On the heels of last year's mesmerising film adaptation of 'Brokeback Mountain' comes this beautiful, single volume collection of Annie Proulx's celebrated Wyoming stories. Inventive, compassionate and wildly funny, they explore the unbreakable bond between a people and their land in rich and robust language, with an eye for detail unparalleled in American fiction. In 'The Contest', the men of Elk Tooth, Wyoming, vow to put aside their razors for two seasons and wait to see who has the longest beard come the 4th of July. Deb Sipple, the moving protagonist of 'That Trickle Down Effect', finds that his opportunism - and his smoking habit - lead to massive destruction. And 'What Kind of Furniture Would Jesus Pick?' is the story of Gilbert Wolfscale, whose rabid devotion to his ranch drives away his wife and sons. Every story of this stunning collection is a tribute to Proulx's wit, her knowledge of the West, and her profound sympathy for characters who must use sheer will and courage to make it in such unforgiving territory.

    A teenage girl—her father long since disappeared, her mother unwilling to have her in the house—is pregnant, alone herself, with nowhere to go. And out in the country, two brothers, elderly bachelors, work the family homestead, the only world they've ever known.From these unsettled lives emerges a vision of life, and of the town and landscape that bind them together—their fates somehow overcoming the powerful circumstances of place and station, their confusion, curiosity, dignity and humor intact and resonant. As the milieu widens to embrace fully four generations, Kent Haruf displays an emotional and aesthetic authority to rival the past masters of a classic American tradition.Utterly true to the rhythms and patterns of life, Plainsong is a novel to care about, believe in, and learn from.

    The son of an alcoholic stagehand father and a Busby Berkeley chorus girl, Bunker was--at seventeen--the youngest inmate ever in San Quentin. His hard-won experiences on L.A.'s meanest streets and in and out of prison gave him the material to write some of the grittiest and most affecting novels of our time.From smoking a joint in the gas chamber to leaving fingerprints on a knife connected to a serial kiler, from Hollywood's steamy undersde to swimming in the Neptune pool at San Simeon, Bunker delivers a memoir as colorful as any of his novels and as compelling as the life he's lead.

    Jack could turn away from the case, but he won't because some old scores need to be settled. So Jack takes the plunge into a world of crime, ambition, and evil.

    Chapters focus on the supernatural elements of the work, as well as the author´s treatment of the physical self.

    Faulkner wanted to use the time remaining to him to achieve a summing-up of his fictional world.. "The Town (1957) is the second novel in the Snopes trilogy that began with The Hamlet. Here the rise of the rapacious Flem Snopes and his extravagantly extended family, as they connive their way into power in the county seat of Jefferson is filtered through three separate narrative voices. Faulkner was particularly proud of the two women characters - the doomed Eula and her daughter Linda - who stand at the novel's center.. "Flem's relentless drive toward wealth and control plays itself out in The Mansion (1959), in which a wronged relative, the downtrodden sharecropper Mink Snopes, succeeds in avenging himself and bringing down the corrupt Snopes dynasty.. "His last novel, The Reivers: A Reminiscence (1962), is distinctly mellower and more elegiac than his earlier work. A picaresque adventure set early in the twentieth century and involving a Memphis brothel, a racehorse, and a stolen automobile, it evokes the world of childhood with a final burst of comic energy.

    And, in a new afterword for this second edition, he reflects on Ali’s legacy in the era of the ‘war on terror’.

    In Englander's amazingly taut and ambitious "The Twenty-seventh Man," a clerical error lands earnest, unpublished Pinchas Pelovits in prison with twenty-six writers slated for execution at Stalin's command, and in the grip of torture Pinchas composes a mini-masterpiece, which he recites in one glorious moment before author and audience are simultaneously annihilated. In "The Gilgul of Park Avenue," a Protestant has a religious awakening in the back of a New York taxi. In the collection's hilarious title story, a Hasidic man incensed by his wife's interminable menstrual cycle gets a dispensation from his rabbi to see a prostitute. The stories in For the Relief of Unbearable Urges are powerfully inventive and often haunting, steeped in the weight of Jewish history and in the customs of Orthodox life. But it is in the largeness of their spirit-- a spirit that finds in doubt a doorway to faith, that sees in despair a chance for the heart to deepen--and in the wisdom that so prodigiously transcends the author's twenty-eight years, that these stories are truly remarkable. Nathan Englander envisions a group of Polish Jews herded toward a train bound for Auschwitz and in a deft imaginative twist turns them into acrobats tumbling out of harm's way; he takes an elderly wigmaker and makes her, for a single moment, beautiful. Again and again, Englander does what feels impossible: he finds, wherever he looks, a province beyond death's dominion.For the Relief of Unbearable Urges is a work of stunning authority and imagination--a book that is as wondrous and joyful as it is wrenchingly sad, and that heralds the arrival of a profoundly gifted new storyteller.

    Between 1950 and 1975, Philip S. Foner collected the most important of Douglass’s hundreds of speeches, letters, articles, and editorials into an impressive five-volume set, now long out of print. Abridged and condensed into one volume, and supplemented with several important texts that Foner did not include, this compendium presents the most significant, insightful, and elegant short works of Douglass’s massive oeuvre.

    He was an American who moved to Mexico and figured out how to live and work with Mexican Authorities. He wanted to populate Texas, but did not want to do so as invaders, but as migrants. He played within the rules. Other Texas migrants, not so much. Here is his story and the origins of Texas as an independent Republic.

    Spanning a period from Walt Whitman to Sherman Alexie, this collection is the first to review the twentieth century comprehensively. It presents not only the canonical poetry of the last hundred years but also numerous poems by women, minority, and progressive writers only rediscovered in the past two decades. Uniquely comprehensive, Anthology of Modern American Poetry represents Robert Frost with 23 poems, Wallace Stevens with 22, and Marianne Moore with 14, including her most ambitious long poems. William Carlos Williams is represented not only by his exquisite short lyrics, but also with an experimental combination of poetry and prose. With 29 poems, Langston Hughes is given full treatment for the first time in any comprehensive anthology. Substantial selections by contemporary poets like John Ashbery, Sylvia Plath, Frank O'Hara, Philip Levine, Lucille Clifton, Judy Grahn, Adrian Louis, Yusef Komunyakaa, Martin Espada, and Sherman Alexie are also included. Anthology of Modern American Poetry is the first anthology to give full treatment to American long poems and poem sequences. T.S. Eliot's The Waste Land, Gertrude Stein's "Patriarchal Poetry," William Carlos Williams's The Descent of Winter, Edna St. Vincent Millay's "Sonnets from an Ungrafted Tree," Muriel Rukeyser's "The Book of the Dead," Melvin Tolson's Libretto for the Republic of Liberia, Theodore Roethke's "North American Sequence," Gwendolyn Brooks's "Gay Chaps at the Bar," Kenneth Rexroth's "The Love Poems of Marichiko," both Allen Ginsberg's "Howl" and his "Wichita Vortex Sutra," and both Adrienne Rich's "Shooting Script" and her "Twenty-One Love Poems" are all included in their entirety. Anthology of Modern American Poetry offers the most detailed annotations available in an anthology of this type. Many works benefit from specially commissioned research that provides students with such help as the identification of the inventive references in Melvin Tolson's poetry, translation of all foreign language passages, and illumination of obscure references. This is also the only American poetry anthology to present selected poems in the beautifully illustrated form in which they first appeared. In addition, an accompanying website featuring readings of poems and historical background is available at http: //www.english.uiuc.edu/maps. Ideal for courses in modern American poetry, modern American literature, modern or contemporary poetry, creative writing-poetry, and American studies, Anthology of Modern American Poetry introduces students to the last 100 years of our poetic heritage in a uniquely rich and provocative format."

    This volume provides the most comprehensive selection of Audubon's writings ever published, along with a portfolio of his drawings.

    Analysing the contradictions of U.S. power while illustrating the real progress won by sustained popular struggle, Chomsky cuts through official political rhetoric to examine how the United States not only violates the UD, but at times uses it as a weapon to wield against designated enemies.

    military forces perish recently in hand to hand combat with a group of hostile greys who subsequently seized control of one of our top-secret underground bases? Controversial author Branton Includes in this shocking book the latest on animal mutilations, energy grids, secret societies, lost civilizations, abductions and missing time.

    That invitation was the start of a career that spanned half a century and culminated with Martin's induction into the International Bluegrass Music Association's Hall of Honor. Always an enigmatic figure, Martin was as famous for his temper as he was for his talent. On assignment from the Oxford American magazine, fiction writer and music critic Tom Piazza drove from his home in New Orleans to Nashville to interview Martin and found himself pitched headlong into a world he couldn't have anticipated. Martin's mercurial personality drew the writer into a series of escalating encounters (with mean dogs, broken-down cars, and near electrocution), culminating in a harrowing and unforgettable expedition, with Martin, to the Grand Ole Opry.Though, or perhaps because, visits to the Opry like the one Piazza recounts were common for Martin, and though he frequently played on its stage and always hoped to become a member, he died before seeing his dream fulfilled. True Adventures with the King of Bluegrass is the funny, scary, and powerfully poignant portrait of one of the legends of American music.Co-published with the Country Music Foundation Press

    Like Undaunted Courage and D-Day, this is a tale of achieving the extraordinary against extraordinary odds.  As incredible as the "official" story of the space program is, the true, behind-the-scenes tale is more thrilling, more entertaining, and ultimately more ennobling.

    From early legends to present-day fiction and poetry, this tradition emphasizes women's spiritual connection to the natural world and their contributions to tribal and familial community. Central to women's strength is the role of animal figures-Coyote, Owl, Beaver and Bear-who act as guides, helpers, and personal totems, appearing unexpectedly in the modern urban landscape as well as being a constant presence in nature.The work of more than forty authors appears in this volume, representing tribes and regions extending over most of the U.S. and parts of Canada. Among the authors included are Louise Erdrich, Joy Harjo, Leslie Marmon Silko, Paula Gunn Allen, Linda Hogan and Beth Brant, along with writers whose work appears here for the first time.

    This is his story. Before Martin Luther King Jr. began to preach from his pulpit in Montgomery, before the landmark Brown v. Board of Education decision, and before Rosa Parks' famous bus ride, a man named Harry T. Moore toiled in Jim Crow Florida on behalf of the NAACP and the Progressive Voters’ League. For seventeen years, in an era of official indifference and outright hostility, the soft-spoken but resolute Moore traveled the back roads of the state on a mission to educate, evangelize, and organize. On Christmas night in 1951, in Mims, Florida, a bomb placed under his bed ended Harry Moore’s life. His wife, Harriette, died of her wounds a week later. Although Florida’s governor reopened the case in 1991, no one was ever convicted of this crime.            Using previously unavailable FBI files, Green introduces his readers to the good and the bad, the villainous and the virtuous, in Jim Crow Florida. In doing so, he offers a poignant and gripping memorial to the pioneering work of Harry T. Moore, one of the earliest martyrs of the modern civil rights movement.

    In part the brainchild of Latino activist and actor Edward James Olmos, the book brings together original work from more than thirty award-winning photographers, as well as essays and poetry from such notable authors as Isabel Allende and Carlos Fuentes. Americanos celebrates both celebrities and everyday heroes, documenting telling moments in the lives of Latinos with images from the workplace, the playing fields, the flamingo bars, and daily street scenes. This unique portrait of the Latino-American experience, written in both English and Spanish, redefines the American notion of diversity for the coming century.

    Singer. Actor. Entertainer. In his life, Louis Armstrong thrilled audiences worldwide and influenced countless musicians. But beyond being a revolutionary musician and an enchanting stage personality, Louis Armstrong was a writer--and he was prolific.This unparalleled collection of Armstrong's candid writings reveals a side of the artist not widely known to his fans. With idiosyncratic language and punctuation that recalls his musical virtuosity, Armstrong presents his thoughts on his life and career--from abject poverty in New Orleans to playing in the famous cafes, cabarets, and saloons of Storyville; from his big break in 1922 with the King Oliver band to his storming of New York; from his breaking of color barriers in Hollywood to the infamous King of the Zulus incident in 1949; and finally, to his last days in Queens, New York.Along the way, these writings reveal Armstrongs honest, and often controversial, opinions about racism, marijuana, bebop, and fellow jazz artists. Whether a devoted Armstrong fan or a jazz neophyte, everyone will find here an illuminating, unvarnished portrayal of this truly compelling man.

    The Historical Atlas of the Pacific Northwest showcases more than 320 original maps, many never before published. Here are the maps of explorers such as Cook, Vancouver, Bodega y Quadra, Mackenzie, Thompson, and Lewis and Clark. Representing four centuries of discovery and exploration, this unique reference book is a must-have for anyone interested in Northwest history.

    A tribal ranger, he lives among people far different from any he has known. Balanced precariously between isolation and community, he is drawn to both the fastness of a remote river canyon and the Apaches who have come to be the only family he has.Nashoba’s world is peopled by, among others, a bright young man who sells vision quests to romantic tourists, a determined elder whose power makes her a force to be reckoned with on the reservation, a resident anthropologist more "native" than the natives, a corrupt tribal chairman, a former Hollywood extra who shouts at reservation women the scraps of Italian he learned from other "Indian" actors, and the ranger’s estranged wife. Confusion and violence follow their encounter with a right-wing militia group training secretly on tribal land. The contrast between these Rambo types and the various Native American characters typifies the sardonic humor running throughout this novel of contemporary Indian identity.

    Celebrity worship and media frenzy, suicidal cultists and heavily armed secessionists: modern life seems to have become a "pyrotechnic insanitarium," Mark Dery says, borrowing a turn-of-the-century name for Coney Island. Dery elucidates the meaning to our madness, deconstructing American culture from mainstream forces like Disney and Nike to fringe phenomena like the Unabomber and alien invaders. Our millennial angst, he argues, is a product of a pervasive cultural anxiety-a combination of the social and economic upheaval wrought by global capitalism and the paranoia fanned by media sensationalism. The Pyrotechnic Insanitarium is a theme-park ride through the extremes of American culture of which The Atlantic Monthly has written, "Mark Dery confirms once again what writers and thinkers as disparate as Nathanael West, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Sigmund Freud, and Oliver Sacks have already shown us: the best place to explore the human condition is at its outer margins, its pathological extremes."

    The book demonstrates that Chicago's cemeteries are home not only to thousands of individuals who fashioned the city's singular culture and character, but also to impressive displays of art and architecture, landscaping and limestone, egoism and ethnic pride. Mysterious questions such as Where is Al Capone buried? and What really lies beneath home plate at Wrigley Field? are answered in this reminder that although physical life must end, personal notes—and notoriety—last forever. Ever wonder where Al Capone is buried? How about Clarence Darrow? Muddy Waters? Harry Caray? Or maybe Brady Bunch patriarch Robert Reed? And what really lies beneath home plate at Wrigley Field? Graveyards of Chicago answers these and other cryptic questions as it charts the lore and lure of Chicago's ubiquitous burial grounds. Like the livelier neighborhoods that surround them, Chicago's cemeteries are often crowded, sometimes weary, ever-sophisticated, and full of secrets. They are home not only to thousands of individuals who fashioned the city's singular culture and character, but also to impressive displays of art and architecture, landscaping and limestone, egoism and ethnic pride, and the constant reminder that although physical life must end for us all, personal note—and notoriety—last forever. Grab a shovel and tag along as Ursula Bielski and Matt Hucke unearth the legends and legacies that mark Chicago's silent citizens—from larger-than-lifers and local heroes, to clerics and comedians, machine mayors and machine-gunners.

    Topanga Canyon is a quiet community of 8,000, just west of Los Angeles, in the Santa Monica Mountains. The one main street goes through the mountains, and has only one stoplight. Since 1947, Topanga Canyon has been a virtual hotbed of UFO sightings. June 14, 1992, marked the beginning of a UFO wave of gigantic proportions. Now, for the first time in print, eyewitness accounts of the activity are revealed, including: ·Unexplained lights ·Strange, metallic ships ·Face-to-face alien encounters ·Strange animal sightings ·Abductions of humans by aliens ·Missing time phenomena The author is a field investigator for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON). He has published numerous books and more than 50 articles on UFOs, and worked with the television programs "Sightings," "National Geographic Explorer," and "Encounters." In UFO's Over Topanga Canyon, you'll read the startling, eye-witness accounts of encounters with the unknown, ranging from odd lights to terrifying abduction experiences.

    It's a powerful study which offers fresh insights into the communist revolution and military tactics, the flaws in US strategy and the legacy of the war both for Vietnam and America. An important new study on a subject often masked by sentiment and myth.

    

    A comprehensive tribute to one of the last old-time baseball stadiums.

    It shows how the bewildering array of racialized images first proffered by music hall songsters and social commentators have evolved and become generalized to Asian-Americans.

    Using an anthropological theory, this groundbreaking book presents and explains the ritual sacrifices and regeneration that constitute American nationalism, the factors making particular elections or wars successful or unsuccessful rituals, the role of the mass media in the process, and the sense of malaise that has pervaded American society during the post-World War II period.

    Tells, in his own words, the story of the personal life and baseball career of the star player for the Baltimore Orioles, Cal Ripken.

    

    This is the tale of a wonderful bird, named by his creator phoenicopteris ruber plasticus; a new avian species, now known to all as Pink Plastic Flamingo. The more than one hundred pictures and the text in this volume are the result of Featherstone's request that adoring owners of the pink birds send original photographs that demonstrate their affection for phoenicopteris on its 40th birthday in 1997. An overwhelming response included such masterpieces as: Biker Birds, What a Pear, The Wedding Party, Anyone for Bridge, Purple Passion, Beachcombers, and the sweetly romantic Flamingo Honeymoon. If you're a believer, or even an skeptic, take a look, see for yourself. This book is one of a kind, the documentation of American genius, homage to an icon, or, perhaps, a rare opportunity to observe a culturally tolerated symbol of taste gone awry. It's great fun!

    The conventional wisdom said that it couldn't be done, but Levine and a team of dedicated professionals at Hasbro worked endlessly to create the most authentic and fun action figure possible. The result: in 1964 Hasbro launched GI Joe, and the 12 inch soldier took America by storm. The demand was overwhelming, and since then GI Joe has sold in the millions worldwide, making it one of the greatest selling toys of all time. This is a behind-the-scenes look at the birth of an icon as told by the men and women who crafted the original action figure. Here you will find the secret origins of GI Joe's scar, the misplaced thumbnail, the construction of the body, and more. Filled with over 100 full-color photos of prototypes, early models, blueprints, and sketches, here is a rare, firsthand account of creative genius, dedication, and entrepreneurial spirit. CONTENTS: Foreword by Alan Hassenfeld * Preface by John Michlig * One Man's Journey to Toyland * A Boy'll Never Play with a Doll * GI Joe is Born * Making America's Moveable Man of Action * Toy Fair 1964 and Beyond * Epilogue