Born from the pure flames of a sacred fire, Draupadi was devoted wife to the five famously talented and virtuous Pandava brothers. The evil Kauravas wanted her for themselves, and eyed the Pandava kingdom as well. Raging at their impertinence, and ranting at her husbands’ helplessness, Draupadi inspired a deadly war which wiped out the Kaurava scourge for ever.

    Burning with anger and humiliation, Drona was filled with a desire for revenge. That was the only tragic flaw in a brave and supremely talented archer who taught the use of arms to the Kaurava and the Pandava princes.

    

    A Poetic Equation: Conversations Between Nikki Giovanni and Margaret Walker is a lively, impassioned, and intense meeting of two literary giants. It is also a caning and yet uninhibited dialogue between two women a generation apart, a mother-daughter confrontation in a spirit of love and respect. The topics range from Vietnam, the racial struggle, the sexes, violence, and literature. Each exchange mirrors the generational and regioual temperaments, backgrounds, and philosophies of both women: for Giovanni, the cauldron of the sixties; for Walker, the Depression and World War II of the thirties and fortics. In this edition of the book a postscript by Nikki Giovanni projects the dialogue into the eighties and beyond. Margeret Walker is the author of For My People, a Volume of Verse, which won the Yale Award for Younger Poets in 1942. She is also the recipient of a Houghton-Mifflin Literary Fellowship for her novel, Jubilee, published in 1966. She recently retired as professor of English at Jackson State University where she taught for thirty years. Her biography of Richard Wright is near completion. Nikki Giovanni was nominated for the National Book Award in 1973 for Gemini. In the same year she won the Youth Leadership Award, a poll, sponsored by the Ladies Home Journal. She also received the Outstanding Achievement Award from Mademoiselle magazine. Currently, in addition to lecturing. Ms. Giovanni writes a column for the black news monthly, Encore. Among her volumes of poetry are The Women and the Men (1975), Cotton Candy on a Rainy Day (1978), and Vacation Time (1979), a volume of children's poetry.

    Today, as literary discourse pays more attention to textuality; to voice, reader-response, and phenomenology, Stein emerges as a pioneering modernist to whom the century is slowly catching up. For those in the performing arts, Geographical History further addresses the notion of play as landscape, one of Stein's most influential theatrical ideas, as well as such issues as dialogue, character, and dramatic structure -- in a book that is itself a model of modern experimentation.

    The authors investigated two Alpine villages—the German-speaking community of St. Felix and Romance-speaking Tret—only a mile apart in the same mountain valley.