King's best-known oration, "I Have a Dream, " his acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize, and "Beyond Vietnam, " a compelling argument for ending the ongoing conflict. Each speech has an insightful introduction on the current relevance of Dr. King's words by such renowned defenders of civil rights as Rosa Parks, the Dalai Lama, and Ambassador Andrew Young, among others.

    At her death in 1964, O'Connor left behind a body of unpublished essays and lectures as well as a number of critical articles that had appeared in scattered publications during her too-short lifetime. The keen writings comprising Mystery and Manners, selected and edited by O'Connor's lifelong friends Sally and Robert Fitzgerald, are characterized by the directness and simplicity of the author's style, a fine-tuned wit, understated perspicacity, and profound faith.The book opens with "The King of the Birds," her famous account of raising peacocks at her home in Milledgeville, Georgia. Also included are: three essays on regional writing, including "The Fiction Writer and His Country" and "Some Aspects of the Grotesque in Southern Fiction"; two pieces on teaching literature, including "Total Effect and the 8th Grade"; and four articles concerning the writer and religion, including "The Catholic Novel in the Protestant South." Essays such as "The Nature and Aim of Fiction" and "Writing Short Stories" are widely seen as gems.This bold and brilliant essay-collection is a must for all readers, writers, and students of contemporary American literature.

    Scrupulous scholarship and magical prose are brought to bear on such diverse topics as seeds, the hieroglyphs on shells, lost tombs, the goddess Circe, city dumps, and Neanderthal man.

    In these essays, Benjamin challenges the image of Baudelaire as late-Romantic dreamer, and evokes instead the modern poet caught in a life-or-death struggle with the forces of the urban commodity capitalism that had emerged in Paris around 1850. The Baudelaire who steps forth from these pages is the flAneur who affixes images as he strolls through mercantile Paris, the ragpicker who collects urban detritus only to turn it into poetry, the modern hero willing to be marked by modern life in its contradictions and paradoxes. He is in every instance the modern artist forced to commodify his literary production: "Baudelaire knew how it stood with the poet: as a flAneur he went to the market; to look it over, as he thought, but in reality to find a buyer." Benjamin reveals Baudelaire as a social poet of the very first rank.The introduction to this volume presents each of Benjamin's essays on Baudelaire in chronological order. The introduction, intended for an undergraduate audience, aims to articulate and analyze the major motifs and problems in these essays, and to reveal the relationship between the essays and Benjamin's other central statements on literature, its criticism, and its relation to the society that produces it.

    Writing in Harper's, Irving Howe described it as an exhilarating performance--this, one tells oneself, is what the life of the mind can be. Berlin's editor Henry Hardy has revised the text, incorporating a fifth essay that Berlin himself had wanted to include. He has also added further pieces that bear on the same topic, so that Berlin's principal statements on liberty are at last available together in one volume. Finally, in an extended preface and in appendices drawn from Berlin's unpublished writings, he exhibits some of the biographical sources of Berlin's lifelong preoccupation with liberalism. These additions help us to grasp the nature of Berlin's inner citadel, as he called it--the core of personal conviction from which some of his most influential writing sprung.

    They go back to the late Paleolithic; the fertility of the soil, the magic of animals, the power-vision in solitude, the terrifying intuition and rebirth; the love and ecstasy of the dance, the common work of the tribe." He develops, as replacement for shattered social structures. a concept of tribal tradition which could lead to "growth and enlightenment in self-disciplined freedom. Whatever it is or ever was in any other culture can be reconstructed from the unconscious through meditation...the coming revolution will close the circle and link us in many ways with the most creative aspects of our archaic past.

    Styles of Radical Will, Susan Sontag's second collection of essays, extends the investigations she undertook in Against Interpretation with essays on film, literature, politics, and a groundbreaking study of pornography.

    Throughout, Olson makes a compelling case for preserving the wilderness. He puts forth his own life as an example of how nature can have a spiritual effect on the human soul, and proposes diligence on behalf of those who fight to conserve our forests, wetlands, and dunes.

    S. Lewis' most important literary essays, written between 1932 and 1962. The topics discussed range from Chaucer to Kipling, from 'The literary impact of the authorised version' to 'Psycho-analysis and literary criticism', from Shakespeare and Bunyan to Sir Walter Scott and William Morris. Common to each essay, however, are the lively wit, the distinctive forthrightness, and the discreet erudition which characterise Lewis' best critical writing.

    In this book originally titled Christian Letters to a Post-Christian World, Sayers explores the underlying spirit and the direction of Western civilization as she considers topics ranging from popular theology and ethics to aesthetics, the meaning of creativity, and theories on communication.

    This edition, edited by Durrell's friend and bibliographer Alan C. Thomas, comprises letters spanning thirty years, excerpts from his first two novels (neither available in the U.S.), short fiction, and travel essays. "My books are always about living in places, not just rushing through them.... the important determinant of any culture is after all -- the spirit of place".

    Using wit and wry humor, Haley in the other essays discusses such topics as: what it takes to be schizophrenic; the art and technique required to have an awful marriage; and how to be an awful therapist. His rationale for a directive therapy is the subject of other essays.

    The text includes Books 1, 2, and 3 of the essays; Montaigne’s translation of the natural theology of Raymond Sebond; a travel journal; and selected letters.

    

    Dorothy L. Sayers will be eagerly sought by the many thousands of readers who already know her vigorous and vivid translation of the Inferno. As those who have heard Miss Sayer's lectures on Dante can testify, she brings to the interpretation of the Divine Comedy a vitalizing power of analysis and re-creation. Readers of Dante often become discouraged by the mass of factual detail which the older school of historical criticism has made available; mere aestheticism, however, unrelated to the time and space, is nor likely to satisfy them either. They will find in Miss Sayers' essays enough scholarly assistance to put themselves in the position of a contemporary reader; but their attention will chiefly be drawn to the relevance of the Divine Comedy to our present day world and way of life. Miss Sayers' emphasis on the ethical, rather than on the aesthetic, or historical, significance of Dante's work, comes as a welcome and bracing challenge to the confusion regarding values, whether of literature or of life, which characterizes the present age.

    

    Under the rubric of "the collapse of mass-based radical movements," Lasch examines the decline of populism, the disintegration of the American socialist party, and the weaknesses of black nationalism. Also included is a history of the Congress for Cultural Freedom and a discussion of the '60's revival of ideological controversy.

    

    This collection is divided into two sections: the first features the eloquent sketches of the West's history and environment, directing our imagination to the sublime beauty of such places as San Juan and Glen Canyon; the concluding section examines the state of Western literature, of the mythical past versus the diminished present, and analyzes the difficulties facing any contemporary Western writer. The Sound of Mountain Water is at once a hymn to the Western landscape, an affirmation of the hope embodied therein, and a careful investigation to the West's complex legacy.

    The impact of her work on the quiet people is imperishable. The impact of this book on the scanners who view the American literary scene in search of imperishable talent is likely to be the same. "Will Mrs. Major Go to Hell?" is offered by the publisher as a work of a major American humorist whose self-effacement should not stand in the way of her achievement. Mrs. Heath, the sister of William F. Buckley, Jr., died suddenly and tragically in 1967 at the age of 48, as the result of a massive cerebral hemorrhage, leaving behind ten children.Supper at great elm --Mademoiselle --Memorandum to: --Growing up with the Buckleys --The day Maureen was born --A letter for Maureen --Pattiche --How to raise money in the ivy league --Ladies' month in the slicks --Seven keys to anomie --The sociology of the carpool --The true spirit of Christmas --A housewife looks at soap opera --Baby in the bathroom --Horizontal enrichment information wise --Before you say no.- Prosiness in purple --A Trapp family Christmas with the Heaths --Merry Christmas to everyone in the world except men --Spare me the rod --It says here. --Politics and mortal sin --A Heath Christmas Carol program

    Vidal's second collection gathering together essays and reviews published subsequent to Rocking the Boat.

    Can Superman make a baby with Lois Lane, or is he doomed to be the last of his kind? This article discusses the scientific and medical issues involved in copulating with a Kryptonian.27 minutes

    

    Rosen's primary objective is to defend Plato & classical philosophy against Martin Heidegger's radical existentialist criticism...Many critics of Heidegger consider his dubious politics during the early days of Nazi rule irrelevant to the understanding of his work. Rosen argues, on the contrary, that Heidegger's philosophy helps explain his initial enthusiasm for, & later submission to, the Nazi regime. The argument yields genuine insight into the connection between philosophical & political nihilism. Furthermore, exposing the evil consequences of nihilistic thought adds to his stout defense of the classical tradition."--Elliot Feingold, Book Week "Those who ignore his book do so at their peril. It vigorously poses issues which have been too long neglected by both political scientists & political theorists."--R.L. Nichols, American Political Science Review "This is an impressive book...Part of the interest of this book resides in its structure, which analyses moments in the history of ideas to sketch a systematic critique of theoretical & practical reason."--Times Literary Supplement

    Toklas, Gertrude Stein delivered her Narration lectures to packed audiences at the University of Chicago in 1935. Stein had not been back to her home country since departing for France in 1903, and her remarks reflect on the changes in American culture after thirty years abroad.   In Stein’s trademark experimental prose, Narration reveals the legendary writer’s thoughts about the energy and mobility of the American people, the effect of modernism on literary form, the nature of history and its recording, and the inventiveness of the English language—in particular, its American variant. Stein also discusses her ambivalence toward her own literary fame as well as the destabilizing effect that notoriety had on her daily life. Restored to print for a new generation of readers to discover, these vital lectures will delight students and scholars of modernism and twentieth-century literature. “Narration is a treasure waiting to be rediscovered and to be pirated by jolly marauders of sparkling texts.”—Catharine Stimpson, NYU

    All the burdens fall on him, or her, for it is time to remember that the Forgotten Man is not seldom a woman."

    Critics applauded the collection, noting that Renata Adler had skillfully chosen details to provide insight into many of the troubling issues of the 1960s & that she had managed to offer meaningful social commentary without intruding on her subject.

    Born on November 30, 1835, in Florida, Missouri, Samuel Langhorne Clemens first used the pseudonym Mark Twain while a journalist in Nevada in 1863. When his first major book, The Innocents Abroad, appeared six years later, he began what would become one of the most celebrated and influential careers in American letters. Autobiographical Writings will help readers know the author intimately and appreciate why, a century after his death, he remains so vital and appealing.This edition includes an introduction by R. Kent Rasmussen that summarizes modern scholarship on Twain.Mark Twain was born Samuel Langhorne Clemens on 30th November 1835, in Florida, Missouri. In 1853 he left home, earning a living as an itinerant type-setter, and four years later became an apprentice pilot on the Mississippi, a career cut short by the outbreak of the Civil War. For five years, as a prospector and a journalist, Clemens lived in Nevada and California. In February 1863 he first used the pseudonym 'Mark Twain' as the signature to a humorous travel letter. A trip to Europe and the Holy Land in 1867 became the basis of his first major book, The Innocents Abroad (1869). His numerous subsequent books include The Adventures of Tom Sawyer (1876), A Tramp Aborad (1880), The Prince and the Pauper (1882), and his masterpiece, The Adventures of Huckleberry Fin (1885). He died on 21st April 1910.R. Kent Rasmussen is the author or editor of six books on Mark Twain and more than a dozen other books. He is best known for his award-winning Mark Twain A to Z (recently revised as the two-volume Critical Companion to Mark Twain) and The Quotable Mark Twain. He holds a doctorate in history from UCLA and currently works as a reference book editor in Southern California.