scant media attention.

The Ghost Soldiers


James Tate - 2008
    His characters are often lost or confused, his settings bizarre, his scenarios brilliantly surreal. Opaque, inscrutable people float through a dreamlike world where nothing is as it seems. The Ghost Soldiers offers resounding proof, once again, that Tate stands alone in American poetry.

Knockemstiff


Donald Ray Pollock - 2008
    Rendered in the American vernacular with vivid imagery and a wry, dark sense of humor, these thwarted and sometimes violent lives jump off the page at the reader with inexorable force. A father pumps his son full of steroids so he can vicariously relive his days as a perpetual runner-up body builder. A psychotic rural recluse comes upon two siblings committing incest and feels compelled to take action. Donald Ray Pollock presents his characters and the sordid goings-on with a stern intelligence, a bracing absence of value judgments, and a refreshingly dark sense of bottom-dog humor.With an artistic instinct honed on the works of Flannery O' Connor and Harry Crews, Pollock offers a powerful work of fiction in the classic American vein. Knockemstiff is a genuine entry into the literature of place.

Rendezvous with Destiny: Ronald Reagan and the Campaign That Changed America


Craig Shirley - 2008
    It dramatically altered the course of American—and world—history. Reagan’s victory gave rise to a new generation of conservatism, ended liberalism’s half-century reign of dominance, reversed the second-worst economic crisis in American history, and led to the demise of the mighty Soviet Union.To write Rendezvous with Destiny , Shirley gained unprecedented access to 1980 campaign files and interviewed more than 150 insiders—from Reagan’s closest advisers and family members to Jimmy Carter himself. The result is the first comprehensive history of the hard-fought 1980 campaign, a gripping account that follows Reagan’s unlikely path from his bitter defeat on the floor of the 1976 Republican convention, through his underreported “wilderness years,” through grueling primary fights in which he knocked out several Republican heavyweights, through an often-nasty general election campaign complicated by the presence of a third-party candidate (not to mention the looming shadow of Ted Kennedy), to Reagan’s astounding victory on Election Night in 1980. Shirley’s years of intensive research have enabled him to relate countless untold stories—including, at long last, the solution to one of the most enduring mysteries in politics: just how Reagan’s campaign got hold of Carter’s debate briefing books. Rendezvous with Destiny reveals how Reagan successfully battled the headwinds of the national media, the Republican Party establishment, and even his own campaign team to become one of America’s greatest chief executives.

The Ice Diaries: The True Story of One of Mankind's Greatest Adventures


William R. Anderson - 2008
    Anderson and his crew's harrowing top-secret mission aboard the USS Nautilus, the world's first nuclear-powered submarine. Bristling with newly classified, never-before-published information and photos from the captain's personal collection, The Ice Diaries takes readers on a dangerous journey beneath the vast, unexplored Arctic ice cap during the height of the Cold War."Captain Anderson and the crew of the USS Nautilus exemplified daring and boldness in taking their boat beneath the Arctic ice to the North Pole. This expertly told story captures the drama, danger, and importance of that monumental achievement." ―Capt. Stanley D. M. Carpenter, Professor of Strategy and Policy, United States Naval War College"Few maritime exploits in history have so startled the world as the silent, secret transpolar voyage of the U.S. Navy's nuclear submarine Nautilus, and none since the age of Columbus and Vasco da Gama has opened, in one bold stroke, so vast and forbidding an area of the seas." ―Paul O'Neil, Life magazine

Hope on a Tightrope: Words and Wisdom


Cornel West - 2008
    In a world that seesaws between unconditional love and acceptance and blind hatred and exclusion, Hope on a Tightrope will satisfy readers in search of deep wells of inspiration and challenge that marries the mind to the heart.This gift book features an original CD that highlights Dr. West’s outstanding spoken-word artistry. His August 2007 CD release Never Forget: A Journey of Revelations that featured collaborations with best-selling artists Prince, Jill Scott, and Andre 3000 topped the charts as Billboard’s #1 Spoken Word album.

Portions from a Wine-Stained Notebook: Uncollected Stories and Essays, 1944-1990


Charles Bukowski - 2008
    Here is a substantial selection of these wide-ranging works, most of which have been unavailable since their original appearance in underground newspapers, literary journals, even porn magazines. Among the highlights are his first published short story, his last short story, his first and last essays, and the first installment of his famous "Notes of a Dirty Old Man" column. This landmark collection also contains meditations on his familiar themes, as well as singular discussions of such figures as Artaud, Pound, and Hemingway, and several discussions of his aesthetics, revealing an unexpectedly learned mind behind his seemingly offhand productions.

On the Laps of Gods: The Red Summer of 1919 and the Struggle for Justice That Remade a Nation


Robert Whitaker - 2008
    . . September 30, 1919. The United States teetered on the edge of a racial civil war. During the previous three months, racial fighting had erupted in twenty-five cities. And deep in the Arkansas Delta, black sharecroppers were meeting in a humble wooden church, forming a union and making plans to sue their white landowners, who for years had cheated them out of their fair share of the cotton crop. A car pulled up outside the church . . . What happened next has long been shrouded in controversy.In this heartbreaking but ultimately triumphant story of courage and will, journalist Robert Whitaker carefully documents—and exposes—one of the worst racial massacres in American history. Over the course of several days, posses and federal troops gunned down more than one hundred men, women, and children.But that is just the beginning of this astonishing story. White authorities also arrested more than three hundred black farmers, and in trials that lasted only a few hours, all-white juries sentenced twelve of the union leaders to die in the electric chair. One of the juries returned a death verdict after two minutes of deliberation. All hope seemed lost, and then an extraordinary lawyer from Little Rock stepped forward: Scipio Africanus Jones. Jones, who’d been born a slave, joined forces with the NAACP to mount an appeal in which he argued that his clients’ constitutional rights to a fair trial had been violated. Never before had the U.S. Supreme Court set aside a criminal verdict in a state court because the proceedings had been unfair, so the state of Arkansas, confident of victory, had a carpenter build coffins for the men.We all know the names of the many legendary heroes that emerged from the civil rights movement: Thurgood Marshall, Rosa Parks, and Martin Luther King Jr. among them. Whitaker’s important book commemorates a legal struggle, Moore v. Dempsey, that paved the way for that later remaking of our country, and tells too of a man, Scipio Africanus Jones, whose name surely deserves to be known by all Americans.

Notes on Blood Meridian: Revised and Expanded Edition


John Sepich - 2008
    The New York Times Book Review ranked it third in a 2006 survey of the “best work of American fiction published in the last twenty-five years,” and in 2005 Time chose it as one of the 100 best novels published since 1923. Yet Blood Meridian’s complexity, as well as its sheer bloodiness, makes it difficult for some readers. To guide all its readers and help them appreciate the novel’s wealth of historically verifiable characters, places, and events, John Sepich compiled what has become the classic reference work, Notes on BLOOD MERIDIAN. Tracing many of the nineteenth-century primary sources that McCarthy used, Notes uncovers the historical roots of Blood Meridian. Originally published in 1993, Notes remained in print for only a few years and has become highly sought-after in the rare book market, with used copies selling for hundreds of dollars. In bringing the book back into print to make it more widely available, Sepich has revised and expanded Notes with a new preface and two new essays that explore key themes and issues in the work. This amplified edition of Notes on BLOOD MERIDIAN is the essential guide for all who seek a fuller understanding and appreciation of McCarthy’s finest work.

Song Yet Sung


James McBride - 2008
    In the days before the Civil War, a runaway slave named Liz Spocott breaks free from her captors and escapes into the labyrinthine swamps of Maryland’s eastern shore, setting loose a drama of violence and hope among slave catchers, plantation owners, watermen, runaway slaves, and free blacks. Liz is near death, wracked by disturbing visions of the future, and armed with “the Code,” a fiercely guarded cryptic means of communication for slaves on the run. Liz’s flight and her dreams of tomorrow will thrust all those near her toward a mysterious, redemptive fate. Filled with rich, true details—much of the story is drawn from historical events—and told in McBride’s signature lyrical style, Song Yet Sung is a story of tragic triumph, violent decisions, and unexpected kindness.

Complete Works of Ambrose Bierce


Ambrose Bierce - 2008
    This comprehensive eBook is spiced with numerous illustrations, rare and forgotten texts, concise introductions and the usual Delphi bonus material. (Version 1)* Beautifully illustrated with images relating to Bierce's life and works.* Concise introductions to the collections and other texts* The rare novella THE DANCE OF DEATH appears here for the first time in digital print* ALL the short story collections, with individual contents tables* Featuring 475 tales, many appearing for the first time in digital print* Images of how the books were first printed, giving your eReader a taste of the original texts* Excellent formatting of the texts* Famous works such as COBWEBS FROM AN EMPTY SKULLare fully illustrated with their original artwork* Special chronological and alphabetical contents tables for the poetry, essays and the short stories* Easily locate the works you want to read* The complete non-fiction, with many scarce essays and newspaper articles* Includes Bierce's letters - spend hours exploring the author’s personal correspondence* Special criticism section, with essays evaluating Bierce’s contribution to literature* Also provides a unique ‘Biercian Texts’ section with interesting articles on the works and disappearance of Ambrose Bierce* Features a bonus full-length biography - discover Bierce's literary life* Scholarly ordering of texts into chronological order and literary genresCONTENTS:The NovellasTHE DANCE OF DEATHTHE MONK AND THE HANGMAN’S DAUGHTERTHE LAND BEYOND THE BLOWThe Short Story CollectionsTHE FIEND’S DELIGHTCOBWEBS FROM AN EMPTY SKULLPRESENT AT A HANGING, AND OTHER GHOST STORIESIN THE MIDST OF LIFE: TALES OF SOLDIERS AND CIVILIANSCAN SUCH THINGS BE?FANTASTIC FABLESNEGLIGIBLE TALESTHE PARENTICIDE CLUBTHE FOURTH ESTATETHE OCEAN WAVEKINGS OF BEASTSTWO ADMINISTRATIONSMISCELLANEOUS TALESThe Short StoriesLIST OF SHORT STORIES IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDERLIST OF SHORT STORIES IN ALPHABETICAL ORDERThe Poetry CollectionsBLACK BEETLES IN AMBERSHAPES OF CLAYFABLES IN RHYMESOME ANTE-MORTEM EPITAPHSTHE SCRAP HEAPThe PoemsLIST OF POEMS IN CHRONOLOGICAL ORDERLIST OF POEMS IN ALPHABETICAL ORDERThe Non-FictionTHE SHADOW ON THE DIAL, AND OTHER ESSAYSTHE DEVIL’S DICTIONARYWRITE IT RIGHTASHES OF THE BEACON“ON WITH THE DANCE!”: A REVIEWA CYNIC LOOKS AT LIFETANGENTIAL VIEWSBITS OF AUTOBIOGRAPHYMISCELLANEOUS ARTICLES AND REVIEWSUNCOLLECTED ESSAYSThe EssaysLIST OF ESSA

Unexplained Presence


Tisa Bryant - 2008
    Literary Nonfiction. African American Studies. By remixing stories from novels and films to zoom in on the black presences within them, Tisa Bryant's UNEXPLAINED PRESENCE ruminates on the sublime power of history to shape culture in the subconscious of both the artist and the reader/viewer. Moving from interrogations of Fran�ois Ozon's 8 Femmes and Virginia Woolf's Orlando to the machinations of the Regency House Party reality TV show, UNEXPLAINED PRESENCE weaves threads of myth, fact and fiction into previously unexplored narratives lurking in our collective imagination.This is truly a bold book, one that combines scenes of rich technicolor with the light of truth, at once invoking and dissolving cultural myths and faux histories.--Brenda CoultasInvestigating the symbolic construction of identity and myth from the angle of art, Tisa Bryant's UNEXPLAINED PRESENCE takes up 'black presences in European literature, visual art, and film.' Fusing criticism, film theory, and fiction with a keenly poetic ear, Bryant reenters cultural artifacts to open up these symbolically loaded but structurally silenced or backgrounded characters and motifs. Her stories trace the ways in which black subjectivity is distributed or denied within pictures and plots, between viewers and artworks and artists, and in acts of conversation and debate, of queer identification or refusal to see. What is most remarkable is how Bryant transforms these elisions into acts of imagination, restoring or reconfiguring partially glimpsed subjects via fleet and surprising sentences that traverse the distance between representation and meaning.--San Francisco Bay Guardian

The Orphaned Anything's: Memoir of a Lesser Known


Stephen Christian - 2008
    In his mind what started as a joke is slowly becoming his �glorious and underrated mantra�. Ayden Kosacov is alive, and that is about all you can say. In the throws of a mundane and jejune life Ayden is slowly coming to the realization that if all his world is a stage than he wouldn�t care if he did or did not miss the final scenes. Through an almost �accidental� suicide attempt and the recovery that soon follows, Ayden learns that there is more to living than just being alive. Finding his way through diverse experiences and people he comes to terms with God, his family, and finally himself. The Orphaned Anything�s style of writing is in the likes of Dennis Johnson (Jesus� Son) and Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius) and yet designed to give life lessons, encouragement, and hope like books by Paulo Coelho (The Alchemist) and Donald Miller (Blue Like Jazz).

Stand By Me


Wendell Berry - 2008
    Short story published in The Atlantic magazine

Pillars of Prosperity: Free Markets, Honest Money, Private Property


Ron Paul - 2008
    He also provides a way out, as implied by the subtitle: free market, honest money, and private property. Dr. Paul has consistently battled for all three. Economics is topic about which most politicians are abysmally ignorant. As this books shows, Ron Paul is a master of the topic and the nation's teacher on a vast range of economic issues. He addresses monetary policy during critical times such as the late 1970s inflation mania, and was a lone voice pointing to the real cause of Federal Reserve monetary policy. Whereas most members of Congress are intimidated by Fed officials, Paul's confrontations with Greenspan are documented here word for word. In addition, he reveals the social and economic effects of loose credit, and shows the ill-effects of bailouts. He addresses high taxes, regulation, trade restrictions, and bravely denounces sanctions against foreign countries for fueling international tensions. He also explains his view of free trade, for the real thing but against misnamed treaties that embroil international traders in bureaucracy. He covers welfare, bureaucracy, war, and a a host of other economic topics in what is surely the most comprehensive, intelligent, and revealing book on economics ever written by a U.S. political figure -- all informed by the Austrian tradition of thought that has so influenced his thinking.

With Zeal and with Bayonets Only: The British Army on Campaign in North America, 1775-1783


Matthew H. Spring - 2008
    Now Matthew H. Spring reveals how British infantry in the American Revolutionary War really fought. This groundbreaking book offers a new analysis of the British Army during the American rebellion at both operational and tactical levels. Presenting fresh insights into the speed of British tactical movements, Spring discloses how the system for training the army prior to 1775 was overhauled and adapted to the peculiar conditions confronting it in North America. First scrutinizing such operational problems as logistics, manpower shortages, and poor intelligence, Spring then focuses on battlefield tactics to examine how troops marched to the battlefield, deployed, advanced, and fought. In particular, he documents the use of turning movements, the loosening of formations, and a reliance on bayonet-oriented shock tactics, and he also highlights the army's ability to tailor its tactical methods to local conditions. Written with flair and a wealth of details that will engage scholars and history enthusiasts alike, With Zeal and with Bayonets Only offers a thorough reinterpretation of how the British Army's North American campaign progressed and invites serious reassessment of most of its battles.

The American Journey of Barack Obama


LIFE - 2008
    Just as LIFE once opened up the glittering Kennedy White House, LIFE now focuses its lens on Barack Obama. The American Journey of Barack Obama covers the candidate from his childhood and adolescence to his time as editor of The Harvard Law Review and his Chicago activist years, culminating with the excitement and fervor of the historic 2008 Democratic National Convention. The unfolding drama of Obama's life and political career is cinematic in scope, and never has it been presented so compellingly. In addition to a powerful array of photographs that were taken by many of the country's greatest photographers (and some that were snapped, in the quiet moments, by Obama family members themselves), this book also includes a Foreword by Senator Edward M. Kennedy, an incisive narrative biography and original essays by some of our finest writers, including Gay Talese, Charles Johnson, Melissa Fay Greene, Andrei Codrescu, Fay Weldon, Richard Norton Smith, Bob Greene and several others. Many readers will find a new understanding of Obama. All readers will feel that they are bearing witness to a singular, undeniably American story.<!--EndFragment-->

Gotta Keep on Tryin'


Virginia DeBerry - 2008
    When they were teens their dreams led them down separate paths and away from each other. But they reunited as adults, drawn back together by a bond of friendship that stood the test of time.Now Pat and Gayle co-own the Ell & Me Company, a business they founded based on a character Gayle created years ago for her daughter. Things are going well, but real-life dramas ensue as each must face issues from the past in order to protect the future.Pat and Marcus look like the perfect twenty-first-century couple-smart, talented, each at the helm of a high-profile enterprise and at the top of their game. but will their professional pursuits leave them time for each other and a family, or carry them into the arms of others? Will a paternity claim prover to be too much of an obstacle to overcome?Gayle faces her own family drama and struggles to maintain control of her life. Despite dating other men, has she ever really gotten over her ex-husband, Ramsey the gambler who left her and their daughter, Vanessa, in financial ruin? Gayle bends over backward to provide a stable, comfortable home for Vanessa, who seems just as devoted to making Gayle pay for every mistake she has ever made. And what ever happened to Ramsey?

The Romance of Happy Workers


Anne Boyer - 2008
    Political and iconoclastic, Anne Boyer’s poems dally in pastoral camp and a dizzying, delightful array of sights and sounds born from the dust of the Kansas plains where dinner for two is cooked in Fire King and served on depression ware, and where bawdy instructions for a modern “Home on the Range” read:Mix a drink of stock lot:vermouth and the water table.And the bar will smell of IBP.And you will lick my Laura Ingalls.In Boyer’s heartland, “Surfaces should be worn. Lamps should smolder. / Dahlias do bloom like tumors. The birds do rise like bombs.” And the once bright and now crumbling populism of Marxists, poets, and folksingers springs vividly back to life as realism, idealism, and nostalgia do battle amongst the silos and ditchweed.Nothing, too, is a subject:dusk regulating the blankery.Fill in the nightish sky with ardent,fill in the metaphorical smell.A poet and visual artist, Anne Boyer lives in Kansas, where she co-edits the poetry journal Abraham Lincoln and teaches at Kansas City Art Institute.

The New Pearl Harbor Revisited: 9/11, the Cover-up & the Expose


David Ray Griffin - 2008
    As new developments occurred, Griffin continually brought the discussion up to date in his subsequent books. Now The New Pearl Harbor Revisited synthesizes the most important points of these previous studies and updates his seminal work with a chapter-by-chapter analysis of evidence that has emerged since 2001 and his own developing thinking on the subject.

Shadows at Dawn: A Borderlands Massacre and the Violence of History


Karl Jacoby - 2008
    In the predawn hours of April 30, 1871, a combined party of Americans, Mexicans, and Tohono Oaodham Indians gathered just outside an Apache camp in the Arizona borderlands. At the first light of day they struck, murdering nearly 150 Apaches, mostly women and children, in their sleep. In its day, the atrocity, which came to be known as the Camp Grant Massacre, generated unparalleled national attentionafederal investigations, heated debate in the press, and a tense criminal trial. This was the era of the United Statesa apeace policya toward Indians, and the Apaches had been living on a would-be reservation, under the supposed protection of the U.S. Army. President Ulysses Grant decried the act as apurely murder, a but American settlers countered that the distant U.S. government had failed to protect them from Apache attacks, and they were forced to take justice into their own hands. In the past century, the massacre has largely faded from memory. Now, drawing on oral histories, newspaper reports, and the participantsa own accounts, prizewinning author Karl Jacoby brings this horrific incident and tumultuous era to life. What brought this party together on that fateful April morning, and what led them to commit such a stunning act of violence? Shadows at Dawn traces the escalating conflicts, as well as the alliances, that transpired among the Americans, Mexicans, Apache, and Tohono Oaodham living in the borderlands over the course of several hundred years, beginning with the seventeenth-centuryarrival of the first Spanish missionaries. The American presence brought further transformations, especially after the Gadsden Purchase transferred a large swath of Mexican territory to the United States, leaving many Mexicans feeling like foreigners in their own land. By recounting the events from the perspective of each of the four parties involved, Jacoby challenges the dominance of the American version of the western story and also reveals the way each group has remembered, or forgotten, the massacre. Prodigiously researched and powerfully written, Shadows at Dawn examines a forgotten atrocity and in doing so paints a sweeping panorama of the southwestern border landsaa world far more complex, culturally diverse, and morally ambiguous than the traditional portrayals of the Old West.

The Glen Rock Book of the Dead


Marion Winik - 2008
    . . they go to the cemetery and stay all night, praying, singing, drinking, wailing. They tell the sad stories and the noble ones; they eat cookies shaped like skeletons. They celebrate and mourn at once.” Striking that balance, The Glen Rock Book of the Dead presents snapshot portraits of The Jeweler, The Driving Instructor, The Bad Influence, The Queen of New Jersey—and roughly fifty others who have touched Winik’s life, from her son’s second grade teacher to Keith Haring. Tied together by the inimitable, poignant voice of Winik, these losses form not only an autobiography but a story of our time, delivering a lyrical journey that ultimately raises the spirits.

Warhorses


Yusef Komunyakaa - 2008
    "Sweetheart, was I talking war in my sleep / again?" he asks, and the question is hardly moot: "Sometimes I hold you like Achilles' / shield," and indeed all relationships, in this telling, are sites of violence and battle. His line is longer and looser than in Taboo and Talking Dirty to the Gods, and in long poems like "The Autobiography of My Alter Ego" he sounds almost breathless, an exhausted, desperate prophet. Warhorses is the stunning work of a Pulitzer Prize–winning poet who never ceases to challenge and delight his readers.

The Hands of Day


Pablo Neruda - 2008
    Moved by the guilt of never having worked with his hands, Neruda opens with the despairing confession, “Why did I not make a broom? / Why was I given hands at all?” The themes of hands and work grow in significance as Neruda celebrates the carpenters, longshoremen, blacksmiths, and bakers—those laborers he admires most—and shares his exuberant adoration for the earth and the people upon it.Yes, I am guiltyof what I did not do,of what I did not sow, did not cut, did not measure,of never having rallied myself to populate lands,of having sustained myself in the desertsand of my voice speaking with the sand.Pablo Neruda (1904–1973) was a Chilean poet and diplomat who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1971. Recognized during his life as “a people’s poet,” he is considered one of the greatest artists of the twentieth century.William O’Daly is the best-selling translator of six of Pablo Neruda’s books, including The Book of Questions and The Sea and the Bells. His work as a translator has been featured on The Today Show.

Chicken Soup for the Soul: Loving Our Cats: Heartwarming and Humorous Stories about our Feline Family Members


Jack Canfield - 2008
    See your own cats with a new eye through these true stories in which cats: heal people or other pets save lives rejuvenate friendships give new meaning to lives save family relationships

The Death of Raymond Yellow Thunder: And Other True Stories from the Nebraska–Pine Ridge Border Towns


Stew Magnuson - 2008
    After covering racial unrest in the remote northwest corner of his home state of Nebraska in 1999, journalist Stew Magnuson returned four years later to consider the larger questions of its peoples, their paths, and the forces that separate them. Examining Raymond Yellow Thunder’s death at the hands of four white men in 1972, Magnuson looks deep into the past that gave rise to the tragedy. Situating long-ranging repercussions within 130 years of context, he also recounts the largely forgotten struggles of American Indian Movement activist Bob Yellow Bird and tells the story of Whiteclay, Nebraska, the controversial border hamlet that continues to sell millions of cans of beer per year to the “dry” reservation. Within this microcosm of cultural conflict, Magnuson explores the odds against community's power to transcend misunderstanding, alcoholism, prejudice, and violence.“Like all good stories, The Death of Raymond Yellow Thunder spins against the way it drives. Even as the people of Sheridan County despise, scorn, exploit, assault, and kill one another, their lives, like objects slipping out of control, become more and more inseparable. Indians and whites coexist and, against all odds, somehow get along, sharing space they really don’t want to share. This countercurrent is the source of the many unexpected stories Magnuson brings forth.” —Pekka Hämäläinen, from the foreword

Dawn


Phil Elverum - 2008
    "Dawn" delves deep into an intensely creative period of Elverum s life, with a beautiful mix of journal writing, jokes, photographs, and music. This 144-page hardcover collection chronicles a winter spent alone in a cabin in arctic Norway, wrestling with ghosts, gathering wood, acting out myths--3 months of unfiltered brain torrents interspersed with drawings. It comes with a 17-track CD of songs written during that time, songs that have become well known over the years through recordings and live performances. The CD is a kind of lost album finally recorded properly, pared down to just guitar and vocals. Also included is a 16-page color photo booklet.

Conversations with Ursula K. Le Guin


Ursula K. Le Guin - 2008
    Le Guin assembles interviews with the renowned science-fiction and fantasy author of The Left Hand of Darkness, The Dispossessed, The Lathe of Heaven, and the Earthsea sequence of novels and stories. For nearly five decades, Le Guin (b. 1929) has enjoyed immense success--both critical and popular--in science fiction and fantasy. But she has also published well-received works in such genres as realistic fiction, poetry, children's literature, criticism, and translation. In the pieces collected here, Le Guin takes every interview not as an opportunity to recapitulate long-held views but as an occasion for in-depth intellectual discourse.In interviews spanning over twenty-five years of her literary career, including a previously unpublished piece conducted by the volume's editor, Le Guin talks about such diverse subjects as U.S. foreign policy, the history of architecture, the place of women and feminist consciousness in American literature, and the differences between science fiction and fantasy.Carl Freedman is professor of English at Louisiana State University and is the author of Critical Theory and Science Fiction; The Incomplete Projects: Marxism, Modernity, and the Politics of Culture; and George Orwell: A Study in Ideology and Literary Form.

Sixty Poems


Charles Simic - 2008
    Here are sixty of Charles Simic's best known poems, collected to celebrate his appointment as the fifteenth Poet Laureate of the United States.

Ghost Medicine


Andrew Smith - 2008
    Troy and his father barely speak, communicating instead by writing notes on a legal pad by the phone. Troy spends most of his time with his closest friends: Tom Buller, brash and fearless, the son of a drunk; Gabe Benavidez, smart enough to know he’ll never take over the family ranch; and Gabe’s sister, Luz, whose family overprotects her, and who Troy has loved since they were children.           Troy and his friends don’t want trouble. They want this to be the summer of what Troy calls “ghost medicine,” when time seems to stop, so they won’t have to face the past or the future. But before the summer is over, their paths will cross in dangerous and fateful ways with people who will change their lives: Rose, a damaged derelict who lives with a flock of wild horses and goats; and Chase Rutledge, the arrogant sheriff’s son.           Troy and his friends want to disappear. Instead, they will become what they least expect —brothers, lovers, heroes, and ghosts.

Puritan's Empire


Charles A. Coulombe - 2008
    For Catholics, history has an even higher purpose beside. For them, history is the unfolding of God's Will in time, and the attempts of men either to conform themselves to or to resist that Will. But American Catholic historians have generally refrained from exploring their own national history with these principles, preferring instead to adopt the analysis of their non-Catholic colleagues, save when looking at purely Catholic topics (and sometimes not then). It is vital then, for Catholics, especially young Catholics, to have a good and proper understanding of their country's history. To exercise their patriotism, they must work for the conversion of the United States; to do this effectively, they must understand the forces and events which brought forth not only the religion of Americanism and the country itself, but also the sort of Catholicism which, in 300 years, failed so dismally to bring this conversion about. This book attempts to reinterpret the better known episodes of our history in accordance with the Faith, and to point up lesser-known details which will give factual proof of the truth of this reinterpretation.

Hinds' Feet On High Places / Mountains Of Spices


Hannah Hurnard - 2008
    

People of the Whale


Linda Hogan - 2008
    But an ill-fated decision to fight in Vietnam changes his life forever: cut off from his Native American community, he fathers a child with another woman. When he returns home a hero, he finds his tribe in conflict over the decision to hunt a whale, both a symbol of spirituality and rebirth and a means of survival. In the end, he reconciles his two existences, only to see tragedy befall the son he left behind.Linda Hogan, called our most provocative Native American writer, with "her unparalleled gifts for truth and magic" (Barbara Kingsolver), has written a compassionate novel about the beauty of the natural world and the painful moral choices humans make in it. With a keen sense of the environment, spirituality, and the trauma of war, People of the Whale is a powerful novel for our times.

Life: Remembering Audrey


LIFE - 2008
    LIFE

Armageddon in Retrospect: And Other New and Unpublished Writings on War and Peace


Kurt Vonnegut Jr. - 2008
    To be published on the first anniversary of Kurt Vonnegut's death, Armageddon in Retrospect is a collection of twelve new and unpublished writings on war and peace, imbued with Vonnegut's trademark rueful humor.

The Night Of 1,000 Murders


Mark Leidner - 2008
    

What is America?: A Short History of the New World Order


Ronald Wright - 2008
    This raises the question, has America ever been what it thinks it is? What Is America? goes to the heart of that inquiry. Ranging with dazzling expertise through anthropology, history, and literature, Wright reconfigures our self-perception, arguing that the “essence” of America can be traced to the foundations of our history-literally to the collision of worlds that began in 1492, as one civilization subsumed another-and exploring how these currents continue to shape our world.

I Believe in You (Marianne Richmond)


Marianne Richmond - 2008
    From a beloved bestselling author who has touched the lives of millions, Marianne's evocative text and beautiful illustrations will speak straight to a parent's heart, exploring that feeling of unwavering support. Sure to become a new fan favorite, I Believe in You evocatively portrays the complex and tender emotions all parents have for their children. (20110613)Book Details: Format: Hardcover Publication Date: 8/1/2011 Pages: 32 Reading Level: Age 4 and Up

The Cult of the Presidency: America's Dangerous Devotion to Executive Power


Gene Healy - 2008
    Yet despite the controversy surrounding the administration's expansive claims of executive power, both Left and Right agree on the boundless nature of presidential responsibility. The Imperial Presidency is the price we seem to be willingly and dangerously agreeable to pay the office the focus of our national hopes and dreams. Interweaving historical scholarship, legal analysis, and cultural commentary, The Cult of the Presidency argues that the Presidency needs to be reined in, its powers checked and supervised, and its wartime authority put back under the oversight of the Congress and the courts. Only then will we begin to return the Presidency to its proper constitutionally limited role.

No End in Sight: Iraq's Descent Into Chaos


Charles Ferguson - 2008
    Culled from over 200 hours of footage collected for the film, the book provides a candid and alarming retelling of the events following the fall of Baghdad in 2003 by high ranking officials, Iraqi civilians, American soldiers, and prominent analysts. Together, these voices reveal the principal errors of U.S. policy that largely created the insurgency and chaos that engulf Iraq today--and what we could and should do about them now.No End In Sight marks the first time Americans will be allowed inside the White House, Pentagon, and Baghdad's Green Zone to understand for themselves the disintegration of Iraq-- and how arrogance and ignorance turned a military victory into a seemingly endless and deepening nightmare of a war.

Ghost Whisperer: Plague Room


Steven Piziks - 2008
    But there's nothing ordinary about the blur of activity at Jack's Dry Cleaning, where shirts are spinning on the racks and dresses are dancing without their owners. A spirit has taken up residence in the store, and although Melinda Gordon usually can sort out what's keeping a spirit from crossing over, this particular one is frustratingly uncommunicative. After a week of trying, the store owner is convinced that Melinda will never succeed. Then self-acclaimed spiritual consultant Wendy King comes to town, guaranteeing success in moving spirits to the afterlife...for a fee. But Wendy's methodology involves trapping and forcing spirits into the light. And she pays no heed when Melinda tells her that what she is doing is wrong and dangerous. After a young couple inherits the old Ray mansion and asks for help selling the antiques that fill the house, Melinda pushes aside her concerns about Wendy. But the old house holds a terrible secret and a spirit that Melinda cannot budge. The frightened owners turn to Wendy King, who forces the spirit to cross over, despite Melinda's pleadings. But Wendy's actions release an evil, unyielding spirit, one who promises to release a flood of disease and terror on the town, starting with the people closest to the Ghost Whisperer.

Sun Going Down


Jack Todd - 2008
    The cast includes a grizzled Mississippi steamboat merchant, two horse-thieving brothers, five Annie Oakley-like sisters who can outride any cowboy, a half-Sioux bride who demands her new family claim her heritage, and a courageous daughter who defies her father and braves the West alone. The Paint family must battle both internal and external elements, and learn to live with spirit and wit.Letters and diaries from the author's own family archives form the basis for all the events and characters for richly detailed authenticity and deep emotional power. Reach spans Vicksburg up through Montana and the Dakotas, four generations from the Civil War to the Great Depression.

Famous Last Words


Catherine Pierce - 2008
    Beginning with a series of literal love poems (to the word “lonesome”, to blank space, to doo-wop, to fear, etc.), Pierce whisks the reader on a cross-country road trip (both literally and figuratively) that takes a tangential spree into a series of genre films and ends with gallows humor in the re-imagining of the events surrounding the famous last words of icons like Billy the Kid, Marie Antoinette, Isadora Duncan, and Pancho Villa. From start to finish, Pierce’s book is a delight to the senses, a playful, nostalgic dance that ends with the reader wanting more.

Merriam-Webster's Advanced Learner's English Dictionary


Merriam-Webster - 2008
    The default setting is The New Oxford American Dictionary included on your Kindle, but you have the option to change your default setting to this compatible dictionary after purchase. Designed for learners of English, this groundbreaking new dictionary from North America-s foremost language experts provides in-depth and up-to-date coverage of basic English vocabulary, grammar, and usage.  - Nearly 100,000 words and phrases - More than 160,000 usage examples - the most of any dictionary - More than 22,000 idioms, verbal collocations, and commonly used phrases

The History of Anonymity: Poems


Jennifer Chang - 2008
    Chang sweeps together myth and fairy tale, skirting the edges of events to focus on the psychological tenor of experience: the underpinnings of identity and the role of nature in both constructing and erasing a self. From the edge of the ocean, where things constantly shift and dissolve, through "the forest's thick, / where the trees meet the dark," to an imaginary cliffside town of fog, this book makes a journey both natural and psychological, using experiments in language and form to capture the search for personhood and place.

The Great Derangement: A Terrifying True Story of War, Politics, and Religion at the Twilight of the American Empire


Matt Taibbi - 2008
    A large and growing chunk of the American population was so turned off--or radicalized--by electoral chicanery, a spineless news media, and the increasingly blatant lies from our leaders ("they hate us for our freedom") that they abandoned the political mainstream altogether. They joined what he calls The Great Derangement.Taibbi tells the story of this new American madness by inserting himself into four defining American subcultures: • The Military, where he finds himself mired in the grotesque black comedy of the American occupation of Iraq;• The System, where he follows the money-slicked path of legislation in Congress;• The Resistance, where he doubles as chief public antagonist and undercover member of the passionately bonkers 9/11 Truth Movement; and• The Church, where he infiltrates a politically influential apocalyptic mega-ministry in Texas and enters the lives of its desperate congregants. Together these four interwoven adventures paint a portrait of a nation dangerously out of touch with reality and desperately searching for answers in all the wrong places. Funny, smart, and a little bit heartbreaking, The Great Derangement is an audaciously reported, sobering, and illuminating portrait of America at the end of the Bush era."The funniest angry writer and the angriest funny writer since Hunter S. Thompson roared into town." -- James Wolcott"…[A] scabrous, hilarious vivisection of our disintegrating nation. …Taibbi shines a light on the corruption, absurdities, and idiot pieties of modern American politics. Beneath his cynical fury, though, are flashes of surprising compassion for the adrift credulous souls who are taken in by it all." -- Michelle Goldberg

The Alphabet


Ron Silliman - 2008
    Consisting of twenty-six smaller books, one for each letter of the alphabet, it employs language in ways that are startling and innovative. Over the course of the three decades during which it has appeared—in journals, magazines, and as stand-alone volumes—its influence has been wide-ranging, both on practicing poets and on critics who have had to contend with the way it has changed the direction of American poetry.   Ron Silliman, a founder of the language poetry movement in the 1960s and one of its most dedicated and acclaimed practitioners, has deployed in The Alphabet the full range of formal and linguistic experiments for which he is known.  The Alphabet is a work of American ethnography, a cultural collage of artifacts, moments, episodes, and voices--historical and private--that capture the dizzying evolution of America’s social, cultural, and literary consciousness.

Zizek's Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity


Adrian Johnston - 2008
    This book focuses on the generally neglected and often overshadowed philosophical core of Žižek’s work—an essential component in any true appreciation of this unique thinker’s accomplishment. His central concern, Žižek has proclaimed, is to use psychoanalysis (especially the teachings of Jacques Lacan) to redeploy the insights of late-modern German philosophy, in particular, the thought of Kant, Schelling, and Hegel.  By taking this avowal seriously, Adrian Johnston finally clarifies the philosophical project underlying Žižek’s efforts. His book charts the interlinked ontology and theory of subjectivity constructed by Žižek at the intersection of German idealism and Lacanian theory.  Johnston also uses Žižek’s combination of philosophy and psychoanalysis to address two perennial philosophical problems: the relationship of mind and body, and the nature of human freedom. By bringing together the past two centuries of European philosophy, psychoanalytic metapsychology, and cutting-edge work in the natural sciences, Johnston develops a transcendental materialist theory of subjectivity—in short, an account of how more-than-material forms of subjectivity can emerge from a corporeal being. His work shows how an engagement with Žižek’s philosophy can produce compelling answers to today’s most vexing and urgent questions as inherited from the history of ideas.

A.J. Liebling: World War II Writings


A.J. Liebling - 2008
    J. Liebling spent five years reporting the dramatic events and myriad individual stories of World War II. As a correspondent for The New Yorker, Liebling wrote with a passionate commitment to Allied victory, an unfailing attention to telling details, and an appreciation for the literary challenges presented by the ?discursive, centrifugal, both repetitive and disparate? nature of war. This volume brings together three books along with 26 uncollected New Yorker pieces and two excerpts from The Republic of Silence (1947), Liebling?s collection of writing from the French Resistance.The Road Back to Paris (1944) narrates Liebling?s experiences from September 1939 to March 1943, including his shock at the fall of France and dismay at isolationist indifference in the United States; it contains classic accounts of a winter voyage on a Norwegian tanker during the Battle of the Atlantic, visits to front-line airfields in North Africa, and the defeat of a veteran panzer division by American troops in Tunisia. Mollie and Other War Pieces (1964) brings together Liebling?s portrait of a legendary nonconformist American soldier in North Africa with his eyewitness account of Omaha Beach on D-Day, evocative reports from Normandy, and investigation of a German atrocity in rural France. In Normandy Revisited (1958) Liebling writes about his return to France in 1955 and recalls the joyous liberation of his beloved Paris while exploring with bittersweet perception how wartime experience is transformed into memory. The selection of uncollected New Yorker pieces includes a profile of an RAF ace, surveys of the French underground press, and an encounter with a captured collaborator in Brittany, as well as postwar reflections on battle fatigue, Ernie Pyle, and the writing of military history. With maps and chronology.

Arthur Schwartz's Jewish Home Cooking: Yiddish Recipes Revisited


Arthur Schwartz - 2008
    JEWISH HOME COOKING presents authentic yet contemporary versions of traditional Ashkenazi foods-rugulach, matzoh brei, challah, brisket, and even challenging classics like kreplach (dumplings) and gefilte fish-that are approachable to make and revelatory to eat. Chapters on appetizers, soups, dairy (meatless) and meat entrees, Passover meals, breads, and desserts are filled with lore about individual dishes and the people who nurtured them in America. Light-filled food and location photographs of delis, butcher shops, and specialty grocery stores paint a vibrant picture of America's touchstone Jewish food culture. Stories, culinary history, and nearly 100 recipes for Jewish home cooking from the heart of American Jewish culture, New York City. Written by one of the country's foremost experts on traditional and contemporary Jewish food, cooking, and culinary culture. Schwartz won the 2005 IACP Cookbook of the Year.Reviews & AwardsJames Beard Foundation Cookbook Award Finalist: American Category IACP International Association of Culinary Professionals Cookbook Awards, American Category Finalist  "Jewish Home Cooking helps make sense of the beautiful chaos, with a deep and affectionate examination of New York's Jewish food culture, refracted through the Ins of what he calls the Yiddish-American experience."—New York Times Book Review Summer Reading issue, cookbook roundup“Schwartz breathes life into Yiddish cooking traditions now missing from most cities' main streets as well as many Jewish tables. His colorful stories are so distinctive and charming that even someone who has never heard Schwartz's radio show or seen him on TV will feel his warm personaality and love for food radiating from the page . . . Cooks and readers from Schwartz's generation and earlier, who know firsthand what he's talking about, will appreciate this delightful new book for the world it evokes as much as for the recipes.”—Publishers Weekly

Night Scenes


Lisa Jarnot - 2008
    In NIGHT SCENES, the fourth book from best-selling poet Lisa Jarnot, we are returned to the "first melody" through mock archaisms, neologisms, rollicking rhymes, and childlike delight. Her circling lyrics sing the pleasure of naming itself, with pastoral dreams occasionally giving way to waking life in Brooklyn. Like William Blake's songs, NIGHT SCENES privileges wonder over reason in a triumph of the imagination: "Be jumpy / or unhinged / with joy / enlightened / fry cakes / Staten hoy."

The Legend of Colton H. Bryant


Alexandra Fuller - 2008
    Bryant was one of Wyoming's native sons and grown by that high, dry place, he never once wanted to leave it. "Wyoming loves me," he said, and it was true. Wyoming—roughneck, wild, open, and searingly beautiful—loved him, and Colton loved it back. As a child in school, Colton never could force himself to focus on his lessons. Instead, he'd plan where he'd go fishing later, or he'd wonder how many jackrabbits he might find on his favorite hunting patch, or he'd dream about the rides he would take on the wild mare he was breaking. "At my funeral, you'll all feel sorry for making me waste so much time in school," he said to his best friend Jake—and it was true.Two things got Colton through the boredom of school and the neighborhood "K-mart cowboys" who bullied him: His best friend Jake and his favorite mantra, a snatch of a saying he heard on TV: Mind over matter, which meant to him: If you don't mind, it don't matter. Colton and Jake grew up wanting nothing more than the freedom to sleep out under the great Wyoming night sky, to hunt and fish and chase the horizon and to be just like Colton's dad, a strong and gentle man of few words. When it was time for Colton to marry and make money on his own, he took up as a hand on an oil rig. It was dangerous work, but Colton was the third generation in his family to work on the oil patch and he claimed it was in his blood. And anyway, he joked, he always knew he'd die young.Colton did die young, and he died on the rig, falling to his death because the drilling company had neglected to spend two thousand dollars on the mandated safety rails that would have saved his life. His family received no compensation. But they didn't expect to—they knew the company's ways, and after all as Colton would have said: Mind over matter.In Scribbling the Cat, Alexandra Fuller brought us the examined life of a Rhodesian soldier; now, in her inimitable poetic voice and with her pitch-perfect ear for dialogue, she brings before us the life of someone much closer to home, as unexpected as he is iconic. The moving, tough, and in many ways quintessentially American story of Colton H. Bryant's life could not be told without also telling the story of the land that grew him—the beautiful and somehow tragic Wyoming; the land where there are still such things as cowboys roaming the plains, where it's relationships that get you through, and where a just, soulful, passionate man named Colton H. Bryant lived and died.

A Change of Allegiance


Dean Taylor - 2008
    S. Army when they realized that, as committed Christians, they had to come to grip with these questions in a new and sincere quest for truth. They were determined to follow Jesus Christ under the banner of no compromise. As they began to search the Scriptures and church history, they came to the startling discovery that the Christian Church originally was uniformly opposed to Christians going to war or joining the military. In A Change of Allegiance, Taylor takes the reader on a moving journey through the Scriptures, Christian history, and his own life s story demonstrating the incompatibility of Christianity and war. Ultimately, Taylor challenges his readers to consider where their allegiance really lies.

Collected Stories and Other Writings


Katherine Anne Porter - 2008
    They number fewer than thirty, but as Robert Penn Warren commented, "many are unsurpassed in modern fiction," and when gathered in one volume in 1965 they won their author both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Award. The Library of America now reprints that landmark volume, The Collected Stories of Katherine Anne Porter, and pairs it with a completely new selection from Porter's long-out-of-print short prose. Expanding the contents of her 1952 collection The Days Before to include both early journalism and major pieces from her final three decades, the prose works collected here are grouped in four parts: critical essays on writers she loved and learned from, including James, Cather, Lawrence, and Colette; personal essays and speeches on such topics as the craft of writing, her own work, women in myth and in history, and American politics; essays and reports on Mexican life, letters, and revolution; and two previously uncollected forays into autobiography.THE COLLECTED STORIES OF KATHERINE ANNE PORTERGo Little BookFlowering Judas and Other StoriesMaría ConcepciónVirgin VioletaThe MartyrMagicRopeHeTheftThat TreeThe Jilting of Granny WeatherallFlowering JudasThe Cracked Looking-GlassHaciendaPale Horse, Pale RiderOld MortalityNoon WinePale Horse, Pale RiderThe Leaning Tower and Other StoriesThe Old OrderThe SourceThe JourneyThe WitnessThe CircusThe Last LeafThe Fig TreeThe GraveThe Downward Path to WisdomA Day’s WorkHolidayThe Leaning TowerESSAYS, REVIEWS, AND OTHER WRITINGS“I needed both . . .”CriticalThe Days BeforeReflections on Willa CatherA Note on The Troll GardenGertrude Stein: Three Views“Everybody Is a Real One”Second WindThe Wooden Umbrella“It Is Hard to Stand in the Middle”Eudora Welty and A Curtain of GreenThe Wingèd SkullOn a Criticism of Thomas HardyE. M. ForsterVirginia WoolfD. H. LawrenceQuetzalcoatlA Wreath for the Gamekeeper“The Laughing Heat of the Sun”The Art of Katherine MansfieldThe Hundredth RoleDylan Thomas“A death of days . . .”“A fever chart . . .”“In the morning of the poet . . .”A Most Lively GeniusOrpheus in PurgatoryIn MemoriamFord Madox Ford (1873–1939)James Joyce (1882–1941)Sylvia Beach (1887–1962)Flannery O’Connor (1925–1964)Personal and ParticularOn WritingMy First Speech“I must write from memory . . .”No Plot, My Dear, No Story“Writing cannot be taught . . .”The Situation of the WriterThe Situation in American WritingTransplanted WritersThe International Exchange of WritersThe Author on Her WorkNo Masters or TeachersOn “Flowering Judas”“The only reality . . .”“Noon Wine”: The SourcesNotes on the Texas I RememberPortrait: Old SouthA Christmas StoryAudubon’s Happy LandThe Flower of FlowersA Note on Pierre-Joseph RedoutéA House of My OwnThe Necessary Enemy“Marriage Is Belonging”A Defense of CirceSt. Augustine and the BullfightAct of Faith: 4 July 1942The Future Is NowThe Never-Ending WrongMexicanWhy I Write About MexicoReports from Mexico City, 1920–1922The New Man and the New OrderThe Fiesta of GuadalupeThe Funeral of General Benjamín HillChildren of XochitlThe Mexican TrinityWhere Presidents Have No FriendsIn a Mexican PatioLeaving the PetateThe Charmed LifeCorridosSor Juana: A Portrait of the PoetNotes on the Life and Death of a HeroA Mexican Chronicle, 1920–1943Blasco Ibanez on “Mexico in Revolution”Paternalism and the Mexican ProblemLa Conquistadora¡Ay, Que Chamaco!Old Gods and New MessiahsDiego RiveraThese Pictures Must Be SeenRivera’s Personal RevolutionParvenu . . .History on the WingThirty Long Years of RevolutionAutobiographicalAbout the AuthorThe Land That Is Nowhere- See more at: http://www.loa.org/volume.jsp?Request...

Early Novels and Stories: Bright Center of Heaven / They Came Like Swallows / The Folded Leaf / Time Will Darken It / Stories 1938-1956


William Maxwell - 2008
    “I had no idea then,” he later wrote, “that three-quarters of the material I would need for the rest of my writing life was already at my disposal. My father and mother. My brothers. The look of things. The Natural History of home . . . All there, waiting for me to learn my trade and recognize instinctively what would make a story.”With his second book, They Came Like Swallows (1937), Maxwell found his signature subject matter—the fragility of human happiness—as well as his voice, a quiet, cadenced Midwestern voice that John Updike has called one of the wisest and kindest in American fiction. Set against the background of the Spanish flu epidemic of 1918, this short novel presents the loving character of Elizabeth Morison, a devoted wife and mother, through the eyes of those whom she is fated to leave decades before her time.Edmund Wilson described The Folded Leaf (1945) as “a quite unconventional study of adolescent relationships—between two boys, with a girl in the offing—in Chicago and in a Middle Western college: very much lived and very much seen.” He praised this “drama of the immature” for the compassion Maxwell brings to his male protagonists, whose intensely felt, unarticulated bond is beyond their inchoate ability to understand.Time Will Darken It (1948) is a drama of the mature: a good man’s struggle to keep duty before desire and his family’s needs before his own. It paints a portrait of Draperville, Illinois, in 1912, a proud and isolated community governed by gossip, where an ambitious young woman must not overreach the limits society has placed on her sex, and an older, married gentleman must not encourage her should she dare.Together with these major works, this Library of America edition of Maxwell’s early fiction collects his lighthearted first novel, Bright Center of Heaven (1934), out of print for nearly 70 years, and nine masterly short stories. It concludes with “The Writer as Illusionist” (1955), Maxwell’s fullest statement on the art of fiction as he practiced it.

The Leper


Steve Thayer - 2008
    Paul neighborhood where a high school diploma is a rarity. Severson has dreams, aspirations. But something had happened to him during the war, something awful. And it follows him home and changes every part of his life. John Severson becomes a leper. Instantly he is torn from his dreams, disconnected from his beautiful plan, ripped from the woman he loves. But Severson is determined to reclaim what he lost, to overcome the horror that is leprosy, to dream again.

Time: 85 Years of Great Writing


Christopher Porterfield - 2008
    Includes 16-page photo insert.

fuckscapes


Sean Kilpatrick - 2008
    The result is a zone of violent ambience, a 'fuckscape': where every object or word can be made to do horrific acts. As when torturers use banal objects on its victims, it is the most banal objects that become the most horrific (and hilarious) in Sean Kilpatrick’s brilliant first book."– Johannes Goransson, author of A New Quarantine Will Take My Place"Pregnancy dream of poetry has this Sean Kilpatrick book by the fist. You learn to signal to others from the woken state, here, line-by-line. Do you have any extra money? Buy this book! If you have to skip lunch, buy THIS BOOK! 'I held my breath so hard I ended up in the country.' Some poetry you read is forgotten, and never remembered. Some poetry, this poetry, Sean Kilpatrick’s poetry, is a manual for exciting the engine to throw you out of the vanquished pleasures. Here is your I.V. drip of sphinx’s blood."– CAConrad, author of The Book of Frank

Cybernetrix


Carlton Mellick III - 2008
    The first such world created was originally supposed to be based on the electronic world from the movie Tron, but due to legal complications with the Disney Corporation the developers decided to base it instead on a B-grade ripoff film called Cybernetrix. Although the movie was a failure, the electronic world of Cybernetrix has become so popular that it has changed our culture forever. There is only one problem: the Cybernetrix world and the real world seem to be slowly bleeding together into one reality. Carlton Mellick III's Cybernetrix is a bizarro satire set in a future world where '80s fads never went out of style, where society has completely lost interest in art and creativity, where reality is so damned boring that fantasy is the only thing left worth living for.

The Weaklings


Dennis Cooper - 2008
    First collection of Dennis Cooper's poetry in 12 years

White Heat: The Friendship of Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson


Brenda Wineapple - 2008
    As the Civil War raged, an unlikely friendship was born between the reclusive poet Emily Dickinson and Thomas Wentworth Higginson, a literary figure who ran guns to Kansas and commanded the first Union regiment of black soldiers. When Dickinson sent Higginson four of her poems, he realized he had encountered a wholly original genius; their intense correspondence continued for the next quarter century.In White Heat, Brenda Wineapple tells an extraordinary story about poetry, politics, and love -- one that sheds new light on her subjects, and on the roiling America they shared.

Wallace Stegner and the American West


Philip L. Fradkin - 2008
    Now, in this illuminating biography, Philip L. Fradkin goes beyond Stegner’s iconic literary status to give us, as well, the influential teacher and visionary conservationist, the man for whom the preservation and integrity of place was as important as his ability to render its qualities and character in his brilliantly crafted fiction and nonfiction.From his birth in 1909 until his death in 1993, Stegner witnessed nearly a century of change in the land that he loved and fought so hard to preserve. We learn of his hardscrabble youth on the Canadian frontier and in Utah, and of his painful relationship with his father, a bootlegger and gambler. We follow his intellectual awakening as a young man and his years as a Depression-era graduate student at the University of Iowa, during its earliest days as a literary center. We watch as he finds his home, with his wife, Mary, in the foothills above Palo Alto, which provided him with a long-awaited sense of belonging and a refuge in which he would write his most treasured works. And here are his years as the legendary founder of the Stanford Creative Writing Program, where his students included Ken Kesey, Edward Abbey, Robert Stone, and Wendell Berry.But the changes wrought by developers and industrialists were too much for Stegner, and he tirelessly fought the transformation of his Garden of Eden into Silicon Valley. His writings on the importance of establishing national parks and wilderness areas—not only for the preservation of untouched landscape but also for the enrichment of the human spirit—played a key role in the passage of historic legislation and comprise some of the most beautiful words ever written about the natural world.Here, too, is the story—told in full for the first time—of the accusations of plagiarism that followed the publication of Angle of Repose, and of the shadow they have cast on his greatest work.Rich in personal and literary detail, and in the sensual description of the country that shaped his work and his life—this is the definitive account of one of the most acclaimed and admired writers, teachers, and conservationists of our time.

Schizophrenia: Cognitive Theory, Research, and Therapy


Aaron T. Beck - 2008
    Beck and colleagues, this is the definitive work on the cognitive model of schizophrenia and its treatment. The volume integrates cognitive-behavioral and biological knowledge into a comprehensive conceptual framework. It examines the origins, development, and maintenance of key symptom areas: delusions, hallucinations, negative symptoms, and formal thought disorder. Treatment chapters then offer concrete guidance for addressing each type of symptom, complete with case examples and session outlines. Anyone who treats or studies serious mental illness will find a new level of understanding together with theoretically and empirically grounded clinical techniques.

W.E.B. Du Bois: A Biography 1868-1963


David Levering Lewis - 2008
    E. B. Du Bois from renowned scholar David Levering Lewis, now in one condensed and updated volumeWilliam Edward Burghardt Du Bois—the premier architect of the civil rights movement in America—was a towering and controversial personality, a fiercely proud individual blessed with the language of the poet and the impatience of the agitator. Now, David Levering Lewis has carved one volume out of his superlative two-volume biography of this monumental figure that set the standard for historical scholarship on this era. In his magisterial prose, Lewis chronicles Du Bois’s long and storied career, detailing the momentous contributions to our national character that still echo today.W.E.B. Du Bois is a 1993 and 2000 National Book Award Finalist for Nonfiction and the winner of the 1994 and 2001 Pulitzer Prize for Biography.

We Meet


Kenneth Patchen - 2008
    New Directions is proud to launch a Patchen revival beginning with omnibus editions of his unique compositions.We Meet highlights Patchen's more outlandish side and includes, like fabrics stitched into a crazy quilt, Because It Is, A Letter to God, Poemscapes, Hurrah For Anything, and Aflame &amp; Afun of Walking Faces. "Because to understand one must begin somewhere," opens Patchen's fabulous book of poems Because It Is: perhaps the most ideal reason for such a melting pot of poetry. Open any page at random and find Patchen protesting the Second World War (A Letter to God), or telling the tale of how hot water first came to be tracked onto bedroom floors (Aflame and Afun of Walking Faces), or informing the reader what happened when the nervous vine wouldn't twine (Because It Is), or why he loathes those who act as if a cherry were something they personally thought up (Hurrah For Anything), or answering what he wants out of life: "let's say—no matter" (Poemscapes).

Revenge (The Ghost Whisperer)


Doranna Durgin - 2008
    But a vicious killer makes certain that Gordon's farewell will be final indeed. And now the haunting begins. Gordon's murder has sparked a return to his violent ways, and his embittered spirit is quickly learning how to physically unleash his fury. He hunts down Craig Lusak -- the last man to see Gordon alive -- and begins to terrorize him mercilessly in a rage fueled by vengeance, anger, and unrelenting bloodlust. Problem is, Gordon may be haunting the wrong man. When ghost whisperer Melinda Gordon begins to investigate the murder, she discovers a terrified Lusak, who, though desperate to ward off his ghostly tormentor, is secretive about his involvement with Gordon Reese's death. Melinda's interference provokes the killer to begin stalking her, and she becomes the next target of his obsessive homicidal rage. For each minute that the murder goes unsolved, Lusak grows weaker and Melinda faces increasing danger. In the ultimate battle between good and evil, will Gordon Reese overcome his demons in time to save Melinda from his killer, or will Gordon's unquenchable thirst for revenge lead her to a horrific end?

Novels and Other Narratives, 1986-1991: The Counterlife / The Facts / Deception / Patrimony


Philip Roth - 2008
    By special arrangement with the author, The Library of America continues the definitive edition of Roth's collected works. This fifth volume of The Library of America's definitive edition of Philip Roth's collected works presents four books that exemplify the description of Roth, proposed by British novelist Anthony Burgess, as a writer “who never steps twice into the same river.” The Counterlife (1986) is a novel told from conflicting perspectives about people enacting drastic dreams of renewal and escape. The Facts (1988)—the first of the “Roth Books”—is a novelist's autobiography in which the author presents his own battles defictionalized and unadorned. In the second Roth book, Deception (1990), a married American named Philip, living in London, and the married Englishwoman who is his mistress meet sporadically in a secret trysting place where the woman eloquently reveals herself to her lover as they talk before and after making love. In the third Roth book, Patrimony (1991), the author watches as his 86-year-old father, Herman Roth, battles a fatal brain tumor.Library of America #185Library of America #185

When She Named Fire: An Anthology of Contemporary Poetry by American Women


Andrea Hollander - 2008
    It features 97 of the most exciting poets in America including Kim Addonizio, Natasha Trethewey, Robin Becker, Laure-Anne Bosselaar, Maxine Kumin, Naomi Shihab Nye, Claudia Emerson, Lynn Emanuel, Mary Oliver, Jane Mead, Mary Ruefle, Kay Ryan, and Pattiann Rogers. The collection includes a photograph and a brief biographical sketch of each poet.

The View from Mrs. Thompson's (A Story from Consider the Lobster): And Other Essays


David Foster Wallace - 2008
    Do lobsters feel pain? Did Franz Kafka have a funny bone? What is John Updike's deal, anyway? And what happens when adult video starlets meet their fans in person? David Foster Wallace answers these questions and more in essays that are also enthralling narrative adventures. Whether covering the three-ring circus of a vicious presidential race, plunging into the wars between dictionary writers, or confronting the World's Largest Lobster Cooker at the annual Maine Lobster Festival, Wallace projects a quality of thought that is uniquely his and a voice as powerful and distinct as any in American letters.

It's Not About the Hair: And Other Certainties of Life & Cancer


Debra Jarvis - 2008
    In that capacity she meets daily with patients in at many points along the path of living with cancer, from diagnosis to treatment to recovery and facing death. So in one of those ironic twists of fate, Jarvis was diagnosed with breast cancer herself. It’s Not About the Hair is the account of her time with cancer. As she says, the first thing people ask when they learn you have cancer is whether you are going to lose your hair. But what they really mean to ask is whether you are going to lose your life. Debra Jarvis is able to write honestly and humorously about her experience with cancer because she has had the unique experience of having witnessed and having guided so many cases of cancer. And she brings all of that perspective and context and wisdom to the story of her own breast cancer. As an ordained minister she considers her voice to be a combination of Mr. Miyagi from The Karate Kid" and Martha Stewart (pre-felon, that is), a persona she labels Mr. Martha Miyagi. It’s mystical and practical. Debra Jarvis manages to channel a humor that is reminiscent of Nora Ephron. This is a cancer story that won’t give you the creeps, but it will guide you to think deeply about the serious stuff like ingrained views on health and disease, life and death, the time we have and how we want to live it.

Fatherless


Brian J. Gail - 2008
    Brian Gail takes us out into the "trenches" and shows what life was like for Catholics good and bad during this critical time. This book is a great opportunity for Catholics to take hold of who they really are.